Research focus and goals
Members of this research group are interested in questions related to childhood, early childhood education and care (ECEC), child development, and ECEC institutions situated in different societies. The group explores childhood and children’s lives as shaped by different relations, such as policy, institutional, biological, discursive or material. The research focus in this group are further divided in to two subthemes:
Child politics (Theme leaders: Maiju Paananen and Zsuzsa Millei)
Research in this group explores the politics of childhood and early childhood education: child politics. By the term ‘politics’ we refer to the the workings of power both in official and everyday realms. Politics shape in explicit and covert ways notions of childhood, care and education, and children’s everyday lives. We understand children and educators as political actors. We seek answers to the question of how societal and environmental changes shape childhood(s), early childhood education, and the everyday lives of children. Thus, our research explores for example datafication, gender, ethnicity, coloniality, nationhood and multiple worldviews in the production of childhood and social, economic, and regional inequalities.
Child and Learning Ecologies (Theme leaders: Zsuzsa Millei and Juliene Madureira Ferreira)
In the Child and Learning Ecologies research group, we see the human as nested in and constituted by ecologies—biological, social, cultural, and material. We explore the implications of this deep connectedness for development, learning, wellbeing and health. Ecologies are understood as dynamic, relational systems—spaces of co-existence and co-constitution where humans (as ecologies themselves – holobiont), materials, environments, and ideas evolve together. These ecologies are not static backgrounds but play constitutive roles in the processes of embodiment, learning and becoming.
The research group emerges from our concerns with the ongoing loss of biodiversity, the fragmentation of human-nature relationships, the overly individualistic and performative views of learning, and the urgency to reimagine education as a site of ecological responsibility and care. We ask: What does it mean to grow up, live and learn in a world where ecological entanglements are both threatened and vital?
Our research is highly interdisciplinary, bringing together different fields of science such as education, developmental psychology, health sciences, philosophy, anthropology, social work, art and political sciences. We welcome researchers in all career stages and cultures, who are interested in:
- Biodiversity loss and impacts on childhood, microbiome and child development, multispecies environmental education, and art methods.
- Implications of embodied cognition in learning, embodiment in child-environment development, digitalization and human thinking, enactivism and social cognition, embodiment and diverse abilities.
Our working methods are grounded in interdisciplinary, slow, and enjoyable collaborations—respecting and caring for all relations that make up our world, and embracing the unpredictability and richness of shared inquiry. We value embodied, situated, and enactive approaches to knowledge-making, where learning is not merely cognitive but deeply felt, lived, and relational.
