OPEN RESEARCH SEMINAR

Date: Tuesday 10 May, 2022
Time: 4.15-5.30pm
Presenter: Dr Roma Thomas

Roma presents the findings of her doctoral study of teenage boys marginalised through school exclusion, highlighting aspects of the methods she used - including group work and an overall approach of ethnography - to centre the voices of young people. Ultimately, she argues for the central importance of understanding the lived experience of school exclusion to improve practice, policy and research in this field.

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OPEN RESEARCH SEMINAR

Date: Tuesday 18 January, 2022
Time: 10.30am-12pm
Presenter: Professor Ephrat Huss, The Charlotte B. & Jack J. Spitzer Department of Social Work, Ben Gurion University of the Negev, Beer-Sheva, Israel

The aim of this seminar is to demonstrate how a qualitative arts-based methodology can be used to understand and evaluate marginalized children’s lived experience of their social realities. This methodology enables the articulation of the rights and abilities of vulnerable children to consult and express their worldview to influence their lives and co-create effective services and interventions.

Arts-based methods are illustrated by two case studies:

• children in a refugee school in Lesbos
• youth in unrecognized Bedouin villages.

Both live in deep poverty and with cultural marginalization. The methodology intends to capture children’s phenomenological and also physical and socially contextualized experiences, needs, and ways of coping - a useful protocol with which to approach additional contexts of children’s lives, health and needs that are difficult to research using traditional methods due to cultural context and related challenges.

*This event is co-hosted with the Centre for Social Work Innovation and Research (CSWIR)

PRESENTATION

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POSTGRADUATE RESEARCHER MEETING

Date: Thursday 9 December, 2021
Time: 2-3pm
Led by: Tim Parkinson, Research Integrity, Ethics & Governance Administrator, School of Law, Politics & Sociology (LPS), University of Sussex

Tim explored ethical implications of online research approaches, and also provide expert governance guidance. 

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OPEN RESEARCH SEMINAR - Co-hosted with the Centre for Social Work Innovation and Research (CSWIR)

Date: Monday 6 December, 2021
Time: 1-2pm
Presenter: Dr Louise Sims, Kinship Care and Fostering Consultant, CoramBAAF
Zoom link: https://universityofsussex.zoom.us/j/96598732805?pwd=UWlJdFF1YllsNWRSQkRVTCtSTWdsQT09
(Meeting ID: 965 9873 2805 / Passcode: 068175)

The last decade has witnessed ‘the withering of the state’ (Hingley-Jones, 2019) and the pandemic has laid bare the results. As the state withers families are increasingly being asked to take on the support for younger family members, often at times of crisis - and when they themselves are in crisis.

Kinship care has come to be known as the unsung and unsupported ‘third pillar of the social care sector’. There is little scaffolding in place. Statutory support, legal, social work, policy, data gathering and research responses have not kept pace with developments. We know very little of children’s experiences or ‘what is going on ‘inside’ [kinship] families’ (Pitcher, 2014, p.20).

In this seminar, Joanne Warner’s (2015) work on emotional politics is used as a psychosocial lens to consider both the matrix of tensions shaping kinship practices, and the possibilities for new understanding and connections within families and across disciplines.

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READING GROUP

Date: Thursday 2 December, 2021
Time: 12-1pm
Led by: Professor Michelle Lefevre (CIRCY Director) & Dr Rebecca Webb (CIRCY Co-director)
Zoom link: https://universityofsussex.zoom.us/j/96209997516?pwd=aWhDcWxQMGNVMDdoNjZiejh2NDZLQT09 (Meeting ID: 962 0999 7516 / Passcode: 929947)

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OPEN RESEARCH SEMINAR

Date: Thursday 25 November, 2021
Time: 1-2pm
Presenter: Roni Eyal-Lubling, PhD Researcher, Department of Sociology and Anthropology,Bar-Ilan University, Israel
Zoom link: https://universityofsussex.zoom.us/j/96637619485?pwd=TWdSbG1heHE4S3o0L01WODExZUpkdz09 
(Meeting ID: 966 3761 9485 / Passcode: 749015)

The term “emotional capital” (Gillies, 2006; Reay, 1998) has been used in literature to describe investment and accumulation of emotional, resilience-related resources transferred mostly from mothers to their young children. Its application to mother - young adult daughter relations in the context of poverty and social marginalisation raises questions about possible transitions in mothers’ perception of their daughters’ entitlement to one-way emotional investment.

