This text is an exploration of collaborative thinking and writing through theories, methods, and experiences on the topic of the child, children, and childhood. It is a collaborative written text (with 32 authors) that sprang out of the experimental workshop Child Studies Multiple. The workshop and this text are about daring to stay with mess, “un-closure” , and uncertainty in order to investigate the (e)motions and complexities of being either a child or a researcher. The theoretical and methodological processes presented here offer an opportunity to shake the ground on which individual researchers stand by raising questions about scientific inspiration, theoretical and methodological productivity, and thinking through focusing on process, play, and collaboration. The effect of this is a questioning of the singular academic ‘I’ by exploring and showing what a plural ‘I’ can look like. It is about what the multiplicity of voice can offer research in a highly individualistic time. The article allows the reader to follow and watch the unconventional trial-and-error path of the ongoing-ness of exploring theories and methods together as a research community via methods of drama, palimpsest, and fictionary.

In this text, we explore the concept of children’s cultural heritage. We do so by investigating and reflecting upon the digitizing, categorizing and registering of children’s digital and analogue pictures in the Swedish Archive of Children’s Art. Children themselves do not agitate for the preservation of their own cultural heritage. As most archive taxonomies are based on adult categorizations, we ask what consequences this has for the preservation of children’s cultural heritage. From our theoretical location in Child and Heritage Studies and Science and Technology Studies, we see archived documents as infused with subjectivity by the way in which they are systematized and classified at the time of archiving. Thus, we approach the process of digitizing children’s pictures as a political practice. The micro-politics of the archive intertwines with broader politics of children and childhood as well as adult cultural heritage policies and theories. The analyses show which procedures are involved in creating a children’s cultural heritage, while also reflecting upon what notions of children become relevant for children’s cultural heritage.

This article explores what it means to listen to children by moving beyond the notion of voice and staying with the absences of children. In this way, we include the possibly lost, forgotten or unapproachable children in child and childhood research. Our methodological starting point is to listen by ‘staying with’ the absences of children’s verbal voices and physical bodies in two photographs. These photographs depict material artefacts connected to children in vulnerable situations: shrouds for wrapping stillborn babies’ bodies, and children’s shoes as an emblem of children living in hiding from domestic violence. The idea is to explore how we can listen to children whose verbal or embodied encounters we cannot or do not wish to display. Our aim is to listen to these absences and discuss how they influence and possibly reshape the practices of listening, as well as notions of the child and childhood.

In this article, we meet a seven-year-old boy, Matti, who was adopted from his birth country in Africa by a family in Sweden. We meet him together with his family as they are planning a family adoption return trip to his birth country and again after their return. We argue that an adoption return trip is a form of family travel and/or visiting friends and relatives (VFR) travel. By methodologically using a so-called children’s perspective we are primarily focusing on Matti and how he talks about the return trip. We explore some key concepts from child studies through Matti’s relational encounters in the world. By presenting agency and cultural competence as something that is enacted in practice, we show how they are enacted through the dependencies between Matti, his mother and his sister. The analysis shows that cultural competence and agency are fluid in the sense that they can be changed by how topics of discussion are woven through one another. Staying with Matti’s lived practices makes it possible to elaborate on and demonstrate different forms of competence and agency that are important for understanding children as tourists and children’s roles in family travel.

Disneyland’s 1955 Main Street is inspired by Walt Disney’s childhood on hometown street. Today, Disney Main Street has become a visual, cultural and historical heritage, and its aesthetic is visible in the architecture of American outlet villages, shopping malls and leisure parks all over the world. The Swedish amusement park Liseberg is one example of a place that reflects its influence. Initially this project set out to use visual documentation to explore the transference of Disney Main Street to a local context. In the course of this endeavour, however, its aim became to take on board an approach that can twist and challenge the settled, consensus view that Disney Main Street is an infantilising construct. So, the chapter begins by facing its own challenge: how to say something new about the well-trodden ground of Disney Main Street. This is resolved via the premise that methods enact the topics we research. The chapter will thus demonstrate that it is possible to avoid taking on the assumptions of earlier research in discussing Disney Main Street. This is achieved by discussing Main Street with family ethnography and the concepts of pure and impure critique (Illouz 2007). What emerges is a more ambiguous and complex interpretation of both Main Streets and their visitors.

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With the development of visual digital technologies it has become more common in the social sciences to both use and present research visually. This article explores different strategies for working with and including images in ethnomethodology and conversation analysis (EMCA) transcriptions. The purpose is to investigate how, and if, the ontology of the transcript changes when verbal transcripts become visual transcripts. The article explores what ensures that a transcript is still a transcript and what happens to the reflexive interpretative strategy fundamental to EMCA when new digital technologies make it possible to incorporate images in transcripts. The articles focus is on the social life of methods as well as methodological productivity showing how images can enact different social realities and scientific knowledge.

This four-volume encyclopedia covers a wide range of themes and topics, including: Social constructions of childhood, Children's rights, Politics/representations/geographies, Child-specific research methods, Histories of childhood/Transnational childhoods, Sociology/anthropology of childhood theories and Theorists key concepts. This interdisciplinary encyclopedia will be of interest to students and researchers in: Childhood studies, Sociology/Anthropology, Psychology/Education, Social Welfare, Cultural studies/Gender studies/Disabilty studies.

