Sevasti-Melissa Nolas

Staff details

Position

Reader

Department

Sociology

Email

s.nolas (@gold.ac.uk)

Links

Website
childhoodpublics.org

Website
childphotoarchive.org

Website
entanglementsjournal.wordpress.com

I am a visual sociologist working on childhood archives, photography, and publics.

I am a visual sociologist best known for my research and practice on childhood publics, children’s visual cultures, children’s archives, multimodal ethnography, and publics creating methodologies. My work has been published in anthropology, sociology, gender studies and childhood studies journals, as well as disseminated more widely for a broader reading public. I direct the Childhood Publics Research Programme and I co-founded and direct the children’s photography archive. I also co-founded and co-edited the journal entanglements: experiments in multimodal ethnography (2018-2022).

I am currently writing a book-manual in childhood publics.

My new research focuses on the possibilities of writing otherwise.

Teaching and supervision

I teach undergraduate and foundation students. I convene or co-convene three modules:

Methods for Worldmaking, a first and second year research methodology core module for students reading for a BA Sociology and Sociology with Criminology.
Childhood Matters, a third year optional module open to all students at Goldsmiths.
Our Lives in Objects, an optional foundation module for students in Sociology and Sociology with Criminology.

I also contribute a block of lectures on American Sociology to our first year module Culture & Society.

I supervise projects at the intersection of childhood and youth, creative methods, and multimodal ethnography.

Current students:

Zoe Walshe, Navigating precarity: children and families’ accounts of housing insecurity in austerity Britain.

Tom Wandsworth, Genres of Health and Harm: Affects of (Non-)Recovery in Online Self-Harm Content.

Maria Georgouli Loupi, Situating migrant domestic workers into the Greek context: welfare state and the Greek family.

Walaa Burqaie, In Search of Childhood and Rights in Palestine: Palestinian children in the Israeli prisons.

Completed Students:

Brenda Herbert, More Than That! – A Study of the Everyday With Children Who Have Experienced Domestic Abuse and Social Work Intervention in an Inner London Borough, UK.

https://www.gold.ac.uk/sociology/staff/research-students/

Tasleem Rana (Sussex), Context is All: a qualitative case study of youth mentoring in the inner-city.

Perpetua Kirby (Sussex), How the light gets in: an exploration of children’s agency in the primary school classroom.

Research interests

I have a longstanding interest in childhood and youth participation and political lives. In 2013 I was awarded an ERC Starting Grant to carry out research with children in Athens (Greece), Hyderabad (India) and London (UK). You can read about the research my team and I carried out here: https://childhoodpublics.org/projects/connectors/

This research project led to the invention of the Children's Photography Archive: https://childphotoarchive.org which is what I am currently focusing on as I collect and catalogue children's contemporary and historical photography, and think and write about children's making of their visual cultures. The initial stages of this project was supported through another ERC grant, this time a Proof of Concept: https://childhoodpublics.org/projects/childphotoarchive/

With post-doc and doctoral students I co-organised a seminar series on Childhood Publics and the Child's Gaze, that was funded by the Sociological Review Foundation. You can listen to the seminar recordings here: https://childhoodpublics.org/podcasts/

My research practice has always gravitated towards and in the last ten years completely embraced creative methods and multimodal ethnography. As well as writing and reflecting on my own adventures in multimodal ethnography with colleagues, I co-founded and co-edited the successful and popular open access, peer feedback journal entanglements: experiments in multimodal ethnography (2018-2022) While the journal is no longer, the archive of the many brilliant contributions can be found here: https://entanglementsjournal.wordpress.com

Most recently, I have started to experiment with 'writing otherwise' and producing multimodal texts in the spirit of radical sociology and the longstanding traditions of feminist writing, practice, and interventions into the public sphere. A first essay from this project is due out later in 2023.

Featured publications

2023: Archiving through crowdsourcing

2023: How to invent childhood publics with photo-stories

2021: Childhood publics in search of an audience: reflections on the children’s environmental movement

2019: Fieldnotes for Amateurs.

2015: Children's Participation, Childhood Publics and Social Change: A Review.

Publications and research outputs

Edited Book

Nolas, Sevasti-Melissa; Varvantakis, Christos and Aruldoss, Vinnarasan, eds. 2018. Political Activism across the the Life Course. Abingdon: Routledge. ISBN 9780815385332

Book Section

Nolas, Sevasti-Melissa and Varvantakis, Christos. 2021. ‘This Parenting Lark’: Idiomatic Ways of Knowing and an Epistemology of Paying Adequate Attention. In: Francisco Martínez; Lili Di Puppo and Martin Demant Frederiksen, eds. Peripheral Methodologies: Unlearning, Not-knowing and Ethnographic Limits. London: Routledge, pp. 45-60. ISBN 9781350173071

Nolas, Sevasti-Melissa. 2020. Child Welfare. In: Dan Cook, ed. The SAGE Encyclopedia of Children and Childhood Studies. London: Sage, pp. 277-282. ISBN 9781473942929

Nolas, Sevasti-Melissa. 2020. Childhood publics. In: Dan Cook, ed. The SAGE Encyclopedia of Children and Childhood Studies. London: Sage. ISBN 9781473942929

Articles related to Sevasti-Melissa Nolas

World’s first Children’s Photography Archive launches

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