Analysing interviews with 18 mother-young adult daughter dyads living in marginalised communities in the south of Israel, Roni found two distinct stages:
In the first, an asymmetric investment of emotional capital from mother to daughter during daughters’ adolescent years. In the second, mother’s investment of emotional capital turns into a demand for reciprocity (Goulner, 1960; Offer, 2012). Roni suggests that, while emotional capital in middle-class mother-child relations is translated into children’s educational and occupational profits, at the intersection of poverty and young adulthood, mothers’ investment of emotional capital turns into debt which young adult daughters are expected to reciprocate.

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OPEN RESEARCH SEMINAR

Date: Thursday 18 November, 2021
Time: 2-4pm
Presenters: Yaw Ofosu-Kusi, University of Energy and Natural Resources, Ghana & Glynis Clacherty, University of the Witwatersrand, South Africa
Chairperson: Dr Dorte Thorsen, Research Fellow, Institute of Development Studies
Zoom link: Zoom link: https://universityofsussex.zoom.us/j/92574252069?pwd=a1V2ZWZMb0hlc2swSWtqWUlzZTI3dz09
(Meeting ID: 925 7425 2069 / Passcode: 244144)

This double seminar was presented by two senior researchers who have done participatory visual and art-based research with children for two decades: Yaw Ofosu-Kusi has worked with engaging street children in Accra in taking photographs of their everyday lives, and Glynis Clacherty has facilitated spaces in which refugee children in Johannesburg could express their experiences through artwork. With their long experience in childhood studies, the two speakers will explore how perceptions of childhood have changed in their research contexts and how that affects children. Their insights are not only important for understanding African childhoods but also for anticipating changes to the space and time of childhood elsewhere, contending with a global pandemic, climate politics, and inequalities at different levels.

Yaw completed his PhD at the University of Warwick in 2002. His thesis focused on child migrant labourers in Accra, arguing that the children in his study were an adjustment generation and their early entry into the labour market was a social consequence of the structural adjustment policies of the 1980s and 1990s. Since then, he has researched and published widely on the theme of childhood in Ghana.

Glynis completed her PHD at the African Centre for Migration & Society in 2016. Her thesis focused on understanding trauma and trauma intervention in new ways through an examination of the Suitcase Project, a project for unaccompanied refugee children in Hillbrow, Johannesburg. She is currently working as a research specialist on refugees and child migration in Cape Town, South Africa.

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FESTIVAL OF SCIENCE EXHIBITION

Date: Saturday 6 November, 2021
Time: 10-11am / 12-1pm
Venue: Jubilee Library, Jubilee Street, Brighton, BN1 1GE

An exhibition of Objects that Matter, chosen by students in Ecuador, India and the UK to reflect their sustainability concerns, will be on show at Brighton's Jubilee Library from 5 November for a week as part of the ESRC Festival of Science 2021.

On 6 November, workshops for children and young people will offer the opportunity to deliberate what these objects reveal about global connectedness and the need to act in the here-and-now.

• A drop-in workshop for children aged up to 12 and their families will run from 10-11am.
• A bookable workshop for young people aged 12 to 21 years will run from 12-1pm.

The 'Objects that Matter' exhibition and workshops are being organised by Rebecca Webb and Perpetua Kirby who have been working with children, families, teachers and educators to engage students with the uncertainties associated with climate change and biodiversity loss. They have been using creative and deliberative activities to explore different sources of knowledge, diverse perspectives and a complexity of feelings to think through what children and young people might do in response to the sustainability crisis. Rebecca and Perpetua's aim is to support young people to experience hope to live and thrive in the world (rather than simply seeing themselves as the future solution) given the weight of facts on climate change and biodiversity loss.

Read more about their research and practice at TRANSFORM-iN EDUCATION.