The paper offers an analytical exploration and points of connection between the categories of activism, childhood and everyday life. We are concerned with the lived experiences of activism and childhood broadly defined and especially with the ways in which people become aware, access, orient themselves to, and act on issues of common concern; in other words what connects people to activism. The paper engages with childhood in particular because childhood remains resolutely excluded from practices of public life and because engaging with activism from the marginalized position of children’s everyday lives provides an opportunity to think about the everyday, lived experiences of activism. Occupying a space ‘before method’, the paper engages with autobiographical narratives of growing up in the Communist left in the USA and the historical events of occupying Greek schools in the 1990s. These recounted experiences offer an opportunity to disrupt powerful categories currently in circulation for thinking about activism and childhood. Based on the analysis it is argued that future research on the intersections of activism, childhood and everyday life would benefit from exploring the spatial and temporal dimension of activism, to make visible the unfolding biographical projects of activists and movements alike, while also engaging with the emotional configurations of activists’ lives and what matters to activists, children and adults alike.
The paper employs data from a European Union funded project to outline the different contexts and factors that enable creativity and innovation. It suggests that creativity and innovation are supported by flexible work settings, adaptable learning environments, collaborative design processes, determined effort, and liberating innovative relationships. It concludes that learning environments that seek to enable creativity and innovation should encourage collaborative working, offer flexibility for both learners and educators, enable learner-led innovative processes, and recognize that creativity occurs in curriculum areas beyond the creative arts.
The study of political activism has neglected people's personal and social relationships to time. Age, life course and generation have become increasing important experiences for understanding political participation and political outcomes (e.g. Brexit), and current policies of austerity across the world are affecting people of all ages. At a time when social science is struggling to understand the rapid and unexpected changes to the current political landscape, the essay argues that the study of political activism can be enriched by engaging with the temporal dimensions of people's everyday social experiences because it enables the discovery of political activism in mundane activities as well as in banal spaces. The authors suggest that a values-based approach that focuses on people's relationships of concern would be a suitable way to surface contemporary political sites and experiences of activism across the life course and for different generations. ARTICLE HISTORY
How do we recognise children's participation and their relationships to public life? Drawing on evidence from ethnographic fieldwork conducted between 2014-2016 for the ERC funded Connectors Study on the relationship between childhood and public life, this paper explores the ways in which children communicate their encounters with public life. Τhe contemporary phenomenon of listening without hearing is discussed as this relates to the call for listening to children and the simultaneous failure to hear what they say. Idioms are introduced as an 'instrument' for thinking through what it means and feels like to encounter and make sense of childhood and children's practices of relating to public life. The analysis focuses on three emblematic encounters with six-to eight-year-old children living in Athens, Hyderabad, London. We argue that dominant understandings of listening to children rely heavily on cognitive, conceptual and rational models of idealised and largely verbal forms of communication that ignore the affective, embodied and lived dimensions of making meaning. Through ethnographic thick description we trouble what it means to tune into children's worlds and to 'properly hear', and in so doing demonstrate the ways in which idioms support an understanding of what matters to children. Drawing on evidence from ethnographic fieldwork conducted between 2014-2016 for the ERC funded Connectors Study on childhood and public life, this paper develops the concept of idioms as an 'tuning device' for understanding children's cultures and their communication therein, as meaningful and agentic. The term idiom, as used in anthropological and other social science literatures, provides an understanding of the act of communication that goes beyond linguistics and spoken language. It shifts attention towards communication as a social, cultural, temporal, as well as fully sensory act, that includes gestures, practices, actions, and affect. As such, idioms are a way of world-making and this paper focuses specifically on those idioms that were mobilised by children to make sense of and communicate their encounters with and experiences of public life. Children in the study understood public life as activities, places, and things that were accessible, communal, civil and political, known and open (e.g. a range of institutions, parks, toilets, voting, etc). A number of children also commented on the difficulty, also found in the literature, of providing a definition of public life (e.g. 'I don't know how to describe what I know aboutit'). In the social science literature and in practice, such encounters and experiences are often referred to as children's participation and much has been made in theory and in practice of 'listening to children' as a medium for participation. While the failure to listen is systemic and often political, we argue that useful sensitising devices (concepts used to think and act with), such as we have found idioms to be, can support theory and practice development that better resonates with everyday childh...
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