Abstract
The diverse contributions to this special issue of Health Education Journal (HEJ) illuminate the different ways in which research can centre the perspectives of children and young people, through ethical and methodological approaches that expand conceptualisations of education for health in children and young people’s interdependent lives. Across varied geographical contexts, disciplines and methodological engagements, the papers brought together here are linked through their connection to the Centre for Innovation and Research in Childhood and Youth (CIRCY), which was established in 2012 at the University of Sussex, UK. CIRCY’s research spans the arts, humanities, health and social sciences, but all its work shares a common concern with putting the child or young person at the centre of critical thinking.
In curating these papers, we have been deliberately inclusive in our consideration of the parameters of ‘health’ and ‘education’, seeking to challenge definitional boundaries that may obscure understanding of children and young people’s views, experiences and support needs. The papers address diverse challenges to children’s health and well-being, ranging from mental health to climate crisis. This approach reflects an understanding of ‘health’ as a concept related to all aspects of children’s physical and mental welfare and well-being, consequently intersecting with varied areas of policy and practice including child protection, special educational needs and disability. Equally, the papers engage with education in the broadest sense of the word – a conceptualisation that shared commonalities with notions of social pedagogy
. . . as an overarching concept capable of spanning and infusing many areas of public policy, all areas in fact that involve working with children, young people and adults in informal or formal settings. As such, it means the application of an educational perspective and educational means to social issues [. . .] a process of change, the development of agency, modification, ‘becoming’ and transformation. (Moss and Petrie, 2019: 402)
Considered as a collective, the articles expand the conceptualisation of health education, providing new insights into the potential for adults – as researchers and practitioners – to learn with and from the children and young people with whom we work, so to understand better how to work educationally to support child health and well-being. Consequently, this collection is fundamentally concerned with building and contributing to epistemic justice in health education for children and young people.
Fricker (2007) uses the term ‘epistemic justice’ to discuss how operations of social power shape ‘two of our most basic everyday epistemic practices: conveying knowledge to others by telling them, and making sense of our own social experiences’ (p. 1). Writing about academic global health, Abimbola and colleagues (e.g. Abimbola et al., 2024; Bhakuni and Abimbola, 2021) have extended this concept to highlight connections with de-colonial and post-colonial scholarship, documenting the ways in which unfair knowledge practices privilege dominant groups, such that ‘local experts or marginalised people are not recognised as people who can determine the frame of analysis or approach to sensemaking, or as people whose frame or approach is valid’ (Bhakuni and Abimbola, 2021: e1467). In childhood and youth research, similar arguments have been made by Wall (2019), highlighting the marginalisation of children in scholarship concerned with their lives and arguing for the need to ‘respond to children’s marginalised experiences by critiquing and reconstructing fundamental normative assumptions’ (p. 260). The papers in this special issue of HEJ respond directly to this ethico-political challenge, centring the child in their thinking across varied methodological and analytic approaches.
Introducing CIRCY
Founded in 2012, the University of Sussex’s Centre for Innovation and Research in Childhood and Youth (CIRCY) has developed a distinctive approach to centring children and young people in research. From its beginning, CIRCY has been an interdisciplinary endeavour that encouraged dialogue and exchange across disciplinary boundaries, research and practice, and the local and global. Its members include teachers, researchers, writers, artists and others from across the social sciences, psychology, social work, education, health and the humanities.
A core underpinning principle of CIRCY’s work across disciplines is that we strive to place the child (or young person) at the centre of our thinking. This emphasis is rooted in an ethico-political conceptualisation of the child and their rights, and of the role of research in shaping societal understandings, policy and practice. This is a perspective that spans our research across diverse disciplines and methodologies within the Centre, entailing a commitment to critical engagement with the implications for approaches to research with children and on children’s lives. This involves adopting a reflexive orientation, addressing how research is designed with children at the centre of our thinking across a range of disciplinary approaches and methodologies. Throughout the years of CIRCY’s work, this approach has entailed thinking about the role of children in research, including through participatory and creative methodological frameworks, and considering how we centre children from the beginning to the end of research processes.
This special issue in the longest established journal in the field of health education builds from those underpinnings to showcase the diversity of CIRCY’s work – addressing concepts, methods and ethics that centre the child or young person in research with a broad focus on the intersections between health and education.
