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Child Centered? Thinking Critically about Children's Drawings as a Visual Research Method
Abstract
Children’s drawings have gained renewed interest as anthropologists and other researchers search for methods that align with the current conceptualization of children as social agents and cultural producers. In this article, based upon fieldwork in the Central Philippines, I critically examine the claim that drawing is a “child-centered” research technique. In particular, I discuss adult–child power relationships and ethical issues that arise when asking children and youth to draw, assumptions about using children’s drawings as a means of understanding their perspectives, and the use of drawings as a tool of child and youth empowerment.
... The analysis of an image is commonly linked to its producer's account of it (Harrison, 2002in Mitchell, 2006, for example, when participant-made photos serve to (co-)determine the topics of an interview (Frith and Harcourt, 2007;Maratos et al., 2016). In research with adults, drawing has been considered a novel way to explore patient experiences of care, illness and treatment (Cheung et al., 2016;Eggleton et al., 2017;Guillemin, 2004). ...
... In research with adults, drawing has been considered a novel way to explore patient experiences of care, illness and treatment (Cheung et al., 2016;Eggleton et al., 2017;Guillemin, 2004). Drawing is also employed in research with children, for example, to explore living conditions and self-image (Mitchell, 2006), care and interpersonal relationships (Eldén, 2012), or children's encounter with the urban environment (Ramioul et al., 2020). With a critical look at the supposed child-centredness of visual methods in general, and drawing specifically, Mitchell (2006) concludes that drawing methods may reveal as much about the adults/researchers as about children's drawings. ...
... Drawing is also employed in research with children, for example, to explore living conditions and self-image (Mitchell, 2006), care and interpersonal relationships (Eldén, 2012), or children's encounter with the urban environment (Ramioul et al., 2020). With a critical look at the supposed child-centredness of visual methods in general, and drawing specifically, Mitchell (2006) concludes that drawing methods may reveal as much about the adults/researchers as about children's drawings. Although Mitchell's point aims to shift thinking about analysing children's drawings and illustrates how 'an adult gaze' may contrast with the outcomes of the drawing activities, it leads to the question what insights can be gleaned from a researcher's own drawings. ...
In qualitative research, visual methods often entail engaging with images as the subject of analysis. Yet, images may be of value also as a means of analysis. This article reflects on this analytical value in relation to drawings. To this end, the authors explore drawings made by researchers in various phases of qualitative research. Drawings made ‘in the margin’ are put centre stage to better understand their role in data analysis. They allow revisiting situations; and they supplement the audio-to-text act of transcribing. Actively drawing involves and stimulates a sensory engagement with the phenomena under study and the data. Drawings furthermore play an important role in arranging and re-arranging concepts when formulating conclusions. Examples highlight how researchers may explicitly incorporate drawing in data analysis to harness the potential of a multisensory skill set and engage with transcribing in new ways.
... Over the past 20 years, many social scientists begin to view minors, as not merely the reproducers of culture, but as "cultural agents and social actors in their right" (Mitchell 2006, p. 60). For children to be able to participate in research, it might be necessary to develop different nonadult centered methods (Mitchell 2006). Boyden (2003) suggests a need for "age-appropriate" methods that "empower children" and lead to "valid child-led data." ...
... Boyden (2003) suggests a need for "age-appropriate" methods that "empower children" and lead to "valid child-led data." Mitchell (2006) argues that visual methods are said to be "child-centered" in the sense that they may be familiar, even enjoyable to the child. When activity is familiar and pleasant to the child, it can be particularly "useful in bringing out the complexities of their experience" (Nieuwenhuys 1996). ...
... Children's drawings go well past the production of art, and instead, interweave their thoughts and emotions (Deguara, 2019), providing insights into children's way of thinking and how they make sense of the world around them. Drawing provides a child-centered approach to sharing those lived experiences that provide a window into a child's emotional and cognitive states (Bland, 2012;Mitchell, 2006;Zlateva, 2019). Drawing has been described as an effective means for children to reveal the complexities of their lived experiences (Mitchell, 2006;Walker, 2007) and is a natural way for children to express themselves without the typical filters of language. ...
... Drawing provides a child-centered approach to sharing those lived experiences that provide a window into a child's emotional and cognitive states (Bland, 2012;Mitchell, 2006;Zlateva, 2019). Drawing has been described as an effective means for children to reveal the complexities of their lived experiences (Mitchell, 2006;Walker, 2007) and is a natural way for children to express themselves without the typical filters of language. Children's drawings, however, are sometimes missed as a resourceful tool in understanding their social and emotional development in the elementary years. ...
The COVID-19 pandemic and the subsequent lockdown was particularly challenging for elementary students who experienced disruptions in almost all aspects of their daily activities. Our study addressed a dearth of U.S. studies documenting the adverse effects the pandemic created and continues to have for children by analyzing their drawings. This study was conducted post-lockdown after students resumed normal school operations. The Mosaic Approach framed this case study research that was conducted using drawings created by sixteen students in grades prekindergarten through fifth grade (ages 4 to 10 years old). Students drew what came to mind when thinking of COVID-19. We conducted a content analysis of the data and determined four dominant themes: (1) symptoms related to COVID-19, (2) evidence of psychological or emotional responses, (3) health and safety precautions, and (4) depictions of the virus cell. We assert children’s drawings as a useful tool for educators to create opportunities to connect with students and potentially reduce their anxieties about issues, including those beyond the pandemic. This will be of interest to educators who may not have considered the power of children’s drawings as a means to provide voice about current issues. It will also add to the global knowledge base about children’s perceptions of COVID-19 and the resulting lockdown.
... photography, drawing, and mapping) is now more widely adopted in research with children and young people as one way to minimise the power imbalances that characterise interviews or focus groups where they answer questions posed by an adult researcher (Mitchell 2006). They are also considered to be more enjoyable for children and inclusive of varying preferences and competencies of self-expression. ...
... Another challenge is that it can sometimes be problematic for adult researchers to interpret visual data produced by children who are not willing to elaborate verbally on what their drawings or photos mean to them (Mitchell 2006 ...
In the past two decades Britain, along with other countries in the western world, has pursued urban regeneration policies that encourage the demolition of social housing estates and their replacement with mixed tenure developments. The aim is to create communities of residents with a mix of income levels and break down spatial concentrations of poverty. Growing up in the latter is evidenced to have a negative impact on individual life chances. Young people are thought to be among the most disadvantaged by these adverse neighbourhood deprivation effects. It is believed that the presence of more affluent households will improve their outcomes by exposing them to aspirational peers and role models, building their social capital, revitalising local economies and improving area reputations. However, there is limited academic evidence of these pathways in the UK context. This thesis explores the mechanisms by which the wellbeing of low-income teenagers is influenced by mixed income social housing regeneration. The capability approach is adopted as an analytical framework, whereby wellbeing is defined in terms of people’s capabilities or freedoms to be and do the things they value in life. To achieve this, the thesis undertakes a case study of a council estate in London that has been redeveloped into a mixed income neighbourhood. Guided by the principles of youth-centred research, a mix of ethnographic and participatory methods, semi-structured interviews and document analysis is adopted. A total of 76 people participated in the study, 40 of which were aged between 12 and 19 years, while the remaining 36 were adult community stakeholders. Data was analysed thematically using a hybrid process of inductive and deductive coding. The thesis does not find evidence of the hoped-for benefits of replacing social housing with mixed income communities. Instead, empirical findings show that there are four pathways through which young people’s valued capabilities are influenced. These are (1) dispossession, (2) social division and inequality, (3) stigmatisation and exclusion, and (4) community breakdown. While the effect of these mechanisms varied by age, relative disadvantage, gender, ethnic background, and personal circumstances, overall young people experienced restrictions on many of the things they value being and doing, with negative implications on their wellbeing.
