Ana Karen Reyes-Bailon

Profile

Before coming to Leeds to undertake my MA in Childhood Studies in 2019, I worked as a preschool teacher in my hometown of Chihuahua, Mexico. My time in the classroom sparked a lasting interest in children’ everyday lives, particularly in how children create relationships, make meaning, and experience childhood in different contexts. This curiosity ultimately led me to pursue postgraduate study and research in childhood studies.

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My PhD research explores how children's cultures emerge through the entanglements and relationships that shape everyday life in residential care in Mexico. Drawing on posthuman and relational perspectives, the project reconceptualises children's culture beyond human-centred understandings by examining how children, spaces, artefacts, routines, bodies, and other more-than-human entities participate in its ongoing production.

In autumn 2024, I conducted an ethnography with children aged six to eight living in a Casa Hogar (residential care home) in Chihuahua, Mexico. Using creative and participatory methods, including drawing, social mapping, photography, and everyday ethnographic engagement, I explored how children's cultures emerge through the intra-actions between children, people, places, materials, and memories. Rather than treating culture as something children simply possess or reproduce, my research understands it as an emergent, relational process that is continuously negotiated through everyday encounters.

By bringing together childhood studies, posthumanism, and ethnography, my research contributes a new way of understanding children's cultures as dynamic, more-than-human, and situated within the complex environments of residential care.

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Conference Presentations

• “Reconceptualising Rapport: Intra-and More-than-human Ethnography in the Global South.” Paper presented at the European Conference on Educational Research (ECER), Tampere University, Finland, August 2026.
• "How Relationships Come to Matter: Child-Material Entanglements and the Emergence of Human Relations". Paper presented at the British Sociological Association (BSA) New Materialisms Annual Conference, Royal Free School of Medicine, London, June 2026.
• “Worlding Childhood: Children's Culture through Relationships with More-than-human in a Casa Hogar in Northern Mexico.” Paper presented at the 71st Association of Hispanists of Great Britain and Ireland (AHGBI) Annual Conference, Lancaster University, March 2026.
• “Children's Cultural Worlds: Spaces, Territories, and More-Than-Humans in Mexico.” Paper presented at the RC33 Eleventh International Conference on Social Science Methodology, Naples, Italy, September 2025.
• “How do children construct their culture in a context of violence in Chihuahua, Mexico? An ethnographic research with children.” Paper presented at the PILAS Conference 2025: “Contesting Precarity, Envisioning New Relationalities,” University of Bristol, April 2025.

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Academic activities

I have experience conducting both qualitative and quantitative research, both as part of my degree and as an independent collaborator with the Latin American Bureau (LAB).

Appointed Secretary (2025–2026) of PILAS, the postgraduate affiliate of the Society for Latin American Studies (SLAS), fostering a supportive academic community for postgraduate researchers working on Latin America.

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Social media

LinkedIn: Ana Karen Reyes

Research interests

• Children’s Culture & Identity 
• Childhood Studies 
• Children’s rights
• Post-Humanism & New Materialism 
• Relational theories 
• Ethnographic & Creative Research Methods 
• Children’s Perspectives on Violence 
• More-than-Human Entanglements 
• Social & Cultural Constructions of Childhood 

Qualifications

• MA Childhood Studies - University of Leeds (2019 - 2020)
• BEd Preschool Education - IByCENECH, Mexico (2014 - 2018)