Children and Youth Research Group
Exploring the everyday lives, experiences, and aspirations of children and young people.
About us
The Children and Youth Research Group in the School of Geography, Politics and Sociology is an interdisciplinary group of researchers working across human geography, social anthropology, sociology, political science.
We are contributing to multiple areas of research, including the following areas:
Our members
Our Research Group includes academic staff from across the School. Read more about our Youth Research Group members
Prospective postgraduate students
PGR research is an important part of our activities and collaboration. We welcome enquiries from students keen to explore themes aligned to our research expertise.
We are part of a Children, Youth and Families Pathway within the ESRC NINE DTP funding partnership. That means we'll work with you to develop your PhD application in any of the areas listed below for funding within the pathway, including interdisciplinary projects.
If you're interested in developing a research proposal, please contact me and any of the staff in our research group. We'll then explore the process and how we can support you develop an application.
As part of our funding there are the Action for Equality Studentships (AforE) which are open to UK-domiciled candidates from Black British, British Asian, or mixed Black or Asian heritage. Applications for NINE DTP funding is also open to international students. We also support students developing studentships for other funding bodies.
From 2024/25, members of the Children and Youth research group will run an MA module Children and Young People: Contemporary Global Challenges, as part of the new Masters programme in GPS. We welcome enquiries from students interested in this.
Post-Doctoral options
We also support candidates making applications to post-doctoral funding schemes. For example, Leverhulme, British Academy and ESRC Post Doctoral Fellowships.
We are contributing to multiple areas of research, including the following areas:
Youth transitions and subcultures
A significant focus of the Children and Youth Research Group draws attention to the changing nature of youth transitions and of youth subcultures. We explore a diversity of transitions that young people encounter in the making of modern adulthood.
We look at how education, employment, family, religion, citizenship, leisure, climate and ecological concerns, and global media shape these transitions.
We focus on young people’s transitions from or through formal and informal education to employment or their leisure transitions. We address the nature, characteristics and geographies of these transitions.
We look at how, why, and in what ways they are changing. We also question some of the normative assumptions built into ideas about what successful transitions to adulthood look like and how such assumptions do not match social, economic and cultural changes that have shifted the contexts of transition pathways.
Our work on youth sub/cultures includes, but is not restricted to, their relationship to youth transitions and identities.
Children, young people and social inequalities
A key focus of our work is the complexity of the inequalities children and young people experience. We investigate how these inequalities manifest in their everyday lives.
We explore how young people show agency and creativity in working through, resisting, and remaking their lives in the context of such inequalities.
Our research looks at a diversity of identities and inequalities. These include:
- disability
- body size
- gender
- sexuality
- health
- social class
- race and ethnicity
- or religion and belief
We examine how these intersect with and shape each other. We focus on the embodiment of such inequalities, and how they intersect across various spaces/times.
We look at how they are lived out in the home, in communities, and in educational settings and how they shape and are shaped by transformations in national policy and practice and by wider geopolitical events.
Minority and migrant children and young people
A prominent focus of the Childhood and Youth Research Group is upon the lived experiences of ethnic minority and/or migrant children and young people.
We consider the accounts of ethnic and religious minority children and young people, including their experiences of and responses to racism and discrimination, their negotiations home and family life, their relationship practices, and their education and employment transitions.
We also explore the lives of migrant children and young people, including asylum seekers, refugees, and other marginalised migrant groups.
We pay attention to their migration journeys, their negotiations of arrival and ‘integration’, and the complex socio-political systems and structures they navigate in the process.
Young people, (geo)politics and participation
An important part of our research with children and young people is about their engagements with political issues and (geo)politics.
We investigate the contestations associated with their complex senses of citizenship and belonging. We explore how they engage (or not) with political issues. We explore young people’s engagements with both formal politics (e.g. voting, party politics, and electoral issues) and their involvement in ‘informal’ politics (e.g. volunteering, activism, and community engagement).
The Childhood and Youth Research Group's work focuses on young people’s engagement with local, national and global politics. We also focus on issues of everyday citizenship and youth activism.
We investigate the ways in which political matters enter into the everyday spaces/times of young people’s lives and how young people manage, contest, and respond to these issues.
Researching with children and young people for social change
An important objective of our research is contributing to change in young people’s lives. We work with a variety of regional, national and international organisations that advocate with children and young people in areas such as poverty, discrimination, education, disability, crime and health.
We are lucky to have the North East Child Poverty Commission located within the School. Much of this work is done in partnership with young people as advisors and/or co-researchers.
Children, young people and environment
Children and youth are at the sharp end of climate change but they are not passive victims of climate and environmental problems.
Recent years have seen young people emerge as key protagonists driving forward action on climate change, biodiversity and sustainability. Colleagues in the Childhood and Youth Research Group are exploring how diverse groups of children and young people are responding to climate change in the North East and beyond, not only as activists, but as family and community members and often in ways that go unnoticed by wider society.
Our research also considers how both the material effects of climate change and policies designed to further net zero and other mitigation can exacerbate already existing socio-environmental inequalities in children and young people’s lives, including unequal access to play space, safe and sustainable travel and uneven exposures to environmental pollutants and harms.