The articles in this special issue
Historical and material dimensions of childhood research
Within CIRCY, attention to historicity and materiality has led to the generation of new pedagogies and methodologies for engaging children and young people around issues of health and well-being. Rachel Thomson and Ester McGeeney’s paper documents how archives (in this case the Women’s Risk and Aids Project) can become a catalyst for developing inter-generational thinking about past and present sexual health issues, such as the AIDS crisis of the 1980s. Their paper demonstrates how working with archived materials can open new opportunities for staging cross-generational conversations about young women’s sexualities and sexual health. Working with young people and youth workers, the authors deploy methods such as collaging and re-voicing to co-produce knowledge about sexuality, sexual health and social change. This approach bridges historical and current understandings of young people’s sexualities, encouraging newly innovative pedagogical practices.
Several papers in this special issue draw on the material world as a means of enabling discussions with children about the complex and nuanced issues impacting their lives. Kathleen Bailey employs a posthumanist lens to examine how the material world can help to facilitate discussions about farming and sustainability – creating interconnections between children’s lives and the material worlds of animals and global ecologies. She applies Barad’s posthumanist framework of diffraction to explore how children perceive and affect ideologies of sustainability. Using artmaking and play as methods, Bailey’s research underscores how societal constructions of children as vulnerable limit their ability to contribute to discussions about sustainability. The research critiques how adult-dominated perspectives can foreclose children’s agency and possibilities for knowledge-making.
The digital realm emerges as critical space of engagement across several papers, with Hamide Elif Üzümcü and Liam Berriman focusing on the ethical challenges in researching children’s digital lives in Türkiye and England. Their paper examines how a digital moral landscape materialises in the homes of families and is shaping of family relationships and practices around digital media. The authors critically reflect on the ways in which researchers are drawn into this moral landscape through their research relationships with families – presenting them with challenges for ‘centring’ children’s digital lives within wider family dynamics. Drawing insights from two international contexts, the paper shows how cultural politics influence the methodologies used to make children’s digital lives researchable, advocating for approaches that respect children’s agency while addressing adult anxieties about digital engagement.
Exploring the connections between historical, material and digital contexts, these four papers provide valuable frameworks for understanding the complexities of children’s lives across diverse settings.
Digital, co-design and participatory approaches in research
Other papers in this issue address the affordances of digital, co-design and participatory approaches for research at the intersections of children’s education and health. Devyn Glass, Sadie Gillett and Nicola Yuill draw on multimedia tools to develop co-constructive methods of digital storytelling with autistic children and young people in a UK secondary school in order to better understand their sensory and emotional regulation. The research emphasises participatory methods, highlighting the evolution of the project from a structured process to one driven by the participants’ needs and self-determined goals. The findings underscore the importance of acknowledging power dynamics in participatory research and allowing young people the space to define their own narratives and meanings.
Issues of power run through all the papers in this issue, together with a consideration of how we can approach the inherent inequalities between children and adults. For some, this involves a re-examination of what ‘co-production’ means in the context of research and practice with children. Pattie Gonsalves and colleagues point out that most literature on co-design comes from high-income countries and offers limited contextually relevant guidance to programme and intervention developers in low- and middle-income countries (LMICs). To remedy this gap, and drawing on their work in India, the authors present 10 recommendations for co-designing youth-focused digital mental health interventions in LMICs. Their paper emphasises collaboration among youth, researchers and clinicians – addressing context-specific challenges such as inclusivity, cultural relevance and the safeguarding of young participants. Together, these approaches highlight the importance of adaptive, interdisciplinary methodologies in addressing the multifaceted realities of young people’s lives.
Co-design and participation are not neat or straightforward processes that can be easily pre-defined. Yet Camille Warrington, Kristine Langhoff and Becky Warnock remind us that the discomfort and uncertainty of co-produced and participatory approaches can nevertheless generate productive epistemic space. Their paper reflects on a 3-year participatory photography and visual methods project working with a group of young people in England who had experienced sexual violence and exploitation – seeking to understand what ‘resistance’ means to them. They demonstrate how arts-based approaches can foster a safe, participatory research environment, but that such an outcome is not guaranteed. As they show, giving over the locus of control to participants in the shaping and pacing of creative research activities is fundamental to the creation of spaces in which young people feel genuinely listened to and supported. The dynamics of ‘spaciousness and playfulness’ are emphasised as critical for dialogical practices, allowing participants to navigate sensitive topics and bridge gaps in power dynamics between stakeholders.
