In this paper we argue that school toilets function as one civilising site [Elias, 1978. The Civilising Process. Oxford: Blackwell] in which children learn that disabled and queer bodies are out of place. This paper is the first to offer queer and crip perspectives on school toilets. The small body of existing school toilet literature generally works from a normative position which implicitly perpetuates dominant and oppressive ideals. We draw on data from Around the Toilet, a collaborative research project with queer, trans and disabled people (aroundthetoilet.wordpress.com) to critically interrogate this work. In doing this we consider 'toilet training' as a form of 'civilisation', that teaches lessons around identity, embodiment and ab/normal ways of being in the world. Furthermore, we show that 'toilet training' continues into adulthood, albeit in ways that are less easily identifiable than in the early years. We therefore call for a more critical, inclusive, and transformative approach to school toilet research.
ARTICLE HISTORY
This paper describes a collaboration between museum staff and university researchers to develop a framework for analysing museum spaces from the perspective of young children. The resultant APSE (abstract, physical, social and embodied) framework draws on spatial theories from childhood studies and architecture to consider children's museum visiting from a spatial perspective. Starting with space not only foregrounds the role places, objects and bodies play in how experiences are constituted, but also resists linearity and predictability of mainstream educational policy discourses about young children's learning. As place, children and objects entangle together, they design and make one another. We draw upon Massey's description of the "chance of space", in which people, objects and places become entangled in unpredictable and unknowable ways, to consider the potential of the APSE framework to offer alternative framings of children in museums.
This article explores how close attention to sound can help to rethink literacy in early childhood education. Through an analysis of text, audio, video and photographic data from a sound walk undertaken with a parent and a child, we make two arguments. First, contrary to skills-based approaches that abstract literacy from context, we show how literacy emerges from vibrational entanglements between bodies and places. We provide examples of how listening and sound-making unfold together in place, as sound moves between different material bodies, including children, animals, objects, buildings, and landscapes. Our analysis suggests that a wide range of sound-making and listening practices, not just those focussed on words, should be valued in early childhood literacy. Second, we demonstrate how sound also transcends bodies and places through its multiplicity, ephemerality and fluidity. We draw on the more-thanhuman semiotics of Eduardo Kohn to analyse how sounds operate as relational signs between human and non-human entities, using his ideas to move beyond humancentred, symbol-centred practices of literacy.
In this guest editorial, we outline a new field of children's museum geographies. We do this by opening up a space for the reader to engage with a collection of papers that trace embodiment, tacit and emplaced knowing, material entanglements and non-representational aspects of experience in accounts of children's presence in museums. We hope that this special issue will act as an impetus for further working, thinking and collaborating, firstly by disrupting the conflation of children in museums with narrowing notions such as learning and talk, and secondly by highlighting the rich potential of museums as a space of interest for the field of children's geographies.
In this paper we bring together the cultural studies of emotion with theories that foreground the agency of place and objects in order to analyse the entanglement of place, children and emotion (particularly fear) in children's play encounters. When children, objects and places come into play with each other, intensities and emotions emerge. Through an analysis of examples from two ethnographic studies in which play encounters between children and place seem to evoke fear, we explore the potentialities of what is evoked. Fear is bounded in place (Ahmed, 2014) and experienced materially and bodily. As fear becomes entangled in the materiality of place and bodies, emotions work to characterise and categorise bodies (human and non human), in ways that connect to anthropocentric and colonial meta-narratives of animal / human and victim / aggressor. We make the case that the cultural studies of emotion can offer a means through which it is possible to connect the micro and the macro, working at these different scales in order to consider the political implications of re-conceptualising play encounters through new materialism.
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