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

Abstract

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.

‘My World, a click’: Preschool children photograph spaces of their daily lives

“…In fact, this is why visual methodologies, including photography, are quite frequently applied. The use of the camera engages children in a meaning‐generating participatory process (Robinson, 2011; Varvantakis et al, 2019) and affords them a degree of control. The act of taking photos itself is an outcome of making choices, that is, of purposeful action.…”

Childhood publics in search of an audience: reflections on the children’s environmental movement

“…For example, we developed a visual storying method that translated data, the photographs that children took of the things that mattered to them, into photo-stories, artefacts that could be and were publicly exhibited 2 in each of the three study cities (Varvantakis, Nolas, and Aruldoss 2019;Nolas et al 2017). Many of the children in the study chose to make their photo-stories about their own pet or another animal they had met.…”

Touching heritage: embodied politics in children’s photography

“…A multimodal ethnographic approach to both data collection and analysis was taken (cf. Varvantakis et al, 2019b, Nolas and Varvantakis, 2018 and Varvantakis and Nolas, 2019, for more details). Our fieldwork took place over a 3-year period during which we visited children at home, in playgrounds near their homes, walked with them around their neighbourhoods and different parts of each city, as well as spent time with them and their families (Nolas et al, 2016, 2017a, 2017b).…”