Becoming a sociologist of childhood: trajectory and transition between field and subject

As part of the interdisciplinary law course Les droits de l’enfant : une approche interdisciplinaire, taught in French during Winter 2025 by Faculty of Education Professor Nathalie Bélanger, all students and professors are invited to attend an open presentation with sociologist and professor emerita Régine Sirota.

Professor Sirota is a pioneer in the French-speaking world in the study of the child as actor, which began to take shape in the 1990s. The child finally carved out a place for itself in research, with the paradigmatic evolution that accompanied the start of investigations inspired by symbolic interactionism and comprehensive approaches.  We are no longer interested in children from a purely categorical and statistical point of view, subject, along with their families, to processes of reproducing inequalities, but rather in children and their daily lives. This contributes to a better understanding of these processes and of the social representations of children.  The field of childhood studies and the sociology of childhood also makes it possible to consider the child as a whole, and not just the so-called at-risk, maladjusted or abnormal child populations that have long been the focus of the social and human sciences, particularly psychology.