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This article draws on a longitudinal ethnographic study of three London homes. It considers photographs taken by three 5-7 year old boys of collections of toys, arranged on floor spaces and bedrooms, and objects within homes. Two households were working class, and the third home middle class. Using the concept of the inventory, representations of t...
Citations
... This literacy is relationally constituted through routines, emotions and interactions with other city dwellers-parents, friends, strangers, as well as the natural and built environments-and explores their place-based experiences. For example, studies interested in children's sense of place in their home setting have already signalled under three-year olds' emotional attachment to special places such as their bedroom (Gillen and Cameron, 2010;Green, 2011;Pahl, 2006). These studies suggested positively layered experiences in their home environment. ...
An increasingly well‐developed body of research uses neighbourhood walks to better understand primary school children's experiences of local environments, yet virtually nothing is known about preschool‐aged children's connections to their neighbourhoods. A reason for this omission is the commonly held view that preschool children lack competency to reflect on lived environments beyond playgrounds, kindergartens, and other confined settings that dominate early childhood. However, preliterate children walk around, use, and create intimate relationships with local environments as shown by 10 children aged 3–5 years from Dunedin in New Zealand during go‐along interviews. We asked each to walk us around their locale, explaining and pointing out favourite and less beloved places and activities. In this article, we advance two arguments: first that preschoolers are knowledgeable meaning makers of place; second that walking with them is a key step to understanding their life worlds and provides a way for preliterate and preverbal children to demonstrate knowledge and understanding of their spatial worlds, including as research participants. We challenge the idea that children of this age lack large‐scale spatial competency and understanding. Walking with them generated an in‐depth appreciation of their experiences of environments and revealed deep connections they had with their locales at varied scales. The work enables us to offer novel insights into spatial competency, sociospatial complexities, and the multiple dimensions of young children's wellbeing affordances in urban environments. Such insights are highly relevant for geographers, planners, and others who shape children's urban environments.
... The aim of multimodal ethnography is to use the theoretical tools of social semiotics in order to "make visible the cultural and social practices of a particular community" (Jewitt, Bezemer, & O'Halloran, 2016, p. 132). This process often involves collecting, producing, and discussing a wide range of artifacts, often including sketches, photographs, and text-or audio-based journals and sometimes a more general sampling from the material culture of participants' lifeworlds (e.g., Pahl, 2006). The goal of these conversations with and around artifacts is to surface the deeply personal meanings participants create and leverage with them. ...
... What I heard-and saw-most clearly in this space agrees very strongly with Lutrell's conclusions from a not-unrelated study and context: "children tell and live stories that recognise and place value on caring as a relational activity and collective responsibility rather than an individual, private matter" (2013, p. 296, italics mine). As I attempt to imagine an "inventory of traces" (see Pahl, 2006) connecting the modes and practices of caring I observed across the time, spaces, and artifacts of this study, I now "see" those traces all originating from a material, imagined, and ultimately lived space (Soja, 1996) hiding in plain site in the data from my very first day at St. Sebastian's. ...
Youth development work within and beyond religious settings should honor and engage the experiences participants bring with them, as well as the directions they wish to take their learning. This paper presents such an approach to using digital storytelling to foster healthy identity development. I illustrate and analyze a mini-ethnographic project conducted during a weeklong storytelling experience at the summer program of a Mainline Protestant congregation in a primarily Latinx northeastern suburb. I show that for these three participants, explicit, agentic self-reflection was mediated significantly by the sociotechnical affordances of digital storytelling and the sociocultural structures of the summer camp itself. The resulting identity work clarified and deepened the participants' understanding of the role of the camp in their development and the contributions they have made to this dynamic community.
... Multimodal and multisensory research is an exciting, interdisciplinary field. It includes studies of sound (Hall et al., 2008; Raimbault and Dubois, 2005; Van Leeuwen, 1999), images (Kress and Van Leeuwen, 1996; Machin, 2007; Banks, 2001; Pink, 2001) embodied emplacement (Casey, 1996; Ingold, 2000), human gesture, gaze and movement (Goodwin, 2000; Mondada, 2006; Lancaster, 2001), multimodal discourse (Scollon and Scollon, Scollon, 2001; Norris, 2004;), interaction with objects and environments (Hurdley, 2010; Pahl, 2004; Heath and Vom Lehn, 2008); visual participatory methods (Lomax et al 2011) and children's use of multimodal resources (Lancaster, 2007; Flewitt, 2006; Jewitt, 2006; Pahl, 2006; Rowsell, 2011). Such research investigates the 'multiplicity of how people communicate' (Bezemer and Mavers, 2011: 192): how talk, gesture, gaze and elements of material surroundings combine together in the production of meaning. ...
