Call for papers for a special issue of Barn
How do children and young people experience and understand significant changes in their everyday lives as a result of events such as a global pandemic, war and disasters, or major changes in everyday life due to illness, accidents or changes in the family's socio-economic situation? How are professionals' understandings and practices altered in the face of such changes? Moreover, how can we, as researchers, understand and investigate these altered everyday lives?
For example, the pandemic exposed the unequal material, economic and social conditions of children's everyday lives and the consequences on their health and well-being. Thus, a start when trying to understand the experiences of the pandemic for children and young people is to take into account their various everyday lives. Further, exploring the conditions, structure, and development of these everyday lives seems central when researching inequality-producing processes among children and their families. For example, how can we understand children and young people's everyday lives as dependent on material and physical conditions, framed by institutional and political structures and ideological guidelines, and in continuous development?
As researchers, we gained experiences that can also be made a subject of exploration and reflection: How did the pandemic affect our research questions and theoretical and methodological approaches to studying children and children's lives? The global covid-19 pandemic represents one example. Other examples may be children’s transformed everyday lives in the context of war, flight, and exile.
The title "Childhood and everyday life in transformation" thus points to relatively sudden changes in several conditions of the everyday lives of children and their families, professionals, and researchers. Further, it points to the development of innovative social practices, transformed participation, meaning-making and conduct of everyday life.
In this special issue, we invite contributions related to transformed everyday life in line with the introductory paragraphs. The special issue is not limited to contributions related to the COVID-19 pandemic but also reformulated or new theoretical and methodological approaches to studying everyday life practices and understandings of young people and professionals who provide insight into 'new' everyday lives.
Contributions may, for example, include
- Empirical contributions that provide historical snapshots of the everyday lives of children and young people, families, and professionals during the COVID-19 pandemic
- How can methodological approaches that emphasize everyday life contribute to understanding how change processes are about preserving and changing cultural and social practices that make meaning for the different parties involved?
- The transformed practices of children and young people, families, and professionals in the face of changing everyday life conditions.
- Theoretical approaches to understanding children's changed living conditions/everyday life such as socio-materiality, place/space, democratic processes, rights etc.
- Policymaking and professional practices: What legislation and governing documents are relevant, and how do they interact with professional practice and children's and young people's experiences of everyday life?
- Changed conditions for research related to methodological innovations and ethical considerations: How to access transformed everyday lives? What should we, as researchers, study - whom do we see - who do we not see, which issues do we see, which do we not see (yet)?
- How do transformations contribute to new and reinforced vulnerabilities and inequality-creating processes?
Schedule
November 7th 2022: Deadline for submission of abstract, 150-200 words, written in a Scandinavian language or English
December 15th 2022: Invitation sent to possible paper contributors.
April 13th 2023: Deadline for submitting manuscripts (7,000 words or fewer, including references and notes). Scripts are peer-reviewed. For additional guidelines for the authors, see Author Guidelines.
Abstracts should be sent to Barn editorial office: barn@ipl.ntnu.no
Please include author’s name(s), affiliation(s) and contact information.
More about Barn can be found here: About the Journal.
For enquiries regarding the special issue, please contact the guest editors.
We look forward to your receiving your submission!
Sincerely, the guest editors
Wenche Bekken (webe@oslomet.no) and Guro Brokke Omland (g.b.omland@psykologi.uio.no)
