ABSTRACT

Exploring Materiality in Childhood: Body, Relations and Space explores the multiple ways that childhood and materiality are intertwined and assembled. Bringing together a diverse range of authors, this topical book makes a scholarly contribution to our understanding of the entanglements of materiality and childhoods in international contexts.

Chapters explore how various environments and material resources, including technologies and consumer goods, affect children’s lives. The book caters to a diverse range of theories, in sociomaterialist, posthumanist, post-anthropocentric and more-than-human research, critically exploring the boundaries of these theoretical approaches with diverse empirical cases. These wide ranges of perspectives develop alternatives to human-centred approaches in understanding children and childhoods. With its diverse theoretical and methodological choices, the book also serves as a versatile example for how to conduct research with children and on childhood. 

This book will be of great interest for academics, researchers, and postgraduate students in childhood studies, early childhood education, social sciences, cultural sciences and sociology.

chapter |10 pages

Introduction

Toward a material study of childhood

part I|42 pages

Body, embodiment and materiality

chapter 1|12 pages

Becoming unruly?

Bodies and materials in a primary classroom

chapter 2|15 pages

Embodying discipline

Remembering bodies and cultural values in Chinese kindergartens

chapter 3|13 pages

From ‘drilling’ to ‘thrilling’

French toilet training literature and the child’s body

part II|68 pages

Materiality in/as relations

chapter 4|18 pages

Connected play as intra-action

Doing CupSong with YouTube

chapter 7|18 pages

Thrown into and out of togetherness

Children’s experiences of living apart from, with and in multi-local families

part III|61 pages

Space, environment and materiality

chapter 9|14 pages

Journeys through space

The interplay of mobility, materiality and social life in early childhood centres

chapter 10|14 pages

Young children’s participation as a living practice

The role of material and emotional relations during the transition to primary school

chapter 11|15 pages

‘(Do not) touch’. ‘(Do not) run’. – On bodies’ plasticities

Curation and exhibition design with/for children in art museums

chapter |3 pages

Epilogue