Florian Eßer is a Professor of Education and Social Pedagogy Research at the University of Osnabrück (Germany). His work links research in child and youth care with contemporary approaches in the interdisciplinary field of Childhood Studies. His latest research focused on the agency of children and young people in care, as well as on participatory research with children in different fields of education. Amongst his publications is:
Eßer, F., Baader, M. S., Betz, T., & Hungerland, B. (Eds.). (2016): Reconceptualising Agency and Childhood. New perspectives in childhood studies. London: Routledge.
Conference Abstract: The family as a “living archive” – practices of remembering in residential care, between public and private institutionalization
The “doing family” and “personal life” approaches have proven fruitful in Social Work research, and offer clear advantages over structuralist approaches to family. The paper begins by exploring this potential on the basis of the speaker’s own empirical research findings on “displaying family” in residential care. Working from this starting point, the paper goes on to advocate an expansion of the “doing”-oriented perspective to include an institutional dimension. This draws attention to implicit functions of family, such as the archiving of material memories of childhood and youth. In the case of residential care as a public institutional place of residence for children, these functions must be organized in a similar way.