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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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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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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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)