We are super excited to announce that we will be co-organising a three-part seminar series on childhood publics and the child’s gaze. The seminar series is part of the Sociological Review Seminar Series and has been funded by the Sociological Review Foundation.

With the advent of smartphones, tablets and digital cameras, children are taking more and more photos – and what happens to these images? This series of three events aims to creatively reimagine the archival, aesthetic, ethical, legal and technical affordances of children’s photography for research and practice, bringing our understanding and practice of children’s photography into the 21st century.

To this end, these three thematically linked seminars explore the infrastructures for the child’s gaze from a theoretical, methodological, and ethical perspective. Our series will open with the first seminar dedicated to the unpacking of how the image of the child is constructed throughout history in the public sphere, and in particular the press and other media outlets. Taking the images of childhood as an entry point into the notion of the ‘gaze’, in our second seminar we will move to explore children’s gazes onto the world and the issues involved in making those gazes public. The third seminar will be brings the series full circle through an explicit focus on the ethics and infrastructures for the child’s gaze.

These three in-person day-long events will be held in April, May and June 2023 at Goldsmiths, University of London. Morning sessions will be open to academics, students, and the general public; afternoon workshops will be reserved for academics and students, with priority given to doctoral and early career researchers and research in practice not linked to the academy. Further details about the events and instructions for booking will be live by 1 February on the Childhood Publics Research Programme events page.

The seminar series is organised by Sevasti-Melissa Nolas, Brenda Herbert, Zoe Walshe (all Goldsmiths, University of London) and Elina Moraitopoulou (Hamburg University/Aristotle University of Thessaloniki)