Zentrum für Kindheits- und Jugendforschung (ZKJF)

The cluster focuses on research that deals with young people’s conditions of growing up. The research’s starting point is constituted by the assumption of life situations shaping the biographical development and thus future opportunities of children and adolescents. The living conditions of children and adolescents are structured by specific contexts of material and symbolic inequalities, which have a specific impact on growing up, their opportunities for realization and their well-being. Considering the strong social differentiation of youth and childhood, the cluster examines unequal "childhoods" and "youths" instead of "childhood" and "youth" in singular. The cluster comprises studies that aim to provide a differentiated description and analysis of young people’s living condition. It also focuses on ways of changing socially unequal living conditions, such as those currently being discussed in debates on children's rights and participation, education and inclusion.

The cluster combines research approaches of different methods to explore media activities of adolescents and children. This includes both theoretical and empirical approaches. Children and adolescents are understood as actors who have to navigate changing media environments. In addition to researching media appropriation and opportunities and challenges of media socialization, media activities, and aesthetic education, the cluster also focuses on educational and cultural analyses of digital and analogue media and their reception in educational processes. This also includes research into the role of digital media assigned to political formation of opinion and participation of adolescents and children. Other topics include the digitalization of young people's everyday worlds, new media in schools as a place of learning, and the combination of media and both formal and informal media education programs.

The cluster focuses on research that examines the constitution of childhood and youth in various contexts. First, the focus is on the educational and subjectivation processes of children and adolescents that arise in or at the transitions between institutions. Institutions and organizations are central empirical sites of practices of differentiation, distinction, and classification that constitute forms of generational order. Second, the cluster examines processes of standardization and normalization of childhood and youth in social, discursive, political, and welfare state practices and regulations. Given that childhood and youth are primarily situated in pedagogical institutions and organizations, the research cluster also attends to the particular pedagogical production of childhood and youth. In this vein, the current transformations in the education system, such as those pertaining to inclusion and all-day education, are also recorded om terms of the constitution of childhood and youth.