Children & Society
Abstract submissions deadline: 31 August 2026
Full manuscript submission deadline: 28 February 2027
Food and eating are fundamental to children’s health, development and participation in society. However, the food environments in which they eat, live and grow are increasingly commercialised, unhealthy and unsustainable. The impacts, including overweight, obesity, malnutrition, food insecurity and environmental degradation, affect children’s lives now and in the future. These harms intersect with widening social inequalities, disproportionately affecting those from lower income and marginalised households.
In this context, ‘anchor institutions’, like schools, hospitals and universities present an opportunity to ‘procure for good’, promote sustainable food and mitigate the impact of economic and social inequalities on their communities’ diets and lives (Morley and Morgan, 2023; Morgan, 2025). This potential is especially relevant to children and young people, who spend a significant proportion of their everyday lives, and consume a large proportion of their diets, in childcare, school and other communal settings. Some existing research explores children’s experiences of food in institutions, including schools and residential children’s homes (e.g. Punch et all., 2010). However, the current emphasis on institutional food as a policy solution to social, health and environmental inequalities does not sufficiently engage with children as active agents. Therefore, renewed attention to the topic via a social justice and inclusion lens is needed to address institutional food from the normative standpoint of children’s rights. Crucially, this includes being able to access food that meets children’s health and social participation needs, and to be involved in the design and development of policies that affect them.
This Special Issue will critically explore the potential of institutional food to address inequality and support inclusion and belonging among children in different contexts. In doing so it will contribute conceptually, methodologically and empirically to international scholarship on a fundamental aspect of children’s everyday lives.
We invite papers that address a mix of policy contexts and settings, from daycare, schools and hospitals, and a range of disciplinary and theoretical perspectives addressing cultural, religious, financial, health conditions, disabilities and sensory sensitivities, including studies that centre children’s own accounts, experiences and meanings of food in these settings. We particularly encourage the submission of papers on children’s food practices and lives in under-researched contexts, including the global south.
Those who submit will be asked to agree to reviewing at least one other paper.
While research on children’s institutional food practices has largely been dominated by studies from Europe and other high-income countries, this Special Issue seeks to broaden the field by actively inviting contributions from a wider range of global contexts. This special issue builds on a conference panel focusing on inclusive institutional food practices which was held at The Child and Teen Consumption Conference in London April 2026. We are interested in papers that address political ethical and /or methodological issues in researching these topics and groups as well as those with a more substantive focus. It is expected that all papers engage meaningfully with concepts of children and childhood and / or include children’s voices, and that they adopt critical social science perspectives on food and eating in institutional settings. We welcome papers that take creative approaches, including co-writing with children and young people. Papers are invited in relation, but not limited to, the following key aims and themes:
Topics for this call for papers include but are not restricted to:
- How are children from different backgrounds and with different needs and preferences catered for, and how do children themselves experience, interpret and influence food provision and food-related decision-making in organisations and institutions?
- Conversely, what does it mean to be excluded from or othered by mainstream institutions through food that does not meet children’s needs, including as understood and articulated by children themselves?
- What are the politics and ethics of ‘inclusive’ food approaches, and how do they intersect with moral and legal rights, such as access to food, equality, and children’s rights to participation and to be heard in policy and institutional contexts?
- How do institutional food practices operate in contexts of poverty, food insecurity or undernutrition, and how do these intersect with children’s rights and agency?
Guest Editors:
Prof. Rebecca O’Connell
University of Hertfordshire
United Kingdom
Dr. Claire Thompson
University of Hertfordshire
United Kingdom
Maria Waling
Umeå University
Sweden
Cecilia Olsson
Umeå University
Sweden
Keywords: scholarship; social engagement; social inequality
Submission Guidelines/Instructions
Submitting an abstract for this special issue:
Abstracts of no more than 500 words, with proposed title, authors, and their affiliations should be sent to r.oconnell2@herts.ac.uk or c.thompson25@herts.ac.uk no later than 31 August 2026
Notification of acceptance and invitation to submit full manuscripts will be no later than 31 September 2026
Full papers (no more than 8,000 words) should be submitted for peer review by 28 February 2027. See Author Guidelines.
Please refer to the Author Guidelines to prepare your manuscript. When submitting your manuscript, please answer the question: “Is this submission for a special issue?” by selecting the special issue title from the drop-down list.