Childhoods and the global polycrisis: New directions for critical childhood studies
06 December 2024, 5:00 pm–6:30 pm
Join us for the global launch of the UCL Critical Childhood Studies Centre as our keynote speaker, Professor Ann Phoenix, and respondents reflect on these challenges and possible new directions for the further development of critical childhood studies.
Event Information
Open to
- All
Availability
- Yes
Organiser
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Critical Childhood Studies Centre
The world we live in is confronted with multiple crises—from the crisis for the dispossessed and the climate change crisis to the ongoing crisis of war and violence that lies at the heart of racial capitalism. These crises all affect children disproportionately, increasingly with more and more detrimental consequences for their lives and well-being. How might a critical childhood studies produce knowledge that is relevant, appropriate, and responsive to these crises? How might it produce knowledge that is ethical, responsible, and even perhaps transformative at this historical juncture?
This event is online. Pre-registration is essential. A zoom link will be sent to you after you register.
Keynote speaker
Ann Phoenix is Professor of Psychosocial Studies in the Thomas Coram Research Unit and a member of the Critical Childhood Studies Centre at UCL. Her research focuses on the ways in which psychological experiences and social processes are linked and intersectional. It explores racialised and gendered identities, mixed-parentage, masculinities, consumption, motherhood, families, migration and transnational families. Professor Phoenix is widely published, and her latest books include Environment in the Lives of Children and Families: Perspectives from India and the UK and Nuancing Young Masculinities: Helsinki boys’ intersectional relationships in new times.
Respondents
Nara Milanich is Professor of Latin American History at Barnard College, Columbia University, and directs the Center for Mexico and Central America. She researches the history of kinship, childhood, reproduction, gender, and law in Latin America and is the author of Children of Fate: Childhood, Class, and the State in Chile, 1850-1930 and Paternity: The Elusive Quest for the Father. With Fanny García, she has developed Separated: Stories of Injustice and Solidarity, an oral history project.
Lucia Rabello de Castro is Professor of Childhood and Youth as the Universidade Federal do Rio de Janeiro, Brazil. She was the president elect of RC53 Sociology of Childhood of the International Sociological Association from 2018-2023 and is currently the Chief Editor of DESIDADES, a peer-reviewed journal about childhood and youth. Her research explores children's and young people’s social and political participation through decolonial epistemologies.
Spyros Spyrou is Professor of Anthropology and Acting Deputy Dean of the School of Humanities, Social and Education Sciences at European University Cyprus. His work explores, among others, the political lives of children, youth activism and more recently surveillance capitalism. He also maintains an active interest in questions around knowledge production in childhood studies.
The Critical Childhood Studies Centre is a home for world-leading scholarship about childhood as a socio-political, cultural, and historical phenomenon in diverse global contexts. The Centre provides a focal point for faculty and students at all levels in UCL to engage in innovative and multi-disciplinary research, teaching, and public engagement geared towards achieving social justice with and for children and young people.
For more information, email us at critical.childhood@ucl.ac.uk