The research unit conducts ethnographic studies of children and young people’s lives and conditions from the perspective of educational anthropology. Applying a comparative and anthropological approach, we focus on children and young people’s everyday lives and meaning-making processes, as well as on cultural expressions and values, social relations, and institutional set-ups in local, national and global contexts. As such, we understand childhood and adolescence as socially and culturally established categories and view children and young people as active subjects whose understandings and practices are of interest in their own right.

For the last 15 years, the members of the research unit have explored a wide range of topics related to the everyday lives, meaning-making processes, sociality, and social relations of children and young people. These topics include:

• Family – parenthood and siblingship; the home; divorce; family practices and ideals.
• Schools and other childhood institutions – institutional conditions and logics; relationships between institutions, children and parents; collaboration between school and home, educational projects and childrearing ideals; troublemaking and counterculture.
• Materiality, place and space.
• Language as social practice; linguistic ethnography; literacy and linguistic socialisation.
• Diversity and (in)equality: gender, ethnicity, religion and social class.
• Processes of mobility and migration – refugees; transnational tendencies in educational concepts and practices; integration policies and the dynamics of marginalisation.
• Inclusion, diagnoses and stigmatisation.
• Policies, tests and standardisation.