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The purpose of this study is to explore rural children’s own perspectives on health, well-being, and nutrition to better understand how they approach, navigate, and make sense of these topics.

This study uses a qualitative ethnographic research design theoretically informed by the “new” Sociology of Childhood and methodologically informed by constructivist grounded theory. This ongoing study with fifth-grade students in an elementary school in a small rural school district in central Illinois consists of ethnographic observations conducted at the school, in-depth interviews with students, and participatory tools that seek to involve students more fully in the process of data collection.

Preliminary findings of this pilot study suggest that many aspects often discussed in the context of childhood obesity, especially in rural settings, including knowledge or education about healthy eating, increasing physical activity levels, or access to healthy foods, are complex and multifaceted and do not easily lend themselves to standard interventions. Findings also indicate that children’s ideas about healthy eating deviate from their own eating practices.

Conceptualized as a grounded theory study, the research is not intended to be generalizable or reproducible. Instead, the study seeks to develop hypotheses directly from the field and study participants’ views and voices. These perspectives will inform a more in-depth study of childhood obesity in rural settings planned for 2019.

Findings from this pilot study will inform innovative, informed interventions that are guided by children’s own experiences and perspectives. Study findings will also be of benefit to practicing pediatricians and other child health professionals as they understand how to better think about and address challenges of health and weight management of patients and their families.

Home-based work results in a specific spatiotemporal arrangement: one location serves as both the family home and the workplace. This mode of work shapes the everyday family life and at the same time has to be adjusted to suit the divergent needs of all family members involved, especially if children live in the same household. So far, research on home-based work has predominantly examined home-based workers’ and adults’ perspectives. Therefore, this chapter puts children’s perspectives at the centre of the inquiry and recognises the wider web of family relations and home by focussing on the spatiotemporal coordination of everyday family life.

This chapter examines how children conceptualise parental home-based work in relation to their everyday family life and home, and how they participate in family practices in the context of home-based work.

The contribution is based on original empirical data that were collected during fieldwork with 11 families in Austria. It builds on observations of daily routines in these families, photointerviews and guided tours through the home with kindergarten and primary school-aged children as well as qualitative interviews with home-based workers living in these households.

From children’s perspectives, the findings show various independences between paid work and family life when work and home coincide. The in-depth analysis of these everyday situations emphasises how children actively modify and shape everyday family life and home in the context of parental home-based work arrangements. Family practices are constantly done and in so doing turn temporarily both the house and the workspace into a home.

Issues related to disability and childhood are frequently examined across the social sciences and humanities. Many researchers conduct studies with disabled children as the focus of study, as research participants and/or as research drivers. Disabled children represent two categories of identified vulnerability, thus, requiring stringent ethical boundaries in terms of recruitment, consent, research methods, analysis, disclosure and knowledge mobilisation. Although many safeguards apply to research with all children, the focus on disability and disabled childhoods initiates further ethical scrutiny. In this chapter, the authors examine a number of ethical dilemmas that have emerged when conducting research with, and in relation to, disabled children. In particular, the authors will examine the roles of disabled children and youth in advancing research on policy and practice within education and care sectors. The authors query the possibilities and limitations that emerge when employing institutional ethnographic, participatory action and phenomenological research. The chapter unpacks some of the tricky tensions around asking children to speak about disability and share their experiences of disablement when disability is so frequently stigmatised. The authors examine the impacts of predetermined categories of impairment within quantitative research. Across methodologies, data collection based on assumptions of impairment can skew analyses towards a medicalised framework of disability, leaving little room for socio-cultural perspectives on disablement, including how these approaches trigger ethical issues around notions of representation and agency in research with disabled children.

To demonstrate how generational as well as gendered identities impacted on researcher-researched relationships built during the interview process, engendering specific insights about contemporary British grandfathering.

An ‘ad-hoc’ reflection of interview transcripts and researcher field notes generated from 31 qualitative interviews with men who are grandfathers, to reflexively interrogate how various identity markers operated within my encounters with them, as a young female researcher.

Men positioned me within a grandparent-grandchild relationship during the interviews, which afforded specific insights into contemporary grandfatherhood, including the socio-historical context in which grandfathering takes place. Whilst perceptions and assumptions about gender influence how participants perceive researchers, focusing too rigidly on gender is problematic. It risks re-enforcing potentially stereotypical assumptions about men and women, thus downplaying the contradictions and paradoxes inherent in men’s constructions and performances of their diverse later life identities, as well as obscuring the complex intersectionalities and power relations that operate in the field.

To argue that the concept of ‘betweenness’ aids in developing a more robust understanding of the complex and knowable negotiations of similarity and difference within research encounters.

This chapter examines how residents of vulnerable communities frame environmental change. Specifically, this study reveals how residents from Louisiana's coastal communities understand coastal land loss. Respondents convey the meanings they give to land loss through constructing a narrative of place. We use a phenomenological approach that focuses on how stories are told and the subjective interpretations of societal members. We suggest that the slow onset disaster of coastal land loss leaves residents feeling vulnerable, forcing a constant and heightened awareness of place attachment. Prior to Hurricanes Katrina and Rita in late summer 2005, residents expressed a sense of separation and alienation from the restoration process. As major restoration plans are considered, residents’ place attachment can shed light on the role the communities can play in policy and restoration projects.

A new database demonstrates that between 1600 and 1830, Parliament passed thousands of acts restructuring rights to real and equitable estates. These estate acts enabled individuals and families to sell, mortgage, lease, exchange, and improve land previously bound by landholding and inheritance laws. This essay provides a factual foundation for research on this important topic: the law and economics of property rights during the period preceding the Industrial Revolution. Tables present time-series, cross-sectional, and panel data that should serve as a foundation for empirical analysis. Preliminary analysis indicates ways in which this new evidence may shape our understanding of British economic and social history. The data demonstrate that Parliament facilitated the reallocation of resources to new and more productive uses by adapting property rights to modern economic conditions. Reallocation surged in the decades following the Glorious Revolution and was concentrated in areas undergoing urbanization and industrialization. The process was open to landowners of all classes, not just the privileged groups who sat in the Houses of Lords and Commons. Parliament's rhetoric about improving the realm appears to have been consistent with its actions concerning rights to land and resources.

It takes a deep commitment to change and an even deeper commitment to grow.— Ralph EllisonThis quote from Ralph Ellison highlights the complexity of the concepts of change and growth. As faculty, we are constantly called on to facilitate the growth and change of our students through their academic work. This chapter provides a narrative of one faculty member's growth toward understanding and the incorporation of social justice concepts and structures into her classroom.I had my first microbiology test last week and as the professor returned the papers, he made a point to acknowledge the work of one student who received a perfect score. When he called my name and I stood up, I saw confusion on his face…and a look of disappointment…. I guess he didn’t expect a Black female to do well on the test.— Anonymous student