ABSTRACT Caste hierarchies in India place children within a complex system of oppressor‐oppressed relationships that structurally reinforce practices of othering. This paper draws on research with children from privileged caste communities, raising critical consciousness of caste oppression in a primary school classroom in New Delhi, India. It focuses on children's dialogues about their identities, privilege and positionality. The study was conducted over a period of 8 months, with three iterative cycles of inquiries and participatory approaches to co‐research with 12 children (10‐year‐olds) in a grade 5 classroom. Informed by critical qualitative, arts‐based, and play‐based methods, data generated with children included inquiry walls, child‐led interviews, drawings, podcasts, zines, maps, comics, puppets and theatre performances. Children's shifting understandings of caste‐based otherness, i.e., from ‘us and them’ conversations to ideas of solidarity and being anti‐caste allies, are explored. The paper discusses implications for addressing systemic barriers which limit children's agency for engaging in anti‐caste work in their schools, communities and society.
ABSTRACT Research on young people's use of digital devices and platforms demonstrates that their online experiences are deeply situated and contextual, shaped both by individual circumstances and by algorithmically driven systems that personalise content and mediate engagement. Yet, current guidance available to support young people's online interactions fails to reflect these lived realities. This study engaged 120 young people from secondary schools (ages 11–18) across the UK to explore their experiences of digital life. Data were generated through a series of creative workshops that employed the heuristic device of ‘digital nutrition’, which aimed to advance algorithmic literacy and encourage reflection on intentional digital behaviours. The workshops prompted discussion around the perceived quality of young people's online experiences, their understanding of the technological and algorithmic structures shaping digital use and the forms of support they believe are necessary to navigate online environments effectively. Visual and audio data produced during the workshops were analysed using thematic analysis. The findings reveal the complex, contradictory and often ambivalent nature of young people's digital experiences. Participants described how digital platforms simultaneously enable and undermine dimensions of community, safety and education, affording opportunities for connection and learning while also introducing risks and challenges. This research demonstrates that young people possess a sophisticated understanding of their digital environments and underscores the importance of meaningfully incorporating their perspectives into educational and policy frameworks aimed at supporting their digital futures.
ABSTRACT Currently, children's citizenship in early childhood care and education (ECCE) is receiving increasing international attention, yet research in the Chinese context remains limited. Employing a post‐structural perspective and theoretical devices drawn from the work of Michel Foucault, this article examines how children's citizenship is understood and enacted in contemporary Chinese kindergartens. Based on three rounds of video‐cued interviews with 11 kindergarten teachers in China, the analysis identifies three interrelated constructions of children's citizenship: national membership, creative thinking and acting and rules and responsibilities. These constructions reflect the interplay of multiple discourses in China's ECCE, which together shape differentiated subject positions for child citizens. In everyday kindergarten practice, children's citizenship is enacted in the dynamic space between creative agency and structured routines. This tension reveals how children's citizenship participation is simultaneously enabled and regulated in selected Chinese kindergartens.
This article explores lower secondary school pupils' perceptions of physically active learning (PAL). Specifically, we explore what educational purposes 12 Norwegian 9th graders perceive PAL contributes to. Five lessons with PAL were observed and informed three subsequent focus groups. Drawing on an abductive, reflexive thematic analysis, we examine how pupils articulate their experiences across activities. We use Gert Biesta's conceptualisations of qualification, subjectification and socialisation as an analytical lens to interpret the educational purposes pupils attribute to PAL. Our findings indicate that pupils primarily perceive PAL in relation to qualification, particularly in terms of engagement with subject content. However, what makes these experiences meaningful is closely linked to collaboration, participation and opportunities to engage in different ways, which can be interpreted in relation to socialisation and subjectification. Importantly, pupils' perceptions are shaped not by movement alone, but by how PAL is structured and enacted in context. These findings contribute to ongoing discussions about the educational purposes of PAL and suggest a need to reconsider the concept to better capture the broader educational experiences that pupils value.
