Katarina Gustafson

Professor in Child and Youth Studies and associate professor in Education.

My research interests are children's agency and diverse living conditions as well as spatial dimensions of childhood. I primarily work with different ethnographical methods.

I teach in Child and Youth Studies on basic and advanced level as well as in preschool- and teacher training education.

My research field is

children´s everyday lives and identity work within families, schools, leisure and neighbourhoods. Starting point is children’s agency, diverse living conditions and spatial dimensions of childhoods. I study phenomena as mobile preschools, preschools in dense cities, children's everyday mobilities, urban childhoods, segregation and local school markets. Another research interest is pupils in need of special support and special education pedagogues' and teacher's professions.

In my research I together with traditional ethnographical research methods as participating observations and interviews also work with children’s own documentations as narratives, photo, maps etc.

I participate in following research groups

Child and Youth Studies https://edu.uu.se/research/childandyouthstudies/

Studies in Childhood, Learning and Identities as Interactive Practices, CLIP http://forskning.edu.uu.se/clip/

Ongoing research projects

Project leader for the project: A citywide preschool yard? Challenges and possibilities for supporting inner city preschool's mobility and space for play in dense areas, in cooperation with ass.prof. Danielle Ekman Ladru. (finansied by FORMAS)

Earlier research projects

Project leader for the project: A citywide classroom: Time-spatial aspects of a mobile preschool pedagogy, a longitudinal study. (finansied by VR, Swedish Research Council)

Mobility, informal learning and citizenship in mobile preschools. In cooperation with PhD Danielle van der Burgt. (finansied by RJ, The Swedish Foundation of Humanities and Social Sciences)

Work with children in need of special support in independant schools. (Fristående skolors arbete med elever i behov av särskilt stöd.) In cooperation with professor Ann-Carita Evaldsson, Uppsala universitet and professor Claes Nilholm, Malmö Högskola (finansied by the Swedish Research Council)

Teaching

I teach in courses in Child and Youth Studies, on basic and advanced level. I also teach in different courses within the preschool- and teacher training education.