Programme Leader BA (Hons) Childhood and Society Studies (Top-Up), Lecturer in Childhood Studies
I am the Programme Leader for BA (Hons) Childhood and Society Studies (Top-up). I began lecturing at the University of Sunderland in 2018. Prior to this I taught Childhood Studies at Northumbria University. I have also taught in other educational institutions including Young Offender establishments and worked with families as part of Hidden Harm interventions.
My expertise centers around children's development, educational policy, and how children can gain agency and have a voice in a range of spaces and places. During my PhD I worked with two-year-old children to understand their relationship with, and lived experience of school readiness using an entangled framework inspired by Deleuze and Guattari, Materialism and Posthumanism. During that time I considered how agency might be distributed and how matter, the objects, and stuff of everyday life come to matter in classroom spaces. My research interests continue to think-with and make-with these theories and philosophies, and I regularly present at conferences internationally, nationally, and regionally.
I actively network within the area of childhood studies and I'm an active member of The Early Childhood Studies Degree Network Research and Knowledge Exchange Strategy Group. I am also a committee member of the Early Education Sunderland Branch.
Teaching and supervision
Undergraduate
- CHS171 Building Graduate Skills For The Professional And Reflective Childhood Practitioner
- CHS301 Work Based Research Project
- CHS346 Equality and Diversity in Contemporary Society
Postgraduate
- SSCM41 Theorizing Childhood and Youth
Research interests for potential research students
I currently supervise doctoral students focusing on Deleuze and Guattarian frameworks.
I have a keen interest in how children make sense of their world and use voice in more than linguistic ways to present their identity within society.
Research
Orcid Id -
Publications
Article
Albin-Clark, J, Latto, L, Hawxwell, L and Ovington, J A (2021) Becoming-with response-ability: How does diffracting posthuman ontologies with multi-modal sensory ethnography spark a multiplying femifesta/manifesta of noticing, attentiveness and doings in relation to mundane politics and more-than-human pedagogies of response-ability? entanglements. experiments in multi-modal ethnography, 4 (2). pp. 21-30. ISSN 2516-5860
Conference or Workshop Item
Ovington, J A (2022) Fractured Identities: the affect of school readiness and neoliberalism in Early Education. In: BERA Annual Conference, 06.09.22 - 08.09.22, Liverpool University.
Albin-Clark, J, Archer, N, Lynette, Morris and Ovington, J A (2022) Time for Advocacy and Activist-Scholarship Movements in Early Childhood Education and Care: why it matters now. In: BERA Annual Conference, 06.09.22 - 08.09.22, Liverpool University.
Albin-Clark, J, Latto, L, Hawxwell, L and Ovington, J A (2022) Becoming Baglady: Collective Storytelling with Posthuman and Feminist New Materialism theories. In: ARCE 2022 'Transitions and Transformations: Educational Research in Rapidly Changing Contexts', 14.07.22 - 15.07.22, Edge Hill University.
Ovington, J A and Albin-Clark, J (2021) ‘It’s this 1 thing that got me trippin’: Feeling-with and Thinking-with the Affect of Songs as Visitations. In: European Congress Qualitative Inquiry 2022, 01-05 Feb 2022, Online.
Ovington, Julie and Roberts, Nicola (2021) Putting New Materialist and Posthuman theory to work in Bystander Evaluations: A Diffracted Reading. In: British Society of Criminology Annual Conference, Crime and Harm: Challenges of Social and Global Justice, 7-9 July 2021, Online. (Unpublished)
Roberts, Nicola, Ovington, Julie and Marsh, Heaven (2021) A Qualitative ‘Evaluation’ of the Bystander Project: the problem of binaries. In: CASS Lecture Series, 17 March 2021, University of Sunderland. Available at: https://www.sunderland.ac.uk/more/research/thematic-research-areas/social-sciences/public-lectures/public-lectures-202021-recordings/. (Unpublished)
Thesis
Ovington, J A (2019) '‘Turning to notice’ a colourful perspective: (Re)presenting two-year-old children’s lived experiences of School Readiness. Doctoral thesis, Northumbria University.
Other
Ovington, J A, Albin-Clark, J, Hawxwell, L and Latto, L (2022) ‘Matter matters’: Knowledge-ing with kin through. UNSPECIFIED.
- School readiness
- Child development
- Feminist Materialism Posthuman and Post Qualitative Inquiry - confused by this and want to know more? Drop me an email, and we can have a chat!