Changing Environments, Changing Childhoods

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“Changing Environments, Changing Childhoods: A Cross-Environmental Ethnography of Moral Socialization in Three Small-Scale Societies” is a five-year research project (2025–29) investigating the impact of environmental changes on the moral development of children in three Indigenous societies. It is funded by an ERC Starting Grant and carried out by a team of international researchers at the RCC under the direction of Dr. Jan David Hauck.

Indigenous communities across the world have been experiencing rapid changes to the spaces they inhabit, including deforestation or changing land use, forcing them to radically alter their ways of life and subsistence. But we know very little about how these changes impact children’s upbringing, particularly their moral development and well-being. While the role of environments for the development of morality is widely recognized—on ontogenetic, historical, or evolutionary timescales—environments are mostly taken for granted as stable contexts for human action. To date there is no study of the concrete ways of how the affordances of different environments and their transformations impact the moral socialization of children.

To address this gap, this project undertakes longitudinal, family-based ethnographic studies in Indigenous communities in Malaysia, Namibia, Paraguay, and Uganda. The communities have experienced dramatic environmental changes that have impacted their modes of subsistence, their patterns of movement, and the relationships they sustain with human and nonhuman others. Through video-based analysis, ethnography, interviews, and psychological experiments, Dr. Hauck and his team will analyze children’s everyday interactions with caregivers and peers across different environments and their reflexive understandings of attendant moral values. Comparing children's socialization in different environments will allow the researchers to examine differences between past and present modes of existence and understand how environmental change impacts sociality and morality.

A recent interview with Dr. Hauck can be found here: https://springs-rcc.org/growing-up-amid-environmental-change/

The Team

• Dr. Jan David Hauck, anthropologist, principal investigator
• Dr. Megan Laws, anthropologist, co-investigator
• Wong Pui May, doctoral candidate in anthropology
• Hiskia Akuupa, doctoral candidate in anthropology
• Dr. Frankie Fong, developmental psychologist, research fellow
• Obol Sunday Jimmy, doctoral candidate in anthropology