Sociology Of Childhood Research Articles

A Sociology of Childhood Among Many

A Sociology of Childhood Among Many

Empowering youth in care: the case of emancipatory research with care leavers

New sociology of childhood has emphasized that children are capable of being reflective, of behaving purposively and are able to influence the environment where they live. This concept is also referred to as ‘children as capable agents’ meaning that they can shape the environment. Despite this, children are rarely given the space for participation. The lack of participation is particularly evident within the child protection system, where the tension between children's right to protection and their right to participation becomes even more pronounced. Preventing them from participation is not only a violation of rights but also impacts their capability to exercise social citizenship. This can be particularly detrimental for care leavers who rank among the most socially excluded and disadvantaged groups of young people. This article addresses these issues by presenting the findings of the action-research project CarINg (Empowering Childcare Systems and Supporting Leaving Care from Inside), implemented in Italy and co-funded by the European Union. This research delved into the participation opportunities for care leavers within the care system, with a dual focus on enhancing the local alternative care system and empowering care leavers to actively voice and influence the status quo. Results show how active involvement of care leavers in the protection system and in the production of knowledge can empower them as individuals and enable them to contribute to bringing about change within the alternative care system. Whether all these changes happen depends on the capacity of the institutions to recognize that children are authentic agents and participants of the society.

SOCIOLOGY IN EARLY CHILDHOOD EDUCATION

This article is due to bibliographic research and aims to ask the questions about the socialization of children in early childhood education and, more specifically, to understand aspects of the social construction of the so -called “student craft” at this level of education. It was intended to unravel the relationships involving early childhood education, families, children and their socialization. Starting from the assumption that there is currently a tendency in society to anticipate the schooling of the child and that this is related to both the transformations of the senses of childhood and “being a child” and specific social conditions, such as forms of family configuration , the division of labor between the sexes, the role of women and their place in the sphere of production, as well as the properly economic pressures about families. The theoretical contribution of this study lies in the interface of childhood sociology with the sociology of education. Thus, it was possible to highlight their commitments to awaken in children early attitudes of discipline and certain habits and knowledge to prepare it for the school and social “future”.

«Распаковка» агентности в школьном проекте: перспективы участвующего подхода

School has become more project-oriented. There is tremendous potential for student agency here. Children's agency can be revealed through a participatory approach to childhood sociology. The analysis model is based on the principles of participatory methodology and interpretive reproduction by Corsaro. Three groups of variables are identified: the subjectivity of the child, the balance of power between the child and the adult, and the joint creativity of the participants. The empirical basis of the study is the “Green School” case, implemented online with the participation of five schoolchildren and one teacher from the Khabarovsk Territory. Observation, interviews, focus groups, and text analysis were used for the monographic analysis of the “case”. In a space of “equal participation”, where students and a teacher are co-participants and co-researchers, children’s agency can be disclosed. Children maximally expresses themselves through free choice, gaining personal experience in the process of making decisions. Responsibility arises not as an “obligation”, but as a motivation for learning: “how can we do it to make it better”. The results of this work can be used by educators in organizing project-based research activities for students, utilizing sociological methods adapted to the study of children.

The Processes of Insertion and Sociability of Haitian Migrant Children in Early Childhood Education

The number of children, both accompanied and unaccompanied, currently crossing international borders in search of humanitarian refuge, has increased significantly in the last few decades of the Twenty-first Century. In Brazil, the presence of Haitian migrant children cannot be ignored, as, in addition to the lack of public policies, they are also victims of racism and xenophobia. Schools face a massive impact of migration, which alters their social structure. Often, the school community is not adequately prepared to cater for these children, as is the case with some schools in the Brazilian municipality of Balneário Camboriú. This research, which is linked to the Postgraduate Program in Education at the University of Vale do Itajaí, initially aims to investigate how Haitian migrant children interact with each other, and with Brazilian children, in two early childhood education schools in Balneário Camboriú. It also intends to investigate, based on the presence of Haitian migrant children, the processes of subjection or transgression of expressions of whiteness as a practice of power and representation of white identity, and to analyze the Municipality’s Curricular Proposal regarding Ethnic-Racial Education. The study is based on the Sociology of Childhood, Racial Studies, and Migration. The research is qualitative and is based on a literature review in two databases. The studies analyzed indicate that one reason for the lack of interest and knowledge about ethnic-racial diversity issues in schools is the existing gap in this theme in both initial and continuing teacher education.

