This study investigates how migrant children are discursively linked to crime in contemporary children’s literature. Using critical content analysis within a labeling-theory framework, the analysis identifies four thematic axes: visibility and labeling, the types and justifications of crime, the role of space and position, and post-crime confrontation. Findings reveal that children are often coded as “potential offenders” not because of their actions but due to linguistic difference, visibility, or association with survival-driven rule-breaking. Such portrayals highlight double standards, where the same acts are criminalized for migrant children but tolerated for others, and show how space functions as an ideological arena of criminalization. While these narratives risk reinforcing stigma, they also provide opportunities for counter-labeling and resistance. Beyond literary representation, the study considers how these depictions may influence children’s self-perceptions and readers’ engagement, as well as how fiction both reflects and shapes real-world patterns of exclusion. The analysis further underscores the educational significance of these portrayals. Implications include the importance of critical literacy practices in classrooms, the role of teacher education in addressing deficit perspectives, and the potential of children’s literature as a tool for fostering inclusive values in contexts such as the Asia-Pacific, where migration and multilingualism are prominent.
Where does the voice of the early childhood educator live in conversations of critical pedagogy? How might the critical everyday movements and choices that teachers make be examined to explore their embedded layers of pedagogical intention? How might the voices emerge from the rich silence of our everyday lives and ordinary moments in the classroom? Through autoethnography, this narrative inquiry explores the everyday moments of one PreKindergarten teacher, and the layers of critical pedagogy that inform her practice. Framed within the work of Freire, Shor, and Grumet, I examine the intentionalities of these moments, the worlds that they silently hold, and the complexities of the daily movements of the early childhood educator. Through narrative inquiry, openings, questions, possibilities, and liberations emerge.
This study explores children’s experiences and rights in the digital environment through an interdisciplinary Participatory Action Research (PAR) design involving a Child Advisory Board of 14 teenagers and interviews with five members, analysed using narrative inquiry. While children’s digital rights have been extensively examined and digital resilience has received growing scholarly attention, important gaps remain in understanding how young people themselves experience and conceptualize resilience in relation to their rights in digital environments. This study contributes by offering an interdisciplinary PAR approach with young people in an understudied regional context, and by integrating narrative inquiry to foreground children’s experiences. Key risk and protective factors emerged as themes in the study and findings suggest that children demonstrate resilience in digital environments when positive adaptation occurs despite exposure to online risks and challenges. Participants described developing resilience through moderate exposure to online challenges, opportunities for learning, and interpersonal and critical digital skills. The findings reflect that promoting digital resilience is closely connected to meaningful youth participation and to the supportive roles of family, peers, community, educational systems, and government. Resilience and the promotion of child rights in the digital world are mutually reinforcing: fostering resilience enables youth to handle online challenges effectively, contributing to safer and more empowering digital environments that uphold children’s rights.
This article explores how children on St Helena Island navigate what it means to matter. Drawing on constructivist grounded theory and participatory World Café methods with children on the remote British Overseas Territory of St Helena, the study illuminates how young people articulate their sense of belonging, fairness, safety, and aspirations for the future within the constraints of a small island. Four categories were constructed: desiring equality and fairness, making space for children, keeping healthy and feeling safe, and migrating towards possibilities. Analysis suggested that children’s accounts across these domains were shaped by ongoing colonial legacies, conceptualised here as colonial scarring. Together, these categories informed the development of the concept of learning mattering, introduced in this study as the ongoing process through which children come to understand whether they are valued by others and able to contribute within relational, institutional, and structural contexts. Situating St Helena within broader debates on island childhoods and marginalisation, the article advances mattering as a critical construct for understanding children’s lives in remote, postcolonial, and internationally dependent contexts. Findings highlight both the agency and resilience of children, while underscoring the need for policies that meaningfully include children’s voices in shaping futures across island territories.
Public and scholarly discussions of children’s video gaming often default to a polarized narrative: parents as largely alarmed and children as uniformly enthusiastic. Such framing risks flattening how gaming is actually lived, negotiated, and felt within families—especially in relation to wellbeing. This study explored how children and parents perceive video gaming and how they interpret its implications for children’s wellbeing, with particular attention to cognitive development, social–emotional competency, and physical health. Using a phenomenological qualitative design, semi-structured interviews were conducted with children and parents to elicit first-person accounts of gaming in everyday life. Data were analyzed to identify shared meanings and points of divergence in how participants described benefits, harms, and conditions shaping gaming experiences. Findings complicate the common “pro-child/anti-parent” binary. Many parents articulated a nuanced, benefit-aware stance, describing perceived gains in decision-making, problem-solving, and children’s self-worth. In parallel, children voiced unexpectedly critical reflections, emphasizing emotional and relational costs such as depressed mood, bullying experiences, social withdrawal, and diminished peer connection. Across accounts, physical concerns—including sedentary patterns and digital fatigue—appeared as recurring constraints that colored otherwise enjoyable play. Overall, video gaming emerged not as a simple risk or reward, but as a spectrum of “shades of grey” whose wellbeing effects depend on context, content, and intensity. These insights support more balanced guidance for parents, teachers, and policymakers—guidance that preserves potential developmental affordances while actively mitigating social–emotional and health-related risks.
