Review past events held by the Centre for Social Work Innovation and Research.

Upcoming Event:

🗓️ Date: Monday 8 September 2025
📍 Location: Room BH-255, Bramber House, University of Sussex or via Zoom Webinar
🎟️ Booking: Please reserve your place via the link below:
👉 https://www.tickettailor.com/events/circy/1787243 

Panel Event: Rethinking Youth Climate Activism

We warmly invite you to an important and timely panel conversation exploring the complexities of youth climate activism across diverse global contexts. This event brings together five leading scholars whose research with young people in Portugal, Australia, Scotland, and England critically examines how climate justice is experienced, represented, and enacted.

• Dr Kevin Ardron is Head of Subject Area for Education, Children & Young People at Northumbria University, a Senior Fellow of the Higher Education Academy and a Qualified Teacher.
• Dr Maria Fernandes-Jesus is an Assistant Professor in the School of Psychology, University of Sussex.
• Dr Callum McGregor is Senior Lecturer in Education and Director of the MSc Social Justice and Community Action at the University of Edinburgh
• Dr Eve Mayes is a Senior Research Fellow and Senior Lecturer in the School of Education (Research for Educational Impact) at Deakin University (Victoria, Australia).
• Dr Catherine Walker is a Research Fellow in Human Geography at Newcastle University, exploring how children, youth and key adults in their lives are experiencing and responding to environmental challenges

This panel conversation will be with four scholars who have researched with young people and climate justice in Portugal (Fernandes-Jesus), Australia (Mayes), Scotland (McGregor) and England (Walker & Ardron). Panellists will discuss and compare the tensions they feel in relation to the concept of ‘youth climate activist’ in their geographical and disciplinary contexts. This will be followed by panellists’ reflections on how affect/ emotions inflect how young people are experiencing and collectively acting for climate and social justice, with particular attention to ambivalence (Emejulu et al, 2025), uncertainty (Kirby & Webb, 2021; Stein, 2021) and refusal (Tuck & Yang, 2014). The panel will conclude with discussion of the ethical and pedagogical responsibilities and obligations of researchers and pedagogues working with young people in the context of climate (and multiple intersecting) injustices.

This event is being hosted by The Centre of Innovation and Research in Childhood and Youth (CIRCY) and Sussex Sustainability Research Programme (SSRP). Please click on this link to find more information and book a place. If you have any questions, please email circyadmin@sussex.ac.uk. 

Previous Events

Futures reimagined: Time and affect in young women’s lives with Signe Ravn

Tuesday 24 June, 12-1:30PM

Signe presented analytical insights from her current book project where she explores non-linear temporalities in young women’s lives. The book problematises dominant understandings of youth futures, in particular the concept of transitions, that rely on a linear time model. In its place, it seeks to offer alternative, non-chronological conceptions of time and temporality that lead to new understandings of how young people, especially young women, orient themselves to ‘the future’. In the book, she combines affect theory and queer temporalities to assemble an analytical framework that can shed light on the non-linear, non-normative and undefined aspects of future orientations and the affects and subjectivities these generate. This framework is then put into dialogue with qualitative data from a large, longitudinal study of the imagined futures of young women on the margins in Australia. In this talk, she shared some of the insights that are generated through this and discussed what is gained from this approach.

Bio:

Dr Signe Ravn is an Associate Professor in Sociology in the School of Social and Political Sciences, University of Melbourne. Signe's research explores processes of marginalisation and positions of marginality, with a focus on youth, gender, disadvantage and risk. Her current theoretical interests centre around temporality, futurity and subjectivity, alongside her ongoing interests in qualitative methodology, narrative, creative methods and research ethics. She has published her research in high-ranking journals and co-edited a number of books, most recently ‘Narrative Now. Critical Perspectives on the Promise of Stories’ (2024) and ‘Small Data is Beautiful’ (2023). Signe is the co-founder of the Narrative Network in the Faculty of Arts and the co-host of the podcast Narrative Now. She is also the Co-Editor-in-Chief of Journal of Sociology, together with Dr Ashley Barnwell.

orem ipsum dolor sit amet, consectetur adipiscing elit. Etiam ligula eros, tempor vitae dignissim nec, sollicitudin a odio. Curabitur nibh nibh, aliquet vel laoreet in, imperdiet nec metus. Sed vel nisi urna.

“Are smartphone and social media bans the best way to support children growing up in a digital world?”