Temporalities in asylum childhoods: time politics and children’s rights in Sweden’s asylum reception and resettlement

ABSTRACT The study of time and temporality can provide a critical understanding of the migration process and be analysed to understand temporal governance and migrants' lived temporal experiences. This article draws on Cwerner's understanding of time politics and Griffiths' theorisation of temporal tensions to consider how temporal governance and temporal regulations affect children's lived temporalities. The article draws on ethnographic fieldwork in the tradition of the sociology of childhood to explore children's lived experiences of time and temporalities in the Swedish asylum reception system and the resettlement process. The article shows how the children's lived experiences entailed different dimensions of time and temporalities and considers how time politics and temporal tensions affect childhood conditions. The article particularly explores children's lived experiences of the temporalities embedded in migration politics concerning school and housing. The article argues that children's lived experiences of time and temporality may contribute to an understanding of how the time politics embedded in the asylum reception system and the resettlement affects the conditions of asylum childhoods and in turn has an impact on children's rights.

Theoretical framework of the integration and well-being of migrant and refugee minors in Europe

Migrant and refugee children face specific challenges that strongly affect their well-being during the integration process in host societies. The institutions and entities in the field dedicated to childhood and migration remark the need to better nuance the factors involved in fostering migrant and refugee children’s well-being, leaning upon researchers to obtain a more accurate portrayal of these childhood experiences. After carrying out a critical narrative review of current models of child well-being and integration, a child-centred analytical frame linking conceptual contributions from both bodies of literature is provided. Upon this basis, a comprehensive theoretical framework that encompasses ecological theory, the new sociology of childhood and interculturalism is discussed thoroughly, with its application in specialised research on this population. These results should be useful for impact policy-making and develop evidence-based psychosocial interventions for migrant and refugee children in Europe.

Citizenship and Political Identities of Children in Transnational Migration

Abstract This article expounds on the relationship between children's rights and asylum discourse as pertaining to the figure of the non-citizen child. Key for the understanding of the political identity of the asylum-seeking child, who is depicted as trapped between paternalistic concepts of childhood and restrictive asylum law on the one hand, and empowering children's rights discourse on the other, is an antagonism in the logic underlying human rights and citizenship discourse. Ethnographic findings with accompanied asylum-seeking children in Germany substantiate the argument, from the perspective of ‘new’ childhood sociology. The concept of citizenship is elucidated as practice lived in the everyday in children's action against exclusionary effects in refugee centres.

Developing a model for child participation in child welfare services

AbstractIn this article, we develop a model for child participation in child welfare services (CPC). Child participation has gained increasing attention in research, policy and practice in the last couple of decades. Two perspectives have concurrently moved this agenda forward—childhood sociology and children's rights—leading to an almost irrefutable understanding of children as social actors with independent rights. We integrate these perspectives in one model in our CPC model. We base the model on the rights‐based Lundy model of child participation and develop it with theoretical insights from childhood sociology and social work as well as empirical insights from the literature on CPC. To capture the specific conditions of child welfare services and the social world of the child, we add contexts as a new overarching element in our CPC model. We also expand the four elements in the original Lundy model to include time and space, voices, direct and indirect audiences and influence and statutory power. The CPC model is designed to conceptualize how child participation unfolds as both a right of the child a social practice within the specific setting of child welfare services.

A participação infantil no espaço público: propostas para pensar o direito da criança ao território

ABSTRACT This paper results from a participatory research with children in public spaces. The research, guided by a framework based on the Sociology of Childhood and the Urban Studies, offers an interdisciplinary dialogue that considers childhood as a generational category of its own worth, constituted by children as social actors with the ‘right to a voice’, recognizing that they have particular modes of communication, relationship and cultures (Dornelles; Fernandes, 2015; Sarmento, 2003; 2008). From the Sociology of Childhood’s perspective, the concept of ‘city’ is widely used when discussing children’s participation, even if such actions do not always take place in the context of the city. It is the case of the space where our research took place, as it seemed to us that the word “city” did not took into consideration the characteristics of the space under analysis. There are several authors in the field of Urbanism who have been questioning the concept of ‘city’, proposing some reflections about it and bringing to the discussion alternative definitions. Likewise, we advocate the importance of using the concept of ‘territory’ instead of ‘city’, in order to be more accurate and to safeguard the participation of all children, regardless of the context in which they live, helping to overcome their geographical/social invisibility.

