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About
Dr Sandra El Gemayel is a Research Officer at the Digital Futures for Children centre where she leads the ‘Better EdTech Futures for Children’ project. Her research focuses on children’s rights, education, play, and wellbeing across both digital and non-digital contexts, with a strong commitment to amplifying the voices of children experiencing disadvantage and marginalisation.
Sandra’s PhD explored the impact of armed conflict and forced displacement on the childhoods and play of young Syrian and Iraqi children in Lebanon. She later held a postdoctoral position on the Toddlers, Tech and Talk project, which investigated how the home lives of children under the age of three intersect with digital technologies in diverse families across the UK. She also contributed to the TYKES project, where she conducted a thematic analysis of the 50 most popular YouTube Kids videos, investigating how themes such as consumerism, family, and gender are represented in videos aimed at young children.
Beyond academia, Sandra has worked within the NGO sector, focusing on the monitoring and evaluation of psychosocial support programmes for refugee communities across Asia and Europe. More recently, she led UNICEF’s Play & Heal research project as a consultant, advancing understanding of the vital role of play in supporting children’s recovery from traumatic events and crises.
Expertise
Children’s rights, play, education, EdTech, digital, refugee, qualitative, participatory