(Mis)trust, Access and the Poetics of Self-Reflexivity

Abstract

This chapter reflects on ethnographic research conducted in London over a period of 28 days in February, September and December of 2013, involving family observations and four workshops with young children of Arab origin between the ages of seven and 12. The ethnographic research was part of a larger, interdependent three-year research project funded by the UK's Arts and Humanities Research Council (AHRC), which examined pan-Arab programming for children through a holistic and relational approach to three strands: audiences, texts and the political economy of screen production and distribution for children. The audience strand of the research project entailed ethnographic research in the UK, Morocco and Lebanon. In all these localities our prime objective was to steer away from the well-rehearsed media audiences models and experiment with new methods that would allow us to make sense of the ways in which children live and communicate their media and culture worlds. In the case of the London children, we were especially interested in the ways in which British children of Arab origin intentionally perform being in the world by navigating through multiple forms of subjectification and cultural tastes. This, we argue below, drawing on Bourdieu's concept of 'habitus' 1 together with studies of the 'mnemonic imagination' whereby remembering is understood as creative practice, 2 results in a mnemonic diasporic habitus.