Come and Play!

Devonshire Building G21 G22, 10am-4pm

The Newcastle Centre for Research in Children and Youth invites you to come and play! Colleagues working on all aspects of childhood and youth and encouraged to join us for a networking event themed around the idea of play in all its forms. Whether you work specifically on an aspect of play, or are more broadly interested in research relating to children and youth, we hope you will join us to share your thinking and identify connections and possibilities with colleagues from across the University.

The day will begin with coffee, pastries and a brief welcome (re)introducing the Centre and the focus for the day.

Play facilitator Paula Turner (https://www.paulaturner.org/) will lead a creative networking session designed to facilitate sharing of our research interests, using the idea of play as a springboard for identifying fruitful connections between our different perspectives on research on and with children and young people.

A series of brief provocations from academics and practitioners will open up the conversation and showcase current thinking around childhood, youth, and play. Thinking through issues of health, space, intergenerational connection, cultural access and more our invited speakers will pose prompts for further consideration.

Lunch

Our afternoon session will build on the morning’s ideas to think in a more focused way about how our different strands of research might speak to each other. Using Newcastle’s ‘Health Innovation Neighbourhood’ as a conceptual sandpit we will think about how our collective expertise could underpin ambitious, interdisciplinary work.

The session will open with a brief introduction from the team involved in the Health Innovation Neighbourhood: they will outline current thinking about Newcastle University’s redevelopment of a major area of the city, the former site of the Newcastle General Hospital.

Using some of the themes identified in the morning, we will work in smaller groups to think about what collaborative research might look like in practice. The HIN will provide a practical framework for these conversations – what might play look like on this site? – but we welcome discussion of any collaborative work across children and youth research, and colleagues are welcome to use this session to form networks relating to their own projects. (If you have a project in mind which would benefit from interdisciplinary collaboration, please let us know at sign up.)

We hope that this session will facilitate some initial networks and connections among all colleagues, and identify a small number of more concrete potential research projects. We plan for a follow-up event which will support more focused workshopping of potential projects.

3.30-4.00: Closing plenary

We will draw the session to a close with a brief plenary discussion of key themes.

Event Venue & Nearby Stays

Devonshire Building, Devonshire Building, Newcastle upon Tyne, United Kingdom