This qualitative study explores how agential realism can reframe understandings of early literacy and agency in Vietnam’s digital childhoods. It examines the entangled intra-actions of a 5-year-old Vietnamese child, Dat, with digital media, materials, spaces, and institutional discourses across home and early childhood education (ECE) settings. Data were gathered through observations, fieldnotes, video recordings, and interviews with teachers and parents over 8 weeks and analysed through an agential realist lens. Findings suggest that agency and early literacy experiences were not solely individual capabilities but were materially and discursively produced through dynamic engagements with digital encounters, classroom routines, spatial arrangements, and adult expectations. By situating agential realism in a Global South context, this study contributes to debates on early literacy and digital childhoods beyond the Global North and highlights possibilities for rethinking agency and pedagogy in Vietnamese ECE.
“Children are human beings” was a foundational motto underpinning the emergence of the new sociology of childhood movement in Western academia during the 1980s. Childhood sociologists engaged with the notion of children as “human becomings” versus “human beings,” aiming to sociologically problematise and reconceptualise children as social actors. This paper revisits the motto, as an emblem of recognition of children’s agency, through reflections of a world-known childhood author and interviewer from Türkiye, Yaşar Kemal. Drawing on his published autobiographical accounts and interviews, as well as his own interviews with children in 1975, it argues: (1) Yaşar Kemal’s unique ways of recognising children’s agency through his interviewing techniques, highlighting his contributions to the broader academic effort to decolonise the seemingly Western-dominated history of the sociology of childhood and make his earlier work visible; (2) novelties that Yaşar Kemal’s approach offers to contemporary childhood studies, from an “ethnographer” standpoint, advancing the field both theoretically and methodologically; (3) the significance of his work as sociological fiction for both children and adult readers.
Educational success is commonly defined through measurable performance within globalised assessment regimes, where comparative metrics and high stakes testing shape policy discourse and public understandings of achievement. Such frameworks privilege quantifiable attainment and narrow success to institutional performance. While extensive scholarship examines structural determinants of academic outcomes, considerably less attention has been given to how children themselves construct the meaning of success when invited to imagine their futures. Drawing on qualitative learning dialogue data from Year 4 students in Melbourne, generated within a multi-site research project examining children’s lifeworlds across three global cities (Melbourne, Hong Kong and Singapore), this article analyses children’s responses to a career aspiration prompt. Framed through lifeworld and scholarly habitus perspectives, aspirations are interpreted not as predictors of occupational outcomes but as forms of future-oriented identity work. Findings demonstrate that children construct success through hybrid moral–economic logics in which care, financial security, curiosity, challenge, recognition and mobility are negotiated simultaneously. Rather than reproducing singular cultural scripts or internalising institutional metrics, children synthesise relational and economic narratives of adulthood circulating within transnational educational fields. The analysis demonstrates that dominant separations between moral and economic framings of achievement obscure how children themselves understand success as moral–economic future identity work shaped through situated lifeworlds.
Approaching literacy from a more-than-human perspective can be a way of honouring the mundane politics that are part of children’s everyday lives globally. However, these politics require a different kind of attunement from adults, who are accustomed to not caring about events that seem to have no purpose and that, at first glance, appear to be unrelated to literacy. With that in mind, this study engages with the concept of the minor gesture to embrace those politics that are difficult to understand but that make us think about yet-unthought relations in the field of literacy. Through a series of sensorial vignettes, the researcher chronicles a dinosaur hunt initiated by children as part of a broader research project in Seville. Through dialogue with Manning’s work on the politics of minor gestures, this seemingly mundane event animates how the dinosaur hunt involved more-than-human literacies driven by unanswerable inquiries with the world, rather than by adult purposes. Furthermore, the author posits that non-normative political ways of understanding language emerge from the intense relationships between children and materials, where words lose priority if what is in-the-making is valued. Ultimately, this work contributes to a more profound comprehension of literacy that extends beyond prevailing parameters and embraces indispensable aspects to cultivating more equitable childhoods and literacies around the world attuned to specific body-minds, other-than-humans, and matters that transcend the linguistic realm.
