About the Centre

Aim and purpose

The CSJ offers interdisciplinary and mixed methodological expertise, which is rooted in collaborations with non-academic partners to foreground children's voices and perspectives and integrate their contributions into policy, practice and programming recommendations. The Centre positions children as active participants in all areas of life, including the research process itself.

We seek to understand how childhoods are shaped by social, political and cultural contexts, treating them as diverse and relational rather than uniform or fixed. The Centre aims to understand what fairer conditions for children may look like, and how best these can be pursued.

The five themes

The CSJ Centre is structured around five themes which organise and drive the focus of research. Find out more about the questions we're asking in relation to the centre’s five themes:

    Children's Rights
    This theme explores how to understand children’s rights, examining both universal and culturally specific approaches.
    Childhood Inequalities
    This theme investigates diverse and intersectional inequalities between children, locally and globally.
    Childhood and Youth Cultures
    This theme explores how children and young people understand their own social worlds and how adults have historically constructed and managed childhood and youth.
    Children's Wellbeing
    This theme examines what makes for a ‘good’ childhood—both in normative terms (what should matter) and empirical ones (what does matter in different times and places).
    Welfare, Care, and Protection
    This theme explores how children’s needs are understood and how care for children is conceptualised and provided.