Modern deaths have become reiterations. That is, despite exhibiting a seemingly high-level of diversity in death's representations in everyday lives, death suffers from a particular onto-epistemological poverty that prevents it from being imagined otherwise. This, in part, is due to a contemporary capitalist domestication of thanatological themes into subjects of sensation, exotification, and ultimately, commodification and consumption. Additionally, the modern biomedical and techno-scientific efforts should also be taken into account in disenchanting the multiplicity of death into a singular and universal experience based on human-centrism and human exceptionalism. Death, as such, warrants novel conceptual and theoretical re-enchantment in order for its multiplicity to be revitalised, especially in emerging post-humanist and relational contexts. Young children's engagements with death/s and dying-long considered to be 'incomplete' or 'magical' by developmentalist constructions-offers a unique opportunity to reimagine what death can possibly be. Drawing on child-led, video-reflexive and art-based ethnographic work with 5-7-year-old children in Australia, this work examines children's everyday socio-material encounters with diverse death/s: ones that are fictional, more-than-human, and ghostly. Specifically, these death encounters encompass children's dreams and constructions of reality, imaginary play with objects, and engagement with non-human subjects. Informed by cross-disciplinary literary and sociological theorisations on magical realism and hauntology, we make children's 'unrealistic', 'matter-of-fact' and 'uncanny' accounts about death visible, illustrating their magical realist potentials, and thus considering their onto-epistemological values to be not oppositional but complementary to dominant death narratives. In particular, we show how children's empirical and imaginative constructions of death/s maps onto metaphysical and ontological versions of magical realism. These constructions constitute death as unreal, objective and uncanny; they collectively expand and re-enchant death's possible meanings beyond conventional human-centric and essentialist understandings.
Children encounter death in everyday life, through family, peers, media, and health care. Opportunities for meaningful engagement with death-related topics are limited. In this article, we reimagine death literacy-the knowledge and skills needed to navigate dying, death, and bereavement-through a child-centred, social constructionist lens. Existing frameworks are adult-oriented, emphasising procedural and caregiving knowledge. We propose a critical literacy approach that recognises adults' child-relational capacities and children as social agents who co-construct knowledge about death and dying in interaction with others. Then, rather than a fixed set of competencies, death literacy is instead viewed as a socially produced phenomenon shaped by language, cultural narratives, and everyday practices. With a focus on the Swedish context, we highlight how children experience death in different social arenas, navigating routines, and complex emotional and philosophical questions. By examining children's perspectives and experiences, especially end-of-life experiences, we call for inclusive, dialogical practices that support children's participation in death-related communication and knowledge production. Our contribution lies in broadening the understanding of childhood as a critical life phase for navigating death and dying, and advancing a child-centred model of death literacy that foregrounds relational, cultural, and communicative dimensions. We show how adults' death literacy, especially among caregivers, educators, and other professionals, conditions children's opportunities for participation, understanding, and well-being. We conclude that viewing death literacy not as an individual capacity but as a set of socio-culturally grounded resources co-produced across generations can foster more inclusive, dialogical practices that recognise children's perspectives and capacities in encounters with death.
In a time when material reality appears disconnected from the spiritual world and meaning is sought through overconsumption of the Earth's material sphere, this study explores how death and grief are narrated as part of the 'stories of the land' that unite the material and spiritual worlds in a forest preschool in southeastern Finland. Additionally, the study investigates how shared narratives of death and grief contribute to the collective care that includes both human and more-than-human participants. Although place-based spirituality has been examined in educational contexts, little is known about how shared stories of death and grief connect material and spiritual dimensions and nurture collective care. This study seeks to deepen an understanding of how such narratives may help repair the current spiritual disconnection from the Earth by fostering material connectivity and caring communication among humans and more-than-humans in early childhood education. It also explores how children participate in and are supported by collective care when encountering death and grief. The study is based on 5-day ethnography in a forest preschool, data including field notes, video recordings and a map of the more-than-human participants in the environment. The findings revealed three metanarratives that connect the spiritual to materiality: all living beings die and return to the soil, death and nature hold mystery and wonder and grief is shared among humans and more-than-humans.
