Children and Youth Research Group

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.

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.

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.

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.

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 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.