Hanne Warming

Research consistently shows that youth participation in child protection decision-making is limited and challenging. This study used video-elicitation interviews and combined Critical Childhood Studies with Positioning Theory to explore how interactions between social workers and young people shape participation. Seventeen recorded meetings allowed both groups to reflect individually on their interactions, which is uncommon in this field. To illustrate a recurring pattern of youth reluctance to reflect in meetings, a detailed analysis is presented of one filmed and transcribed meeting between a social worker and a young girl, along with interviews with both participants. The study reveals how social workers and young people are pre-positioned and negotiate their positions during meetings, thereby shaping participation. It shows how self-reflection and the verbal expression of emotions can become obligations within youth participation, and how youth resistance or reluctance may be viewed as a critique of available positions. The article also highlights broader challenges of maintaining meaningful participatory ideals within an institutional framework focused on protection and risk assessment. Overall, it calls for a shift in child protection policy and practice to recognize youth participation as a relationally negotiated and context-dependent phenomenon.

This article expands Bronfenbrenner’s bioecological model by integrating biological and ecological processes—particularly microbial life—into its core concept of proximal processes. Drawing on host–microbiome research and the concept of the child-as-ecosystem, we reconceptualize the developing person as a multispecies being embedded within nested ecological systems. Through four interdisciplinary encounters—spanning social stratification, family separation, socialisation, and environmental health—we demonstrate how microbial diversity and ecological entanglements shape children’s development, well-being, and learning. We argue that BEM’s human-centered framework must evolve to reflect multispecies interdependencies and ecological realities, especially in the context of biodiversity loss and climate change. This rethinking has direct implications for early childhood education, research, and policy, offering a more ecologically attuned model of development.

All bodies—child, animal, plant—are bodies sustained by life processes. Human as well as animal and plant bodies coexist with a multiplicity of microbial life. As symbiotic partners, human bodies are ecosystems of microbial life in a microbial world. In this way, microbes cannot simply be seen as disease-causing and human bodies as hosts of human-only life. Simplistic notions of the child as a unitary and social subject and the image of the agentic child are both questioned by this view. What if we considered for childhood studies the body’s microbial constitution in a bacterial world? How would everyday life unfold as a more-than-human sociality in which children act, think, and feel on a daily basis? In this conversation article, seven multidisciplinary scholars address the following questions by grounding their responses in their respective fields, in childhood, and in their research interests: How do microbes and childhood matter in your research? Consider how the understanding of microbes as foundational for life influences your field of research. How does your research seek to engage the biosocial imagination and the challenge of integrating biological and social understandings of the child in fruitful and robust ways? How do considerations of microbes and childhood bring together multidisciplinary engagements?

This article presents an analysis from a project that focuses on the entanglements that emerge between practices within the family law system and the everyday lives of children in conflictual family law cases. We position our analysis in critical childhood studies and zoom in on the social–spatial dimensions of children's everyday lives by exploring their lived spaces. We focus on what emerges as important for the children and explore how this is (not) reflected in either the family law case or the ultimate decisions. Inspired by the concept of foodscapes, we introduce a new concept, ‘divorcescapes’, to address the mundane spatial contexts of children's lives with separated parents. We also draw on Barad's agential realism and Ahmed's concepts of sticky and circulating emotions. Empirically, the research is based on 100 anonymous documents from child conversations, interviews, observations and documents from 32 family law cases. We find that the professionals and parents fail to acknowledge some of the spaces and relations that are essential to the child. Furthermore, we find that the image of what it means to be competent to participate—as well as discourses regarding divorce—results in the othering of the child together with sticky emotions of shame and powerlessness.

Children’s rights and wellbeing have increasingly attracted attention both politically and in the scholarly field

This chapter elucidates how COVID-19 has affected the everyday lives of children and young people with physical impairments. The chapter challenges one-sided accounts of the pandemic as an inequality-reinforcing event and presents a more ambivalent, surprising, and potentially transformative picture. While a social crisis such as a pandemic is often conceived as a temporary condition demonstrating a sense of loss of balance and control, such a disordered state of being is ‘the normal’ rather than an exception for many disabled children and young people. The analysis reveals how the pandemic has opened new opportunities and ways of participation and inclusion while at the same time not radically altering the everyday lives of disabled children and young people, as social isolation is already a part of their lives as a result of both disablist barriers and impairment effects. The chapter discusses how such insights can form a basis for improving the lived citizenship of disabled children and youth. The analysis is based on empirical contributions from 19 children and young people, including interviews and written texts. Theoretically, the chapter draws on concepts from the literature on lived citizenship and the social-relational model of disability.

In the field of qualitative health research on children, scholars have called for the inclusion of children’s perspectives. Still, health care research on children appears to be characterized by an exclusionary approach that stems from a conception of disability and sickness as equivalent to a lack of agency. This article responds to the call to include children’s perspectives. It presents the Double-view (Dovi)-river interview, which is a drawing- and metaphor-based interview method that enables ambiguous and multi-layered life course narratives. Based on two steps – (1) a life course interview conducted while drawing a river of the child’s life and (2) revisiting and unfolding the child’s stories – the method allows for an arts-based, joint exploration of life experiences. Inspired by childhood studies as well as a poststructuralist epistemology, the article discusses and proposes ways to challenge power relations between the adult interviewer and the child interviewee. It is argued that the method can also challenge the predominant deficit view and the dichotomous understanding of children’s experiences of their life and capabilities that characterize much health care practice and health research, by focusing both on challenges and opportunities. Doing so enables a more nuanced and appreciative approach to children. We draw on empirical examples from a study with children with disabilities. However, we suggest that the method’s potential for enabling articulation of the complex and ambiguous can inspire qualitative research and health care practice more broadly.