Centre for Innovation and Research in Childhood and Youth (CIRCY) and Sussex Digital Humanities Lab (SHL) roundtable

Thursday 12 June, 3-5PM

Digital Humanities Lab, Silverstone Building

Over the past year, calls for smartphone and social media bans for children have gained significant momentum among parents, policymakers, and the media. In November, the Australian government passed legislation to prohibit all individuals under 16 from using social media. However, concerns have emerged regarding the practicality of enforcing this ban and whether it might push young people toward more secretive or unregulated social media use. In the UK, organisations like Smartphone Free Childhood have advocated for limiting smartphone access for children under 14, while the recent Schools Bill has sparked discussions about introducing compulsory smartphone bans in schools. Additionally, the television drama Adolescence has fuelled further interest in the issue, with the show’s creator expressing support for social media bans for young people.

This event brought together a panel of University of Sussex experts on youth and digital technology to explore whether complete bans are the most effective approach to helping young people navigate the digital world safely. Drawing from a wide range of expertise, the panel delved into the major challenges young people face in their digital lives and considered what child- and youth-centred perspectives can contribute to the ongoing debate.

The panel included:

Prof Nicola Yuill – Professor of Developmental Psychology lead of the Children and Technology Lab (ChaT Lab) and Autism Community Research Network Sussex.

Dr Suraj Lakhani - Associate Professor in Sociology and Criminology, and Director of the Sussex Terrorism and Extremism Research Network (STERN). 

Dr Gemma Cobb – Assistant Professor in Digital Culture, author of the book Negotiating Thinness Online: The Cultural Politics of Pro-Anorexia.

Dr Liam Berriman – Associate Professor in Childhood and Youth Studies, and Director of the Centre for Innovation and Research in Childhood and Youth (CIRCY).

orem ipsum dolor sit amet, consectetur adipiscing elit. Etiam ligula eros, tempor vitae dignissim nec, sollicitudin a odio. Curabitur nibh nibh, aliquet vel laoreet in, imperdiet nec metus. Sed vel nisi urna.

CIRCY Seminar – Perspectives on young people’s involvement in organised crime

Wednesday 19 March - 1-2:30PM

In this conversation-style event, criminologist Dr Sally Atkinson-Sheppard will discuss her work on young people's involvement in gangs and organised crime, focusing in particular on county lines and the concept of ‘hyper-agency’.  Sally will be joined by Professor Michelle Lefevre and Professor Kristi Langhoff to offer reflections from their work on children, agency and exploitation.

Exploring environmental sustainability: what issues matter to the lives of children and young people?

CIRCY Symposium - Humanist and Post-Humanist Perspectives within Forest School Education.

Wednesday 26 March – 3:30-5:30PM

This event is being curated by a group of our BA Childhood and Youth students. Further details will follow shortly.

Date: Wednesday 22 January

Time: 11.30-12.30

The SSRP and CIRCY, two University of Sussex 'Centres of Excellence', hosted a workshop on sustainability research important to the lives of children and young people, with the support of the Widening Participation team. Four presenters gave short inputs on their research, and participants were invited to share their own ideas, responses, and questions. The event offered the opportunity to collaborate on exploring complex sustainability issues where answers are not straightforward, as well as to contribute to an idea for a new sustainability game.

• Eco-anxiety and the relationship between climate change and human and children rights – Dr Emanuela Orlando (Associate Professor in Environmental Law)
• Citizen science for sustainable menstrual health, Dr Chi Ezifula (Associate Professor in Infection, Brighton & Sussex Medical School)
• Nurturing Nature with(in) Children – Nature in Education, Kathleen Bailey (Postgraduate researcher, Department of Education)
• Sustainable Futures and Not-So-Serious Play, Dr Jo Walton (Research Fellow in Arts, Climate and Technology)

Schools, Playgrounds, Communities: The Cultural Infrastructures of Childhood

Hester Barron and Ben Highmore in Conversation

Date: Wednesday 4 December
Time: 2-4pm
Location: Fulton 103

Hester Barron's book The Social World of the School: Education and Community in Interwar London and Ben Highmore's Playgrounds - the Experimental Years both highlight the importance of understanding the social worlds of childhood as material practices (from violin lessons to den building) embedded within networks of community and governance. We came together to discuss their work and their shared preoccupations.

CIRCY Conversations Series: How do we change how we talk about young people

Date: Thursday 13 June 2024

Time: 5-7pm 

Venue: University of Sussex 

This special event brought together a panel of experts to reflect on the following key questions:

• What does language tell us about the way society values, and has empathy for, young people?
• How can we challenge and disrupt ways of talking about young people that vilify and excludes them?
• How can we develop a more empathetic and supportive language around young people?

