Leverhulme Trust PhD Studentship

Royal Holloway University of London has been awarded over £1 million from the Leverhulme Trust to support a total of 15 PhD research projects on the theme of Freedom and the Rights of the Individual in the Digital Age. We would like to draw your attention to the following project which is of relevance to the Marketing blog.

Surveilling children: Intensive parenting and children's freedoms in the digital age.

This will be supervised by Dr Vicki Harman (Sociology) and Dr Benedetta Cappellini (Marketing).

This project explores the increased surveillance of children in the family. It will do so by looking at how the consumption of technological devices (for example nanny cams, RFID- enabled clothing, mobile phones, GPS tracking devices, surveillance toys) is involved in surveilling children’s everyday lives from the perspective of parents and children themselves.

One of the most powerful and pervasive discourses concerning contemporary childhood is that children are subjects at risk who need vigilant protection. Given the range of risks that may potentially befall children in the digital age, whether being attacked by unknown adults met online or simply becoming obese, children’s own agency is perceived as insufficient for negotiating the risks of everyday life. As such, parents’ intensified surveillance is now considered the only plausible way of doing ‘good parenting’. Commentators have highlighted how the intensification of everyday parenting produces anxious parents, especially mothers, who need reassurance on their ways of surveilling their children from experts (such as nutritionists, paediatricians, teachers, celebrities and parenting experts) and from the increased consumption of up-to-date technology to support their monitoring and safeguarding efforts.

This project aims to understand how the growing domestic scrutiny results in a redefinition of childhood in which the lines between protection and freedom, surveillance and privacy have become complex and blurred. The research will involve semi-structured interviews with parents and children using photo-elicitation techniques. Key questions the project will explore include: How do children respond to the decrease of their personal freedom? In what ways do children negotiate or resist this growing scrutiny within and outside the domestic setting? What are the implications for family life and parent-child relations? What are the implications for children’s freedom of choice and expression?

About the Studentship
The studentship will include UK/EU fees and a stipend of £16,057 including London weighting for three years. There will also be additional support available for travel, subsistence and other related expenses linked to the research project.

For details of how to apply, please visit: https://www.royalholloway.ac.uk/studyhere/researchdegrees/feesandfunding/leverhulmedoctoralstudentships/home.aspx

The deadline for applications is 7 May 2015.