Rachel Thomson, University of Sussex (Principal Investigator) is Director of the University of Sussex Centre for Innovation and Research in Childhood and Youth (CIRCY). She is a sociologist by discipline, and has worked at the University of Manchester, the National Children’s Bureau; London South Bank University and the Open University. Her research interests include the study of the life course and transitions, as well as the interdisciplinary fields of gender and sexuality studies. She is a methodological innovator and is especially interested in capturing lived experience, social processes and the interplay of biographical and historical time.
Liam Berriman, University of Sussex (Co-investigator/Research Fellow) is Lecturer in Digital Humanities/Social Science at the University of Sussex’s Humanities Lab. He studied for his PhD in the Department of Sociology at Goldsmiths, University of London. His thesis – titled ‘Design and Participation Across Young People’s Online Spaces’ – looked at the how and on what terms young people come to be defined as ‘participants’ in the development of virtual worlds and online games. Liam’s research interests include digital childhood and youth, children’s consumer cultures, and digital and cultural economy.
Fiona Courage, Mass Observation Curator (Project Partner) has worked with the Mass Observation Archive since 2000 and is responsible for the care and accessibility of the collection. She is particularly interested in increasing access to archival collections to much wider audiences, encouraging communities to use archives to develop and inform their own interests and activities, and to see the value in recording their own communities to create the archives of the future. The Curating Childhoods project enables her to work directly with young people, helping her to understand how best to record and preserve contemporary views of everyday life in Britain.
