Children's Spatialities

Embodiment, Emotion and Agency

Julie Seymour,Abigail Hackett,Lisa Procter

• Publisher: Palgrave Macmillan
• Year: 2016
• ISBN:
  9781137464989
• Topic: Sciences sociales
• Subtopic: Sociologie

Drawing from a wide range of disciplines, including anthropology, sociology, architecture and geography, and international contributors, this volume offers both students and scholars with an interest in the interdisciplinary study of childhood a range of ways of thinking spatially about children's lives.

Part I

Senses and Embodiment

1

Knowing the World Through Your Body: Children’s Sensory Experiences and Making of Place

Kerstin Leder Mackley, Sarah Pink and Roxana Moroşanu

In this chapter, we discuss what theoretical considerations of place, embodiment and sensory perception, drawn from phenomenological anthropology, human geography and media studies, can bring to the study of children’s experiences in environments that traverse the physical and the digital. In doing so, we advance a steadily growing area of research that goes beyond mainstream psychological and developmental approaches to childhood studies and instead takes into account sensory and ‘more-than-representational’ modes of inquiry and lived experience. We propose an understanding of children’s environments as composed of material and immaterial – invisible and imagined – entities, and of children as perceivers, makers and ‘knowers’ of ever-changing configurations of place. This, we will argue, has implications for the kinds of questions we ask of young people’s lifeworlds and the methodologies through which we might explore them. Yet, rather than prescribing how to research children’s sensory experiences of place, our conceptualisations of place, embodiment and sensory perception aim to provide a coherent theoretical framework that might offer new methodological and analytical routes within increasingly interdisciplinary contexts of research. For the purpose of illustration, we will address how children’s sensory-embodied knowledge and ‘making’ of home featured in our own research about digital media and domestic energy consumption. However, our main purpose is to propose a set of theoretical-methodological principles through which to advance discussions around frames of research for scholars and practitioners working with young people.

Researching children’s experiences

There have been some important developments over the last decades that have transformed childhood studies both in terms of taking more seriously the experience of children as ‘beings’, rather than ‘becomings’ (James et al., 1998, p. 207; cf. Oswell, 2013), and in accounting for children’s varied lifeworlds in increasingly interdisciplinary contexts. This has included conceptualisations of children’s bodies as socially and culturally constructed and re-constructed, as situated, and as continuously changing in their physical, social and experiential manifestations (cf. James, 1993, 2000; Horton and Kraftl, 2006b). In this context, the concept of ‘embodiment’ has received increased attention, following interests in breaking down the mind/body dichotomy (cf. Shilling, 2013) and taking bodily sensations and emotions seriously (see also Prout, 2005). For instance, in her 1990s research Allison James drew on Csordas’s notion of embodiment ‘as a seat of subjectivity’ with ‘the mind/subject/culture … deployed in parallel’ (Csordas, 1994, p. 9, in James, 2000, p. 27) to emphasise ‘the situated agency of the body and a view of the body as not divorced from the conscious, thinking and intentional mind’ (James, 2000, p. 27). James was chiefly interested in how young people’s sense of self develops, and how embodied experience and meanings associated with the body form part of this.

More recently, the non-representational dimensions of embodiment have been emphasised, along with the situatedness of learning in place. The pedagogy scholar Elisabeth Ellsworth describes embodiment as one of the ‘human universals’, along with movement and sensation (2005, p. 166). ‘As living, moving, sensing bodies’, she argues, ‘we all exist only and always in relation even as our individual experiences of relationality are singular and unsharable’ (ibid.). Her approach to pedagogy as ‘knowledge in the making’, rather than ‘knowledge as a thing made’ (p. 2), seeks to explore this relationality – between people, things, environments – as something outside the realms of language and cognition.

Geographers of childhood, such as Horton and Kraftl (2006a), have also adopted a renewed emphasis on the body and embodied experience, whereby the body is not necessarily ‘a bounded thing’ (2006a, p. 77). They argue:

close attention to bodies reveals how ‘we are not made up of the black and white signifying symbols of the written page – malleable and easily defined – but of biological flows of energy, matter and stimulating chemical fluids (adrenaline, pheromones, endorphins) which are in excess of such definitions, irradiating, condensing, intersecting, building and rippling our senses of being-in-the-world’ (Dewsbury, 2000: 485) … [T]his embodiment – and this being-in-the-world – is always becoming: bodies are always in flux; always ongoing; never still.

