Vicky Johnson – författare

Children's and young people’s right to participate has been increasingly acknowledged and taken up internationally, as expressed in the UN Convention on the Rights of the Child. Yet much of this has focused on collecting children’s voices, rather than achieving change, and has met its limits. This book provides an analysis of children’s participation in formal, collective and action research processes in six different international settings. It offers a deeper understanding of what helps and facilitates children's and young people’s participation through research, evaluation and decision-making to go beyond voice and effect change. This analysis is set in the context of historical and current discourses of participation, the sociology of childhood, contemporary anthropology, children’s geography and international development.Themes addressed include time and processes in children’s participation, shifting and multiple identities of children, political and cultural contexts, places and spaces children inhabit, skills and capacities of adults, accountability and power. The analysis promotes an approach to children’s participation as relational and collaborative, and will contribute to answering some of the questions facing practitioners and researchers embarking on participatory enquiry with children and young people.This is an invaluable book for practitioners and for scholars, postgraduates in anthropology, sociology, human geography, childhood studies, development studies, social policy, social work, community work, education, youth work and those with an interest in citizenship, children’s rights and human rights. Researchers and practitioners in UN, government and non-government services will also find it applicable to engaging with children and young people.

Children's and young people’s right to participate has been increasingly acknowledged and taken up internationally, as expressed in the UN Convention on the Rights of the Child. Yet much of this has focused on collecting children’s voices, rather than achieving change, and has met its limits. This book provides an analysis of children’s participation in formal, collective and action research processes in six different international settings. It offers a deeper understanding of what helps and facilitates children's and young people’s participation through research, evaluation and decision-making to go beyond voice and effect change. This analysis is set in the context of historical and current discourses of participation, the sociology of childhood, contemporary anthropology, children’s geography and international development.Themes addressed include time and processes in children’s participation, shifting and multiple identities of children, political and cultural contexts, places and spaces children inhabit, skills and capacities of adults, accountability and power. The analysis promotes an approach to children’s participation as relational and collaborative, and will contribute to answering some of the questions facing practitioners and researchers embarking on participatory enquiry with children and young people.This is an invaluable book for practitioners and for scholars, postgraduates in anthropology, sociology, human geography, childhood studies, development studies, social policy, social work, community work, education, youth work and those with an interest in citizenship, children’s rights and human rights. Researchers and practitioners in UN, government and non-government services will also find it applicable to engaging with children and young people.

From cathedral choirs, football chanting, and birdsong, to castrati, protest songs and artificial intelligence, On Voice explores the world of the voice that exists between the mouth and the ear. This is a book about the sound that journeys from the lips to the heart; how we speak it, how we hear it and how we embody it as people made in the image of the God whose voice created the heavens and the earth. Victoria Johnson, the new Dean of St John’s College, Cambridge, was previously Precentor of York Minster, the first woman to inhabit that role in a history which reaches back over a thousand years. A Precentor is someone who orchestrates worship and ‘sings first’, hers is the voice which invokes God to open our lips, so that our mouth can show forth praise. When a new voice inhabits such an ancient role does anything change? Do the stones resound in a different way? This book aims to explore the sonics of voice - human and divine – expressed through speech, song and silence. Through the lens of Christian worship, theology and culture, the voice is explored as a spoken, sung and heard phenomenon. As an animateur of worship and working towards a theology of voice, Victoria reflects on the power of the church’s musical and liturgical heritage to cut through the clamour of our modern-day echo chambers and the roar of populism, empower those who are seldom heard, and speak into the challenges of contemporary life.