Understanding Children’s Experiences of Care in Their School Lives Through Participatory Research Methods: A Comparative Analysis of Focus Group Discussions and Photovoice

The theoretical development of the ‘new sociology of childhood,’ coinciding with the recognition of children’s right to express their voice and have it heard on matters affecting them, has inspired the proliferation of participatory methods in research with and by children. This paper addresses a gap in the methodological literature by comparing two such participatory methods, focus group discussions and photovoice, in an exploration of care in children’s school lives. Drawing on the narratives of 49 Second Class children (typically aged eight to nine years) participating in Ireland’s national longitudinal study of primary schooling, Children School Lives ( https://www.cslstudy.ie ), the paper details the data collection, processing, and analysis associated with each method, as well as the emergent themes arising from each. We draw on our exploration of care in children’s school lives in order to illustrate the comparison of the two participatory methods. Our comparative analysis underscores the greater complexity associated with the data collection, processing, and analysis for photovoice. In addition, emergent themes suggest two distinct discourses on care arising from each method. While narratives from focus group discussions offer descriptive accounts of children’s experiences, photovoice data provide a more personal, emotive, and in-depth account of care in children’s school lives. Methodological decisions taken in this study and implications for future research which employs participatory methods with children are discussed and positioned within the wider literature.

Scripts de Gênero e as Performances das Crianças que Reverberam no Contexto da Educação Infantil

ABSTRACT Gender Scripts and Children’s Performances that Reverberate in the Context of Early Childhood Education – Based on Gender Studies and the Sociology of Childhood, this article seeks to understand and analyze the strategies that children establish to deal with the gender scripts addressed to them in everyday Early Childhood Education. The results of the analysis show that they seek more plural ways of living their experiences as girls and boys, even though they are educated based on binary concepts that try to impose a repeated control of children’s bodies. The research, of ethnographic inspiration, was developed based on participant observation with four-year-old children, in a public early childhood education school, in the Metropolitan Area of Porto Alegre/RS/Brazil.

“O mundo aos nossos olhos e pelas nossas vozes”: o que crianças dizem sobre direitos, discriminações e diferenças, género e pobreza

ABSTRACT In the context of the project SMOOTH - Educational Common Spaces, Passing through enclosures and reversing Inequalities (Horizon 2020, European Commission) and the subproject RED - Rights, Equality, Difference - as well as an epistemological, theoretical, methodological and ethical position, that puts in dialogue the Sociology of Childhood and Education Sciences, a qualitative research was carried out with children attending the 2nd Cycle of Basic Education, in a public school in Lisbon, within the subject of Citizenship and Development. A central aim of the Project, which is presented in this paper, is to analyse, from an active listening of the children, their conceptions about rights, discriminations and differences, gender, and poverty, and their lived/attributed subjective meanings. Methodologically, through observation, semi-structured interviews and focus groups, their voices, and by their proposal, materialised in the publication of a podcast episode. Qualitative content analysis enables us to exercise an understanding of what children say about these themes, what they have prioritised, reflected upon, and ignored. Their views about the world must be understood from their biographies and contexts.

Mitigating the Risks and Vulnerabilities during COVID-19 Pandemic: Emerging Solidarities With-in the Migrant Neighbourhood of Delhi, India

RESEARCH OBJECTIVE: The article explores migrant children’s lives and emerging solidarities in the selected neighbourhood (a squatter-slum) during the early phase of COVID-19 pandemic induced lockdown. Children’s lives within the family, as community member and mutual relationship in the moments of risk and resilience are explored.
 THE RESEARCH PROBLEM AND METHODS: Belonging to marginalised group, for children and their families, the COVID-19 lockdown period added multiple layers of disadvantage. Children’s lives are explored with ethnographic fieldwork (as part of the broader study initiated in 2017) and during the lockdown period (early 2020) with telephonic interviews.
 THE PROCESS OF ARGUMENTATION: The article establishes migrant children’s contribution who despite being doubly disadvantaged in an adult centric society, actively shape and co-build the social spaces. Drawing upon Walby’s work on crisis; the New Sociology of Childhood, children are reinstated as collaborators, presenting the adaptation strategies of children to sustain and cope during the initial phase of the COVID-19 pandemic.
 RESEARCH RESULTS: Risk and resilience have become normalised part of the lived reality of migrant children’s lives. Amidst the COVID-19 pandemic the risks got elevated and with it the adaptive coping strategies at the level of family and neighbourhood emerged that helped in mitigating the risks to some extent.
 CONCLUSIONS, RECOMMENDATIONS AND APPLICABLE VALUE OF RESEARCH: The article demonstrates migrant children as collaborators and recommends (i) considering children’s voices and participation while framing policies, programmes, and schemes, and (ii) to view children as expert of their lives, active members, reiterating recognition of their role at various fronts.

