We welcome international colleagues with an interest in spending time at the Centre for Parenting Culture Studies in Kent, as well as other associates across the UK. Please contact Ellie Lee if you are interested in becoming a visiting fellow.
Current Visitors
We are delighted to welcome Ashley Frawley as a Visitor between 2023 and 2026. Ashley researched her PhD in SSPSSR at the University of Kent, supervised by Frank Furedi and Ellie Lee. Her work then has been set out and developed in Semiotics of Happiness: Rhetorical Beginnings of a Public Problem (2015) and Significant Emotions: Rhetoric and Social Problems in a Vulnerable Age (2024). Using constructionist approaches to social problems, her research overall explores the problematisation of emotion and the emotionalisation of social problems. More recently, she has been interested in the use of claims about children’s wellbeing and mental health in public campaigns to outlaw mild forms of physical discipline in the home. She is also a member of the editorial board for Zero Books, and contributed to the project Childhood, Wellbeing and Parenting led by Claude Martin with this article.
Previous Visitors
We were delighted to welcome Joan Wolf, Associate Professor of Women’s and Gender Studies at Texas A&M University, as our first international Visitor to the Centre for Parenting Culture Studies. During her stay over the first two weeks of February 2013 Joan participated in a range of discussions involving Centre Associates, and got to know more about our work. The focal point of her visit was an Open Lecture she gave at the University of Kent to a full lecture theatre. You can watch the lecture in full here. The questions and discussion are posted here. You can read coverage of Joan’s lecture in The Observer, The Independent, The New Statesman and Mumsnet. There was also further coverage in: ‘The witches of breast milk need to back off’.
Linda Blum PhD was a Visiting Fellow in 2015, having first come to Kent University for an invitation-only seminar back in 2005, to discuss Ellie Lee and Frank Furedi’s research about feeding babies [https://kar.kent.ac.uk/25249/1/Infant_Formula-Full%5Bfinal%5D.pdf]. Linda visited again in 2015 to discuss here work published as Raising Generation Rx: Mothering Kids with Invisible Disabilities in an Age of Inequality (2015, NYU Press). Details of the talks Linda gave during her visit can be found here. Linda is also the author of Between Feminism and Labor: The Significance of the Comparable Worth Movement (1991, University of California Press); At the Breast: Ideologies of Breastfeeding and Motherhood in the Contemporary United States (1999, Beacon); and Raising Generation Rx: Mothering Kids with Invisible Disabilities in an Age of Inequality (2015, NYU Press).
In 2016, Hilde Danielsen visited, as she was working on the project Parenting cultures and risk management in plural Norway in collaboration with CPCS. Her research focuses on family-life, sexuality and intimacy, gender-equality, urban living, social movements and everyday-life. The collaboration with CPCS focussed on a two-day international conference Parenting and Personhood: Cross-cultural perspectives on expertise, family life and risk management [https://blogs.kent.ac.uk/parentingculturestudies/pcs-events/previous-events/parenting-and-personhood/]. At the same time, we welcomed Synnøve Bendixsen, who was a postdoctoral fellow at the Department of Social Anthropology, University of Bergen, and was working with Hilde as a researcher at Uni Rokkansenteret on the project “Parenting cultures and risk management in plural Norway”.
In 2016, to coincide with the event Parenting and Personhood: Cross-cultural perspectives on expertise, family life and risk management, we also welcomed the following as Visitors:
Vicki Harman https://www.surrey.ac.uk/people/vicki-harman
Erica Millar https://researchers.adelaide.edu.au/profile/erica.millar
Yana Kozmina https://www.researchgate.net/profile/Yana_Kozmina
Other Visitors:
Katrien De Graeve (2015) https://research.flw.ugent.be/en/katrien.degraeve
Márton Matyasovszky-Németh (2019) https://www.elte.hu/en/
Zehra Zeynep Sadıkoğlu (2019) https://avesis.medeniyet.edu.tr/zeynep.sadikoglu
Raquel Herrero-Arias (2019) https://www.hvl.no/en/employee/?user=Raquel.Herrero-Arias
Edmée Ballif (2020) https://unil.academia.edu/Edm%C3%A9eBallif