... Over the last few decades, childhood scholars have contributed to scholarly understandings of voice by detailing the myriad ways voice can be expressed beyond oral speech. Anthropologists of childhood, especially, have attended to children's perspectives voiced through "undomesticated" expressions (Spyrou, 2018, p. 95): screams (Rosen, 2015); proximity (Hunleth, 2017); touch (Spray, 2020a); bodily expression (Das, 1989;Spray, 2020a); role play and theatre (Hasemann Lara, 2022;Hunleth, 2011); imagery and play (Bluebond-Langner, 1978;Clark, 2003;Das, 1989;Hunleth, 2019); drawing (Hunleth, 2019;Mitchell, 2006;Spray, 2021), and silence (Hunleth, 2017;Spyrou, 2018). To elicit these diverse forms of voice, both anthropologists and childhood scholars of other disciplines have innovated an array of alternatives to the traditional spoken interview, including drawing and other arts-based methods, film and photography, and mapping (e.g., Leitch, 2008;Lomax, 2012). ...
Childhood studies’ long concern with elevating children’s perspectives has focused attention on “voice” rather than researcher-participant dialogue, precluding critical
attention to the normative adult researcher voice. This article investigates how cocreating comics with children about the COVID-19 pandemic engaged a different
researcher voice and produced different representations of pandemic childhoods. Making comics with children aged 7–11, I asked: What does it mean for researchers
to speak in speech? I suggest that shifting researcher voices can help researchers recognize the conventions that allow adults to colonize spoken conversation with
children, denaturalizing adult voice and allowing us to tell more than one story.
... Indeed, this tool has proven particularly efficient in catching emic perspectives providing a concrete focal point for discussion with children (Mitchell, 2006;Soukup, 2014). Results from this work have brought new insights into the emergent field of children's anthropology particularly regarding children's perception of natural landscapes and environmental changes (Alerby, 2000;Chabanet et al., 2018;Fache, Piovano, et al., 2022;Pellier et al., 2014), although the tool has not yet been used to explore specific knowledge realms such as plant identification and folk taxonomy. ...
This is an open access article under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivs License, which permits use and distribution in any medium, provided the original work is properly cited, the use is non-commercial and no modifications or adaptations are made. Abstract 1. In small-scale societies, people learn to identify plant species during childhood. Plant recognition is an important baseline knowledge, immediately useful to avoid intoxication risk due to wrong identification. Plant recognition is the basis of other ethnobotanical knowledge essential for safeguarding biocultural diversity. However, despite many studies on folk classification, we still have a narrow understanding of the criteria locally used for species identification; the gap being even larger regarding children's plant identification criteria. 2. Here, we study the criteria used by Betsileo children and adolescents to identify wild edible plant (WEP) species using a child-adapted method including drawings and follow-up interviews. We worked with 80 teenagers (from 12 to 17 years old; 51 girls, and 29 boys). 3. Our results suggest that teenagers use a large spectrum of visual criteria to identify plants and that these criteria match with botanical and ecological knowledge documented in the literature and herbarium vouchers. We found that 35% of the identification criteria used were non-morphological (e.g. phenology, biotic interactions), suggesting deep ecological knowledge. 4. On average, teenagers use more than nine distinct criteria per plant, which allows them to identify most plant species with a very high level of precision. The precision level of plant representation increases with age for boys, but remains constant for girls, suggesting different dynamics in plant identification knowledge acquisition. 5. We also found that boys and girls use different identification criteria: girls focus on morphological criteria while boys also incorporate ecological criteria, such as landscape features and biotic interactions, in their spectrum of identification keys. 6. Our results highlight the complexity of teenagers' plant knowledge and the importance of the ecological context and gender in plant identification's knowledge acquisition.
... Indeed, this tool has proven particularly efficient in catching emic perspectives providing a concrete focal point for discussion with children (Mitchell, 2006;Soukup, 2014). Results from this work have brought new insights into the emergent field of children's anthropology particularly regarding children's perception of natural landscapes and environmental changes (Alerby, 2000;Chabanet et al., 2018;Fache, Piovano, et al., 2022;Pellier et al., 2014), although the tool has not yet been used to explore specific knowledge realms such as plant identification and folk taxonomy. ...
In small‐scale societies, people learn to identify plant species during childhood. Plant recognition is an important baseline knowledge, immediately useful to avoid intoxication risk due to wrong identification. Plant recognition is the basis of other ethnobotanical knowledge essential for safeguarding biocultural diversity. However, despite many studies on folk classification, we still have a narrow understanding of the criteria locally used for species identification; the gap being even larger regarding children's plant identification criteria.
Here, we study the criteria used by Betsileo children and adolescents to identify wild edible plant (WEP) species using a child‐adapted method including drawings and follow‐up interviews. We worked with 80 teenagers (from 12 to 17 years old; 51 girls, and 29 boys).
Our results suggest that teenagers use a large spectrum of visual criteria to identify plants and that these criteria match with botanical and ecological knowledge documented in the literature and herbarium vouchers. We found that 35% of the identification criteria used were non‐morphological (e.g. phenology, biotic interactions), suggesting deep ecological knowledge.
On average, teenagers use more than nine distinct criteria per plant, which allows them to identify most plant species with a very high level of precision. The precision level of plant representation increases with age for boys, but remains constant for girls, suggesting different dynamics in plant identification knowledge acquisition.
We also found that boys and girls use different identification criteria: girls focus on morphological criteria while boys also incorporate ecological criteria, such as landscape features and biotic interactions, in their spectrum of identification keys.
Our results highlight the complexity of teenagers' plant knowledge and the importance of the ecological context and gender in plant identification's knowledge acquisition.
This knowledge acquired very early in childhood, constitutes the foundation of future interactions with nature and should be at the heart of environmental humanities studies and knowledge co‐production projects to tackle socio‐ecological concerns. Hence, we urge further research to explore innovative methods that complement traditional ethnoecological tools and capture complex sensory aspects of folk children's taxonomy to better understand human‐plant interactions and knowledge.
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... We found that children's explanations of their own drawings and a consideration of their situational and socio-cultural environment (Billmann-Mahecha & Drexler, 2020) provided for rich data, especially when interviewing children in their home situation. While some authors acknowledge the limitation of not considering children's own explanations of their artistic work (Darbyshire et al., 2005), others point out that even where asked, not all children expound on the drawings in minute detail (Mitchell, 2006). This tallies with our experience where children explained their drawings but mostly without providing dense accounts. ...
Purpose
We explored children’s experiences of COVID-19 in terms of proximity and distance to significant others.
Methods
Our qualitative study with children in Germany (6–15 years of age) explored their views and experiences of COVID-19 times via drawings and face-to-face semi-structured interviews (n = 13). We analysed data thematically and used the socio-ecological model as the theoretical underpinning. Case studies contextualized how children dealt with the COVID-19 precautions.
Results
Salient motives in children’s drawings were school scenarios showing distance-keeping and mask-wearing as an expression of interpersonal distance; in the home-schooling context, loneliness was highlighted. Drawings also illustrated the impact of COVID-19 in terms of separation, illness and death. A dynamic perception of proximity and distance emerged from drawings and interviews. COVID-19 barred children from spending “real” time together with close friends. Bridging physical distance virtually was easier for adolescents than for children.
Conclusion
To bolster children’s mental and social resilience in future epidemics, participants’ plea for maintaining social and physical interactions with significant others and for keeping schools open should be heeded by policy-makers. Our study also highlights the benefits of conducting direct research with children and using non-verbal methods of data collection.
... Bu çizimler onlara duyusal zevk sağlar ve fiziksel gelişimlerini destekler. Çocuklar büyüdükçe yaptıkları karalamalar, soyut çizgilerin ve şekillerin oluşumuna doğru ilerlemekte ve bu çizimler onların dünyalarını temsil etmek için bir araç haline gelmektedir (Martin, 2010;Mitchell, 2006). ...