(Horton and Kraftl, 2006a, p. 77)

In this chapter, we advance the focus on embodiment, perception/knowing and place/environment emphasised in the literature outlined above by outlining a theoretical-methodological approach to researching the relationship between embodiment, sensory perception and place. In doing so, we draw on our research with families in an interdisciplinary study of energy and digital media use in the home (Low Effort Energy Demand Reduction (LEEDR), 2010–2014). In our research, we have employed a sensory-ethnographic methodology that draws on theories from phenomenological anthropology and human geography in terms of how we understand body/environment relations within the research context, and the kinds of knowledges this produces. Our work focused on the routines and experiences of all members of participating families. However, young people and their experiences formed an important part of our study. Here we highlight the ways we worked with them and the particular methodological challenges involved.

An approach to embodiment, perception and place

Tuan is regularly cited for stating that ‘the child knows the world more sensuously than does the adult’ (Tuan, 1977, p. 185), and children are often attributed with being particularly ‘in touch’ with their senses, with adults described as increasingly ‘ “disembodied” ’ or marked through an ‘ “absent body” ’ (Leder, 1990 in Bartos, 2013, p. 91). Above we have outlined how the respective works of James, Ellsworth and Horton and Kraftl have shaped ways of thinking about children’s worlds as sensory, embodied and not routinely articulated verbally. Giving a ‘voice’ (or agency) to children within the research context therefore requires a shift towards studying experiences and sensations that go beyond language and also include what had previously been considered as too ephemeral or mundane, the kinds of tacit embodied knowledges that form part of children’s everyday lives but that often remain ‘unnoticed … unsaid … [or] unsayable’ (Horton and Kraftl, 2006b, p. 259). These elements of life, as Horton and Kraftl argue, are fundamental to what it means to be in the world, as children and adults.

Horton and Kraftl used their reflections on a number of their own embodied childhood experiences, which they revisited as adult researchers, to investigate this theme and to highlight ‘how glasses-wearing and clumsiness mattered and matter to us; and how feelings of wearing glasses or being clumsy return to us today in sudden, surprising moments of affective realisation (cf. McCormack, 2005) … [demonstrating] how our childhoods live on (and on) in the ongoing-ness and non-linearity of our everyday lives’ (2006b, p. 269). Researchers’ own personal experiences offer useful insights into childhood experience, yet they do not solve the problem of how we might go about accessing children’s own worlds as they are actually lived. While it is impossible to directly access personal lived experience, there are a number of ways in which we might develop empathetic understandings and/or explore children’s role in making ‘place’, both when engaging them in conversation and going beyond. Researchers who work with visual methods have developed various techniques for working collaboratively with children to explore their worlds in ways that go beyond the verbal. As Pink (2007) outlines, these include the work of Andrea Raggl and Michael Schratz, who used photographs they took of children in school to ask the pupils to ‘recall learning situations’ and to ‘reflect on or about action’ (2004, p. 151, original emphasis). Using photography differently, Phil Mizen asked children who worked to photograph their own worlds in a role he refers to as ‘researcher photographers’ creating photo-diaries in order to ‘illustrate, document and reflect upon their work and employment’ (2005, p. 126). Likewise anthropological filmmaker David MacDougall’s series of films focuses in on the sensory and embodied experience of the school and its environment as an institution (discussed in MacDougall, 2005). Below we expand on this by building on our earlier work of how working with video can open up new empathetic and embodied routes to understanding (e.g. Pink and Leder Mackley, 2012; Leder Mackley and Pink, 2013). First, in the next section we outline our theoretical-methodological approach. This connects with the ways of thinking about children’s lives represented in the above literatures – that is with theories of place, embodiment and perception – but takes the further step of considering how these theoretical principles might be played out through practical techniques for researching children’s lives. In the subsequent section, we explore examples of how this theoretical-methodological approach was engaged when working with children in the context of bathrooms, digital media and energy use.