Citizenship, migration and urban belonging in mega-cities are infrequently discussed in relation to young members of society. When visually staged to reflect a rescaling of multicultural membership and optimism for the future, the classroom and its young learners become a testing ground for interculturalism. In Steve McQueen’s Year 3 photography installation at the Tate Britain in 2019, London school classrooms and its 7 and 8-year-old pupils raised the possibility that London’s kaleidoscopic and flourishing interculturalism offer greater conviviality and tolerance through multiethnic proximity in this learning milieu. Here primary schools in the capital seen in over 3,000 classroom photographs affixed to the marble walls of the Duveen Galleries offer what we call the “intercultural image.” The intercultural image promotes wholeness, urban bondedness and superdiversity through increased interpersonal communication. The result of McQueen’s Year 3 is a diverse portrait and allegory of an intensely changing social demographic that gave further credence to the moniker “Global London,” thus challenging at the time the Brexit narrative of anti-immigration and isolationism purported by conservative wings of the British media.
Children's everyday lives are shaped by shifting rhythms of movement, suspension, and retrospection through which time becomes lived, imagined, and meaningful. This article brings together interdisciplinary and international perspectives, with members of a collective reflecting on temporality in children's lives. Across a prologue and nine reflective pieces developed through prolonged dialogue, the article explores time in children's diverse everyday contexts - including home, school, public, digital, and natural environments - in Canada, Czechia, Finland, and the USA. By applying a temporal lens to projects spanning literacy, ecology, placemaking, and media, the collection conceptualises time as non-linear, plural, situational, and relational. This perspective on time and childhood enables a closer understanding of how children's experiences unfold within tensions between progress-oriented social expectations, ecological timeframes, and their own ways of being and learning. It also highlights the importance of slow and stretched temporalities for creative, reflective, playful, and imaginative practices. By foregrounding dialogue and deep listening, the article promotes responsive and empathetic approaches to research with children. Developed through collaborative practices grounded in an ethics of care, it also manifests slow childhood scholarship.
This paper questions the dominant discourse of listening to (young) children’s voices by drawing on Jacques Derrida’s critique of phonocentrism and Jean-Luc Nancy’s ontology of resonance to propose a more attuned conceptualisation of listening. While Article 12 of the United Nations Convention on the Rights of the Child foregrounds the child’s right to ‘express views’, this principle has often been translated into a language of ‘voice, which risks reducing expression to a representational act – something to be extracted and recorded. Expression, by contrast, suggests movement, openness, and relationality, qualities that resonate with Derrida’s deconstruction of the metaphysics of presence. Derrida questions the assumption that voice transparently conveys meaning, exposing how it is always marked by différance and trace rather than full presence. Nancy radicalises this critique by positioning listening as an activity that does not aim at mastery but sustains the openness of meaning – a mode of being-with that allows for plurality and indeterminacy. For research and practice with young children, this shift demands creating spaces where voices (verbal, visual, gestural) can resound without being reduced to data points, and where sense can emerge in its plurality rather than being fixed or closed.
The majority of work dealing with children in contexts of political violence tends to focus on protectionist, humanitarian, and trauma-centred frameworks. While these paradigms have generated important safeguards and services, they often conceptualise children primarily as vulnerable subjects requiring rescue, rehabilitation, or psychological repair. These approaches risk obscuring how childhood is actively lived and constituted within conditions of protracted conflict. Drawing on ethnographic fieldwork conducted in Manipur, Northeast India, this article proposes an alternative framework grounded in social pedagogy and feminist care ethics. It argues that childhood in violent contexts is not merely interrupted or damaged by violence, but there is a rapid process of forming through everyday pedagogical relations of care. Care is conceptualised not as a moral response to harm but as a relational and political practice that mediates vulnerability and agency. By foregrounding everyday care practices, the article contributes to childhood studies by reframing children in conflict zones as relational actors whose subjectivities are constituted within networks of interdependence structured by violence. The study calls for a relational reorientation of child protection and humanitarian policy in protracted conflict settings.
This article explores how loose parts play functions as a material–discursive space in which young children negotiate gendered subjectivities. Framed by postdevelopmental and feminist new materialist perspectives, the study challenges developmentalist assumptions that treat gender as a stable, age-related attribute and instead foregrounds children’s shifting becomings with materials, peers and discourses. The research was conducted as a qualitative case study in a public preschool in Türkiye with children aged 5–6. Data were generated through 6 weeks of non-participant observation in a specially designed loose parts environment, using a structured “Loose Parts Gender Observation Form”, and analysed through descriptive and thematic analysis. Findings show heterogeneous and often ambivalent patterns: some children reproduced binary gender norms through colour preferences and gender-segregated play, while others adopted non-traditional roles and cross-gender affiliations that quietly unsettled normative expectations. Loose parts emerged as socio-material actors that both stabilised and troubled gendered subjectivities, rather than as neutral pedagogical tools. The study concludes that loose parts environments hold significant potential for opening more expansive possibilities for becoming gendered in early childhood, provided that educators critically attend to how materials, interactions and exclusions are organised, and use systematic observation to inform ethically attuned pedagogical interventions.
