Upcoming events

Exploring environmental sustainability: what issues matter to the lives of children and young people?

Wednesday 22^nd January, 11.30-12.30

The SSRP and CIRCY, two University of Sussex 'Centres of Excellence', are hosting a workshop on sustainability research important to the lives of children and young people, with the support of the Widening Participation team. It brings together young people and researchers. Four presenters will give short inputs on their research, and participants will be invited to share their own ideas, responses, and questions. The event offers the opportunity to collaborate on exploring complex sustainability issues where answers are not straightforward, as well as to contribute to an idea for a new sustainability game.

• Eco-anxiety and the relationship between climate change and human and children rights – Dr Emanuela Orlando (Associate Professor in Environmental Law)
• Citizen science for sustainable menstrual health, Dr Chi Ezifula (Associate Professor in Infection, Brighton & Sussex Medical School)
• Nurturing Nature with(in) Children – Nature in Education, Kathleen Bailey (Postgraduate researcher, Department of Education)
• Sustainable Futures and Not-So-Serious Play, Dr Jo Walton (Research Fellow in Arts, Climate and Technology)

 

Previous 2023/24 Events

Hester Barron and Ben Highmore in Conversation

Date: Wednesday 4 December
Time: 2-4pm
Location: Fulton 103

Hester Barron's book The Social World of the School: Education and Community in Interwar London and Ben Highmore's Playgrounds - the Experimental Years both highlight the importance of understanding the social worlds of childhood as material practices (from violin lessons to den building) embedded within networks of community and governance. We came together to discuss their work and their shared preoccupations.

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Date: Thursday 13 June 2024
Time: 5-7pm 
Venue: University of Sussex 

This special event brought together a panel of experts to reflect on the following key questions:

• What does language tell us about the way society values, and has empathy for, young people?
• How can we challenge and disrupt ways of talking about young people that vilify and excludes them?
• How can we develop a more empathetic and supportive language around young people?

Discussants: 

• Dr Beverley Barnett-Jones – Associate Director at the Nuffield Family Justice Observatory
• Prof Kristi Langhoff – Professor of Social Work and project lead for the AHRC ‘Imagining Resistance’ project developing collaborative methods with young people.
• Dr Liat Levita – Reader in Behavioural and Clinical Neuroscience whose work focuses on young people’s wellbeing throughout their development.
• Naqeeb Saide - Hummingbird Project 

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Date: Thursday 14 December 2023
Time: 4:30-6pm 
Venue: Woodland 3, The Student Centre, University of Sussex 

CIRCY and CSWIR celebrated the launch of Professor Janet Boddy’s new book: ‘Thinking Through Family: Narratives of Care Experienced Lives’. 

Discussants: Rosie Canning (University of Southampton) and Professor Ros Edwards (University of Southampton). 

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Date: Wednesday 29 November 2023
Time: 4:30-5:30pm 
Venue: Online 

How to “think with” children and young people? Using philosophical inquiry. A discussion with Rebecca Webb (Social Work and Social Care), Fliss Bull (Education and Social Work) and Loreto Rodriquez (Social work and Social Care).

To join our PGR network please contact bm333@sussex.ac.uk.

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Date: Wednesday 22 November 2023
Time: 2-3pm 
Venue: Fulton 107

'Ideas in Action’ is a regular CIRCY event for members where colleagues can present new ideas for interdisciplinary feedback and sugideas suggestions, e.g. a new or reworked bid, book gestions, proposals, or plans for knowledge exchange/impact generation.

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Date: Tuesday 14 November 2023
Time: 4:30-6pm 
Venue: Hybrid - Zoom / Fulton 107 

In this CIRCY Research Seminar, Hedi Viterbo will lay bare three overlooked pitfalls of calls to reduce or abolish the penal confinement of youth, particularly in the UK and the US. First, despite their anti-carceral semblance, such calls persistently portray most people in trouble with the law—namely, adults—as deserving of imprisonment. Second, this ageist rhetoric often disregards adult vulnerability. Thus, despite adults’ greater medical vulnerability to COVID-19, some organisations pushed for youth to be prioritised for release from prisons during the pandemic. Third, the youth decarceration discourse reproduces essentialist assumptions about youth, which rest on questionable science and downplay the socially constructed dimension of age differences. Doubtless, there are compelling arguments against penal confinement, but it is only decarceration across the age spectrum that can truly challenge carceral thinking—and ageism.

Please register for this event: Just for Kids? Google Form  

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Date: Thursday 26 October 2023
Time: 1-2pm 
Venue: Fulton 204 

The PGR network consists of postgraduate students from across the university who are researching with/about children and youth. We meet twice termly to discuss different themes/topics around researching children and youth. This academic year starts with a welcome meeting to introduce incoming and ongoing postgraduate students.

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Date: Wednesday 25 October 2023
Time: 3:30-5pm 
Venue: Jubilee G36 / Zoom 

Narratives of ‘crisis’ – whether ‘migration crisis’ or ‘childhoods in crisis’ – have become rhetorical tropes which shape and are reproduced by value-ladened political responses to children on the move. These typically reflect a sedentary bias which, as they intersect with generational time, draw on normative ideas about ‘good’ and ‘bad’ childhoods and rigid assumptions about children and care. Consequently, children on the move globally, whether with family or separately, and those who remain in place when parents migrate, do so in contexts where migration is typically framed as a political and existential crisis for rich countries and associated with trauma and pathologisation for children. Equally, some children's movements, particularly those involved in South-South mobility, are rendered invisible, as protracted displacement and ongoing historical crises are normalised. Indeed, these silent stories raise questions about when and why children's (im)mobility is or is not constituted as a 'crisis', by and for whom, and with what effect for infrastructures and practices of care. 

In this presentation, Rachel Rosen and Valentina Glockner will draw on their just-released edited volume Crisis for whom? Critical global perspectives on childhood, care, and migration* to complicate these silences and challenge hegemonic interpretations by considering the diverse and diffuse effects of border technologies and crisis narratives on childhood (im)mobility.

Rachel Rosen is a Professor of Sociology at the UCL Social Research Institute. Her research, teaching and public engagement focuses on marginalised children and families, especially those with precarious immigration status; the intersection of welfare and border policies which shape their lives; and their practices of sustenance, care, and solidarity.

Valentina Glockner is a Mexican anthropologist affiliated with the Educational Research Department of The Center for Research and Advanced Studies of the National Polytechnic Institute, Mexico City. Her work in Mexico and India explores engaged research and reflective and participatory methodologies around the anthropology of childhood, migration and the state.

*Freely available to download in English and Spanish: Rosen, Rachel, E. Chase, S. Crafter, V. Glockner, and S. Mitra (Eds). (2023) Crisis for Whom? Critical global perspectives on childhood, care, and migration. London: UCL Press.

Tea and coffee will be provided!

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Date: 10 October 2023
Time: 3-6pm 
Venue: Digital Humanities Lab, Silverstone Building 

On the 10 October we hosted an exhibition and film screening in the Sussex Humanities Lab for the Imagining Resistance project, a
3-year AHRC-funded project that drew upon participatory visual methods to support young people in understanding and communicating their own acts of resistance. This was an opportunity to view the creative project outputs, including photographs and a ‘protest banner’ quilt embroidered and designed by the young participants. We also screened the project film, created with participants, and this was followed by a discussion and drinks/nibblesdrinks/nibbles.

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Date: 10 October 2023
Time: 1-2pm 
Venue: Silverstone 302  

This was an informal discussion about possible shared interests and directions, with the Centre for Life History and Life Writing Research and the Centre for Innovation and Research in Childhood and Youth.