Primary classrooms are dynamic spaces where young students learn to read and develop as readers. While reading inherently fosters an individual interaction with a text, its manifestation in a classroom transforms reading into a collective activity. This study explores young students' simultaneous, collective participation during private, unshared reading in the classroom, aiming to illuminate bodily practices of reading and discuss their relation to the interpretative work of reading. The data employed include observational (photographs and fieldnotes), reflectional (student logbooks) and experimental (co-creation sessions) methods regarding different reading activities performed with 10-11-year-old students in grade four at two different public primary schools in Sweden. The reading activities were mainly conducted during Swedish language classes, where the students commonly read a book of their own choice individually, alongside their classmates in the classroom. The paper is inspired by assemblage theory, adopts an abductive approach with data and theory, and employs the concepts of micro-discipline and sensory orchestration in the analysis. Results show individual and joint body-sensory dimensions attached to classroom reading practices. Becoming a reader thus emerges as a complex bodily trial, where each student needs to find ways for their own body to favour their interaction with the text while simultaneously respecting the potential needs of other students in a collective reading classroom. The study problematizes what reading becomes in institutionalized settings and who is and is not considered a reader in primary classrooms. Understanding how the classroom contributes to framing and shaping the ways in which primary students are (un)able to engage productively with reading is important. Institutionalized reading forms a significant part in the development of young readers and is critical to the early stages of young people's 'careers' as readers. This study contributes to a further understanding of often taken-for-granted aspects of reading.
Collaboration with justice-involved children is a central tenet of the 'Child First' guiding principle for the Youth Justice System of England and Wales. However, exactly what constitutes 'collaboration' is moot in policy, practice and research with vulnerable children in contact with support systems, and currently neglected within youth justice contexts. As we discuss, children's collaboration is typically modelled and operationalised in adult-centric, static ways, based on levels of involvement and how professionals can facilitate children's (often inequitable) participation in planning and decision-making. This article utilises data from justice-involved children who participated in the 'Child First Collaboration Project' via a Project Reference Group (n = 22) and system journey interviews facilitated by creative methodologies conducted with children across a range of youth justice stages (n = 66). Analyses identified a dynamic and relational 'cycle of collaboration' containing four inter-related mechanisms: asking, listening to, respecting and informing children, throughout processes within and beyond the Youth Justice System. Where this cycle and its mechanisms were enacted, children perceived child-centric, effective, authentic collaboration. Where they were not (or not fully), children perceived adult-centric, ineffective, disingenuous 'collaboration' more akin to tokenistic consultation. Therefore, it is recommended that the Child First 'collaboration with children' tenet and associated practice guidance be augmented to reflect this evidence-based and dynamic 'cycle of collaboration'.
Child physical punishment was outlawed in Wales in March 2022. Previous research suggests that legislative changes prohibiting physical punishment can positively influence attitudes towards child discipline methods. This exploratory study investigated the impact of this legislative ban on Welsh parents' attitudes towards physical punishment and positive parenting practices through a qualitative online survey. Additionally, broader contextual factors, including the COVID-19 pandemic, were considered in relation to parent and child well-being. Participants comprised 25 psychology students who were parents residing in Wales with children aged 0-18 years. Findings indicated that parental attitudes varied widely, alongside a perceived lack of support for parenting and child behaviour management. Gaps in parental knowledge regarding the illegality of physical punishment in Wales were also identified. Further research is required to clarify parental perceptions of discipline versus punishment. Moreover, the prospective influence of Welsh Government legislation on attitudinal shifts holds broader implications for the global abolition of child physical punishment.
Over the past three decades, children and youth ('young people') have been increasingly conceptualised as moral agents with rights and capacities to be meaningfully engaged in decisions affecting them. While evidence suggests that social spaces are opening to prioritise listening to these voices, gaps still exist. One such domain is young people's experiences with palliative and end-of-life (P-EOL) care. Our team is conducting a national study to create opportunities for young people's views and experiences to be heard regarding P-EOL care and policymaking in Canada. Our project is guided by a Childhood Ethics framework, recognising the moral agency of young people and using interdisciplinary methods to ensure their voices are considered. It proceeds with two phases, designed using a participatory approach with a qualitative methodology. Phase One is a consultation phase with youth advisors from Youth Advisory Councils and healthcare practitioner (HCP) advisors, through virtual focus groups and interviews. From consultations, generated data on how best to engage young people in research and policymaking pertaining to children's P-EOL care has been used to inform Phase Two design. In this paper, we report on our Phase One consultations, detailing how they informed Phase Two design. Participants highlighted challenges related to recruitment and alternative means of engagement, the importance of using multi-modal formats for ensuring informed consent, generating data, and mobilising study findings, and the utility of inviting young people to participate in discussions related to death, dying, and EOL care. Ours is one of the first Canadian studies to investigate young people's experiences with P-EOL care, and the first Canadian study on childhood death and dying to employ a participatory approach. Findings presented here generate insights for researchers looking to conduct research with young people on sensitive topics through approaches that are attentive to their voices, perspectives, and agency.