Bu çalışma depremi yaşayan 6-10 yaş arası çocuklara okunan metaforik hikayenin, çocukların yaptıkları resimlerin temaları ile incelenmesi amacıyla yapılmıştır. Çalışma nitel araştırma yöntemlerinden Durum Çalışması tekniğinde tasarlanmıştır. Araştırmanın çalışma grubunu, 20 Şubat Kahraman Maraş merkezli deprem felaketinden sonra, Konya iline gelerek, yurtlara yerleştirilen ve yurtlar içinde açılan okullara devam eden temel eğitim düzeyindeki çocuklar oluşturmaktadır. Verilerin toplanması için serbest resim çizim tekniği kullanılmıştır. Ön test verileri olarak toplanan bu resimlerin ardından çocuklara, Kahraman Maraş merkezli depremden etkilenen çocuklar için yazılmış olan metaforik hikaye okunmuştur. Bir gün sonra çocuklardan tekrar resim yapmaları istenmiştir. Hikâye sonrası istenen resimler son test verileri olarak kullanılmıştır. Çocuklardan alınan resimlerin içeriği iki uzman araştırmacı tarafından incelenmiş ve resim içerisindeki tüm temalar not edilmiştir. NVivo 14 paket programı kullanılarak temalar, ortak özelliklerine göre kodlara ayrılmış ve 29 kod elde edilmiş ve aynı program ile karşılaştırmalar yapılmıştır. Çalışmanın sonuçlarına göre çocukların resim temaları incelendiğinde, metaforik hikayenin tüm yaş gruplarında(6-10 yaş) olumlu değişimlere yol açtığı görülmüştür.
... Other creative methods, including drawing, mapping and drama have been used to encourage children's free expression and reveal 'subjugated knowledges' (Mizen and Ofosu-Kusi, 2010;Thomas De Benitez, 2011;Johnson et al, 2014) and children's understanding of place, space and their everyday lives (Mitchell, 2006;Johnson, 2011;Bolzman et al, 2017;Bowles, 2017). Methods like drawing have been successfully used in large-scale studies (Kilkelly et al, 2005;Crivello et al, 2009;Crivello et al, 2013). ...
... In the following sections, I discuss the use of participatory photography and suggest how this method can help researchers to: (i) address and expand the notion of child voice; (ii) explore nonverbal realms of knowledge from a child-centred perspective; and (iii) grant children freedom to document their daily lives, which can have relevance for the future. I do not claim that participatory photography is the only efficient method to produce valuable work with children, and instead, I acknowledge the limits and drawbacks of using participatory techniques in child-centred research (Mitchell 2006). But given that such methods are still limited in ethnographic research with hunter-gatherer and rural children -if not entirely absent in studies of Amazonia -I will highlight how participatory photography can offer an alternative to standard methods of research and representation, and stimulate children's enthusiasm and participation in the research process. ...
This article explores the use of participatory photography in ethnographic research with hunter-gatherer children. Drawing on my fieldwork in Peruvian Amazonia, I examine on how participatory photography can help researchers of childhood to move beyond the notion of child voice and explore non-verbal realms of knowledge from a child-centred perspective. While acknowledging the drawbacks and limits of child-centred visual methods, I will focus primarily on the advantages of using methodologies that can highly stimulate children’s enthusiasm and participation in the research process, allowing the researchers to move away from an adult-centric research approach.
... Soilsafe Kids aims to understand what children know about soil and how they value it. This takes a child-centered approach [31,32] throughout our workshop series with 8 primary school classes in Tāmaki Makaurau Auckland. Class sizes are planned for approximately 30 students, resulting in a convenience sample of ~240 participants. ...
Background:
Soil underpins most terrestrial systems; hence, its degradation should concern everyone. In 2021, Soilsafe Aotearoa surveyed the adult population of New Zealand about how they value soil, particularly values related to how they care about and are concerned about soil. Pursuant to this study, Soilsafe Kids (the outreach branch of Soilsafe Aotearoa) developed a combined research and outreach program to collect a supplemental data set of children's soil values, so both adults' and children's voices can be considered when understanding the implications of different practices and how to care for presently "uncared for" or neglected soils in the future.
Objective:
The program not only asks primary school students about their soil values but also aims to teach them about soil from many disciplinary perspectives to enhance their understanding and awareness of soil, and, more broadly, for knowledge production.
Methods:
Here we describe the research protocol used in this Soilsafe Kids program. This program uses surveys (in the form of worksheets), focus groups (introduced as group discussions), and art projects to learn what children think about soil in Tāmaki Makaurau Auckland. We have received ethics approval from the University of Auckland's Human Participants Ethics Committee (reference number 23556) on March 25, 2022, for 3 years.
Results:
We have begun recruiting participants and delivering the Soilsafe Kids program in schools across Tāmaki Makaurau Auckland. Our data collection is ongoing with final student engagement in the first quarter of 2023. We expect to analyze data at the start of 2023 and to disseminate results later this year.
Conclusions:
Once this study is complete, we will disseminate the final results to the research community, stakeholders, and the local community through conference presentations, journal articles, hui (meetings), on our website, and in art exhibits. We note that although Tāmaki Makaurau Auckland is home to the majority of people living in Aotearoa New Zealand, the Auckland region only represents a small portion of Aotearoa New Zealand's land, and findings are not generalizable to Aotearoa New Zealand as a whole.
International registered report identifier (irrid):
DERR1-10.2196/43390.
... It is even considered to be "child-centred" in the sense that it may be familiar to, and even enjoyable for the child. Drawing may be more sensitive to children's (especially younger children's) particular competencies or interests (Punch, 2002;Mitchell, 2006). According to Punch (2002), younger children may have a limited and different use of vocabulary and understanding of words, they could have difficulty expressing their views freely while being interviewed by an unknown adult researcher in a one-to-one situation, and they may have a shorter attention span than adult participants. ...
To conclude this stage of research on the representations of supernatural agents in children’s drawings, this chapter summarizes some of the main results of the works collected in this volume. The use of drawings to study children’s representations is not a classic methodology in child psychology. Analysing images is challenging on different levels: content analysis, material features of the drawings, and the development of technical tools needed for the analysis. This chapter discusses the benefits and the limitations of this methodology, as well as those of interdisciplinary approaches that try to combine computer vision methods with studies on child and adolescent development. It ends with the presentation of specific research ideas generated by this first stage of investigation, ideas which we propose as a program for a second stage of research.
... To avoid spontaneous copying of patterns from one to another, the children drew without being watched by others and did not see the drawings made by others before them. The interpretation of these drawings is based on the theoretical framework outlined by Mitchell (2006), Guillemin (2004) and Rose (2016: 115-116;128-145). ...
Stemming from a multi-species ethnographic research on the cohabitation between humans and crocodiles in village of Bazoulé, Burkina Faso, the article describes the use of play and drawing as research instruments for understanding how children see crocodiles, the precepts informally transmitted to them by adults about this animal and, ultimately, the unverbalized perception of this human community about crocodiles.
... This is particularly useful when working with children as research participants. Eglington (2008) argues that when children make art, the outcomes represent their experiences, instead of capturing their interpretation of our (the adults') positions and perspectives, and when embedded into research, art allows children to articulate their worlds 'through approaches that were congruent with their way of seeing and relating to the world' (Johnson et al., 2012: 164;Mitchell, 2006). However, this is only useful if researchers have some understanding of the culture represented by children, to enable them to consider the nature and purpose behind children's image construction (Banks, 2001). ...
This paper presents one aspect of a sociocultural micro-ethnographic study examining how 11- and 12-year-old children formulate meanings when working with an artist in a contemporary art gallery. My primary focus is an examination of methodological contributions emerging from an imaginative coding and analysis of children’s art. Ninety-nine artworks were created in collaboration with the artist and were organised and interpreted using a constructionist interviewing coding scheme. This unorthodox approach to visual analysis unearthed information that oral accounts cannot provide alone revealing meanings which would otherwise remain dormant. By intuitively applying the coding framework I expose how participants’ meanings are negotiated by appropriating and re-organising cultural concepts into personalised narratives. As such, artworks reveal participants’ desires, interpretations and intentions, operating as agentic cultural producers as well as unconsciously reproducing visual epistemologies ubiquitous in Western cultures.
... The methodological uniqueness of youthcentric research lies not so much in the data-collection tools used, but rather in the researcher's sensitivity to the specificities of young people's life-stage, including the institutional structuring of their lives and time and the power inequalities inherent in the research process (Heath et al. 2009: 4-5). I soon learned that the best way of making my research youth-centric was not to devise specific 'youth-centred' activities -which often reflect adults' perceptions of young people's preferences (Mitchell 2006;Notermans 2008) -but rather to participate in young people's lives and interests; to be open to, curious about and respectful of their views and perspectives; and to let them guide me as to what topics and phenomena related to my research interests were important and relevant (Christensen and Prout 2004). ...