Frequencies is an artistic initiative developed by Turner Prize-winning artist Oscar Murillo, as an enterprise which opens connections between children and young people geographically thousands of miles apart. The Frequencies initiative has involved the Murillo Studio Team laying empty canvases across desks and tables, in hundreds of schools, across over 30 countries and five continents. Children and young people, ages 10–16 years, are invited to freely mark the empty canvases. In this article, I discuss a research project that examined a sample of marks made by children and young people on the Frequencies canvases. I identify abstract (non-figurative nor textual) marks created by children and young people, across various cultural and geographical spaces. Through the article, I apply a semiotic approach, drawing on indigenous and philosophical ideas that posit human and more-than-human worlds as deeply interconnected – suggesting these abstract marks as a manifestation of our deep connectedness. I highlight the forms and potential functions of abstract marks produced by children and young people, as a system of signs that may tune into the deeper aspects of self, potentially shared beyond social identities, cultures, spaces and histories. Paying attention to the abstract, and potentially, universal mark making of children and young people may support wider understandings about how self and subjectivity is expressed through free creativity.
Based on child-centered ethnographic fieldwork at a public middle school in Qingdao, the study investigates how consumerism reshapes identity formation among rural migrant children, foregrounding the symbolic power of branded footwear in everyday peer culture. Through in-depth observation and interviews, the research identifies three primary strategies through which migrant children navigate the symbolic boundaries of urban belonging: consumer imitation, meritocratic alignment, and strategic withdrawal. Rather than treating identity as an outcome of Hukou-based institutional exclusion alone, the study conceptualizes it as a situated, embodied process shaped by material consumption, peer comparison, and affective regulation. Drawing on Bourdieu’s theory of symbolic capital and Goffman’s framework of performative identity, the findings demonstrate how consumerism functions as a mechanism of symbolic violence disciplining migrant children’s desires, behaviors, and self-perceptions. The paper proposes “consumption capital” as a new axis of inequality, wherein social legitimacy is increasingly tied to market-mediated symbols. By tracing the lived negotiations of marginalized children, the study offers a critical lens on how classed identities are reproduced and resisted under late consumer capitalism in contemporary China.
Ghana’s child protection system reveals a significant gap between its legal framework and its practical implementation. Despite being the first nation to ratify the United Nations Convention on the Rights of the Child (UNCRC), Ghana struggles to enforce these mandates because of a direct clash between global standards and local traditions. This study argues that the system fails not because of a lack of resources, but because universal rights-based principles do not align with Ghana’s duty-oriented cultural practices. To investigate this gap, the research employs a dual-method approach, combining a systematic review of 24 core documents, following the Preferred Reporting Items for Systematic Reviews and Meta-Analyses, with Interpretive Policy Analysis to evaluate how society defines childhood, family responsibility, and welfare. The findings reveal that Western concepts, such as the “best interests of the child,” often function as tools of control, prioritizing individualism over Ghanaian communal values. This creates a “double bind” for families where the formal legal system feels culturally intrusive, yet the traditional kinship networks they trust lack legal authority. To bridge this gap, the study proposes a hybrid governance model that coordinates legal definitions with actual kinship structures, empowers community-based justice and diversion programs, and provides practitioners with culturally sensitive training. By treating cultural differences as opportunities for meaning-making rather than barriers to progress, this study provides a path toward a more robust child protection system in Ghana.
This study examines the intergenerational transformation of childhood in Türkiye by analyzing the experiences of grandparents, parents, and young adults. Grounded in the sociology of childhood, the research conceptualizes childhood as a socio-historical construction shaped by shifting economic and cultural conditions. Employing a qualitative design centered on Collective Memory Work and cross-generational comparison, data were generated through interviews and visual narratives produced by university students. The analysis focuses on five dimensions: space, play, emotions, education, and family relationships. Findings reveal a fundamental shift from rural, community-centered, and embodied childhoods toward urban, individualized, and digitally mediated forms. This transition is marked by the domestication of space and the evolution of play from productive labor to individualized cognitive activities. Ultimately, the study highlights a “modern childhood paradox”—characterized by increased agency and visibility alongside heightened emotional isolation—offering a critical perspective on postdigital childhood and cultural continuity in Türkiye.
