2023 PhD Project
Project Aims
Child Friendly Nottingham is the city’s ongoing project under UNICEF’s Child Friendly Cities Initiative. Underpinned by the UN Convention on the Rights of the Child, Child Friendly Cities seek local implementations of promoting children’s rights and participation for sustainable development (UNICEF, 2022). So far, there is no published work on how Child Friendly Nottingham progresses; alongside a broader scarcity of academic literature presenting children’s experiences of participating in Child Friendly Cities. Whilst limited, previous research has only conducted policy analysis of child-friendly city policies (Nam & Nam, 2018) and/or produced adult-centric knowledge about developing child-friendly cities (Riggio, 2002; Gleeson & Sipe, 206; Whitzman, Worthington, & Mizrachi, 2010; Yao & Liu, 2017).
This proposed PhD project therefore seeks to investigate children’s experiences of participating in Child Friendly Nottingham activities. By capturing their experiences, the project aims to understand existing knowledge produced about Child Friendly Nottingham by children, as well as to identify knowledge gaps and barriers to participation. Existing literature on children’s participation has pointed out that in this body of scholarship, voices of children from low-income, black and minority ethnicity, special educational needs, disability, and other marginalised family backgrounds are underrepresented (Wainwright and Hoskins, 2021; Hoskins, Xu, Gao, & Zhai, 2023). Therefore, this current project particularly seeks to explore whether and how Child Friendly Nottingham engages with children from diverse backgrounds.
Overall, this project will co-construct with children in Nottingham knowledge of and about Child Friendly Nottingham – both their experiences of participating in the initiative, and the knowledge gaps on what makes child-friendly Nottingham. In addition to practical significance for further developing Child Friendly Cities in Nottingham and other parts of the world, this project will critically reflect on the theoretical underpinnings of UNICEF’s Child Friendly Cities Framework. The framework’s universality will be problematized (Urban, 2022) by producing local knowledge about Child Friendly Cities.
This project has been co-created and is supported by researchers from Nottingham Trent University, the University of Nottingham and partners at Nottingham City Council.
Project Aims
This project aims to address the following research questions:
- What are primary school-aged children’s experiences of participating in Child Friendly Nottingham activities?
- What existing knowledge has been produced about Child-Friendly Nottingham and with what groups of children is the knowledge co-produced?
- What knowledge gaps exist about Child-Friendly Nottingham, in relation to diverse childhoods represented in the city?
- What are the perspectives of Child-Friendly Nottingham from those underrepresented children in Nottingham?
The Project Team
- PhD Candidate: Hannah Burrows
- Lead Supervisor: Dr Yuwei Xu, UoN
- Co-Supervisor: Dr Ana Souto Galvan, NTU
- Community Supervisor: Ekua Ghansah, Nottingham City Council