Abstract
This research aims to conceptualise the current changes in the social order at the intersection of childhood, adulthood, criminology and the trajectory of socio-legal interventions. It aims to illustrate those social mechanisms through which the regulating institutional practices have altered. The research interest is sociological, historical and juridical with an aim of interpreting current practices with children and their families including child protection, children’s institutional care and lawmaking practices.
The purpose is to meet three timely related challenges in the socio-legal field: 1) undeveloped theorisation of the ongoing and past changes in the institutional practices that regulate the everyday lives of children and youth; 2) the lack of knowledge on these ongoing changes also from the child’s point of view, and 3) grounding the almost entirely lacking multi-disciplinary socio-legal scholarship as well as strengthening post graduate training of the socio-legal field in the Finnish university system.
The research plan consists of five thematically interrelated and complementary subprojects to be carried out by researchers who represent different stages of expertise in research. The subprojects are united by key concepts, complementary research methods, as well as joint publications. The research interest is to understand trajectories and shifts in the past which have contributed to a problematisation of the present. As such it has strong interest in multi-disciplinary researcher education in the socio-legal field. The research is linked both theoretically and methodological, to various fields of multi-disciplinary studies including Social Work, Childhood Studies, Criminological Study, interpretations of the joint trajectory of social and criminal policy, and histories of the Nordic Welfare States from the viewpoint of children.
The ‘home’ discipline of the group is social work, a discipline applying a wide range of fields (e.g. sociology, psychology, law, pedagogy) and cross-disciplinary methodological approaches. The research work will be carried out in multi-disciplinary researcher training groups with several partners. The research group will link research in the fields of social policy, pedagogy and legal and cultural history. The partner experts, who significantly strengthen the group’s post-graduate potential, are all accomplished scholars including Leena Alanen, Prof.,Early Education (University of Jyväskylä), Jukka Kekkonen, Prof., Legal History and Roman Law, (University of Helsinki), Edgar Marthinsen, Prof. Social work (NTNU, Norway), Caroline Skehill, Dr. Univ. Lecturer, Social work (Queen’s University), Harriet Strandell, Dr. Univ. Lecturer, Childhood Sociology (University of Helsinki) and Toomas Kotkas, LL.D. Fellow, Legal history and Social Law (University of Helsinki, Helsinki Kollegium for Advanced Studies).
Keywords: socio-legal practices, child protection, social work, legislative procedures, generational relations, generational power, childhood, adulthood, childhood research, social mechanisms