Within the English key stage four curriculum, where pupils are preparing for standardised assessment at age 16, many subjects include content pertinent to the Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs). However, due to the assessment focus and exam content of this educational phase, these are rarely explicitly referenced or discussed. Within the context of Global Citizenship Education (GCE), this paper explores the response of pupils in a secondary school in England to resources taken from The World's Largest Lesson-a teaching resource which addresses the SDGs through citizenship, climate justice and the environment. Through engaging with these resources we invited young people to take part in focus groups to provoke a discussion on where participants had encountered subject content that speaks to the SDGs and their level of awareness of the goals themselves. Many SDG foci were identified in their learning, in particular climate change (SDG 13), gender equality (SDG 5), peace and conflict (SDG 16), hunger (SDG 2) and life on land (SDG 15). The findings include the interconnected nature of the SDGs the pupils had learnt about, juxtaposed with the fragmented nature of the curriculum for assessment and how this fragmentation hampers a 'joining of the dots' between SDGs, local and global issues, individual and collective actions, and between formal and informal learning. All of which illustrate a lack of time for reflection and space to allow for connection between SDGs and a transdisciplinary discussion of knowledge.
ABSTRACT Over the past 15 years, the UK government has implemented significant welfare reforms. This paper reports a rapid review of qualitative data about the impact of the benefit cap and two‐child limit on children and young people's health and wellbeing. Four peer‐reviewed journal articles and 21 grey literature sources were included. The review, the first synthesis of qualitative evidence, demonstrates that the policies reduce children and young people's access to key resources for health and wellbeing; they create stress, anxiety, shame, exclusion and relational tensions, and intensify existing inequalities. The current socioeconomic context exacerbates the negative impacts of the policies.
This study was part of a larger research project, which investigated post-separation violence, father-child relationships and children's participation in child custody and child protection proceedings. It was funded by the Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council of Canada, and it was approved by the University of Ottawa's Research Ethics Board. This article presents findings from a secondary data analysis. The data were initially gathered through two independent studies conducted in Quebec. The final sample for this study included 23 custody evaluation reports, which had been produced in the context of family court proceedings, in cases where there had been domestic violence. A feminist critical discourse analysis was conducted using NVivo. Overall, the research findings reveal that children's voices have been marginalised in the family evaluation process, as the evaluators gave little or no consideration to the children's wishes and feelings in their reports. In some cases, children's wishes and feelings have been dismissed and seen as irrational, particularly when the evaluators have concluded that they had been influenced by their mothers' alienating behaviours. The research findings also show that family evaluators tend to interpret what children's needs are with little or no consideration to their perspectives, wishes and feelings. These research findings raise important questions regarding custody evaluators' understanding of children's experiences in the context of domestic violence, and the place that is given to their voices in this process. The findings will be discussed in relation to children's rights and the International Convention on the Rights of the Child.
In recent decades, youth activism has experienced a global resurgence, playing a pivotal role in advocating for social and political change across diverse national and international contexts. Drawing on empirical data from a study of high school students in diverse Washington, DC public schools, this paper offers a unique perspective on youth engagement with activism. Findings include insights from students not identified as traditional activists, deepening the understanding of youth perspectives beyond established activist circles. We used thematic analysis of 20 group discussions (GDs), each consisting of three to six high school students (ages 14-18; 72 participants total). Participants were recruited from public high schools across the city, with the goal of including youth from diverse racial, ethnic, and socioeconomic backgrounds. Based on thematic analysis of transcripts, the findings show that D.C youth engage with activism in complex ways, navigating local experiences and global concerns, adapting global narratives to local contexts, distinguishing between perceived 'good' and 'bad' forms of activism, and expressing critical concerns about the commercialization of movements. While literature widely addresses youth disengagement from politics and civic action, our findings demonstrate the ways in which youth possess insightful understandings of activism and exhibit significant engagement within social and digital spheres. This research uniquely illuminates how high school youth in Washington, DC interpret and engage with activism, accounting for the interplay of their everyday experiences, global trends, and local contexts of place, race, and generation. These findings provide essential groundwork for nuanced international youth research. They highlight how direct exposure to global issues embeds into and shapes youths' perspectives on civic engagement, and informs culturally responsive approaches for educators and policymakers seeking to cultivate meaningful youth participation.
