First published in 2004. Routledge is an imprint of Taylor & Francis, an informa company.

This book investigates the position of young children’s self-determination within a range of social contexts, such as education, social care, mass-media, health, politics, law and the family. It brings to the fore the voices of the children in the present, with their interests, agendas and rights. Based on original primary research, the chapters tackle hegemonic discourses on children’s self-determination as well as current policies and practices. They address a broad range of topics, from the planning of role-play to national policies, from the use of digital technologies for pedagogy to children’s health and well-being, and from democratic practices in the classroom to the preservation of traditional family values. The book presents case studies to unravel how childhood and young children’s self-determination are constructed at the intersection with intergenerational relationships. Coming from different disciplines and using a diverse range of methodological traditions, the contributions in the volume eventually converge to generate a rich, complex and multi-layered analysis of contemporary cultures of childhood and young children’s rights.

Informed by ethnographic research with children, Davies offers new sociological insights into children's personal relationships, as well as closely examining methodological approaches to researching with children and researching relationships.

This four-volume encyclopedia covers a wide range of themes and topics, including: Social constructions of childhood, Children's rights, Politics/representations/geographies, Child-specific research methods, Histories of childhood/Transnational childhoods, Sociology/anthropology of childhood theories and Theorists key concepts. This interdisciplinary encyclopedia will be of interest to students and researchers in: Childhood studies, Sociology/Anthropology, Psychology/Education, Social Welfare, Cultural studies/Gender studies/Disabilty studies.

Children’s Cultures after Childhood introduces theoretical concepts from new materialist and posthumanist childhood studies into research on children’s literature, film, and media texts with attention to the entanglements of which they are part. Thirteen chapters by international contributors from diverse disciplinary fields (literary studies, cultural studies, media studies, education, and childhood studies) offer a cross-section of empirical and theoretical approaches sharing an inspiration in the notion of “after childhoods”, proposed by Peter Kraftl, a children’s geographer, to conceptualize theoretical and methodological orientations in research on children’s lives and on past, present, and future childhoods. This interdisciplinary collection will be of interest to scholars working in children’s literature and culture studies, education, and childhood studies.

This Handbook draws together leading social scientists in the world from multiple disciplines to articulate what is known and needs to be known about spiritual development in childhood and adolescence.

Capturing Children’s Meanings in Early Childhood Research and Practice draws together contemporary research and established theories to produce a unique take on the meanings children express through a range of creative tools. Drawing on Reggio Emilia and the Mosaic approach, this book provides readers with a range of strategies for accessing, recording and interpreting young children’s perceptions of and responses to their experiences. Providing a synthesis of the multiple imaginative ways we can capture young children’s meanings through observations, art, photo elicitation, mindfulness, music and other creative methods, Halpenny covers topics such as: Negotiating challenges presented by researching with children Frameworks for seeing and hearing children’s intentions Accurately documenting and interpreting research findings Promoting children’s meanings and their performance of them Moving forward with new understandings This book is an indispensable resource for students of early childhood education, especially for courses focusing on the lived experiences of children from early to middle childhood. It is also a useful reference for those working with young children in educational and caregiving settings, and for those advocating for young children.

In an era in which environmental education has been described as one of the most pressing educational concerns of our time, further insights are needed to understand how best to approach the learning and teaching of environmental education in early childhood education. In this book we address this concern by identifying two principles for using play-based learning early childhood environmental education. The principles we identify are the result of research conducted with teachers and children using different types of play-based learning whilst engaged in environmental education. Such play-types connect with the historical use of play-based learning in early childhood education as a basis for pedagogy. In the book ‘Beyond Quality in ECE and Care’ authors Dahlberg, Moss and Pence implore readers to ask critical questions about commonly held images of how young children come to construct themselves within social institutions. In similar fashion, this little book problematizes the taken-for-grantedness of the childhood development project in service to the certain cultural narratives. Cutter-Mackenzie, Edwards, Moore and Boyd challenge traditional conceptions of play-based learning through the medium of environmental education. This book signals a turning point in social thought grounded in a relational view of (environmental) education as experiential, intergenerational, interspecies, embodied learning in the third space. As Barad says, such work is based in inter-actions that can account for the tangled spaces of agencies. Through the deceptive simplicity of children’s play, the book stimulates deliberation of the real purposes of pedagogy and of schooling. Paul Hart, University of Regina, Canada

Children's literature shapes what children learn about the world. It reflects social values, norms, and stereotypes. This book offers fresh insights into some of the key issues in fiction for children, from the representation of gender to embodied cognition and the translation of children's literature. Connecting classic children's texts such as Alice in Wonderland with contemporary fiction including Murder Most Unladylike, the book innovatively brings together perspectives from corpus linguistics, stylistics, cognitive linguistics, literary and cultural studies, and human geography. It explores approaches to experiencing fiction, as well as methods for the study of literary texts. Childhood discourses are investigated through the materiality of texts, the spaces that literature takes up in libraries, the cultural history of fiction moulded through performances, as well as reading environments that shape childhood experiences, such as fashion and urban spaces. Children's Literature and Childhood Discourses emphasizes the crucial link between fictional stories and real life.

The Bloomsbury Handbook of Theories in Childhood Studies brings together an international group of childhood studies scholars who work with a range of critical theories. It speaks to both scholars and students by addressing questions such as how childhoods are diversely constructed and how children's experiences can be better understood. The volume draws together a diversity of theoretical perspectives from the social sciences and humanities such as critical race studies, disability studies, posthumanism, feminism, politics, decolonialism, queer theory and postcolonialism to generate a much-needed conversation about how to move childhood studies forward as a grounded field of research. The volume is subdivided into three sections - subjectivities, relationalities, and structures - each of which addresses different but interrelated approaches to childhood studies theorization. This handbook will be an essential text not just for childhood studies researchers, but for all those interested in theorizing what childhood is, what work it does and who children are.