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The neighbourhoods surrounding social housing are often characterised by poverty, high rates of unemployment, community violence and other social stress factors that are often linked with adverse childhood experiences, including diverse forms of family, community and institutional violence against children. Based on the sociology of childhood, which considers children as active subjects with rights and promotes a critical understanding of their participation in matters that concern them, this chapter reviews participatory research with children, highlighting the importance of hearing their voices, to sustain their key role in building knowledge about them and the contexts in which they live. In this case, children participated in research to provide a deeper understanding of their needs in their neighbourhood, the role of their families and communities and what they needed to improve the quality of their lives.

Working conditions on many digital work platforms often contribute to the grand challenge of establishing decent work. While research has examined the public regulation of platform work and worker resistance, little is known about private regulatory models. In this paper, we document the development of the “Crowdwork Agreement” forged between platforms and a trade union in the relatively young German crowdworking field. We find that existing templates played an important role in the process of negotiating this new institutional infrastructure, despite the radically new work context. While the platforms drew on the corporate social responsibility template of voluntary self-regulation via a code of conduct focusing on procedural aspects of decent platform work (i.e., improving work conditions and processes), the union contributed a traditional social partnership template emphasizing accountability, parity and distributive matters. The trade union’s approach prevailed in terms of accountability and parity mechanisms, while the platforms were able to uphold the mostly procedural character of their template. This compromise is reflected in many formal and informal interactions, themselves characteristic of a social partnership approach. Our study contributes to research on institutional infrastructures in emerging fields and their role in addressing grand challenges.