Sandra El Gemayel

• Manchester Metropolitan University

As digital technologies have become increasingly embedded in daily family life, there has been a growing international concern about children's protection, provision and participation rights in a digital environment. Recognising this, the Committee on the Rights of the Child published General Comment No. 25 Children's Rights in Relation to the Digi...

The second article in this series about the Toddlers, Tech and Talk project reviews the academic literature around young children's use of technology in the home. Dr Sandra El Gemayel, research associate at Manchester Metropolitan University, Rosie Flewitt, professor of early childhood communication at Manchester Metropolitan University and Dr. Lor...

This paper identifies key barriers to young Iraqi and Syrian refugee children’s access to education in Lebanon and highlights how local initiatives serve as glimmers of hope, or ‘lifelines’, for their well-being and learning. Reporting on aspects of my doctoral study, the paper homes in on one case study with an Iraqi family and their 5-year-old so...

This paper addresses how unequal power dynamics in research with young children in disadvantaged communities can be negotiated through co-reflexivity. It explores this through two different projects, the “London Study” and the “Beirut Study”, which researched the play of young children from families living with disadvantage in two distinct cultures...

This chapter reviews how recent scholarship examining the nature of childhood can enable insight into different aspects of play. Our approach develops from the new sociology of childhood’s conceptualisation of childhood as constructed and its advocacy of children being experts in their own lives. The chapter analyses how play features in three diff...

Armed conflict and displacement have immeasurably harmful effects on children and their families. They constrain children’s opportunities to play, to learn through play, and for their unique potential to flourish. Nonetheless, there is a lack of in-depth research conducted into how conflict and displacement affect young refugee children’s play and...