Dr Karen Wells

Head of Department

BA (Hons) African History and Religious Studies (SOAS, London)
MSc Comparative Government (LSE)
PhD International Relations (LSE)

Assistant Dean Geography, Environment and Development Studies

Contact details

Department of Geography, Environment and Development Studies
Birkbeck, University of London
Room 203
32 Tavistock Square
London
WC1H 9EZ

Email: k.wells@bbk.ac.uk
Tel: + 44 (0)20 3073 8387

Profile

• Karen is a Senior Lecturer in Development Studies with a specific focus on childhood and globalisation, and visual cultures of childhood. She joined Birkbeck as a full-time lecturer in 2003 having taught as a sessional lecturer since 1998. Prior to 2003 she was a Research Fellow at Goldsmiths. Before returning to study in 1993 she worked as a finance officer for worker's co-operatives and voluntary sector organisations for ten years. She has a BA (Hons) in African History and Religious Studies from SOAS, University of London, an MSc in Comparative Government and a PhD in International Relations from the London School of Economics. She is the author of Childhood in a Global Perspective (Polity, 2009) and has published widely on visual representation, and on the impacts of global structures and flows on children and childhood.

Research and Teaching

• Introduction
• The focus of my research is on how global processes and structures interact with practices of childhood in local contexts and how this dialectic between the global and the local impacts on children's lives and on practices of childhood. I am particularly interested in how these processes are represented in visual culture and I have published widely on visual representations and global/local dynamics of childhood. A specific focus of my research is on representations of violence and suffering; related to this I am interested in how war and other forms of structural and corporeal violence impact on children's lives, e.g. in mobilising youth migration and youth military recruitment. I have a cross- cutting interest in non-talk based methods (visual and material) as mechanisms for exploring and understanding these dynamics.
• Research Interests
• My research interests include:
• Globalisation, uneven (international) development and childhood
• Child and Youth migration
• Visual cultures of childhood
• Violence, youth and childhood
• Teaching
• I convene the MSc International Childhood Studies and co-convene the MSc Development Studies. I teach the following postgraduate modules:
• International Political Economy of Childhood
• Social Studies of Childhood: key issues and concepts
• Researching Children and Childhood
• Research Methods for Dissertation
• Material and Visual Cultures of Development
• PhD/MPhil Supervison
  
• I am currently supervising the following students
• Nelly Ali Street Children in Cairo
• Lama Younis Discipline and Punishment: Children in Saudi Society
• Martina Lasovska Edutainment in Kenya and South Africa
• Pauline O'Dwyer Juvenile Justice in Sierra Leone
• I am interested in supervising in the areas of globalisation and childhood, child and youth migration, and visual cultures of childhood.

Publications

• Books
• Childhood in a Global Perspective (Polity, 2009)
• Book Chapters
• 'Becoming a Gendered Subject: Genital Cutting, Liminality and Normative African Girlhood', in Childhoods at the Intersection of the Local and the Global (Palgrave, forthcoming 2012)
• 'Memorialising Violent Death: the Ethical Demands of Grievable Lives', in G. Rose and D. P. Tolia-Kelly, eds, Architectures of the Visual: Embodied Materialities, Politics and Place (Farnham: Ashgate Press, 2012)
• 'The Gaze of Development after the Cultural Turn', in S. Roseneil and S. Frosh, eds, Social Research after the Cultural Turn (Palgrave, 2012)
• 'Children and international politics', in H. Montgomery and M. Keller, eds, Children and young people's worlds: Developing frameworks for integrated practice (The Policy Press, 2009)
• 'Embodying Englishness: whiteness, gender and class in the children's film 'The Secret Garden'', in R. Carrol and R. Helyer, eds, Adaptation in Contemporary Culture (Continuum Press, 2009)
• 'Mimesis and Alterity: representations of 'race' in children's film', in K. Horschelman and R. Pain, eds, Contested Bodies of childhood and youth (Palgrave, 2009)
• Journal Articles
• 'Children and Violence', in H. Montgomery, eds, Oxford Bibliographies Online: Childhood Studies (Oxford University Press, 2012)
• 'The strength of weak ties: the social networks of young separated asylum seekers and refugees in London', Children's Geographies, 2011
• 'The politics of life: governing childhood', Global Studies of Childhood 1(1), 2011
• 'Assembling webs of support: child domestic workers in India', with Shaziah Wassiuzzaman, Children and Society 24 (4), 282 - 292, 2010
• 'Child-saving and child rights: depicting the suffering child in international NGO fundraising leaflets', Journal of Children and Media 2 (3), 2010
• 'Diversity without difference: modeling 'the real' in the social aesthetic of a London multicultural school', Visual Studies 22 (3), 2007
• 'The Material and Visual Cultures of Cities', Space and Culture Special Issue, Volume 10, Issue 2, May 2007
• 'Symbolic capital and material inequality memorialising class and 'race' in the multicultural city', Space and Culture Special Issue, Volume 10, Issue 2, May 2007
• 'Narratives of Liberation and Narratives of Innocent Suffering: the rhetorical uses of images of Iraqi Children in the British Press', Journal of Visual Communication, 2006
• 'Strange Practices: children's discourses on transgressive unknowns in urban public space', Childhood: A Global Journal of Child Research, 12 (4), 495 - 506, 2006
• 'Spaces of Nostalgia', with Sophie Watson, Social and Cultural Geography 6 (1), 17 - 30, 2005
• 'A Politics of Resentment: shopkeepers in a London neighbourhood', with Sophie Watson, Ethnic and Racial Studies, 28 (2), 261 - 277, 2005
• 'Reconfiguring the Radical Other: urban children's consumption practices and the nature/culture divide', Journal of Consumer Culture, 2 (3), 291 - 315, 2002
• 'Strangers in the city: the structure and significance of children's fears of urban spaces', Everyday Cultures Working Paper, No. 4, (The Open University: 2002)
• Lectures
• Public lecture debate on identity and ethnicity, http://backdoorbroadcasting.net/03/the-political-and-geographical-boundaries-of-identity-and-ethnicity/
• Webpages for the ESRC seminar series: Childhood and Violence: International Perspectives, http://internationalchildhoodstudies.org/
• Presentation to Birkbeck Conference on Social Reproduction Across the Life Course, http://backdoorbroadcasting.net/2011/03/karen-wells-the-place-of-children-and-childhood-in-social-reproduction/
• Public lecture at Birkbeck, http://backdoorbroadcasting.net/2011/03/karen-wells-whose-children-child-protection-in-the-global-world/

Highlight

• I am currently writing a book to be published in Polity in 2014 on Childhood Studies and inequality. I am also editing a collection on violence and childhood to be published by Palgrave in 2013.