Suchergebnisse

Whilst children's competency is evident through their everyday socio-material encounters, dominant discourses continue to depict children as incompetent 'human becomings', shielding them from 'sensitive' matters (e.g., death). Originating from adult-centric traditions, this humanist understanding prioritises binary oppositions (e.g., life/death, body/mind, and child/adult). Reinforced by neoliberal academic expectations, such a developmentalist assumption is further appropriated and holds true as 'gold standard' when examining children and childhood, producing injustices against children. In response to critical post-human calls to disrupt child-adult binaries, I use post-qualitative inquiry to showcase the epistemological-ethical-emotional entanglement within a research project investigating children's children's encounters with death. Specifically, by combining poetry and drawing to challenge increasingly homogenous academic writing and traditionally clean-cut research paradigms, this work playfully highlights that children face power injustices in contemporary social life and their rights to participation in complex social realities (e.g., death) matter.

AbstractSchool closures across Australia in response to COVID‐19 have persisted since 2020, with rising mental health problems in children and adolescents, alongside rising negative family health and socioeconomic outcomes. Further, some children and young people who were already experiencing disadvantage pre‐pandemic may be at heightened risk of poorer educational outcomes. Therefore, the aim of this study was to conduct a systematic review of the literature to identify the factors for poorer educational outcomes that may be exacerbated by COVID‐19 amongst disadvantaged school students. Key development stages of disadvantage were identified: young children who started school behind, older students already at risk of disengagement from school and children and young people who have had contact with the child protection system. Five databases were systematically searched, across two search periods. A total of 69 Australian, peer‐reviewed articles, published in 2005–2021, examining risk factors for poor educational outcomes for children attending school met the inclusion criteria and were included in final analyses. Our findings provide evidence of key risk factors that make these populations susceptible to worsening outcomes resulting from the COVID‐19 pandemic, and of the critical importance of ongoing research to guide policy and practice support for these at‐risk groups.

AbstractIn its most recent report, the Academy of the Social Sciences Australia (ASSA, 2021: 10) identified social inequality as a "grand challenge" for the social sciences, arguing that social scientists have a pivotal role to play in "understanding, addressing and guiding us towards a narrowing of a two‐tier society." Nevertheless, the social sciences continue to be regularly positioned as "soft" and esoteric in relation to the natural sciences, while also sustaining disproportionate funding cuts. In this article, we—a multidisciplinary group of social science researchers forming part of the Inequalities and Social Action Research Cluster based at The University of Queensland (Australia)—draw on the existing literature and our diverse experiences to reflexively consider how academic social scientists might play the active role that ASSA foresees to address social inequalities into the future. This includes by countering the inherent imperialism of the Western academy itself. We explore the roles, barriers and tensions that social scientists face and conclude by offering a framework of key strategies to improve the translational impacts of social science research for addressing social inequalities.