Book Launch and Review Seminar

In this talk I set out to challenge some of the dominant perspectives within the sociology of education by reorientating traditional debates about socialisation, childhood, early years education, care, schooling and the curriculum, focusing on the relational learning processes that lie at the heart of pedagogic relationships between parents, teachers, children and peers. In my new edited book, I draw on some theoretical and applied studies that authors from different countries have used to follow young children as they grow up and learn how to become civilized in institutions in contemporary society, discussing how from one generation to the next they learn from adults and their peers an enormous social fund of knowledge about their world.

The Speaker

Norman Gabriel is Senior Lecturer in Childhood Studies in the Department of Psychosocial and Psychoanalytic Studies at the University of Essex, where he is Director of the Centre for Childhood Studies. He has written one of the first books in childhood studies, The Sociology of Early Childhood—Critical Perspectives (Sage, 2017), to explore children’s lives from a relational sociological perspective and co-edited a Sociological Review Monograph with Stephen Mennell, Norbert Elias and Figurational Research: Processual Thinking in Sociology (Blackwell, 2011). With Lars Bo Kaspersen, he recently co-authored ‘Warfare, Survival Units, National Habitus and Nationalism: Norbert Elias’s Contribution to Political Sociology’ in The Anthem Companion to Norbert Elias, edited by Alex Law and Stephen Mennell. His research interests are in relational and process sociology, child psychoanalysis and the sociology of childhood.

This event is a collaboration with the Centre for Childhood Studies.

Entry is free and open to all but please register your place.

Host or Publisher Department of Psychosocial and Psychoanalytic Studies