This thesis investigates the ‘transnational youth mobility trajectories’ of migrant youth, meaning all the moves that young people make in their lives, including migrations but also family visits, holidays, internships, and transitions between different school systems. An increasing proportion of young people around the world have a migration background, and recent research shows that many migrant youth in Europe travel regularly to their country of origin. Nevertheless, we know very little about the way mobility affects their lives. As part of the ‘Mobility Trajectories of Young Lives’ project (www.motrayl.com), this thesis focused on Ghanaian-background youth (15-25 years) living in Hamburg. It shows that migrant youth are very mobile, that the frequency and reasons for their mobility change over time, and that mobility has important effects on their lives in the country of residence. Experiences in the country of origin – including schooling, family environments, and other important relationships – can provide valuable resources, like confidence and motivation, and other forms of support that help migrant youth navigate schooling and life in the country of residence.
... This again may decrease the power imbalance between the child and the researcher. And finally, drawings (or pictures) can encourage discussions that give voice to the children in a different way than when just using words (Mitchell, 2006). Especially if children enjoy to draw, it is often seen as fruitful experience for both the children and the researcher. ...
The black and coloured population of South Africa are facing severe obstacles and
disadvantages in terms of unemployment, education and health. More than half of the black children are living below the poverty line. Due to the high levels of inequalities and increased rates of HIV-positive people the amount of orphans has been rising steadily. Orphaned children are facing severe circumstances, such as acute poverty and economic challenges.
This study aims to examine the experiences of children living in an orphanage in South Africa. It aims to gain an understanding of how the children living there define and understand the terms ‘responsibilities’ and ‘protection’ and how they experience them at this place. Also, the study wants to engage a discussion about how these experiences can be understood in the context of children’s rights and how they could be challenging ‘Westernized’ ideas.
The research was carried out in an orphanage in Cape Town, southern South Africa. 19 children were participating in this research, aged between 8 and 18 years. The sample consisted of 8 male and 11 female participants who have been living in this orphanage between 2 and 8 years. The basis of this study was created by theoretical approaches from Childhood Studies, seeing childhood as a social structure and children as social actors. It was conducted as a qualitative research project, using the following child friendly methods engaging the children to participate in the study: Emotion cards, drawings, life stages as well as research interviews.
The findings of this research present ‘protection’ as defined as keeping something safe. The children said that everybody needs protection and focused the term mainly on physical protection against violence and danger. The term ‘responsibilities’ was used by the children as taking care for something and was employed as a concept everybody has to fulfil in order to be prepared for the life as an adult. Most of the children were glad to be able to stay in this orphanage and receive its protection. However, the participants experienced a lack of guidance and interest from the workers. Yet, the children have accepted these issues as part of their lives. The findings also show a close connection to both the UNCRC and the ACRWC in regard to the protection needs of the children. Still, only the African Charter includes responsibilities and respect which were visible in the results of the study.
The study suggests seeing the UNCRC as a useful instrument to create a basis for children’s rights. However, it recommends adapting the implementation of the Convention to the local context. More research is necessary to investigate more into experiences of children living in an orphanage setting.
... We further justify our review as critical given the expanding emphasis on using qualitative research to inform programmatic and policy intervention work in pediatrics, and also because including children in qualitative research in meaningful ways, as the field of childhood studies has shown, often demands creative, flexible, and participatory approaches (for example, see [5-7, 15, 19, 20]). It also demands a specific researcher stance, whereby researchers view children as social actors within their environments and acknowledge generational power dynamics [8,16,[21][22][23][24][25][26]. ...
Background
Children are the focus of numerous health interventions throughout the world, yet the extent of children’s meaningful participation in research that informs the adaptation, implementation, and evaluation of health interventions is not known. We examine the type, extent, and meaningfulness of children’s participation in research in qualitative health intervention research.
Method
A scoping study was conducted of qualitative published research with children (ages 6–11 years) carried out as part of health intervention research. Following Arksey and O’Malley’s scoping study methodology and aligned with the PRISMA-ScR guidelines on the reporting of scoping reviews, the authors searched, charted, collated, and summarized the data, and used descriptive and content analysis techniques. Ovid MEDLINE was searched from 1 January 2007 to 2 July 2018 using the keywords children, health intervention, participation, and qualitative research. Study selection and data extraction were carried out by two reviewers independently.
Results
Of 14,799 articles screened, 114 met inclusion criteria and were included. The study identified trends in when children were engaged in research (e.g., post-implementation rather than pre-implementation), in topical (e.g., focus on lifestyle interventions to prevent adult disease) and geographical (e.g., high-income countries) focuses, and in qualitative methods used (e.g., focus group). While 78 studies demonstrated meaningful engagement of children according to our criteria, there were substantial reporting gaps and there was an emphasis on older age (rather than experience) as a marker of capability and expertise.
Conclusions
Despite evidence of children’s meaningful participation, topical, geographical, and methodological gaps were identified, as was the need to strengthen researchers’ skills in interpreting and representing children’s perspectives and experiences. Based on these findings, the authors present a summary reflective guide to support researchers toward more meaningful child participation in intervention research.
... According to Sweet and Ortiz Escalante (2015), an advantage of body-mapping is how it can address the imbalance of forces between the researcher and participant. Moving beyond an interview, creating body-maps engage participants in pondering questions deeply (Sweet & Ortiz Escalante, 2015) and as useful research method for working with marginalized or vulnerable people (Mitchell, 2006a;2006b). Participants decide what colors to use, how to portray themselves, what symbols and slogans to use, and how their body-map will be interpreted (de Jager et al., 2016). In other words, participants create both the data and describe their interpretations of their body-maps, a participatory collaborative process. ...
Drawing from Paolo Freire and bell hooks, we reconceptualize the arts-based method (ABR) of body-mapping as a form of Action Research for Transformation (ART) in the higher education classroom. As such, we connect emancipatory education and culturally responsive teaching to propose an emancipatory pedagogy of body-mapping—a form of ART facilitating the inclusion of students’ culturally situated knowledge and experience within multicultural contexts.
... Furthermore, the draw, write and tell method could also be used to elicit children's responses on their experiences of caring for an ill brother or sister (Angell et al., 2015). Through an approach that it is familiar to most school aged children, this method offers to children the possibility to interpret what they have created (Mitchell, 2006). The use of visual methods may also enable to capture feelings and emotions that otherwise could be hidden that researchers should be prepared to deal with (Martin, 2019). ...
Siblings' lives and well‐being are potentially affected in profound ways when their brother or sister suffers from a chronic illness in childhood. The shift in the care of chronically ill children from the hospital to the home in recent years has had an impact on family relationships and interactions. Whilst studies on caregiving have focused on the parental care of children who are chronically ill; siblings may nevertheless take on some caring roles and responsibilities. This article intends to make a novel contribution to the sociological literature on siblings, caring, and chronic illness by presenting a review of the literature addressing siblings' caring roles and responsibilities in families of children with a chronic illness. Knowing about the caring roles and responsibilities undertaken by siblings when a brother or sister has a chronic illness, may be beneficial to healthcare professionals and influence their caring practice. In addition, this work may contribute to a better understanding of family relationships and further improve healthcare policies.
... Over recent decades, scholars have called for greater critical attention to the processes implicated in "participatory" or "child-friendly" methods such as drawing (Eldén 2013;Hunleth 2011;Mitchell 2006). Rather than emancipating children as research collaborators, scholars suggest that participatory methods differently structure children's involvement in research, with different forms of adult power, with different constraints on children's agency, and serving different adult interests and goals (Gallacher and Gallagher 2008;Hunleth 2011). ...
Reflecting on drawing together, a methodological intervention I developed through two child‐centered ethnographic projects, I explore what happens when researchers draw together with children. While anthropologists of childhood have called for critical attention to the use of child‐friendly participatory methods such as drawing, few have considered how researchers participate in these methods. Yet drawing is embedded with value‐laden cultural notions of age and social status. Soliciting children’s drawings for research is therefore a social act that produces identities and relationalities. I argue that researchers must make the nature of their participation a methodological choice rather than an unexamined default.