This comparative study explores young people's experiences of communication and decision-making during parental divorce in two distinct cultural contexts: T & uuml;rkiye and England. Drawing on qualitative interviews with 44 young people aged 11-16, the research addresses a gap in the Turkish literature by foregrounding children's perspectives, which are rarely centred in divorce studies from this context. Thematic analysis revealed that fragmented or absent communication left many participants feeling confused, excluded and emotionally unsupported. Cultural stigma, patriarchal family structures and emotional role-reversals shaped how young people in both countries navigated their agency, often leading to silence or self-protection. The study highlights the need for culturally sensitive, rights-based approaches that prioritise clear, open, timely and inclusive communication with children during divorce to enhance young people's emotional wellbeing and agency.
This article explores how girls aged 9-15 perceive and experience adult support in relation to influencer culture, drawing on qualitative research conducted in southeast England. Girls believed that adults often seek to mitigate digital risk through instrumentalised education or protective parenting, and articulated a desire for more emotionally attuned, developmentally responsive and dialogic support. They critiqued superficial or misattuned adult responses and highlighted the importance of trust, emotional safety and mutual understanding in navigating the relational complexities of influencer culture. The article bridges research on girls' digital self-presentation and adult-led digital safety interventions, arguing for an ecological, relational and socio-affective approach to supporting girls' wellbeing. Findings point to a need for pedagogies and parenting strategies that move beyond risk aversion and information delivery, toward practices of care, co-reflection and critical media literacy attuned to the affective and gendered dimensions of influencer culture.
The ongoing ethnic conflict in Manipur, India, has resulted in the mass internal displacement of Kuki children, severely disrupting their access to education and overall well-being. This exploratory case study examined the specific challenges and compromised educational well-being experienced by displaced Kuki adolescents aged 13-17. We employed a qualitative exploratory holistic multiple-case design with purposive sampling, focusing on three case units-Oasis Academy, The Scholar School, and Carmel School-in Guwahati, Assam. Data were obtained through observations and semi-structured interviews with displaced children. The findings revealed that these adolescents experienced profound social insecurity and emotional distress, often feeling isolated while staying in school hostels due to prior exposure to ethnic conflict. A critical shortcoming identified in the host institutions is the near absence of essential school health services, including health promotion programmes, emergency facilities, and guidance or counselling support. These issues, compounded by financial pressure and language barriers, negatively affect the educational well-being of displaced children. Thus, comprehensive policy interventions promoting inclusive education and standardised psychosocial support are urgently required to safeguard the stability, well-being, and educational rights of these vulnerable populations.
Meeting the needs of young people affected by sexual exploitation, alongside other forms of extra-familial harm, remains a challenge for social workers, youth workers and other professionals responsible for their safety and well-being. This paper proposes that to more effectively create safety with/for young people, we must re-examine how we understand and interpret their responses to professionals including acts of resistance, drawing upon Recognition Theory to support this. Specifically in this paper we utilise Jackson and Mazzei's method for 'thinking with theory' to bring Recognition Theory into the 'threshold' with data from a three-year participatory arts project with young people (aged 13-25) in England. In applying the work of three theorists who have contributed to the development of Recognition Theory: Axel Honneth, Nancy Fraser, and Judith Butler, the paper describes how their theoretical contributions both enable new questions about young people's resistance to emerge and support identification of new answers within the data. Findings highlight the need to shift our focus away from seeing young people's resistance as a problem and instead, recognise the possibilities of resistance-including a more honest and humble awareness of the limits to professionals' influence, and the need to create space for more expansive frames of recognisability where young people's whole, dynamic selves can be known.
For a healthy democracy, it is essential that children are introduced to democratic principles from an early age and are encouraged to engage in political activities in ways appropriate to their age and understanding. Yet, research on the role of media in promoting children's political engagement remains scarce. This study examines to what extent televised election debates affect children's political engagement. In anticipation of the Dutch parliamentary elections in fall 2023, the Dutch children's news broadcaster NOS Jeugdjournaal aired an election debate specifically for children, featuring six party leaders. In a within-subject experiment, 133 children (8-12 years old) participated and completed a questionnaire before and after watching the debate. Results show an agenda-setting effect: children rated topics discussed during the debate as more important afterward, and as more important than undiscussed topics. Furthermore, children's attitudes toward the featured politicians became more positive after the debate. No significant effects were found for other aspects of political engagement: political knowledge, accuracy of party policy positions, political interest, internal efficacy and trust. Future research should further examine both the content of political programming for children and the broader role of media in fostering young people's democratic engagement.
