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Research Centre

Centre for Childhood Studies

Part of Department of Psychosocial and Psychoanalytic Studies

A line of young children walking on a beach with the sun in the background.

Project overview

 

The Centre for Childhood Studies offers a radical and alternative contribution to existing knowledge within the field of childhood studies, exploring the lives of younger and older children from a multi-disciplinary perspective.

We will bring together scholars from across the whole University whose work represents a contribution to expanding our understandings of and approaches to children and childhood, filling the conceptual, methodological, social and political lacunae that still exist in the theories and research of mainstream childhood studies.

View our latest research project video - Be Yourselves Project – Forging the Links between Child Psychotherapy and Virtual Reality


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Our key aims
  • to bring together scholars from across the University whose work represents a contribution to expanding our understandings of and approaches to children and childhood, filling the conceptual, methodological, social and political lacunae that still exist in the theories and research of mainstream childhood studies.
  • to build and develop an international reputation in the multidisciplinary academic study of childhood (birth-21 years), encouraging ground-breaking theoretical and policy relevant analysis, applied to understand and explain the lives of children.
  • to provide the development of an innovative, multidisciplinary approach to childhood studies forging important connections with other University Departments and disciplines, such as developmental psychology, sociology, language, neuroscience, history, anthropology, geography, literature and politics. 
Norman Gabriel
Our goal is to apply ground-breaking theoretical research to understand and explain the lives of children.
Dr Norman Gabriel Director for the Centre for Childhood Studies

Our Director

Dr Norman Gabriel

Dr Norman Gabriel

Senior Lecturer

Department of Psychosocial and Psychoanalytic Studies, University of Essex

Our research

Be Yourselves Project

Forging the Links between Child Psychotherapy and Virtual Reality.

Co-producing a child maintenance assessment tool for the Departments of Social Welfare in Ghana

Dr Ebenezer Cudjoe is engaged in a project to co-produce a child maintenance assessment tool to be used by social workers in Ghana. Funded by the University’s International Impact Fund, the project will develop a child maintenance specific tool in a context where majority of cases handled by social service organisations are related to the neglect of the financial needs of children.

Dr Cudjoe is working together with colleagues from the University of Ghana and Flinders University, Australia to co-produce this tool. A key part of the project is working together with social workers in the co-production, as part of a practice research methodology. A workshop organised by practitioners in Ghana has provided inputs for the project.

Read the news article

Institutions and Infant Care: Foundling Hospitals and Residential Homes for Babies in Twentieth-Century Europe

Dr Katharina Rowold (University of Essex) and Dr Niamh Cullen (QUB) lead an AHRC-funded project which explores the comparative history of foundling hospitals and residential institutions for babies in twentieth-century Europe and their meaning, then and now.

The project has several objectives. Firstly, it draws together a range of scholars from different national contexts to explore the diverse trajectories of residential infant institutions, examining the contexts that reinforced the role of such institutions as well as the forces that eventually underpinned their disappearance.

Secondly, it fosters interdisciplinary dialogue about the representation and memory of residential infant homes, and considers what is, or should be, the role of public history in the memory and history of these institutions. Thirdly, it provides a space for people who have experienced the contemporary care system in England to contribute their personal reflections to the project.

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Key publications

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