Search

This text is an exploration of collaborative thinking and writing through theories, methods, and experiences on the topic of the child, children, and childhood. It is a collaborative written text (with 32 authors) that sprang out of the experimental workshop Child Studies Multiple. The workshop and this text are about daring to stay with mess, “un-closure” , and uncertainty in order to investigate the (e)motions and complexities of being either a child or a researcher. The theoretical and methodological processes presented here offer an opportunity to shake the ground on which individual researchers stand by raising questions about scientific inspiration, theoretical and methodological productivity, and thinking through focusing on process, play, and collaboration. The effect of this is a questioning of the singular academic ‘I’ by exploring and showing what a plural ‘I’ can look like. It is about what the multiplicity of voice can offer research in a highly individualistic time. The article allows the reader to follow and watch the unconventional trial-and-error path of the ongoing-ness of exploring theories and methods together as a research community via methods of drama, palimpsest, and fictionary.

This article asks questions about the ontology of child culture. It aims to position the concept of child culture at the forefront of theoretical research without creating a ‘true’ or singular definition of the concept. It is rather a conceptual exploration of partial consistencies of child culture in and through practices. The focus of the analyses is on five institutional cultural practices created for children: two children’s museums, a science centre, a theme park and an amusement park. A cross-analysis of these practices provides the empirical material for proposing the notion of ‘child culture multiple’.

The aim of this study is to unpack the notion of family togetherness as constitutive of good parenthood during visits to child cultural establishments like amusement parks, theme parks and children’s museums. The analyses challenge earlier assumptions of intensive family togetherness – such as closeness, spending time together and cohesion – by showing how togetherness is being done through the interdependence of proximity and distance. The study illustrates how good parenthood is made up of heterogeneous material and non-material entities such as patience, waiting, trust, wallets, mobile phones, age and the like; what is here called “the ontological choreography of (good) parenthood”. The article draws on theories of doing family, making parents and family practice.

This book provides an ethnographic contribution to research on children’s consumption, family life and happiness. Various and shifting notions of happiness are explored, as well as conditions for a ...

Even though fiction and fantasy are fundamental to how childhoods today are understood, this is a topic that is seldom explored either theoretically or academically. We address the question of how the relationship between material real and fictive real can be understood in new ways in contemporary society. We suggest that fiction can be understood in other ways than the hitherto dichotomized approaches to it, and our aim is to focus on the hybridity that is created through the interconnecting word and, as in fiction and childhood and material real and fictive real. This article explores how fiction can be understood as hybrid and interrelated rather than a pure and separate phenomenon, and in particular how materiality as something real and fiction as real mingle. This article introduces ways to talk about the fictive real as realunreality and highlights the drawbacks that might stem from these concepts since in several ways they re-enact childhood innocence and nostalgia, as well as negative differences between childhood and adulthood, where different childhoods share a subordinate position in society.

Over recent years, a cultural industrial branch of play and fun, focused on children, has been established in Swedish cities. Under names such as ‘the mischief factory’, ‘play and mischief land multisport’ and ‘funhouse’, opportunities to consume spaces filled with tools for play, so-called sports zones and celebration milieus with different themes, are offered. Children and their parents as well as schools can stay in these spaces for hours or days, as camps are one of the services provided. In information and advertisements for these businesses, playfulness, speed, parties and celebrations are marked out as key components; everything in a world that is claimed to be created for children. This paper critically investigates the temptations and the activities portrayed within this ‘children’s culture industry’ (Langer, 2002) by analyzing informational material and advertisements as presented on websites. The study is based on the hypothesis that these spaces offer, encourage and make possible certain forms of social choreography (Hewitt, 2005) that are connected to logics of productive consumption (Lefebvre, 1991). The paper develops a picture of the characteristics of industrial play in what is conceptualized as the ‘funzone’. The concept of the funzone is developed with support from research on childhood that has highlighted the tensions between nature and culture during this life phase.