While the evidence is clear what we do not understand is the mechanisms that underpin these differences, when they emerge, how they change, and what could be done to address them.

SEED

SEED - Social InEquality and its Effects on child Development: A study of birth cohorts in the UK, Germany and the Netherlands, is a European study that aims to explore the mechanisms by which social inequalities affect child development and later educational and life outcomes. The research team is multidisciplinary with psychologists, speech and language therapists, epidemiologists, social scientists, and ear, nose and throat (ENT) specialists. Funded by NORFACE, the project draws on the best and most detailed longitudinal data available from each of the three countries to achieve two principle objectives:

• To identify the mechanisms through changing social inequalities impact on children's oral language development.

• To identify the implications that these evolving social disparities have for patterns of performance at school age and beyond into adolescence and adulthood.

SEED Project Team and Partners

The SEED research programme started in January 2018. Led by Newcastle University’s Professor James Law the UK team includes Helen Wareham, Robert Rush and Cristina McKean. In addition there are six team members from the Erasmus Medical Centre in Rotterdam in the Netherlands, led by Dr Marie Christine Franken, and six from Germany led by Professors Sabine Weinert and Jutta von Maurice from the LIFBI Institute in Bamberg.

Given the complex links between poverty, work, access to services and social issues, the team has identified a real need for research to identify what factors help or hinder the lives of the urban poor.  The informal colonies, which include unauthorized colonies, Jhuggi Jhopri or squatter settlements and resettlement colonies, have different levels of access to basic amenities provided by public agencies. Therefore a community-based approach that leads to local development planning and design is at the forefront of articulating the needs and concerns of the community. This allows for the formulations of shared goals, collective action and decision making that leads to models of sustainable urban development.

We are engaging widely with national and local governments alongside NGO networks to inform policies and interventions across India to improve services and the lives of millions of low-income citizens.

Our project contributes to Sustainable Development Goals 11,8,5,4,1.

Project Team: Pauline Dixon and Steve Humble, ECLS; Anil Namdeo, School of Engineering; Renu Khosla CURE; Ravinder Kaur, Indian Institute of Technology, Delhi.

The book includes rewrites of 28 existing legal judgments relating to children (from a range of jurisdictions, including international courts), in order to consider how they might have been drafted if adjudicated from a children’s rights perspective. An innovative and highly effective legal methodology - judgment re-writing – has thus been extended to children’s rights.  

In phase two of the project, Professors Kathryn Hollingsworth and Helen Stalford (the co-directors of the project) are working to disseminate the findings with a view to develop judicial training materials in order to influence practice so that a more concerted children’s rights approach is taken in the courts. Seminars have been delivered to judges and lawyers in Scotland, New Zealand and Singapore, and scoping workshops with members of the English judiciary are to follow in 2018.

Project Team: (Co-directors) Kathryn Hollingsworth (Newcastle Law School) and Helen Stalford (Liverpool University)

Project Duration: January 2015 - on-going (Phase One: January 2015 - April 2017; Phase Two: September 2017 - December 2018)

External Funders: Phase One: AHRC network grant; Phase Two: ESRC Impact Accelerator Award

The core Newcastle project team were stimulated by these events and began talking about working together on film in the aftermath of conflict, drawing on their research expertise in Algeria, Argentina, Colombia, and Indonesia.

Screening Violence is an innovative engagement with communities that have experienced prolonged and entrenched violence of different kinds: from guerrilla warfare, to state sponsored persecution of particular groups, to mass murder, to sectarian conflict. It aims to achieve a new understanding of how social imaginaries shape civil conflicts and transitions to peace.

This project recognises visual culture as a key imaginary space where meaning is made about conflict and violence. We therefore use the medium of film to engage with communities that have experienced violence. Our fieldwork research will go beyond the so-called “flat-pack peace” to engage with local experiences and perceptions of conflict and its aftermath.  

Project Team: Professor Guy Austin (School of Modern Languages), Dr Nick Morgan (School of Modern Languages), Dr Philippa Page (School of Modern Languages), Dr Simon Philpott (School of Geography, Politics and Sociology), Professor Brandon Hamber (University of Ulster), Dr Roddy Brett (University of St Andrews), as well as academic partners and film practice partners in five countries (Algeria, Argentina, Colombia, Indonesia, Northern Ireland).

Funder: AHRC, 2018 to 2021