Discussants: 

• Dr Beverley Barnett-Jones – Associate Director at the Nuffield Family Justice Observatory
• Prof Kristi Langhoff – Professor of Social Work and project lead for the AHRC ‘Imagining Resistance’ project developing collaborative methods with young people.
• Dr Liat Levita – Reader in Behavioural and Clinical Neuroscience whose work focuses on young people’s wellbeing throughout their development.
• Naqeeb Saide - Hummingbird Project 

‘Thinking Through Family: Narratives of Care Experienced Lives’ Book Launch with Janet Boddy

Date: Thursday 14 December 2023

Time: 4:30-6pm 

Venue: Woodland 3, The Student Centre, University of Sussex 

CIRCY and CSWIR celebrated the launch of Professor Janet Boddy’s new book: ‘Thinking Through Family: Narratives of Care Experienced Lives’. 

Discussants: Rosie Canning (University of Southampton) and Professor Ros Edwards (University of Southampton). 

Just for kids? How the youth decarceration discourse endorses adult incarceration with Hedi Viterbo

Date: Tuesday 14 November 2023

Time: 4:30-6pm 

Venue: Hybrid - Zoom / Fulton 107 

In this CIRCY Research Seminar, Hedi Viterbo will lay bare three overlooked pitfalls of calls to reduce or abolish the penal confinement of youth, particularly in the UK and the US. First, despite their anti-carceral semblance, such calls persistently portray most people in trouble with the law—namely, adults—as deserving of imprisonment. Second, this ageist rhetoric often disregards adult vulnerability. Thus, despite adults’ greater medical vulnerability to COVID-19, some organisations pushed for youth to be prioritised for release from prisons during the pandemic. Third, the youth decarceration discourse reproduces essentialist assumptions about youth, which rest on questionable science and downplay the socially constructed dimension of age differences. Doubtless, there are compelling arguments against penal confinement, but it is only decarceration across the age spectrum that can truly challenge carceral thinking—and ageism.

CIE/CIRCY Research Café with Rachel Rosen and Valentina Glockner: 'Crisis for whom? Global border regimes and childhood (im)mobility'

Date: Wednesday 25 October 2023

Time: 3:30-5pm 

Venue: Jubilee G36 / Zoom 

Narratives of ‘crisis’ – whether ‘migration crisis’ or ‘childhoods in crisis’ – have become rhetorical tropes which shape and are reproduced by value-ladened political responses to children on the move. These typically reflect a sedentary bias which, as they intersect with generational time, draw on normative ideas about ‘good’ and ‘bad’ childhoods and rigid assumptions about children and care. Consequently, children on the move globally, whether with family or separately, and those who remain in place when parents migrate, do so in contexts where migration is typically framed as a political and existential crisis for rich countries and associated with trauma and pathologisation for children. Equally, some children's movements, particularly those involved in South-South mobility, are rendered invisible, as protracted displacement and ongoing historical crises are normalised. Indeed, these silent stories raise questions about when and why children's (im)mobility is or is not constituted as a 'crisis', by and for whom, and with what effect for infrastructures and practices of care. 

In this presentation, Rachel Rosen and Valentina Glockner drew on their just-released edited volume Crisis for whom? Critical global perspectives on childhood, care, and migration* to complicate these silences and challenge hegemonic interpretations by considering the diverse and diffuse effects of border technologies and crisis narratives on childhood (im)mobility.

Rachel Rosen is a Professor of Sociology at the UCL Social Research Institute. Her research, teaching and public engagement focuses on marginalised children and families, especially those with precarious immigration status; the intersection of welfare and border policies which shape their lives; and their practices of sustenance, care, and solidarity.

Valentina Glockner is a Mexican anthropologist affiliated with the Educational Research Department of The Center for Research and Advanced Studies of the National Polytechnic Institute, Mexico City. Her work in Mexico and India explores engaged research and reflective and participatory methodologies around the anthropology of childhood, migration and the state.

*Freely available to download in English and Spanish: Rosen, Rachel, E. Chase, S. Crafter, V. Glockner, and S. Mitra (Eds). (2023) Crisis for Whom? Critical global perspectives on childhood, care, and migration. London: UCL Press._

Imagining Resistance film screening and Imagining Resistance film screening and project exhibition with Dr Kristi Langhoff

Date: 10 October 2023

Time: 3-6pm 

Venue: Digital Humanities Lab, Silverstone Building 

On the 10 October we hosted an exhibition and film screening in the Sussex Humanities Lab for the Imagining Resistance project, a
3-year AHRC-funded project that drew upon participatory visual methods to support young people in understanding and communicating their own acts of resistance. This was an opportunity to view the creative project outputs, including photographs and a ‘protest banner’ quilt embroidered and designed by the young participants. We also screened the project film, created with participants, and this was followed by a discussion and drinks/nibblesdrinks/nibbles.