... Body-mapping developed to "visually represent aspects of people's lives, their bodies and the world they live in" (Gastaldo, Magalhães, Carrasco, & Davy, 2012, p. 5). It's an approach supporting voices of marginalized and vulnerable populations (Mitchell, 2006a(Mitchell, , 2006b. The production of research data and interpretation can encourage greater agency for participants (Naidu, 2018) and reduce the power imbalance between researcher and participant (Sweet & Ortiz Escalante, 2015). ...
... Students' drawings are used as a research tool in other studies to determine students' mental models (Leonard, 2006;Merriman and Guerin, 2006;Mitchell, 2006;Tay-Lim and Lim, 2013), including mental models of atoms and molecules (Cokelez, 2012;Ozden, 2009) and states of matter (Adbo and Taber, 2009;Chang and Tzeng, 2018;Novick and Nussbaum, 1978;Ozmen, 2011). ...
In common with many other countries, the Iranian science curriculum does not introduce primary children to atoms and molecules but instead leaves the teaching of these concepts until high school. This paper challenges this practice and describes the changes in elementary Iranian children’s understanding of atoms and molecules following a 10-h teaching intervention about basic atomic-molecular theory, derived from recently published Australian research. The participants involved in this study are a group of 25 Iranian children aged 9 to 12 years old, who participated in a vacation summer school where they were taught about the structure of atoms and molecules. Thematic and content analysis of children’s written responses and drawings before and after the intervention reveal significant changes in their conceptual thinking. The results also show the extent to which the children can generate microscopic representations of the states of matter from their understanding of atoms and molecules.
Inspired by scholarly calls for archives that connect different justice claims
across times and geographies, this article examines the Colours of a Journey
(CoJ) archive, focusing on its visions and practices of documenting, curating and
disseminating migration struggles. Using an ethnographic approach, the arti-
cle investigates what constitutes an archival record of migration struggles and
the practices that support such an archive. The argument unfolds in three parts.
First, the CoJ archive is situated within discussions of archives as sites for migra-
tion justice struggles, proposing a model that rejects hierarchies of knowledge,
memories and classifications, instead fostering encounters among diverse expe-
riences, memories, bodies and objects. Second, the article analyses drawings as
a core element of the archive, interpreting them as knowledge-making tools that
interweave varied migration experiences. Third, it explores how the CoJ archive’s
commitment to epistemic diversity is reflected in exhibitions, art performances and
public displays, highlighting the interplay between archival structure and public
engagement.
While a robust scholarly dialogue has emerged in recent decades surrounding child and youth‐centred research methods, less attention has been paid to how other elements of research design can better account for the needs, vulnerabilities, and perspectives of children and youth. In this article, I discuss challenges tied to informed consent processes and inflexible ethical guidelines in social science research with minors. Drawing from the child and youth studies literature as well as my past research experiences, I explore what it means to develop ethical approaches that are situated, responsive, and relational and which focus not only on the protection of minors but also their inclusion and full participation in research. In doing so, I develop the concept of “playful consent checkpoints” and argue that playful approaches can offer interesting and flexible possibilities for responding to ongoing ethical challenges in research with young people.
Neste texto, objetiva-se pesquisar os desenhos produzidos por crianças que estavam na etapa final da educação infantil. Para tanto, os dados de análise provêm da dissertação intitulada “‘Não é de verdade, é só um desenho’: de que nos falam os desenhos infantis?”. Como perspectiva teórica, utiliza-se a sociologia da infância, principalmente o conceito de reprodução interpretativa proposto por Corsaro (2011). A metodologia da pesquisa teve por base a pesquisa de campo de viés antropológico, utilizando o desenho como principal método de comunicação com as crianças, com registros no diário de campo. Os dados da pesquisa evidenciam o simbolismo do desenho das crianças, paralelo às questões sociais e culturais apresentadas por elas. A observação da produção dos desenhos infantis, bem como a interação junto às crianças, evidenciou suas capacidades de construir ideias e conceitos sobre determinados temas, muitas vezes além daquilo proposto pela pesquisadora. As atividades com desenhos se mostraram uma forma de comunicação eficiente entre pesquisadores e crianças e como um propulsor para apresentarem as suas ideias sobre as temáticas pesquisadas.
Sharing young emergent bilinguals’ artwork and voices, this article highlights drawing and talking as valuable practices to recognize capacities and create belonging in literacy classrooms.
This paper focuses on art productions by children participating in an art-based wellbeing intervention project in Kashmir. Drawing on feminist security studies, we conducted narrative analysis to explore how children represent in/security. The locations of in/security were the environment, the body, and the socio-political realm. Children articulated nuanced and complex representations of the natural and social world, influenced by local and global forces, and created their own meanings and practices of in/security.
The use of visual methods as a research tool has increased worldwide, along with the need to understand the nuanced and contextual benefits, challenges, and risks of their use. Based on participatory approaches, visual methods can offer an adaptable, interactive, and critical way of engaging with refugee young people, making research more accessible and representative. In Montreal, the COVID-19 pandemic forced programs, services and research involving refugee young people to adapt to meet the needs of this population while respecting physical distancing guidelines. Little is known about the strengths and challenges of using visual methods in the context of physical distancing, especially with refugee young people. In this paper, we describe some of the strengths and challenges of using photo journals, a form of visual methods, with refugee young people (11-17 years old) to document their experiences participating in Say Ça!, a Montreal community-based mentoring program, during the pandemic. Six young people participated in photo journals and individual interviews, and 11 volunteers participated in focus group discussions. The journals prompted young people to describe themselves, their favourite moments at Say Ça! and moments when things did not go as planned. In the findings, we describe opportunities and challenges of using photo journals to engage migrant young people in research during the pandemic. Photo journals facilitated building a rapport with young people, overcoming communication challenges, ensuring valid consent throughout the study, and addressing power dynamics between participants and researchers. Challenges included recruitment, confidentiality, and study logistics. In this paper, we present key lessons learned from using photo journals as a method to capture the perspectives of refugee young people. We argue that by including the views of service users, programs may gain a richer understanding of the elements that contribute to refugee young people wellbeing and, ultimately, help improve community-based support for this population in Montreal and other welcome programs.
Çocukların birey olarak toplumsal yaşama nasıl katılım gösterebileceklerini deneyimleyebilecekleri ilk ortam, aynı zamanda toplumun küçük bir kesitini de oluşturan okullardır. Doğru bir planlamayla, eğitim hizmetinin sürdürüldüğü tüm örgün öğrenme ortamlarında, çocuklara katılım haklarını kullanabilecekleri sosyal bir atmosfer ve gerekli öğrenmeler sunulabilir. Öğrenme ortamlarında katılım hakkı tanınan çocuklar, eğitim süreçlerinde yaşadıkları sorunları çözüme kavuşturma konusunda kendilerini sorumlu hisseder, sorunlarını çözebilmek ve öğrenme ortamlarını iyileştirebilmek için okulun diğer paydaşlarıyla iş birliği yaparlar. Böylelikle, çocukların öğrenme ortamlarında aldıkları sorumluluklar, eğitimin diğer paydaşlarının işlerini de kolaylaştırabilir. Öğrenme ortamlarında katılım hakkını kullanabilen çocuklar, öz güvenli, öz saygılı, girişimci, iş birliği yapabilen, eleştirel düşünebilen, yaratıcı düşünebilen, doğru bilgiye ulaşabilen, karar alabilen, bireysel farklılıkları olan bireylere karşı kapsayıcı tutum geliştirebilen aktif yurttaşlar olabilirler.
Bu kitapla, öğrenme ortamlarında çocuk katılımının, öğretim faaliyetlerine çocuk dostu yöntemler üzerinden entegre edilerek sağlanabileceğine ilişkin bir bakış açısı sunulmaktadır. Çocuk dostu yöntemler adı verilen ve kitapta farklı eğitim seviyelerinde örneklenerek açıklanan etkinlikler sayesinde, çocukların ve gençlerin araştırma ve karar alma süreçlerinde aktif katılımcılar olarak yer almaları, yaşamları hakkında karar verebilecek aktif ve yetkin sosyal aktörler haline gelmeleri mümkün olacaktır. Bu kitap çocuk katılımı sürecinde okul idarecilerine ve öğretmenlere okulu ve öğrenme ortamını katılımı destekleyebilecek şekilde uyarlamaları, öğrencinin bilişsel gelişimine rehberlik etmeleri, öğrencilere etkileşim imkanı sunmaları, katılımı kolaylaştırıcı teknikleri işe koşmaları, eleştirel düşünmeyi desteklemeleri açılarından destek olmayı hedeflemektedir.
