Â鶹ÒùÔº

Dr Sandra El Gemayel is a Postdoctoral Researcher at the Digital Futures for Children (DFC), a joint research centre between LSE and 5Rights Foundation. She leads on the Better EdTech Futures for Children project, which adopts a children’s rights perspective and centres children’s views and experiences to examine the impacts of EdTech and AI on their learning and rights.

Sandra’s research interests include children’s rights, education, play, and wellbeing across digital and non-digital contexts, with a strong commitment to amplifying children’s voices and diverse experiences. Her 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, conducting monitoring and evaluation of psychosocial support programmes for refugee communities across Asia and Europe. She also led on UNICEF’s Play & Heal research project, which sought to advance understanding of the vital role of play in supporting children’s recovery from traumatic events and crises.