Generating alternative discourses of childhood.

ESRC Seminar Series

Series Organiser: Dr Rachel Holmes, Education and Social Research Institute, Manchester Metropolitan University

Generating alternative discourses of childhood as a resource for educational policy making

The aim of the series

The aspiration of this seminar series is to bring together people working in the field of childhood in order to better understand how critical interdisciplinary research and practice might improve the education system’s capacity to engage with, and intervene in the lives of young children in the 21st century. The series will also bring together visual, object-based and written texts of childhood in the form of exhibitions, research studies and museum artefacts to generate alternative discourses of childhood as a resource for educational practice and policy making. The series has the following objectives:

1. To provoke and attend to alternative discourses of childhood as a resource for educational policy making;

2. To enhance the communication and exchange of ideas about the child and childhood between academic researchers working in education, psychology, art, visual and social anthropology, sociology and museum studies;

3. To facilitate a critical forum for discussions between educational researchers, policy-makers and practitioners;

4. To enable education researchers to develop theoretical and methodological tools to generate alternative, interdisciplinary understandings of the child in the 21^st century; 5. To debate the ethical challenges of researching ‘the child’ through different academic disciplines; and

6. To enhance the contribution of interdisciplinary research on children/childhood to education strategy.