This article discusses three qualitative research traditions concerned with ‘multimodal’ and ‘multisensory’ methods, namely: i) ethnomethodology, ii) multisensory ethnography and iii) social semiotics. These have been selected not because they are the only research domains in which qualitative multimodal methodology is currently developing, but because a comparison between them allows for discussion of methodological and theoretical issues of key importance for advancing the field. Each is argued to rely on a distinctive underlying epistemological commitment – to the study of action, experience and communication, respectively. Each combines linguistic and non-linguistic data to try and get closer to the object of research, but involve different ontologies of closeness. The differences include how the object of research is defined, the role of context, the nature and locus of meaning, the nature of evidence and the relationship between researcher and the object/subject of research. These in turn have implications for how time and space are conceived. The discussion ends by indicating how the respective insights and advantages of each might be synthesised to suggest a new, integrated perspective for this kind of qualitative research.
... I first began ethnographic work in homes when I was looking at boys at risk of exclusion from school and I spent two years doing an ethnographic study of three boys (then aged between five and six) in their homes in North London. These children lived on council estates, sites where nobody 'wanted to be' but at the same time, were 'home' and I studied their images and meaning making practices as a reflection of their experiences (Pahl 2006). This concept of 'home' and its layers were interesting to me. ...
Abstract
Football in Brazil has always been a ‘man thing’ and historically women were actually excluded from playing it formally until 1979, when the law banning them from playing competitively was repealed. Since then, women have gradually become more prominent in the sport. Despite this, obstructive prejudices still permeate women’s football in Brazil with the most prevalent form of discriminatory marginalization being in relation to their physical appearance. In 2002, one of the biggest sporting bodies in Brazil, the Football Federation of Sao Paulo (FPF) organized a women’s football championship with much fanfare and huge television coverage. It was required by the FPF that the players were to be aged between 17 and 23 years, have long blond hair, be white-skinned and (preferably) be beautiful. This paper demonstrates how arcane paternalistic concepts of gender in Brazilian football still continue to restrain the human rights of women players in the twenty-first century. The article is the product of an ethnographic study undertaken in 2002 and centred upon three semi-structured interviews with three of the players that played in the FPF championship played in 2002. Ahead of the interviews carried out by the researcher the FPF cautioned the interviewees, placing restrictions as to what they could discuss in regards to their own sporting history and what they could comment upon in regards to the championship. Furthermore, the players were told that if they disparaged the organization and conduct of the competition or football in Brazil per se their teams would lose competition points. Despite these constraints the interviews revealed that the male hegemony that rules Brazilian football is rife with discrimination, racism and the sexualization of women players.
... Pri številnih znanstvenih raziskavah različnih disciplin in umetniških projektov so otroci in mladostniki dobili fotoaparate in fotografirali različne tematike (Moličnik, 1998;Dell Clark, 1999;Orellana, 1999;Rich in Chalfen, 1999;Ewald, 2000;Morrow, 2001;Wang in Redwood Jones, 2001;Mitchell in Reid-Walsh, 2002;Sharples et al., 2003;Rasmussen, 2004;Pahl, 2006;Thomson, 2008a;Mizen in Ofosu-Kusi, 2010;. Mnenja se razhajajo v tem, ali naj otroka usmerimo, kaj naj fotografira, ali pa mu pustimo, da poljubno uporablja fotoaparat ter tako pridobimo bolj avtentičen vpogled v otroški svet. ...
... Fotografije otrok lahko obravnavamo iz več perspektiv: »kot estetsko izkušnjo, kot družbeno--kulturno aktivnost in kot kognitivno-razvojni proces povečanega nadzora nad samim seboj in drugimi« (Sharples et al., 2003: 320). V etnografskih raziskavah fotografije, ki jih posnamejo otroci, raziskovalci navadno vidijo predvsem kot orodje, ki jim omogoča vpogled v perspektive otrok (Mitchell in Reid Walsh, 2002;Pahl, 2006). Tako lahko bolje spoznamo otroke kot »vedoče subjekte in spoznamo omejitve tega, kar lahko vidimo, vemo in razumemo« (Lutrell, 2010: 225), saj lahko fotografije pomenijo dostop do informacij, ki bi jih iz perspektive odraslih lahko spregledali ali slabo razumeli. ...
... It may also involve "showing research participants images of themselves engaged in particular activities and then exploring how they experienced these activities verbally in interviews" (Pink 2009:110). Since collaborative and participatory methods go hand in hand with contemporary paradigms about children and childhood, which emphasize the role of children as active agents and the notion of research with children rather than only about children (James 2007;Dell Clark 2004), they seem to be particularly appropriate in research involving children and youth in various disciplines (Hubbard 1994;Orellana 1999;Morrow 2001;Mitchell and Reid-Walsh 2002;Pahl 2006). Not only do such methods offer an insight into research participants' views, they also present an opportunity to overcome the ethnographer's dominant and objectifying voice. ...
Drawing on the existing documenting parallels between ethnographic fieldwork and photography, the paper discusses dilemmas connected to the relationship between the ethnographer and his research participants. The paper argues that the ideas of sensory ethnography and arts practices, as well as a reflexive approach to visual anthropology, especially collaborative and participatory methods, could prove useful in transcending boundaries between the researcher and research participants. Furthermore, the experience of taking pictures might help us towards a better understanding of ethnographic fieldwork. For this purpose, the paper offers an analysis of a number of photographs.
