Conference Sessions

Academic discussions of cosmopolitanism have been reinvigorated in the context of contemporary processes of globalization, transnational mobilities, and multicultural urbanism. Cosmopolitanism can be understood as both: 1) a philosophy and political project of world citizenship; as well as 2) an intellectual or aesthetic disposition and set of practices premised on an openness to cultural diversity and global awareness. Within the broader academic literature, a growing sociology of cosmopolitanism is characterized by research that uses a grounded notion of cosmopolitanism to understand the ways in which cosmopolitanism is ‘lived’ and expressed in daily life. For this session, we feature papers that advance sociological understandings of the various ways in which cosmopolitanism is manifest in everyday life. This includes research that focuses on cosmopolitan consumption and markets, cosmopolitan canopies and cultural practices, as well as the relationships between cosmopolitanism and banal nationalism. Theoretically informed and grounded in empirical research, the papers are based on recent studies that consider how cosmopolitanism surfaces and is expressed in various, ordinary ways.

Much research in child and youth studies focuses on challenges in young lives, including vulnerability, inequality, discrimination, marginalization, worry, and hardship. While seeking to recognize and appreciate these challenges, researchers in the sociology of childhood and youth frequently recognize that such challenges do not wholly define the lives of children and youth who are living with precarity: there is also hope, joy, innovation, creativity, participation, and activism. The papers in this session all examine hope in the face of precarity, and the possibilities for thinking about and making change.

The papers in this session are curious about what is generated by generation. Generation invites us to consider the tensions produced through expectations about age, and what is produced within and carried through different stages of life (whether that be inequality, investment, or trauma). The papers in this session explore how ideas of generation—including the experiences of a specific generation, interactions between generations, and transgenerational trauma—shape young people’s lives.

How does design in our work with children, in areas such as research, practice and policy, bring about particular ways of being and doing? How does design shape research carried out with children, e.g. in terms of methods, methodology, participation, and knowledge mobilization? How do conceptualizations of childhood shape the design of spaces where children and youth spend their daily lives? How can design create particular life worlds for some children and their families while excluding others? This session includes researchers, educators, and other professionals who work with children and will share their ideas, knowledge and experiences from research and/or practice to contribute to discussions that rethink, refocus and reshape the future for children through a focus on design. Design within this context can be understood as an intentional plan aimed at a particular result. This session will provide space for reflecting on and sharing our work with children while engaging with larger questions around design and exploring the impact of design on children’s past, present and future lives. These reflections can lead us to exploring and considering our own role as childhood scholars and the ways we are collectively responsible for designing the field of childhood studies. As Spyrou (2022) states, “A critical engagement with design might offer childhood studies not just a new conceptual area for innovative theoretical and methodological work but also more fertile ground for exploring its own design practices and their effects on research work with children.” (p.471).

This session invites papers that assess theorizations of childhood. Of the accounts available today, which seem particularly sophisticated, promising, insightful, and/or well grounded? What are substantial outstanding questions in the area and what seem to be the most promising lines of approach to answering them? While the diversity, and multi-faceted nature, of how humans conceive of childhood had already attracted scholarly interest in the 1890s and received renewed impetus from the publication of Ariès’ L'enfant et la vie familiale sous l'Ancien Régime in 1960, it was with the birth of childhood studies and reconceptualist ECE in the late 1980s and early 1990s that “constructions of childhood” and “the image of the child” became a sustained research program. Yet, despite a generation of effort since then, it is not clear how far we’ve come. One of the dominant images of childhood is that “children are our future”. A sustainable, shared future is centrally one in which our children (and their children, and their children, …) can envisage actually living. At the same time, for adults, childhood is also about the past, a past that may be viewed with ambivalence or nostalgia, and that may serve as a resource for, or as an obstacle to, a livable future. Constructions of childhood are not just “ideas”, but institutions and practices, with their explanations and justifications, projects and critiques. Questions about how we theorize and construct childhood are, therefore, precisely questions about how we are constructing the future – and which futures we are constructing, for whom.