The qualitative paradigm of empirical social research not only advocates a subjectivist epistemology, which, among other things, concerns a critical self-reflection of all phases of the research process, but also the principle of circularity and flexibility of the research process in order to approach the subject matter (cf. Döring & Bortz, 2016, p. 68 ff.). The present contribution is based on the critical reflection of a research project of my own, which examined children's drawings with regard to ideas about school enrolment and school learning of children in Sri Lanka and is located at the interface of transition research, primary school research and childhood research.
Against this background, questions about the multimodality and processuality of children's drawings (cf. Duncan, 2013 & Mitchell et al., 2011, among others) and their methodological consideration came to the fore in the course of the research process and in particular the deeper engagement with children's drawings, so that the researchers' own research design, and in particular the data collection and analysis of children's drawings, were increasingly viewed critically and other analytical approaches to children's drawings were chosen. This led to the following questions, which are guiding the findings in this article: To what extent can the recorded data, but also the initially image-documentary approach to analysis (cf. among others Wopfner, 2012), depict or capture the performative-narrative process dimension of children's drawings (cf. Glas, 2015; Faulkner & Coates, 2011; Wright, 2007)? To what extent can the (research-induced) context of origin of the children's drawing be taken into account here? Or, on the other hand, to what extent can analytical approaches along the lines of Visual Grounded Theory (cf. Mey & Dietrich, 2016; Brill in this volume) refer to formal structural elements of children's drawings and still not prematurely exclude the actual meaning of the image?
In this article, it is not so much the concrete analytical steps nor the mere content-related results of the study that will be discussed, but rather these critical and self-reflexive perspectives on children's drawings and their role in the context of the author's own research project. Furthermore, the concept of "multislice imaging" according to Konecki (2011) will be applied to children's drawings in order to discuss 'blind spots' and the resulting implications of the discourse on children's drawings in the context of empirical social research on the basis of the author's own reflexive-critical stock of experience.
Drawing from the new childhood paradigm that emerged in the past 40 years in the social sciences (James & Prout, Constructing and deconstructing childhood: Contemporary issues in the sociology of childhood. Falmer Books, 1990), the chapter challenges the traditional view of children as “passive recipients,” “immature,” and not to be “taken seriously,” advocating for visual research with and for children positioned as active agents (Thompson, Doing visual research with children and young people. Routledge, 2008, p. 1). Shifting away from conventional adult-centric research methodologies, first, the chapter views children as having their own agendas, capable of providing valuable and thoughtful insights, and able to offer expert testimony about their experiences, lifestyles, and daily practices (Prosser & Burke, Image-based educational research: Childlike perspectives. In J. G. Knowles & A. L. Cole (Eds.), Handbook of the arts in qualitative research (pp. 681–694). Sage Publications, 2008; Veale, Creative methodologies in participatory research with children. In S. Green & D. Hogan (Eds,), Researching children’s experience: Approaches and methods (pp. 253–272). Sage, 2005). From this perspective, the notion of visual voice is not conceptualized as universal, authentic, or fixed but rather theorized as complex, expressive, multilayered, and multidimensional (Thompson, Doing visual research with children and young people. Routledge, 2008). Second, the chapter suggests that when researchers implement drawing as a child-centered visual methodology (Martin, Draw(me) and tell: Use of children’s drawings as elicitation tools to explore embodiment in the very young. International Journal of Qualitative Methods, 18, 1–9, 2019), the visual voice of children can emerge and be represented in personal, meaningful, and contextualized ways. Drawing might be a particularly well-suited visual methodology for education researchers who aim to explore the perspectives, struggles, concerns, embodiments, and experiences of children (Mitchell, Child-centered? Thinking critically about children’s drawings as a visual research method. Visual Anthropology Review, 22, 1, 60–73, 2006). When education researchers position children as active agents in creating, representing, and performing visual arts, visual scholars can then begin to inform public policy, opening up possibilities for social change (Finley, Arts-based inquiry: Performing revolutionary pedagogy. In J. G. Knowles, & A. L. Cole (Eds.), Handbook of the arts in qualitative research (pp. 407–420). Sage Publications, 2008). The chapter concludes by suggesting that while drawing is a particularly apt approach in research with children, researchers need to take cautions and limitations into consideration when they implement drawing in research settings.
Background:
Ethnographic work among high altitude populations has shown that children are highly mobile-the most recent expression of this is the educational migration of children born at high altitude to boarding schools at lower altitudes. The impact of these patterns of migration on size for age are unknown.
Aim:
We investigated the association between growth in weight and height and educational migration in ethnic Tibetan children living in and out of their natal communities.
Subjects and methods:
Five hundred and fifty eight children ages three to sixteen from the Nubri Valley, Nepal participated in this study. Three hundred children were living in natal villages and 258 were attending boarding schools in Kathmandu. Height, weight, and skinfold thicknesses were collected and matched to demographic data from the community.
Results:
There was no association between altitude of family residence and size for age z-scores. Males had lower z-scores than females; z-scores for both groups declined with age. Differences in size for age among children in boarding schools were associated with two factors: sex and type of boarding school (individual sponsor or group funded). Individuals attending individually sponsored schools had greater size for age compared to children in group funded schools or in their natal villages; younger children in collectively funded schools were smaller than village peers.
Conclusions:
Despite popular perceptions, educational outmigration in Himalayan communities may not be associated with improved child growth outcomes and investment in community level schools may be a practical solution for improving child growth and physical and mental health.
Abstract
Children are the forgotten group as they have been excluded from examining howthey understand information about COVID-19. This study examined how childrenin Greece represent the COVID-19 virus. The drawing method was used as a pro-cess of meaning construction combining subjective experiences with socio-culturalmeanings. Thirty-four children aged 4 to 6 years old (M = 5.4) were asked to drawa picture of the COVID-19 virus and explain their drawings verbally. This studyused participant-created drawings to assess how children represent the COVID-19virus and reports that drawing is an effective method of examining children’s socialrepresentations. Methodologically, by using drawing, this study reveals layers ofsocial representations that may be difficult to put into words. Three distinct themes,namely “scientific” knowledge of the virus, the COVID-19 virus as the enemy, andthe confinement situation, were identified in the children’s visualizations and ver-balizations constituting children’s social representations of COVID-19. This study’sresults show that social representations give meaning to a novel reality and allow theparticipating children to direct themselves as regards this novel reality
Using two plays written by girls and boys, I discuss how children from low-income urban neighborhoods in Honduras reflected on the slow process of privatization of the Honduran national health system. The children peppered their narratives with motifs suggestive of ongoing processes of material and social deterioration under capitalism, while paying attention to the different social mechanisms through which care could be mobilized. The plays speak to the value of incorporating children's perspectives on topics of health-disease processes that circle political, economic, and social tensions, and the importance of incorporating new ways of producing knowledge through artistic mediums.
In this article, I discuss my use of blind-portrait in which participants draw an image about ‘who I am’ in a particular context with their eyes closed. Blind-portrait, as an arts method, could provide a political and ethical tool to redefine the knowability of intercultural, educational research. It moves beyond and besides the traditionally-privileged, central medium of language, challenges the quest for certainty, and disrupts the traditional power hierarchy between the researcher and participants. Blind-portrait could contribute to challenging epistemic injustices and to de-essentialising what counts as knowledge and how knowledge is created in intercultural, educational research.
Through studying pregnant women’s experience of prenatal screening and testing in Taiwan, this article argues that the collection of participant drawings provides a valuable contribution to feminist methodology where participants are seen as knowledgeable about their own situation. Drawings offer a context that enables us to analyse how participants (pregnant women and their partners) situated themselves in relation to their foetuses, technologies and families. This approach taught us an important methodological lesson, namely that methods always embody a particular political and epistemological location. Inspired by this line of thought, we suggest the concept enacting up, which combines the idea of enacting and the expression acting up to challenge scientific objectivity and biomedical practice while simultaneously giving voice to our participants.
