Hope and resilience 2025

Subject of presentation

Commoning childhood and the collective rights of children

In this presentation, I explore multiple and overlapping epistemes of children’s rights as cyclical/reciprocal, relational, and interdependent to render intelligible the modes of existence of children outside modernity’s framework. I do so by providing case studies that exemplify the socially distributed caregiving practices of families and communities experiencing poverty and the ways in which child fostering (both purposeful and crisis-led) as a shared venture involves inter- and intra-generational care and priming of young members to be socially responsible and resilient. I map out and reflect on why such practices of mutuality, affective forms of organising care and children’s rights to collective well-being matter in childhood studies, as well as how Afrocentric onto-epistemologies of collective existence and pluralistic relationality might be used as analytical lenses through which the moral and existential tensions of being part of the world might be reconceptualized. What can we learn from the care ethics of families and communities that share resources, pool labor, and engage in a diverse portfolio of livelihood practices to reproduce life? In what ways do the living labor of children and the range of collective livelihood activities they take part in connect and create community-forming economies? How might practices of commoning childhood help us envision the care and protection of precarious children, and what kinds of ethical and political imaginaries do they open up?

Speakers's Biography

Tatek Abebe is Professor of Childhood Studies at the Department of Education and Lifelong Learning, Norwegian University of Science and Technology. His research and publications intersect childhood/youth studies and development studies with an emphasis on how young people are affected by and contribute to the transformations of the socio-cultural and political-economic environments they inhabit. He has conducted longitudinal ethnographic and participatory research on precarious childhoods and youth in Ethiopia and worked on a range of topics in diverse African contexts. Currently, he lead a project financed by the Norwegian Directorate for Higher Education and Skills to facilitate research and capacity-building activities on the connections between childhood, culture, and development. 

In recent years, his research has further focused on the generational dimensions of music, activism and worldmaking, looking at how music produced and consumed by young people provides a window into the ways they make sense of the future and history, as well as its capacity to re-imagine the world differently. 

https://www.ntnu.edu/employees/tatek.abebe

Subject of presentation

Resilience and Education: Lessons from Rousseau and Shelley

Progressive education can seem like a very lighthearted affair: When we think of Waldorf, Montessori, or Reggio-Emilia schools, we typically imagine children happily at play, surrounded by aesthetically pleasing objects, in a social situation structured to promote gentleness and kindness.  Yet the philosophical roots of this model of progressive education lie in grief and loss.  Jean-Jacques Rousseau’s seminal theorization of childhood and education, Emile, portrays happy childhoods that end in marital bliss and the promise of future contentment, but in the less-familiar and unfinished sequel, Emile and Sophie: Or, The Solitaries, disaster ensues.  Emile’s resilience in the face of his devastating losses adds an important dimension to our understanding of Emile – and, perhaps most importantly, of progressive education.  Rousseau’s Enlightenment-era insights are extended in the 19th century novels of Mary Shelley, which take up themes from Emile, particularly the educational relationships between parents/educators and children.  Her gothic novels are rife with disaster, yet, invariably, hope wins out, thanks to the educability of the characters who live on.  This presentation aims to provide philosophical and historical depth to our consideration of hope and resilience in the lives of adults and children. 

Speakers's Biography

Amy Shuffelton is a Professor in the Philosophy Department.  She began her career at Loyola in the School of Education in 2012.  Previously, she was Assistant Professor of Education at the University of Wisconsin Whitewater (2007-2012).  She earned her PhD in Educational Policy Studies, with a focus in Philosophy of Education, at the University of Wisconsin in 2006.  She also holds an MA from that department (2001) and an AB from Harvard (1992). 

 Her primary areas of research are democracy and democratic education, feminism, and parental engagement in schools.  She is particularly interested in how family and schooling are understood in relation to one another in the modern era.

