University Global Patnership Award winner - Jo Moran-Ellis, Department of Sociology
Thursday 14 February 2013
Since 1990 there have been significant developments in the sociology of childhood regarding theorising childhood and understanding children’s lives. However, this has generally been built on empirical studies of children from primary school age upwards, whilst the lives of children in early childhood, ie pre-school, has largely been the province of developmental psychology, pedagogical sciences, and family sociology.
Whilst these disciplines are key, the contribution that can be made by the social study of childhood is also important. Studying young children from a sociological perspective opens up questions concerning the family in contemporary times and its relationship to pedagogical and child care institutions. Furthermore, questions need to be addressed concerning the integration of sociological approaches with other perspectives to develop a multi-disciplinary body of knowledge to support children in their early years.
The project is led by Jo Moran-Ellis, Department of Sociology, at Surrey and Maria Letícia Barros Pedroso Nascimento in the Faculty of Education in the University of Sao Paulo. Via workshops, PhD events and the establishment of an international network of early childhood social scientists, we will tackle these questions and challenges in order to establish firm bases for research into early childhood in the context of differing configurations of home, family, work, institution and culture. The overall focus will be on identifying the state of the art of knowledge concerning young children’s experiences of institutional care in nurseries, kindgartens and day care settings and then building on this theoretically and methodologically to develop a knowledge base that underpins understanding the ways in which children in these settings are actively engaged as social actors with their own goals, understandings, and contributions to the setting in which they spend their time, as well as being embedded within intergenerational orderings and other social structures. The research workshops will also address the key challenge of how to conduct research with very young children which enables accounts to develop of their life worlds with respect to them as social actors. In addition, we will explore integrating sociological approaches with other disciplinary perspectives to create a multi- and inter-disciplinary body of knowledge. In addition, the workshops and the network will establish the advances and understandings that come from comparative research between UK and Brazil, with a wider question concerning European and Latin American childhoods in their social, economic and cultural contexts. an international network of early childhood sociology.
Jo and Maria will run two workshops and PhD events and produce reports for scholars working in the social studies of early childhood via networks within the European Sociological Association, the International Sociological Association and relevant Latin American networks in order to promote a new international network in this field. To support this they will also map current doctoral research in the field to identify new and emergent work, and bring these colleagues into the new network. They will also develop a joint publication in respect of a sociology of early childhood, and a joint research proposal focussed on comparative cross-cultural research on young children’s everyday lives between home and institution.