Varvantakis, C (2021) Η Ακρόπολη από μακριά: Απόσταση, εγγύτητα και αφή (Acropolis from a distance: Distance, proximity and touch) In: Petsini, P, Stathatos, Y (eds) Φωτογραφία και συλλογικές ταυτότητες: Ελληνικές φωτογραφικές μελέτες Ι (Photography and collective identities: Greek photographic studies I). Athens: Koukkida, 159–178.
This paper presents the preliminary results of a one and a half-year ethnographic study conducted in Victoria, British Columbia, Canada. The research focused on participants’ experiences of their bodies in the context of yoga as a health practice—specifically how they conceptualised their musculoskeletal bodies in this practice through ideas of systems, fragments, and materiality. It argues that participants’ larger narratives about health and healthy bodies inform how yoga as a health practice is embedded in discourses of body work where yoga, health, and particular notions of bodily-ness become a project for the transformation of the self into a particular idea of what a body is or should be.
How can visual collaborative methods advance the discussion of power relations, particularly regarding representation? The chapter explores the potential of using photos taken by Danish children and young people in care as a dialogic knowledge production about their everyday lives. When a photo-elicitation talk follows photos taken by young people, the participants are involved in creating research data and invited to be both co-defining and co-reflective (Harper, 2012). This chapter draws on a growing research tradition on visual methods in the field of youth research, an approach where involvement is the crucial activity (Gubrium & Harper, 2013; Rasmussen, 2017b; Thompson, 2008). However, often the researcher has the final say in terms of conclusion and representation. The potentials and limitations of involvement and collaboration with the young people are discussed in relation to the participatory turn (Gubrium et al., 2015).
El texto revisa las investigaciones antropológicas recientes que se han centrado en el estudio de las prácticas a través de las cuales los individuos y los grupos humanos producen música, videos, películas, artes visuales y teatro, tomando en cuenta los marcos ideológicos e institucionales dentro de los cuales ocurre esta producción Estas formas mediáticas y de cultura popular son presentadas como campos dentro de los cuales los actores sociales discuten acerca de los significados, y como evidencia observable de procesos y relaciones sociales. Desde este punto de vista, Mahon muestra cómo las distintas investigaciones antropológicas han abordado las dimensiones sociales, políticas y estéticas de estos productos culturales.
The utility of using children's drawings and open-ended survey responses as a way to learn about how Jamaican children view tourists and tourism is examined. A sample of six primary schools located near tourism centers completed an “activity book” containing open ended sentence completion items and a space for drawing a picture of “a visitor who has come to Jamaica from far away”. The responses are analyzed using an inductive content analytic protocol. The children express generally positive views of “visitors”, often indicating concern for the visitor's experience of Jamaica. Comparison of rural, tourism-area, and elite preparatory school representations suggests potentially important differences in the socialization experiences of the sample.
Over the past decade, there has been an increasing interest in the methodologies used in research with children. Geographers have contributed to the growing body of research that highlights that children are not simply passive objects dependent on adults, but are competent social actors that make sense of and actively contribute to their environment. The growing trend to conceptualize children as social actors has profound implications for geographical research with children, most notably the development of more `inclusive' and participatory research agendas and children-centred methodologies. In this article, we draw upon two ongoing postgraduate research projects with children to discuss our experiences of adopting such innovative children-centred research practices and methodologies. In particular, we focus upon the contribution that a specifically geographical approach can make to the wider interdisciplinary debates about children-centred research. Therefore, we discuss the importance of recognizing the spatiality of research with children, and highlight the significance of the geography of methodological issues, by exploring the significance of both the spaces in which we conduct our research, and the spaces at the centre of our research. We also discuss issues concerning the representation of children in the process of dissemination.
As children have been increasingly conceptualized as active participants in their own social worlds, researchers have sought methods able to reveal children's perspectives as arbiters of their own experience. In an autodriven interview, photographs of the child's experiences serve as the basis for a child‐directed interview. Studies using this method illustrate its benefit for revealing child‐relevant content. In a study of childhood chronic illness, autodriving encouraged the child's free recall, sense of personal control, and ability to reflect upon photographed events.
In much anthropological literature infants are frequently neglected as outside the scope of both the concept of culture and disciplinary methods. This article proposes six reasons for this exclusion of infants from anthropological discussion. These include the fieldworker’s own memories and parental status, the problematic question of agency in infants and their presumed dependence on others, their routine attachment to women, their seeming inability to communicate, their inconvenient propensity to leak from a variety of orifices, and their apparently low quotient of rationality. Yet investigation of how infants are conceived of beyond the industrialized West can lead us to envision them far differently from how they are conceived in the West (including by anthropologists). Confronting such comparative data suggests the desirability of considering infants as both relevant and beneficial to the anthropological endeavor. [babies/infants, childhood/youth, structure/agency, social theory, West Africa]
Few major works in anthropology focus specifically on children, a curious state of affairs given that virtually all contemporary anthropology is based on the premise that culture is learned, not inherited. Although children have a remarkable and undisputed capacity for learning generally, and learning culture in particular, in significant measure anthropology has shown little interest in them and their lives. This article examines the reasons for this lamentable lacunae and offers theoretical and empirical reasons for repudiating it. Resistance to child-focused scholarship, it is argued, is a byproduct of (1) an impoverished view of cultural learning that overestimates the role adults play and underestimates the contribution that children make to cultural reproduction, and (2) a lack of appreciation of the scope and force of children's culture, particularly in shaping adult culture. The marginalization of children and childhood, it is proposed, has obscured our understanding of how cultural forms emerge and why they are sustained. Two case studies, exploring North American children's beliefs about social contamination, illustrate these points. [Keywords: anthropology of childhood, children's culture, acquisition of cultural knowledge, race]
Youth and identity politics figure prominently in this study of personal and collective memory in Madagascar. A deeply nuanced ethnography of historical consciousness, it challenges many cross-cultural investigations of youth, for its key actors are not adults but schoolchildren. This book refutes dominant assumptions that African children are the helpless victims of postcolonial crises, incapable of organized, sustained collective thought or action. It insists instead on the political agency of Malagasy youth who, as they decipher their current predicament, offer potent, historicized critiques of colonial violence, nationalist resistance, foreign mass media, and schoolyard survival. The book asserts that autobiography and national history are inextricably linked and therefore must be read in tandem, a process that exposes how political consciousness is forged in the classroom, within the home, and on the street in Madagascar.
Childhood and the body are topics which have both seen an enormous growth of sociological interest in recent years. Both have been reconstituted as legitimate topics of sociological enquiry, that is as properly belonging to the ‘social’ sphere and in need liberation from their previous confinement to the ‘natural’. In both cases a substantial and still growing literature has been produced to this end. In general, however, these developments have occurred on separate tracks, with remarkably little contact between the two fields and only occasional cross-reference. This volume takes a step towards remedying this mutual neglect by bringing together a series of papers and research reports by sociologists and anthropologists who have investigated their intersection.
Children have long been present in anthropological research but rarely does their involvement receive the critical attention that is given to adult participants. This paper examines what is revealed about the construction of identities of self when the research-related play of two girls in quite different ethnographic contexts is examined. Drawing on research in Bridgetown, Barbados, and Saskatoon, Canada, it is argued that through the playful search for a pseudonym, these two girls speak to issues of poverty and prostitution that highlight how they see, experience and contribute to the world around them as active agents, rather than passive recipients, of cultural processes. /// Les enfants sont présents depuis longtemps dans la recherche en anthropologie, mais leur implication a rarement reçu l'attention qu'on a accordée aux adultes. Cet article décrit ce qui est exprimé de la construction du moi quand on examine le jeu proposé à deux fillettes dans des contextes ethnographiques différents. M'appuyant sur une recherche à Bridgetown, aux Barbades, et à Saskatoon, au Canada, je soutiens que grâce la recherche d'un pseudonyme, sous forme de jeu, ces deux fillettes commentent des questions de pauvreté et de prostitution qui expriment la façon dont elles voient, subissent et contribuent à construire le monde autour d'elles en tant qu'agents actifs des processus culturels et non comme des objets passifs.
