My name is Melissa Nolas and I am a visual sociologist, digital archivist, writer, and photographer with considerable experience in communicating and archiving social science research. In 2021, I co-founded, and now direct, the Children’s Photography Archive. My current research focuses on childhood publics, children’s cultures and their cultural productions, digital archives, and creative and multimodal ethnographic research. This research is housed under the ongoing Childhood Publics Research Programme. Following twenty years in academia, where I taught and did research including holding two prestigious European Research Council grants, I continue my research programme as an independent scholar. I launched my consultancy in 2024. I specialise in working with decision-makers and practitioners who work with children and young people to develop interdisciplinary ways of thinking about childhood and youth. I continue to train researchers in multimodal ethnography and in developing ethics and infrastructures of project archiving. I work with funders, universities, and knowledge intensive third sector and commercial organisations. My photographic practice is influenced by my training in the social sciences, where I work with cultural theories of everyday life, as well as theories of the senses and of affect, and developed sensibilities for focusing on the familiar, mundane and often overlooked, as well as the excluded or somehow normatively ‘problematic’, to make the invisible visible. I am a member of the Independent London Photography Community and the Imprint Documentary Film Collective.Micro CV
Education
2008, PhD London School of Economics 2001, MSc Social Psychology London School of Economics 1999, BA (Hons) Linguistics University of Sussex.
Professional Experience
2019-to date, Director, Children’s Photography Archive C.I.C.
2018-2024, Reader in Visual Sociology, Goldsmiths, University of London.
Expert work
2024-to date, EU Expert Evaluator (grants and ethics).
2023-to date, Ethics advisor, ERC ABIDE project.
2020-2024, Research advisor, UNICEF U.K.
Grants
2020-2022, ERC Proof of Concept, CHILD PHOTO ARCHIVE.
2014-2019, ERC Starting Grant, CONNECTORS STUDY.
Honours
2025, Fellow, Software Sustainability Institute.
2024, Emeritus Professor, Goldsmiths, University of London.
Editorial work
2018-2022, entanglements: experiments in multimodal ethnographic practice.
Full CV available upon request.
