Early Years Group members

Co-founders and co-leads

Dr Kristina Konstantoni, Co-Founder and Co-Lead

This initiative is driven from personal and professional ambition to imagine a different university space: a civic university which will serve public purposes and where children, parents/carers, practitioners, policy makers, researchers, academics, professionals and community activists within the early years sector will interconnect, co-exist, share co-learning and co-lead change towards implementing young children’s rights in homes, communities and institutional settings.

Holding many different positions myself (parent, researcher, academic), all of which interplay at any given moment in my everyday life, I view research, theory, policy and practice as interconnected fields. As such, one of the aims of our vision is to show and provide evidence of this interconnectedness in terms of sustained change towards social justice for young children and their communities. It is important for the University to also be a community space where children and their communities feel like active parts of the everyday ‘workings’ of University life, with direct, sustained and meaningful entanglements to a range of diverse local and national communities and at the same time with international and global reach.

Dr Lynn McNair OBE, Co-Founder and Co-Lead

I have always had a utopian dream of a just world. I find injustice intolerable, and for this reason find myself actively fighting against some of the wrongs of our world, e.g., intolerance of other human beings, whether it be for the colour of their skin, class, gender or age; in particular when adults dominate children to fulfil their own agendas in our neoliberal world.

For many years young children have been at the heart of my professional life, and I have often found myself concerned for young children, subsequently tackling systematic problems that young children live with every day. The development of this space is an attempt to create an early years’ setting with children that is participatory.  I love it when children influence the spaces they occupy, however, notably, despite the participation of children being in mainstream and social and public policy, adults continue to dominate the spaces that children live in. 

My aspiration for this space will be to root participation into every day practice. I am also passionately interested in practitioners as researchers.  The hope is that this space can provide enhanced exposure to both practitioners and students, i.e., exposure to a wide range of alternatives when working with children.  Practitioners / students greatly benefit from sharing and exchanging professional knowledge across different contexts. This space will be an opportunity not to simply answer questions, but it will open opportunities to create new questions.

Members

PhD students

You can find information about the PhD students working within the Children and Young People hub on our Research Students page.

Research students