Feminists have re-visioned women as active subjects in knowledge by granting them agency and diversity and by challenging divisions like public versus private. But both feminist and traditional knowledge remain deeply adult centered. Adult perspectives infuse three contemporary images of children: as threats to adult society, as victims of adults, and as learners of adult culture (“socialization”). We can bring children more fully into knowledge by clarifying ideological constructions, with attention to the diversity of children's actual lives and circumstances; by emphasizing children's agency as well as their subordination; and by challenging their conceptual privatization. The re-visioning of children involves complex issues of gender, generation, autonomy, and relatedness.
In this paper, I examine photos made by children as one part of a three‐year, ethnographic study of childhoods in different communities in California. Within this study, the children's photographs—and their talk about these and other images—illuminate distinctions between the urban spaces that outsiders might notice from particular urban places meaningful to children themselves. These images and commentaries reveal some of the ways in which the children's urban experiences are shaped by social class, gender, ethnicity, immigration, and racialization. They also confirm the importance of social relationships for the meanings that children attach to the urban landscapes in which they live.
This qualitative study of drawings created by inner‐city, Latino, junior high school students examines how these drawings are made, how they are used, and how they are read by other Latinos as visual texts that encode and communicate culturally important information. The study is based on interviews with young Latino adults about the roles these drawings played during their adolescence. The interviews revealed that these drawings function as texts in a system of visual communication. They also illustrate how such drawings can be linked to cultural identities, and how their power derives not just from the imagery they include but from how they are used to shape and support social interaction.
Located within the context of recent debates about the body as both a material and socially constructed entity, this article takes up these corporeal issues through a focus on children’s images and depictions of cancer. Key themes here include monstrous/demonic bodies, dys-figured/absent bodies, the combustible body, pathological bodies and mortal bodies. Under-pinning these representations, it is suggested, is a view of the primordial body as a ‘recalcitrant’, ‘transgressive’ entity; something with a ‘will of its own’ which, despite our best efforts, can go horribly wrong. A focus on issues of corporeal transgression, therefore, throws into critical relief the relationship between the material and the cultural, the physical and the social, the rational and the emotional. Explorations of malignant bodies, however culturally constituted, lie at the heart of this dialectic. The article concludes with a series of reflections on these issues, including the notion of children as active agents, the relationship between lay and scientific knowledge, and a view of the material body which is not only shaped by social relations, but enters into their very construction and transgression, as both a resource and constraint, a limit and opportunity.
This article begins from a perceived lack of empirical evidence in cultural studies, namely the ethnography of cultural globalization in 'global cities' other than those of the West. Youth culture among the upper strata of the South-Indian metropolis Bangalore is taken as an instance of how modernity is experienced and produced in the post-colonial Third World. The focus lies on the reception of Western pop music, but music is treated broadly as a practice situated in, and producing, real and imagined space. Two examples of these musical practices serve to elaborate on Indian power relations, Indian modernity and the critical geography of music.
Understanding the ways in which children with different life experiences come to terms with day-to-day contexts and constraints has become an important topic of social science research. This study applies the technique of auto-photography to the study of children-environment transactions. How children apprehend their environments is described through a leitmotif analysis and an interpretation of photographs taken by children from middle-class families, homeless children, and children whose mobility is impaired by cerebral palsy. We speculate upon the social and physical contexts of these children based upon the images that they selected to photograph. Although impressionistic, our findings suggest the importance of auto-photography as a method for uncovering children-environment transactions.
This books examines the demand for the genuine participation of children and young people in defining and acting upon environmental issues. The 'environment' is interpreted broadly to include, for example, the planning of housing areas and the management of playgrounds as well as the various fields of its conventional definition. Detailed case studies are provided from urban and rural, poor and middle class communities from both the North and South. The text is intended for use by teachers, group facilitators and community leaders and presents organizing principles, successful models, practical techniques and resources for involving young people in environmental projects. The value of the role of children in terms of both an involvement with management their environment and in terms of their commitment to the cause.
ABSTRACT In 1991 a Filipina performing artist died while working in Japan. Her death became an international incident and a catalyst for action on the issue of migrant exploitation. In particular, a series of policies was constructed by the Philippine Government in an attempt to afford protection to migrant workers. In this paper I critically examine the construction of these policies, with the purpose of identifying how specific notions of gender and sexuality are incorporated into the construction and reconstruction of policy. I demonstrate how the representation of exploitation within systems of labor migration serves the purposes of dominant factors of society, with little regard to the actual lived experiences of migrant workers. Findings indicate that current policy is based on an image that only illegally-deployed, hence immoral and disreputable women are exploited, overlooking the observation that both illegally- and legally-deployed women are susceptible to abuse. At one level this paper reflects an ontological attack against the employment of categories previously conceptualized as natural within the construction of migration policy. At a second level this paper is also concerned with the issue of 'who speaks for whom,' and the implications of this for viable protective policies. The significance of this paper extends beyond the confines of the Philippines, for it encompasses a growing international awareness of abuses toward migrants.
The ideas of Luo schoolchildren about worms and their role in the body were studied. Worms were found to be prominent in the children's body‐image and ideas about illness. To give meaning to their bodily experiences, children made use of both a ‘traditional’ and a ‘biomedical’ model, providing different views on the relationship of worms and the body. The children learned about the traditional model from older people and about the biomedical model in school. They made use of both models in their talk, in drawings of the body and in written compositions. They maintained the basic idea that worms were an unavoidable part of the body, but tried to integrate biomedical and traditional notions. The findings show that children, moving at the interface of ‘traditional’ knowledge conveyed informally in the family and ‘modern’ ideas, mainly conveyed in formal institutions, are creatively contributing to the integration of old and new and actively shaping the ideas about health and the body of a future generation.
In this article we examine an innovative application of visual communication and social science methods, moving the study of indigenous media from the purely academic realm into pediatric health research. Through Video Intervention/Prevention Assessment (VIA), children and adolescents who share a medical condition create visual narratives of their lives with chronic disease to show and tell their illness experiences to health care providers. Clinicians routinely plan medical management with limited knowledge of how patients interact with disease in their “real life” physical, psychological, and social environments. VIA asks young patients to teach clinicians the realities of day‐to‐day life with illness, yielding unique insights that can guide the development of more realistic, more humane, and ultimately more effective medical care. We describe the VIA methodology, a pilot study of asthma, and the illness experiences shown and told by VIA Asthma participants. Not only did VIA generate useful research findings, it also produced visual documents of the child's illness experience that can serve as tools for influencing policy, advocating for patients, and educating health care providers, patients, and their families.
This article describes, analyzes, and interprets various cultural influences on the representational drawings of young Navajo students, in order to understand their changing cultural viewpoint. The data and drawings were gathered from two elementary art classes in one Navajo public school in northeastern Arizona, as part of an ongoing study. This information is compared to anthropological data gathered on adult Navajo drawings nearly 30 years ago, as well as to some dominant theories on child art. Data reveal students are influenced by Navajo traditional images, classroom teachers’ versions of school art, popular art images, pan‐Indian influences, and peer copying. Results reveal the persistence of traditional nature imagery, the incorporation of similar schemas and color use with mainstream children, a keen ability to render realistic images and space, and the incorporation of those American things that the Navajo regard as “good for them.” Keen drawing abilities appear at a young age among the Navajo because of the high status of the arts, traditional education through observation and demonstration, peer imitation, and male drawing competition.
Abstract This review starts from the premise that the visual has been, until recently, a neglected dimension in our understanding of social life, despite the role of vision in other disciplines, including medicine itself. The potential for a visual approach will be analysed drawing on a range of studies, broadly within the sociology of health and illness, which have used visual approaches. I highlight the value of visual methodology projects within qualitative approaches to research more generally, and assess the difficulties as well as the advantages. It is suggested that using visual methodologies does not necessarily lead to greater reactivity in the research process as has sometimes been proposed; and that visual worlds are themselves unique topics of sociological study which may be enhanced by using visual techniques rather than written and spoken language. A combination of visual and traditional methods can also be fruitful. Painting and drawing, video, film, and still photography are included as examples which researchers have used and can use.
Through five case studies, this chapter uses a Vygotskian perspective to frame youth participatory evaluation as both developmental and performatory.
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