Dr Dimi Kaneva

Dr Dimi Kaneva 

Dr Dimi Kaneva is deputy Director of HudCRES and a Senior Lecturer in Childhood Studies. Dimi’s research is concerned with exploring children’s voices and participation in different contexts, including formal and informal education settings, and sits within the ‘Education, childhood and youth’ theme. She is particularly interested in researching alongside children and working with the youngest members of communities whose expressions go beyond spoken language. Dimi’s most recent projects explore entanglements between children, objects, materials, and space in different contexts. 

Dimi is leading a British Academy project aiming to develop innovative play-based method for listening and eliciting children’s voices to achieve meaningful participation in early childhood settings and high-quality pedagogic documentation. This project involves a partnership with three private day nurseries in the North West of England to pilot and test play-based methods with preschool children (aged 3-4) uncovering their understanding and experiences of what families do that make them a family. Alongside evidence of children’s voices in the form of poems, the project team will develop and disseminate practice-based and evidence-informed resources for early childhood practitioners.

Dimi is Principal Investigator on the following projects:

British Academy: ‘Listening through play-based methods (LIME): young children’s experiences of family life in the aftermath of a global pandemic’ (SRG23\231850) British Academy/Leverhulme Small Research Grants Scheme, October 2023 – January 2025.

ESRC: ‘Early Years Talk: embedding speech, language and communication focus into early education and home activities’ (University of Huddersfield Impact Accelerator Award). Co-creation project with Speech Stars at Kirklees Success Centre, Kirklees Council, December 2024 – January 2026.

Previous research projects and partnerships:

University of Huddersfield: ‘Children’s experience of migration, language and difference voiced through arts-based methods in England and South Africa’. This project funded by the University of Huddersfield (2022-2023), explored the use of participatory arts-based methods with children in urban areas of Manchester, England and Cape Town, South Africa, as means of eliciting stories about migration and understanding the complexity of children’s entanglement with family migration, movement and location. The project involves an ongoing collaboration with colleagues from the School of Education and Humanities Education Development Unit at the University of Cape Town, South Africa.  

University of Huddersfield: ‘How I wonder what you are: Exploring the value of arts in early years creative encounters’. This project, funded by the University of Huddersfield (2022), focused on young children’s creative exploration of museum spaces and loose-parts resources in collaboration with The Earlybird Project.  

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More information about Dimi’s research can be found via this link.