... It may also involve "showing research participants images of themselves engaged in particular activities and then exploring how they experienced these activities verbally in interviews" (Pink 2009:110). Since collaborative and participatory methods go hand in hand with contemporary paradigms about children and childhood, which emphasize the role of children as active agents and the notion of research with children rather than only about children (James 2007;Dell Clark 2004), they seem to be particularly appropriate in research involving children and youth in various disciplines (Hubbard 1994;Orellana 1999;Morrow 2001;Mitchell and Reid-Walsh 2002;Pahl 2006). Not only do such methods offer an insight into research participants' views, they also present an opportunity to overcome the ethnographer's dominant and objectifying voice. ...
Drawing on the existing documenting parallels between ethnographic fieldwork and photography, the paper discusses dilemmas connected to the relationship between the ethnographer and his research participants. The paper argues that the ideas of sensory ethnography and arts practices, as well as a reflexive approach to visual anthropology, especially collaborative and participatory methods, could prove useful in transcending boundaries between the researcher and research participants. Furthermore, the experience of taking pictures might help us towards a better understanding of ethnographic fieldwork. For this purpose, the paper offers an analysis of a number of photographs.
... He shows how children's play activities contain traces of practices from a range of places that are then combined in new and unique ways during play. Pahl (2006), in her study of children's textmaking in the home argues that young people 'pick up' various 'traces ' (i.e. discourses, orientations, preoccupations) as they go about everyday life and that these traces become 'sedimented' in the habitus and are then recognisable in the texts young people produce. ...
In this paper, we suggest a view of young people's digital technology use as negotiated social and literate practice. Rather than emphasising the boundedness of school and home spaces and literacy practices, we argue that young people's practices that develop around their use of digital technologies flow across these spaces, making simple distinctions and binaries about use in each domain problematic. To help illustrate, we present ethnographic case study snapshots of 15–16-year-olds from contrasting schools in and around Melbourne, Australia. In our thinking, we bring together insights from a range of work in the hope of prompting a reframing and rethinking of the relationship between home and school and the other spaces young people inhabit and create. We use Bakhtin's ideas about ‘dialogic negotiation’ and Bourdieu's notion of habitus to suggest that texts, meanings and practices do not emerge wholly from one social/physical domain but are traced and sourced from the whole life world of experience. In this framing, young people's engagement with language, learning and technology might be characterised as a dialogic negotiation of a complex range of texts and practices that flow across and between school, home and other spaces.
Initial teacher education is a significant site for learning to become a teacher. Central to this phase of becoming are issues around “What do the teachers think, feel, want; what are their ideals, what inspires them, what kind of teachers do they want to be? And above all, What is their potential?” For the past few decades, initial teacher education has not shown much deviation from its framing of teacher education. The core components of the teacher education framework remain a theory-driven on teaching practice, subject specialisation and disciplinary knowledge, and education foundations. This evidence-based policy framework within which individuals are prepared to become teachers does not work. The question driving our inquiry is, what are we learning from early career teachers’ lived experiences about initial teacher education as a productive space for negotiating the personal in the teacher and teaching? Framing the teacher education curriculum as a creative, critical and collaborative space, we argue that preservice teacher education often reduces the complexity of becoming a teacher. By not considering the person and what they bring into teacher education, preservice teachers’ complex lives are effaced. We draw on early career teachers’ storied lives to highlight how beliefs and formative experiences influence perspectives and decisions to shape their thinking and practice as they struggle to mediate their reimagined teacher self and the complex world of the educational practice. For teacher education to move beyond the theoretical dimension of learning to become a teacher, we propose an ethic of relationality, collaboration and dialogue, and care for self-others. This has the potential to understand the material nature of the educational experience as interconnections of the who, the how and the what. Understanding the material nature of teacher education can enable a holistic view of learning to teach and may enable a fuller view of the world of teachers’ work.
Children’s identities constitute and are constituted by the everyday spaces they inhabit. Though there are innumerable accounts of what adults think public spaces like subways and city streets mean to children, fewer recorded accounts exist from young children themselves (Faulkner and Zolkos 2016, “Introduction.” In Critical Childhood Studies and the Practice of Interdisciplinarity, ix–xvii. Lexington: Lanham.). In this work I explored 2- – 5-year-old children’s conceptions of public space through the photographs they took and the narratives they told in and around those images. I focused on how children imaged their spaces, how their narrative fragments added layers of story to the images’ contents, and how their photographic performances acted as ‘visual voice’ (Burke 2005, “‘Play in Focus’: Children Researching Their Own Spaces and Places for Play.” Children Youth and Environments 15 (1): 27–53.), highlighting for us how they see themselves and their positions within the larger urban environment. The young children’s photographs depicted their growing autonomy and mobility within an urban context, attunements to non-human forms of the city, and knowledge of what it means to live in their communities.