Both Gonsalves et al. and Warrington et al. highlight the value of co-design and arts-based methods as tools for involving youth in creating interventions or exploring complex issues. Rachel Burr’s findings on group settings further reinforce the power of collective, participatory environments in fostering positive outcomes. In her paper, Burr offers insights from a longitudinal study that explored the impact of preventive mental health support offered in therapeutic group settings for adolescents aged 11–16 over 4 years. Group participation led to improved emotional expression, reduced isolation and a rethinking of mental health beyond diagnostic categories. The study findings underscore the importance of participatory research in fostering social agency, empathy and redefined self-worth outcomes, which are not easily measured but are deeply impactful for young participants.
In common across all of the papers in the special issue is a desire to re-imagine how research and practice can be made more attentive and responsive to the needs of young people and the communities that support them. This includes challenging a model of decision-making in research and practice that epistemologically prioritises an adult-centred view of children’s needs (of knowing ‘what is best’ for children). In some instances, participatory methodologies can face a challenge of working with groups whose voices have not generally been elicited in research and practice. Tom Grice-Jackson and colleagues reflect on how young people and other local stakeholders can be meaningfully involved in the design of mental health services through their lived experiences of using and navigating these services. They set out how place-based health interventions can be led by local stakeholders, centring the views of young people and the health practitioners who support. As with other papers included here, they recognise the inherent challenges of this stakeholder partnership approach, and they reflect on individual researchers’ experiences of navigating the co-design processes and facing the challenges of fragmented health systems and developing trust and sustainability in stakeholder involvement. Their work also links to a third theme running throughout the papers in this special issue: namely, the importance of hearing children and young people’s voices at a systemic level.
Addressing systemic challenges: the importance of listening to children’s voices
Participatory research with children in this special issue spans socio-political and geographically specific concerns. May Nasrawy’s research focused on understanding what well-being means to children and young people in Jerusalem, a context affected by uncertainty, violence and the ongoing Israeli Palestinian conflict. Her work highlights the sharpened complexities of doing research with children experiencing violence, uncertainty and political conflict. She documents how systemic silencing affects children in conflict-affected regions and advocates for methodological approaches that amplify children’s voices while navigating complex ethical landscapes. By engaging with the stories of 44 children and young people aged between 12 and 16 years (within Christian and Muslim minority communities in Jerusalem), Nasrawy was better able to understand what hinders and supports children’s well-being in this context. Building on the limited research that centres the voices of children in conflict-affected areas, her paper reinforces the importance of ‘voice’ and ‘listening’ while highlighting the complexities of navigating silence and representation within the constraints posed by contexts of violence, uncertainty and political conflict.
Several papers in the special issue challenge systemic shortcomings in youth support systems at local and national levels within the United Kingdom. Nathalie Huegler and colleagues’ paper focuses on the safeguarding support available to young people as they transition to young adulthood in England, focusing on the transitional gap that occurs at age 18. The authors explore the potential for a Transitional Safeguarding framework to better link together systems and services around a young person during this key period of early adulthoods and call for more ‘collaborative and connective work’ that places young people in a whole-system perspective, with all agencies connected with young people recognising the role they need to play in safeguarding during transitions to adulthood. These authors also identify funding and cost as significant challenges against a backdrop of under-investment and austerity in children’s services. This point resonates with critical arguments in Holmes and Lefevre’s paper which seeks to rethink how ‘value’ is defined in relation to children and young people’s services.
Lisa Holmes and Michelle Lefevre critique the conventional focus on financial cost-effectiveness in safeguarding and welfare services for young people at risk of extra-familial harm. They argue that assessments often prioritise measurable, monetisable outcomes while overlooking subjective and moral dimensions of value. Drawing on UK-based research, the authors advocate for a more holistic approach that centres young people’s perspectives and integrates ‘softer outcomes’, such as well-being, educational engagement and qualitative insights into what matters most to youth. They emphasise the importance of taking a life-course perspective to evaluate the long-term societal and moral implications of providing timely and appropriate support to young people who are vulnerable. Holmes and Lefevre’s re-envisioning of cost-effectiveness aligns with the central theme across all the papers in the special issue: the prioritisation of young people’s perspectives and holistic approaches to their well-being. The shared emphasis on participatory methods, subjective outcomes and long-term systemic change underscores a collective argument for rethinking how child- and youth-focused research and services are designed, evaluated and implemented.
