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Institute of Advanced Studies (IAS)

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Dr Sevasti-Melissa Nolas

Critical Childhood Studies Centre Visiting Research Fellow, October 2024 - June 2025

Melissa Nolas is an independent researcher, writer, photographer, digital archivist and curator. She directs Childhood Publics Research Programme and the Children’s Photography Archive C.I.C. and is best known for her research on childhood publics and children’s modes and media of expression and communication, as well as her multimodal, team ethnography, the ERC Connectors Study, with children in middle childhood in Athens, Hyderabad and London which, amongst other things, led to the hugely successful in common: children's photo-stories of public life exhibition.  She holds a PhD from the London School of Economics and has worked in U.K. higher education doing research and teaching for over 20 years.

Project summary

While at CCSC Melissa will be working on and sharing her new research project on creative biographies, children’s visual cultures, and the child's gaze. Through a series of in-depth interviews with adults recollecting their earliest memories, encounters and ongoing engagement with photography, the 'Hide and Seek: Looking for Children’s Photography in Family Spaces’ will theorise the child’s gaze and map out child-photo-memory configurations in diverse childhoods of the past.

Drawing on her significant expertise in participatory, qualitative research methodology and ethics, including creative, inventive and visual methods, and experience of research in majority and minority world contexts, and across disciplinary fields in childhood studies, including sociology, anthropology and psychology, Melissa will contribute to the intellectual life of the CCSC during her stay by running a seminar, workshop, and a regular reading group.