This edited collection presents the concept of lived citizenship as a fruitful avenue for exploring the role played by social work practices in the lives of people in vulnerable positions. The book centres on the everyday experiences through which people practice, negotiate, understand and feel their citizenship. The authors offer both empirical analyses of how social work influences the rights, obligations, identities and belongings of children, homeless people, migrants, ethnic minorities, and young people with mental disabilities; and a theoretical framework for analysing the complexities of social work. Drawing on the notion of intimate citizenship and an understanding of citizenship as socio-spatial, the theoretical framework addresses the challenges of enhancing the agency of social work clients and of promoting inclusive citizenship, and how these challenges are shaped by emotions, affect, rationality, materiality, power relations, policies and managerial strategies. Lived Citizenship on the Edge of Society will be of interest to students and scholars across a range of disciplines including social policy and social work.

This book presents a new childhood studies research program; namely Childhood Prism Research and offers unique childhood research contributions to the wider scholarly field. Bringing together cutting-edge childhood studies scholars from various disciplines, including philosophy, psychology, feminism, anthropology, sociology and literature, the book demonstrates the rich potential of this program and offers an introduction to the childhood prism theoretical framework, as well as examples of childhood prism research. Childhood prism research is underpinned by a distinct childhood studies approach that involves re-thinking the generational order perspective, and combining this with a relational ontology and a flat, non-adultist epistemology. The key assumption is that the study of children’s lives can offer not only insights into adults’ lives, and vice versa, but in some cases may even offer a privileged lens onto broader societal issues. The program embraces a number of seemingly oppositional positions in an ongoing debate within childhood studies and children’s geographies about how to reinvigorate theoretical thinking within these fields. Featuring leading childhood studies scholars from various disciplines, including philosophy, psychology, feminism, anthropology, sociology and literature, this book demonstrates the rich potential of the program and shows how researching children’s and young people’s lives using this approach holds great promise for significant theoretical development beyond the field of children’s geographies and childhood studies, as well as for empirical exploration of broader societal issues. Society and Social Changes Through the Prism of Childhood will be a key resource for academics, researchers, and advanced students of Childhood Studies, Sociology, Human Geography, Social Sciences and Psychology. The chapters included in this book were originally published as a special issue of Children’s Geographies.