Learning from across the papers
Across the papers in this special issue, we present a range of engagements with the ethico-political challenge of centring children and young people’s views and experiences, with a particular focus on troubling what engagement with children might look like at the intersections of health/education, local/systemic and research/practice.
The contributions to this special issue collectively advance the field of participatory research and practice with children and young people. By foregrounding innovative methodologies, ethical reflexivity and interdisciplinary approaches, they offer a compelling vision for reimagining how we engage with young people across diverse settings. The works included challenge traditional hierarchies and efficiency-driven frameworks, advocating instead for practices that prioritise agency, inclusivity and long-term impact.
In different ways, each paper engages with questions of how children’s expertise in (and about) their lives might inform research, policy and practice, challenging their marginalisation in wider society. Issues of epistemic power run through the papers, with many of the studies critically questioning how we approach the inherent inequalities between children and adults. For some, this involves a re-examination of what ‘co-production’ means in the context of research and practice with children – such as Gonsalves et al.’s unpicking of global north assumptions about child participation and Warrington et al.’s reflections on how discomfort and uncertainty can be productive in creating space for co-production. For others, this involves a critical reflection on the complexities of relationships of power that surround a child that must be navigated to reach children’s voices: for example, Üzümcü and Berriman’s reflections on the challenges of hearing children’s voices within families and Nasrawy’s careful cultivation of spaces of safety and participation for children who have grown up in conflict situations. Viewed together, the papers offer a serious engagement with the tensions of seeking to cultivate ‘horizontal’ collaborative relationships, while navigating the ‘vertical’ power relationship that are embedded in children’s lives (e.g. within families, schools, and health and social care). For Huegler et al., this also involves using research to challenge these relationships in practice, asking how children’s views of well-being and safety can be brought to the fore in social care and other services.
Many of the papers reflect on how children’s and young people’s participation becomes ‘possible’ within and beyond research, giving close attention to the relational and material dynamics of working with children. Recognising that topics such as mental health, sexual health and climate catastrophe can be challenging to explore, the papers carefully consider how the material and relational conditions of research are central to creating spaces in which young people can potentially feel comfortable, safe, curious and heard. Burr’s longitudinal observations of a peer support group in secondary school offers ways into thinking about support for young people’s well-being that prioritise presence, trust and relationality. These are also significant themes in Warrington et al.’s group work, with the researchers and participants exploring ways of working together that prioritised safety and trust to enable experimentation and playfulness. In many of the papers, material objects act to scaffold, mediate or provoke young people’s engagement in the research. Bailey’s forest school setting creates a sensorial environment where the outdoors plays a significant role in opening lines of dialogue that may not otherwise be possible, such as around factory farming. Similarly, Glass et al. draw on multimedia tools to develop co-constructive methods of digital storytelling, which afford the autistic young people they are working with the means to share their experiences of emotional regulation at school in ways that may otherwise be difficult to articulate. In Thomson and McGeeney’s paper, the reanimation of archived materials opens new opportunities for staging inter-generational and cross-generational conversations about young women’s sexualities and sexual health that re-imagines the connections between past and present.
Across the special issue, we see a desire to re-imagine how research and practice can be made more attentive and responsive to the needs of children and young people and the communities that support them. The collected work challenges models of decision-making in research and practice that epistemologically prioritise adult-centric views of children’s lives and needs, disrupting assumptions about who knows ‘what is best’ for children. In research and practice contexts where children’s voices have not often been elicited, this prompts a radical challenge – as in Holmes and Lefevre’s call for young people’s voices to be heard in debates about cost-effectiveness of services. Similarly, Grice-Jackson et al.’s work demands the meaningful involvement of young people and other local stakeholders in the design of mental health services. Together, the papers in this special issue show how we can conceive of research with children beyond tokenistic voice or shallow participation, and offer a critical provocation to researchers, policy makers and practitioners: to engage critically and creatively with the methodological and ethical complexity of centring children and young people’s experiences.