https://www.luc.edu/philosophy/profiles/amyshuffeltonphd.shtml 

Subject of presentation

Socially sustainable environment for children, young people and families

In an urbanizing world, it is essential to understand the characteristics of urban settings that promote socially sustainable living environment of children, young people and families and the related health outcomes.  According to the “Bullerby”-model by Kyttä (2003), the two central criteria for child-friendly environment include children’s possibilities for independent mobility and their opportunities to actualize environmental affordances. These two criteria are not far from the definitions of socially sustainable environments where accessibility and perceived environmental quality has often been defined as core criteria for socially sustainable settings. In a series of studies among children, young people and families, we have developed a place-based research strategy and investigated the contextual qualities that encourage children to move around independently and find intriguing possibilities for functional, social and emotional activities. An online public participation GIS (PPGIS) methodology, Maptionnaire, allows the study of large groups of children and families, who can produce localized experiential knowledge through user-friendly applications. Also socially sustainable, health promotive urban environments can be studied using the place-based research strategy. Working in close collaboration with city officials has revealed that the place-sensitive research strategy helps achieving a more realistic understanding of environmental health promotion processes and helps to apply research findings in planning practice. Cities in 40 countries in over 14 000 projects have used PPGIS methodology as part of their public participation processes. For example, a Finnish city of Espoo collected data from over 6500 inhabitants – including 2500 children and young people - and was able to realize large-scale and influential public participation. The ultimate goal is to find solutions together with inhabitants that do not only promote the health and wellbeing of children and families but also promote planetary health. 

Speakers's Biography

Photo: Mikko Käkelä

https://research.aalto.fi/en/persons/marketta-kytt%C3%A4

Marketta Kyttä works as a professor of Land Use Planning in the department of Built Environment in Aalto. She received her PhD in the Department of Architecture from Helsinki University of Technology in 2004. Her doctoral thesis about child-friendly environments received two scientific awards, Lea Pulkkinen and Tapio Nummenmaa awards.

Having background in environmental psychology, her interests cover widely human aspects in planning. Her research topics include environments that promote well-being and health, active living, child- and age-friendly environments, social sustainability, urban lifestyles, perceived safety and new methods for public participation.

Subject of presentation

Building communities and learning environments to support coparenting – towards a paradigm change in family services

Coparenting, denoting shared parenting responsibilities and mutual support between parents (Feinberg, 2003), is an important resource for families, and a factor that can buffer against and mitigate distress caused by various stress factors (Durtschi et al., 2017). A coparental relationship in which there is active, positive collaboration between parents and mutual sharing of parenting tasks “radiates” to several positive outcomes, including parental and child wellbeing and parents’ and children’s mental health. Well-functioning coparenting does not, however, evolve automatically, and various challenges such as conflicts, undermining behavior and a lack of involvement are common, especially in early parenthood.  Parenting education and services for parents are however, still very much concentrated on individual parents, especially on mothers and parent-child relationship, instead of coparenting. Even in Finland, where gender equality in parenting is almost a norm, the term coparenting is unfamiliar to many family professionals, nor do they have systematic tools to support it. 

In this presentation I will ask how family services, parenting education programmes and policies can promote the construction of coparenting. Although coparenting is primarily a family issue, negotiated by parents, the forms and concrete arrangements of coparenting are socio-culturally embedded, affected by the institutional or informal support available, the level of individualistic vs collectivistic values, and gender regimes of the country (Bornstein, 2012; Kekkonen et al., 2023). To demonstrate the socio-cultural embeddedness of coparenting, I will present cross-national findings of coparenting among Finnish, Japanese and Portuguese new parents. I will ask, how varying family policies and services as well as ideals related to parenthood and ways of communicating, affect construction of coparenting. I will present findings from a cross-national “Learning to coparent”-study (CopaGloba), with interviews of Finnish, Japanese and Portuguese parents (N=90 parental couples).  Then I will show how professionals in family services understand and promote coparenting, by utilizing focus-group interview data of Finnish family professionals (N =21 workers). Furthermore, I will present findings from a pilot study where principles of citizen science, e.g., building learning environments and involving parents to test research-based information, were utilized in supporting coparenting. Instead of only sharing information via social media, maternity clinics and family services, we aimed at activating parents to use our tips, discuss with a partner and give feedback.  We also encouraged parents to supplement their parental teams with other caring adults. The new model was piloted in the Wellbeing County of Central Finland, in collaboration with family professionals working in local maternity clinics and family centers.

I argue that new parents are highly motivated to learn coparenting and have the capabilities to grow as coparents.  My vision is that coparenting practices – sharing responsibilities, supporting each other, dealing with disagreements and agreeing on childrearing – are facilitated as part of services for parents, integrated into their daily lives and supported by family policies.

Speakers's Biography

Anna Rönkä is a Doctor of Psychology and professor in education and adult education at the University of Jyväskylä (JYU), Finland. She is a nationally and internationally recognized expert on daily family life, parental working time patterns  parenthood and coparenthood. She is also interested in family services, parental education and innovative family research methods and interventions. She has led several large cross-national studies, such as Families 24/7 and Learning to Coparent (CopaGloba). Her most recent research focuses on the construction of coparenthood during the transition to parenthood in a cross-national context.

https://www.jyu.fi/en/people/anna-ronka