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The Childhood, Law & Policy Network (CLPN)

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Professor Heather Montgomery

Professor of Anthropology and Childhood, The Open University, United Kingdom

Email: heather.montgomery@open.ac.uk

Profile

I started out my academic life as a social anthropologist. After a first degree in English Literature I studied for a PhD at Cambridge which I wrote on child sexual abuse and exploitation in Thailand. I have held teaching and research positions at the universities of Sussex, Trondheim, Rice, Texas and Oxford. My research interests lie within Childhood Studies, especially the history and anthropology of childhood, children’s rights, and interdisciplinary studies of child abuse and violence against children.

Research

Publications

  • Familiar Violence: A History of Child Abuse, 2024, Polity Press.
  • Parenting the First Twelve Years: What the Evidence Tells Us (with Victoria Cooper and Kieron Sheehy), 2018, Pelican.
  • Children and young people’s worlds (2nd edition). Edited with Martin Robb, 2018, Policy Press.
  • Childhood, Youth and Violence in Global Contexts: Researchers and Practitioners in Dialogue. Edited with Karen Wells, Erica Burman, and Alsion Watson, 2014, Palgrave Macmillan.
  • Childhood and Violence in the Western Tradition. Edited with Laurence Brockliss, 2009 
  • An introduction to childhood: Anthropological perspectives on children's lives, Wiley-Blackwell, 2009.
  • Modern Babylon?: Prostituting children in Thailand, 2001, Berghahn.

Expertise

Interdisciplinary studies of child abuse, the anthropology of children and childhood; representations of childhood; the history of childhood; children and violence; children's rights.
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