Children and Childhoods Conference 2026

Building on a successful legacy, the Children and Childhoods Conference theoretically and empirically engages with children’s lives, across disciplines, to reflect the diverse nature of contemporary childhoods. We continue to uphold our inclusive ethos and aim to bring together academics, pedagogues, practitioners, policymakers, early career and postgraduate researchers and students.

DAY 1 Crime, Risk, Safeguarding and Social Harm

Day One focuses on how children and young people encounter, navigate, and are shaped by systems of crime, justice, safeguarding, and social regulation.

We welcome theoretical, empirical and practice-based contributions that critically engage with issues such as but not limited to: youth justice, safeguarding and protection, children’s rights, social harm, marginalisation, family and community contexts, lived experiences of adversity, risk and resilience, and professional or institutional responses.

Interdisciplinary approaches especially those drawing from criminology, childhood and youth studies, social work, education, sociology, psychology, and law are strongly encouraged.

DAY 2 Childhoods at Crossroads

Day Two contextualises childhoods on the edge in global perspectives of childhoods lived in an era of intensifying childhood poverty, political instability and rapid technological change.

Prolonged stagnation in global economic development has contributed to rising unemployment and a widening cost-of-living crisis, both of which have intensified childhood poverty in many regions. International, regional and domestic political instability—together with outbreaks of violence—has directly and often lethally affected children and young people, inflicting lasting harm on their families, physical safety, and psychological well-being. At the same time, rapid technological change, including the emergence of generative artificial intelligence (AI) and its varied local applications, is reshaping education and transforming future labour markets in ways that remain uncertain for decades to come. These economic, political, and technological forces, together with other forms of social harms, are deeply interconnected, placing contemporary childhoods at a critical and consequential crossroads.

A more detailed agenda will be provided closer to the conference.

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Host or Publisher University of Suffolk