Sociology of childhood evolution: in the world and in Ukraine

The sociology of childhood, as a separate branch of sociology, emerged about forty years ago. Until then, children and childhood were considered only within the framework of the sociology of family or the sociology of age. In the article, I consider the following questions: what exactly led to the emergence of a new field? How and under the influence of what changed the traditional attitude of social science to children and childhood during the twentieth century. What is the New sociology of childhood and Childhood Studies and how do the views of their proponents differ from traditional ones? What principles unite researchers of the new sociology of childhood and how is the sociology of childhood developing in Ukraine?The childhood phenomenon, despite all the achievements and development of social sciences, is still difficult to define. During the twentieth century, the perception of childhood and the attitude of researchers toward children changed. Sociologists of childhood no longer perceive children as passive, innocent, firmly embedded in the family, and “non-yet-adults” whose main goal is to properly socialize. Now, according to sociologists, children are perceived as active and unique social actors that need to be studied intersectionally, in the context of gender, class, ethnicity, and outside the family. The perception of the child has changed – from a usual future adult in the 1960s to a real member of society that can influence the world of adults in the 1980s. All this happened due to the influence of interactionists schools in sociology, researchers of subcultures and age groups, as well as social movements for women’s rights and civil rights. The new sociology of childhood and childhood studies has set new goals – to explore children’s practices as the activities of socially active agents, using methods that take into account age characteristics, but do not reduce children’s ability to reflect and formulate their own point of view. During the last 40 years, the followers of the new paradigm actively created a new scientific community and tried to change the attitude towards children and childhood not only within the social sciences but also outside of it. They partially succeeded, but many of the announced goals remained unfulfilled. Ukraine and Ukrainian researchers of childhood are taking the first confident steps in this field. We need more translations of world classics into Ukrainian language, as well as the results of original Ukrainian researchers into English. As well as we need more students enrolled in relevant programs and funding for the National Center for Childhood Studies.

”Titta, jag ser dig!” – kameran som resurs för delaktighet i förskolan

This article contributes knowledge concerning how the use of cameras as a digital resource can offer children participation and agency in the everyday education practice of preschool. The data is retrieved from three different research studies, and the analytical approach focuses on children's interaction with cameras as a photographic and cinematic resource. The data is analysed following multimodality (Goodwin, 2000; Jewitt, 2014) and using a participation model (Szönyi & Söderqvist Dunkers, 2020). The analyses carried out are based on re-analyses of previously produced data. Theoretically, the study is contextualised within the sociology of childhood, where one of the basic assumptions is that children are regarded as co-constructors with opportunities and abilities to independently act, interpret and reinterpret their lives (Corsaro, 2018). The results show that children's interaction with cameras as a digital resource enables participation in everyday practice from several aspects. Children's agency and participation become visible in the children's interaction with the camera function and between children and children, children and educators, where laughter, gazes, gestures, silence and the development of digital competence are part.

La nouvelle sociologie de l’enfance et les droits des enfants

This article focuses on childhood and more specifically on children's rights, from the perspective of the new sociology of childhood. Although children's rights advocates and proponents of the new sociology of childhood both aspire to a better understanding of childhood while striving to improve the lives of children, collaborative work between the two disciplines is rare (Freeman, 1998). I will therefore attempt to answer the following question: how are children's rights addressed in the new sociology of childhood and what are its implications for research, policies, and practices in social work?
 Keywords: child, children's rights, new sociology of childhood, social work, best interests of the child, participation

The new sociology of childhood and children's rights

Cet article s’intéresse à l’enfance et plus particulièrement aux droits des enfants, sous l’angle de la nouvelle sociologie de l’enfance. Bien que les défenseurs des droits des enfants et les tenants de la nouvelle sociologie de l’enfance ont tous deux comme priorité de mieux comprendre l’enfance tout en tâchant d’améliorer la vie des enfants, les travaux collaboratifs entre les deux disciplines se font rares (Freeman, 1998). Je tenterai donc de répondre à la question suivante : comment les droits des enfants sont-ils abordés dans la nouvelle sociologie de l’enfance et quelles en sont les implications pour la recherche, les politiques et les pratiques en travail social?

Child Rights Education from the Perspective of New Sociology of Childhood

Child Rights Education from the Perspective of New Sociology of Childhood

Being siblings of children with visual impairment

This is a qualitative study that gives voice to 33 siblings of children with visual impairment in care at the Robert Hollman Foundation, focusing on their relationships with their brothers/sisters. Participants aged 7 to 22 recounted their daily life experiences and perspectives, expressing their feelings during semi-structured individual interviews. Data were analyzed according to the thematic analysis in the conceptual framework of ‘the new sociology of childhood’. The vast majority of siblings showed a special relationship with their brother/sister, characterized by unconditional love and willingness to help. Different emotions, such as happiness, empathy, sorrow and sadness, were expressed as well as how the experience of being siblings of children with visual impairment shapes their attitudes, highlighting a number of needs in some of the subjects.