Seminar: Thinking with and through Alice-the-child-figure

Anna Sparrman, Linköping University, Sweden, Professor of child culture, consumption, sexuality, materiality, children and childhood and visual research methods.

Thinking with and through Alice-the-child-figure

Abstract

In this presentation I ask: “What if”, Lewis Carroll’s Alice in Wonderland, had been one of the main figures drawn upon when forming child research theories? In an exploration on Alice-the-child-figure I show how Alice-the-child multiplies in all directions. Through this process she challenges important contemporary concepts in child studies such as dependency, age/growth and materiality. Staying with the multiple multidirectional Alice challenges universal ideas about the child and the tendency within social science to through ideas about oneness create children who nicely hang together. The question is what happens if we as researchers, just like Carroll did, decide to stay with the unfinished and incoherent? What happens then with the notion of the child? Which child or children are we then talking about? And what possibilities and limitations arise with this thinking? On these questions follows yet other questions. Every change in the notion of the child also changes the idea and the notion of the adult. If children are approached as continuously ongoing in multiple directions where does that situate the adult? I will with the help of Alice-the-child-figure explore and reflect on these questions and open for theoretical re-specifications of the child, and the adult.

Bio

Anna Sparrman, PhD, is a Professor at The Department of Thematic Studies – Child Studies, Linköping University, Sweden. Sparrman conducts research at the intersection between visual culture, child consumption, child culture, and child sexuality asking questions such as: what ‘is’ child culture, who can look at whom, and what are the cultural notions of sexuality in relation to children? Sparrman also has a special interest in materiality and how norms and values are enacted by children and adults in children’s everyday lives. Sparrman is working within the theoretical framework of what she calls Child Studies Multiple and her research project Children’s cultural heritage – the visual voices of the archive explores what notions of the child archiving principles of children’s drawings rests on.

Possible readings: Sparrman, Anna (2020) Through the looking glass: Alice and Child Studies Multiple, Childhood, 27(1): 8-24.

Sparrman, Anna, Westerling, Allan, Lind, Judith and Karen Ida Dannesboe, eds. (2017). Doing good parenthood: Ideal and practices of parental involvement. London: Palgrave.

Sparrman, Anna., Samuelsson, T., Lindgren, A-L. and D. Cardell (2016). The ontological practices of child culture. Childhood, 23(2): 255-271.

Children & Childhood Babies, motherhood, and materiality

This seminar series is enables us to consider the diversity and strength of the research base focusing on babies and the youngest children. More specifically, it will engage with scholars across disciplines to think more about ways to bring the importance of sensation, affect, materiality, movement and place into these discussions as playing a vital role in early development, underpinning language and literacy. Two key issues emerge from research that involves infants: firstly, most is carried out by developmental psychologists, paediatricians, nutritionists and educators (Orrmalm, 2019). Secondly, although Norway and Sweden have a more established commitment to baby-culture (Brinch, 2018), this is absent in the UK. Secondly, infants are overlooked as co-researchers because of “their presumed dependence on others, their routine attachment to women, their seeming inability to communicate” (Gottlieb, 2000: 121). Some research emerging from Australia (Elwick, 2015), US (Deloache et al, 2010), and Sweden (Orrmalm, 2019), foregrounds babies’ agentic capacities in their own culture-making. This slowly emerging field contrasts with a more rapidly expanding culture-industry for babies founded on developmental theories about what babies need and enjoy, that become institutionalised and naturalised (Burman, 2016).

This online seminar series (2021) puts babies and their families at the heart of our thinking. It will generate conversations drawing ESRI colleagues together with international researchers working in this area from across the disciplinary fields of education, human geography, urban cultural geography, economic sociology, social policy, arts, child studies, health, social work and anthropology to hear about their work, share our own research as well as to open up opportunities to work further with others in the field.