Researching through place, embodiment and perception: Life as unbounded

Within childhood studies and childhood geographies, the concept of place has largely been engaged to consider children’s relationships to their physical environments. For instance, Bartos has explored children’s sense of place and an ‘emotional attachment’ to (a) place, that is, an ‘affective bond that develops between people and locations over time’ (Relph, 1976, cited in Bartos, 2013, p. 89, original emphasis). Although, in this context, place – as a meaningful association – is increasingly discussed as fluid and changing, we argue for pushing the concept of place in childhood studies further, that is, beyond its association with locations. We are interested in the concept of place as it pertains to how people live out everyday life in environments that are not fixed localities that ‘exist’ in the world but as ‘unbounded … places’, as ‘evershifting constellations of trajectories’ (Massey, 2005, p. 151). For the phenomenological anthropologist Tim Ingold, environments are not localities but ‘zones of entanglement’ (Ingold, 2008, p. 1807) that ‘occur along the lifepaths of beings’ (ibid., p. 1808, our emphasis). People – including children – are likewise part of the environment, we both shape and are shaped by the worlds we live in. In this sense, while, as we have noted above, theories of embodiment sought to bring together the mind and body and acknowledge that they are not separate, theories that take the environment as their starting point extend this relationship. As David Howes has put it, this can be thought of as ‘emplacement’ (2005) whereby the mind-body-environment relationship becomes that which we need to attend to. This shifts the relationship between environments and people, such that the environment is not a thing separate from us that we do things to, but rather we are part of the environment. Therefore, for Ingold, bodies or organisms are conceived not as bounded but as ‘bundles of interwoven lines of growth and movement, together constituting a meshwork in fluid space’ (2008, p. 1796). Thus seeing everyday life as such as ‘zones of entanglement’ we understand environments as social, material and digital, as constituted through ‘emergent relations between things and processes’ and through different ‘intensities of [people and] things of which both localities and socialities are elements’ (Postill and Pink, 2012, p. 124).

Following from this, the way in which we experience the environment is precisely from within – that is, as part of it. Such a way of thinking about our relationship to the world brings to the fore the need to consider the hidden processes through which everyday environments are constituted; the sensory, tacit and perhaps never-spoken-about aspects of the ways we live and experience the places we are part of, and the activities we engage in in relation to them. Ellsworth’s relational approach to the ‘living, moving, sensing [body]’ (2005, p. 166) suggests that it is through our embodied relation with others, objects and environments through time that we experience. Moreover, Ingold has described embodiment as a process, and as ‘the development of [the human] organism in its environment’ (1998, p. 259). Accordingly, notions of embodiment and emplacement can be approached as processual throughout a person’s life course; children’s bodies and activities ongoingly generate place(s) while their multisensorial engagement with their environments impacts on how place is experienced, imagined and remembered. Following this line of thinking we have therefore paid attention to the relational and contingent aspects of children’s embodiment and their activities as constitutive and part of environments, through sensory and embodied ways of knowing, which are often tacit and not spoken about.

These ways of knowing, experiencing and making environments are equally applied to the digital and physical elements of place as children engage through their sensing bodies with digital media technologies and platforms. While Ingold does not consider the implications of digital technologies in his work, other scholars (e.g. Moores, 2012; Pink and Leder Mackley, 2013; Hjorth and Pink, 2014) have begun to use his ideas to also situate digital media as part of environments. Understanding digital environments in this way allows us to rethink them not as ‘empty’ or ‘minimal’, as in Dudek’s conception of cyberspace (2005, p. 174), but as similarly felt, imagined, and negotiated; and moreover not as separate from the material worlds that we are part of. The same principle, as we see below, can also be used to understand how technologies like showers and baths fit into the environment of home.

To be able to research an everyday environment that our child participants both inhabit and are constitutive of – which they might not usually speak about and indeed might not have words for – requires research methods that involve learning from children about how they experience their worlds, from perspectives that allow us to imagine what it is like to be inside those very worlds. To undertake this we adapted a sensory ethnography approach (Pink, 2015) which is informed by the theoretical ideas outlined above and which deliberately seeks such forms of collaboration and routes to empathetically understanding everyday ways of knowing and experiencing. We now introduce our project, methods and the ways in which we worked with participants.

Researching energy demand in homes with children

Between 2011 and 2014, we worked with 20 family households in the Midlands (UK) to explore domestic energy consumption and the opportunities that digital interventions might afford in the context of energy demand reduction. Our ethnographic research formed part of the interdisciplinary LEEDR project and informed the work of engineering and design colleagues in terms of supporting numerical models of energy-use practices and changes, and also the creation of digital design concepts. Our methodology built on that of Pink’s previous sensory- and visual-ethnographic research into everyday life in the home (Pink, 2004, 2009) and chiefly employed video within collaborative encounters with participants, allowing us to get a specific embodied and emplaced (Pink, 2015) understanding of people’s lifeworlds and experiences. For instance, the home video tour was designed to enable us to experience people’s homes with them, learning both empathetically from the ways in which they used their bodies and words to demonstrate how it felt to live in their homes, as well as from our own sensory embodied experiences of being there (Pink and Leder Mackley, 2012). We also visited households at a later stage to explore in detail how energy use was implicated in specific domestic activities, such as doing the laundry, cooking, showering and using digital media. When we could we followed activities as they played out,...