Centre for Childhood Studies
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
- 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.
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Our goal is to apply ground-breaking theoretical research to understand and explain the lives of children.
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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.
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.
Key publications
- Cudjoe, E., (2022). Using Diaries With Interpretative Phenomenological Analysis: Guidelines From a Study of Children Whose Parents Have Mental Illness. International Journal of Qualitative Methods. 21: 1-9
- Cudjoe, E., Chiu, MYL. and Tam, CHL., (2023). Navigating peer relationships: What do friendships look like for children whose parents have mental illnesses? Child Abuse Review. 32:1-9
- Gabriel, N., (2021). Beyond ‘developmentalism’: A relational and embodied approach to young children's development. Children and Society. 35 (1), 48-61
- Laubender, C., (2022). Getting into character: On psychoanalysis and literature in the classroom. Psychoanalysis, Culture & Society. 27 (2-3): 386-390
- Halton-Hernandez, E., (2023). The Marion Milner method: Psychoanalysis, autobiography, creativity. Routledge.
- Rowold, K. and Cullen, N., (2023). Mothers’ Milk and Mothers' Time: Childcare Advice and the Conceptualization of Demand Feeding in Post-1945 Britain and Italy. Historical Journal, 1-22
- Wood, M., (2020). Parents and Children in the Mid-Victorian Novel Traumatic Encounters and the Formation of Family. Springer Nature.
- Working in other worlds, the article begins on page 30 featuring research from Dr Norman Gabriel, Arianna Pulsoni, Dr Vito De Feo and Dr Katerina Bourazeri
- The Sociology of Early Childhood - Critical Perspectives.
- Carolyn Laubender: https://www.euppublishing.com/doi/abs/10.3366/pah.2017.0229 and https://www.tandfonline.com/doi/abs/10.1080/15240657.2019.1559519
- Soreanu, R. and Hurducaș, I., (2016). Children's imaginaries in the city: on things and materials. Children's Geographies. 14 (4), 422-436
- Clark J, and Duschinsky R. (2020) Young masculinities, purity and danger: Disparities in framings of boys and girls in policy discourses of sexualisation. Sexualities. 2020;23(5-6):739-756. doi:10.1177/1363460717736718
- Castro, I. and Clark, J. (2019) (eds.) Child and Youth Agency in Science Fiction, Travel, Technology, Time, NY: Lexington
- Clark J. (2018) “There’s Plenty More Clunge in the Sea”: Boyhood Masculinities and Sexual Talk. SAGE Open. April 2018. doi:10.1177/2158244018769756
- Nicholson, C. Dwivedi, K.N. Irwin, M. (2010) Children and Adolescents in Trauma: Creative Therapeutic Approaches. London: Jessica Kingsley Publishers
- Nicholson, C. (2018) ‘The needle dips and pokes’: Graves, Childhood and Psychoanalysis’ republished by request in Vestigia, The Journal of The International Network of Psychotherapeutic Practice. Volume 2, Issue 2, pp 299-315
- Nicholson, C. (2012) ‘Relational Ruptures: The Psychodynamic Processes Influencing Care Leavers and Care Organisations’ International Journal of Therapeutic Communities. Issue 32 (3)
- Clark J, and Duschinsky R. (2020) Young masculinities, purity and danger: Disparities in framings of boys and girls in policy discourses of sexualisation. Sexualities. 2020;23(5-6):739-756. doi:10.1177/1363460717736718
- Castro, I. and Clark, J. (2019) (eds.) Child and Youth Agency in Science Fiction, Travel, Technology, Time, NY: Lexington
- Clark J. (2018) “There’s Plenty More Clunge in the Sea”: Boyhood Masculinities and Sexual Talk. SAGE Open. April 2018. doi:10.1177/2158244018769756
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