Childhood’s studies, children’s rights and social justice

A research cluster within SSRU exploring childhood as a social, political and ethical site of contestation.

About us

We take the standpoint of babies, children and young people to understand how their lives are shaped by power, policy, care and inequality. Drawing on childism, anti-racism, feminism, anti-colonial and critical traditions, our work connects children’s experiences to wider social structures. We conduct multidisciplinary research that informs policy, practice and public debate.

Our history

From the beginning of SSRU in 1990, seminars and conferences on childhood were organised through the Childhood Study Group. In 1997, this became the Childhood Research and Policy Centre (CRPC), and many academics visited from around the UK and the world. The Centre’s aims were to connect research, policy and practice, to increase practical respect for children and young people, and to promote research about childhood as a set of social concepts:

  • Children’s and young people’s own lives and experiences.
  • Children’s agency, competence and rights.
  • Children’s status in their families and schools, communities and wider society.

Our research

Our research approaches childhood as a lens through which wider political, economic, social and ethical tensions become visible. 

We study how children’s lives are shaped by power and political economy across everyday settings in diverse global contexts, revealing how social injustices and inequities are experienced and negotiated. 

We also explore how social policy, migration, welfare, education, health and legal systems construct and contest inclusion, exposing the ways children encounter and navigate structural forces that shape their life. 

Alongside this, we examine care and responsibility as ethical and relational practices, as well as sites of extraction and stratification, investigating how consent, care and decision-making are negotiated from the standpoint of babies, children and their families. 

Our work positions childhood not as a stage of development but as a site where power, policy, care and injustice intersect, and where critical research can inform social and political change.

Our approach

Our research combines empirical, theoretical and participatory approaches, with a strong commitment to ethics and co-production. We work with babies, children, young people, families, practitioners, organisations and policymakers. 

We develop theoretical contributions on:

  • Sociological theories of generation, children’s standpoints and generational order.
  • Critical reworkings of dominant constructions of childhood, trauma, resilience and intergenerational memory, including arts-based and culturally grounded epistemologies.
  • Childhood, care and social reproduction, including practices of solidarity, responsibility and ethical relations.
  • Global and marginalised childhoods, examining violence, resilience, recognition and inequality through ethnographic and lived-experience-centred approaches.
  • Children’s rights, consent and participation across legal, policy and everyday contexts.
  • Ethical frameworks for research with babies, children and young people.
  • Critical realist, feminist and anti/decolonial analysis for childhood research.
  • Advancing “child as method” as a theoretical lens for critiquing deficit-based and pathologising accounts of childhood, and for conceptualising knowledge as co-produced with children.

Our methods include:

  • Developing participatory and co-produced research designs that work with babies, children, young people, families, practitioners and policymakers.
  • Advancing ethnographic and lived-experience-centred approaches that attend to children’s everyday lives across diverse social, institutional and global contexts, including situations shaped by inequality, violence and exclusion.
  • Extending the use of arts-based, creative and multimodal methodologies to generate culturally grounded forms of knowledge with children, including non-verbal, sensory and embodied modes of expression.
  • Elaborating ethical frameworks for research with babies, children and young people, with particular attention to consent, care, power relations and safeguarding.
  • Applying critical realist, feminist and anti-/decolonial methodologies to analyse how structural inequalities, political economy and power shape childhoods, while remaining attentive to everyday experiences.
  • Conducting longitudinal and intergenerational research that traces how childhoods are shaped over time, across family relations, institutions and policy environments.
  • Using “child as method” to challenge pathologising and deficit-based accounts of childhood and to generate knowledge from children’s standpoints rather than adult-centric categories. 

People

Our team includes researchers with expertise in sociology, history, social policy, ethics, philosophy, rights, international development, and arts-based methodologies. We have international collaborations across the world.

Researchers at SSRU working in this field:

We work closely with colleagues from the Thomas Coram Research Unit: 

We also work closely with the UCL Critical Childhood Studies Centre.

Associated PhD candidates

  • Anna Hata – Researching Children’s Rights and Inclusive Education in Nepal (Supervisors: Tejendra Pherali, Kirrily Pells, and Uma Pradhan)
  • Fernanda Ahumada Medina – Researching Childhood and parenting practices in migrant families in Chile (Supervisors Carol Rivas and Rosa Mendizabal)
  • Hanan Kazim – Researching Children’s Rights in the United Arab Emirates (Supervisors: Guy Roberts-Holmes, Kirrily Pells, and Veena Meetoo)
  • Nadeen Abbassy – Palestinian Refugee Children’s Practices of Care and Decolonial Solidarity in Jordan’s Camps (Supervisors: Rachel Rosen and Feryal Awan)
  • Ruiqi Deng – Child Gifting Practices in Rural China (Supervisors: Rachel Rosen and Alison Lamont)
  • Sixuan Han – Researching Children and Memory in China (Supervisors: Rachel Rosen, Kirrily Pells and Meghanne Barker)
  • W’Ayendjina Antchandie – Children for Change: Being an anti-racist child activist in racial capitalist times (Supervisors: Rachel Rosen and Ida Danewid) 

Partners

We work with national and international academic partners. Our networks also include:

  • International partners in Rwanda, Nepal, Kyrgyzstan, Kenya, Uganda, Indonesia, Mexico, Colombia and Chile.
  • Policy organisations and ethics committees.
  • Child rights, healthcare and social policy networks.

We actively welcome collaboration across disciplines and sectors, working with researchers, practitioners, and policymakers to co-create knowledge that advances social justice for babies, children and young people.

Former childhood studies doctoral students

Research projects

Our research focuses on global, local and intergenerational contexts, exploring children’s lives in relation to policy, care, ethics, conflict, migration, violence, health and wellbeing.

Examples of areas of work include: