Doctoral Study - Environment and children's lives in India and England - Catherine Walker

Environment and children's lives in India and England: Everyday experiences, understandings and practices

Catherine Walker

This doctoral study is attached to the NOVELLA Family Lives and the Environment project and has been funded from the National Centre for Research Methods NOVELLA grant. It aims to explore the everyday experiences of twenty 11-14 year old children living in a variety of context in Andhra Pradesh, India and the UK, in the environments in which they live. Catherine has worked closely with the Family Lives and the Environment project at all stages of her PhD research, and her thesis includes secondary analysis of data generated with two children as part of the Young Lives longitudinal study of children growing up in poverty based at the University of Oxford. The doctoral study presents and analyses narratives of children's everyday experiences, understandings and practices in relation to their environments generated through multi-method case-based research with children, their family members and their peers. These narratives are used to explore children's perspectives on their environments and the local-global spatial scales children imagine and interact within these environments, as well as considering children's environmental concerns and their assessments of their capacities to act upon these as a way of re-examining children's situated agency in a variety of cultural and socioeconomic contexts.

Publications

Walker, C. (2014) 'Photo Elicitation as Part of a Multi-Method Research Design: Family Lives and the Environment in Andhra Pradesh, India' Case study included in Sage Research Methods online database. Available to access at http://srmo.sagepub.com/cases

Walker, C., Boddy, J. and Phoenix, A. (2014) 'Walking and talking: Mobile methods for understanding families' everyday environments in India and the UK' NCRM Methods News Autumn 2014. National Centre for Research Methods: Southampton. Available to access at http://eprints.ncrm.ac.uk/3699/1/MethodsNewsAutumn2014.pdf