Metaphors we experiment with in multimodal ethnography

Varvantakis, Christos; Nolas, Sevasti‐Melissa

doi:10.1080/13645579.2019.1574953

Cited by 22 publications

(23 citation statements)

References 56 publications

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“…Surrendering to children's play and working as we did, as a team, forced us to rethink both the individual career narratives expected by our employers as well as our profession (e.g., the practice of writing the individual staff pages, something we both struggle with and dislike). Playing with children literally made us more aware of our bodies (Varvantakis and Nolas 2019)-an awareness often erased by contemporary work practices, such as eating lunch at a desk or responding to e-mails late into the night-and our 'shared drinks' foregrounded our material selves as bodies that eat, drink, laugh, sleep, and so forth. While workplaces can often make one feel alienated and dehumanized, like a cog in a machine, play offered us an opportunity for human connection.…”

Section: Contradictions Of Researcher Agency In the Neo-liberal Universitymentioning

confidence: 99%

“…3. For those interested in the ethnographic write-up underpinning the narrative of this article, see Varvantakis and Nolas (2019). A full bibliography of activities and publications from the program can be found on the Childhood Publics website at https://childhoodpublics.org/communications/writing/.…”

Section: Contradictions Of Researcher Agency In the Neo-liberal Universitymentioning

confidence: 99%

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Field Notes for Amateurs

Nolas

Varvantakis

2019

Social Analysis

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In this article we develop the idea of ethnography as a practice of desire lines. Lines of desire are pedestrian footpaths that are at once amateurish and playful, and that deviate from the grids and schemes of urban planners. We argue that ethnography has always been so at the same time as also being highly professionalized. The article explores these tensions between desire lines and professionalization as they became evident to us during a funded, international multi-modal ethnographic study with children—a study, we argue, that rendered us childlike. We conclude that being childlike and ‘out of line’ is an appropriate and necessary response for knowledge creation at a time of heightened professionalization in the academy.

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Section: Contradictions Of Researcher Agency In the Neo-liberal Universitymentioning

confidence: 99%

Section: Contradictions Of Researcher Agency In the Neo-liberal Universitymentioning

confidence: 99%

Field Notes for Amateurs

Nolas

Varvantakis

2019

Social Analysis

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“…My intention was to give the children playful opportunities to imagine and experience their school grounds at different stages of the design process. As Varvantakis and Nolas (2019) write, play can be a useful metaphor for research, both methodologically and epistemologically. For Varvantakis and Nolas, play 'did similar work as composing, meandering, plundering and time travel have 6 done for other scholars' (2019: 269).…”

Section: Fieldworkmentioning

confidence: 99%

Rewilding education? Exploring an imagined and experienced outdoor learning space

Bates

2019

Children's Geographies

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fern… As Macfarlane writes, these nature-words were recently deemed no longer relevant to modern-day childhood and deleted from a new edition of the Oxford Junior Dictionary. The entries that replaced them included attachment, blog, broadband, bullet-point, celebrity, and chatroom. According to the head of children's dictionaries at Oxford University Press, the substitutions made in the dictionary reflected the consensus of experience of modern-day childhood-a childhood in which the outdoor and the natural has been displaced by the indoor and the virtual (Macfarlane, 2015). This paper considers some of the undercurrents of modern-day childhood that are portrayed by OUP's decision-of feelings about children's access to and engagement with nature, and the educational management of the relationship between children and nature-by following the progress of a small rural primary school in the UK as it goes about transforming its outdoor spaces. The paper does not seek to evaluate the benefits of outdoor learning, but explores the significance of these outdoor spaces as they are imagined, made, and experienced, from the first design stages to the first days of use. It is a whole school project, blending the voices of adults and children to document a process. Combining observations and insights gathered over two years, including four site visits, interviews with teachers, ethnographic observation in classes and at break times, observant participation at design workshops, and multimodal methods workshops conducted with the school's pupils, the paper tracks the ways in which outdoor spaces are created by adults and children, and considers the ways in which the creation of spaces can influence and shift school practices and cultures. As such, the paper is concerned with the creation of different possible futures. The paper consists of four sections. The first section, 'School spaces and childhood places' reviews sociological and geographical work on childhood and space in order to consider what is at stake in the relationships between children and nature. Section two, 'Fieldwork' introduces the school project and expands on the multimodal methods that I used. The next two sections, 'Imagining a new future' and 'Experiencing a new outdoors' portray the hard work done by one primary school, and discuss how participation, imagination and risk shape and are shaped by the ambition to create a new future. In conclusion, I suggest that there is much to learn from

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“…According to MacDougall the project of visual anthropology may enable 'rethinking certain categories of anthropological knowledge in light of understandings that may be accessible only by 3 nonverbal means' (MacDougall, 1997:292) -which, in his understanding, may lead to novel enquiries into human culture and 'new pathways to anthropological knowledge ' (1997:292). Additionally, multimodal methods have been noted in recent literature as enhancing ethnographic research (for a review see: Varvantakis and Nolas, 2019; see also In this paper, we document our engagement with the above debates in the context of a comparative longitudinal and multi-sited ethnography with children, the ERC-funded Connectors Study, in which we explored the relationship between childhood and public life (Nolas, 2015;Nolas et al 2016Nolas et al , 2017aNolas and Varvantakis, 2019;Varvantakis 2018;Varvantakis and Nolas 2019;Varvantakis et al, 2018). The study followed a sample of 45 children, aged around six years old in the beginning of the study, living in different neighbourhoods across three cities (Athens, Hyderabad, London).…”

Section: Introductionmentioning

confidence: 99%

“…All care was taken to construct a heterogenous sample. We used an intensive research design and multimodal ethnographic methods including participant observation, photography, walking, mapping, interview and workshop methods (Varvantakis and Nolas, 2019). The relationship between childhood and public life is conceptualised in broadly phenomenological terms and we draw on ethnography and social theory rooted in this philosophical tradition to think about experiences of human agency, relating, belonging and everyday life in childhood.…”

Section: Introductionmentioning

confidence: 99%

Photography, politics and childhood: exploring children’s multimodal relations with the public sphere

Varvantakis¹,

Nolas²,

Aruldoss³

2019

Visual Studies

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In qualitative research with children visually oriented and multimodal approaches are identified in the literature as more appropriate for approaching children's meanings and feelings often deemed to lie beyond the realm of language. In our own research, a comparative ethnography which enquired into the relationships between childhood and public life, with six-to-eight year olds in three cities (Athens, Hyderabad and London), we have reflexively experimented with the employment and remixing of methodologies which would allow us to explore such relationships. In the process of our research, incorporating different visual and ethnographic methods, we have developed a data collection and production process, an adaptation of the photo-story, which allows for a multimodal, processual and reflective enquiry into children's relationships of concern and politics of care. We review the central visual methods in research with children, we then proceed to provide a documentation of the method, its development and its rationale. Consequently, we provide some examples of the photostory method's implementation in the Connectors Study together with a discussion of the production processes of the photo-stories themselves and our readings of them. We conclude with a section with reflections on the method, which, we argue provides a departure point from which we may rethink the political in childhood, as well as the ways in which photography is employed as a research method in the social sciences.

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Metaphors we experiment with in multimodal ethnography

Cited by 22 publications

References 56 publications

Field Notes for Amateurs

Field Notes for Amateurs

Rewilding education? Exploring an imagined and experienced outdoor learning space

Photography, politics and childhood: exploring children’s multimodal relations with the public sphere

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