It can be argued that adoption return trips are a new travel industry. Today, transnational adoptive families make adoption return trips while their children are very young. The aim of such trips is to create positive links between the child and their birth country. Based on interviews with ten Swedish transnational adoptive families, this qualitative and interdisciplinary study sets out to explore how adopted children and their parents plan return trips. The analysis shows that both children and parents mobilise memories of places, people and heritage sites from the birth countries while planning their trips. In theoretical terms, the study draws on family tourism in combination with child studies and personal memory tourism. The article challenges the idea that adoption return trips are exclusively for the benefit of the adoptee and suggests that the family planning of adoption return trips makes them into family memory trips.

This is NOT an article about Alice in Wonderland. It is about the figure of Alice-the-child and an exploration of the contemporary theoretical research field of Child Studies. What if, I ask, Lewis Carroll’s Alice had been one of the sources drawn upon when forming child research theories? The idea is to explore how the fictive child character Alice in Wonderland enacts key theoretical concepts in Child Studies. Out of this exploration grows the idea of Child Studies Multiple.

This is a research anthology about children’s and young people’s leisure cultures in the Nordic countries. Children’s and young people’s practices take centre stage in this book for the purpose of exploring culture from within their own practices, focusing on what they do (Sparrman, Samuelsson, Lindgren & Cardell 2016; Sparrman, Sandin & Sjöberg 2012). In this book, this is expressed through, how leisure culture creates social mobility, how children move between and multitask digital technologies and platforms, and how they on a regular basis are engaged and active in multiple cultural activities such as going to the theatre, singing, or online gaming. It also engages with leisure culture in terms of venues where people, objects, ideas, imaginations, and pleasures move in and out of one another. The concept of culture is in constant motion through the chapters entangling social processes with cultural processes, cultural heritage with popular and digital culture, doing and making in practice with place, and markets with cultural policies. This collection demonstrates that leisure culture gets its meanings in and through social relations and is not solely the expressions of individual identity work

The purpose of this book is to explore in ten empirical chapters how good parenthood is done in different contexts, by different agents. The introductory chapter outlines the theoretical implications of viewing parenthood as a series of practices and our interest in the enactment and negotiation of good parenthood. We argue that the doing of good parenthood must be studied empirically and in context. Therefore, the particularities of Denmark and Sweden as contexts are briefly introduced. Finally, we argue that parenthood must be understood in relation to childhood, and the doing of good parenthood must be situated in relation to notions of children’s interests and rights. Therefore, the book is anchored in the research fields of both parenting studies and child studies.

This article asks questions about the ontology of child culture. It aims to position the concept of child culture at the forefront of theoretical research without creating a true or singular definition of the concept. It is rather a conceptual exploration of partial consistencies of child culture in and through practices. The focus of the analyses is on five institutional cultural practices created for children: two childrens museums, a science centre, a theme park and an amusement park. A cross-analysis of these practices provides the empirical material for proposing the notion of child culture multiple.

Linköpings universitet avstyrker utredningens förslag att inkorporera barnkonventionen till svensk lag på grundval av bristande kunskapsunderlag och konsekvensanalys. Linköpings universitet föreslår att regering och riksdag använder sig av de analyser som har genomförts inom ramen för utredningens utvalda fokusområden och lägger förnyad ansträngning vid fortsatt transformering av barnkonventionens artiklar inom specifika områden och genom utveckling av andra politiska styrmedel för att värna barns rättigheter.

Barnsrättsutredningens ambition att Barnkonventionens grundprinciper gällande barns rättigheter skall ligga till grund för svensk lagstiftning är i många avseenden lovvärd. På en rad punkter är förslagen förtjänstfulla och viktiga, det gäller t ex migrationsområdet där utredningens granskning leder till ett förslag om ett utökat utredningsansvar hos myndigheter vad gäller barns bästa genom transformeringsprocessen i utlänningslagen och ändringar i specifikt lagrum (se 5.1.6 s. 174-181 och 10.6 490) för att på så vis undvika den idag slentrianmässiga användningen av barnets bästa och tvinga fram ett bättre beslutsunderlag. (Se även övriga förslag under kap 5.1 – 5.4)

Trots det menar Linköpings universitet att utredningen brister i både kunskapsunderlag och konsekvensanalys. Regeringens föregripande av utredningens betänkande genom att redan 2014 deklarera sin vilja att göra Barnkonventionen till svensk lag har medfört att frågan inte har utretts förutsättningslöst. Utredningen borde också ha fått i uppdrag att utreda alla politikområden och de konsekvenser en inkorporering av lagen skulle innebära. Avsaknaden av en förutsättningslös konsekvensanalys medför att argumenten för att barns rättigheter skulle stärkas av en inkorporering av konventionen i sin helhet framstår som mycket svaga.

Som kunskaps/forskningsmyndighet har Linköpings universitet valt att lyfta fram utredningens bristande forskningsunderbyggnad samt speciella forskningsrelaterade frågor relevanta för en inkorporering av Barnkonventionen i svensk lag. Linköpings universitet har följande synpunkter. Utredningen:

a) saknar en genomgripande konsekvensanalys

b) saknar i det närmaste helt anknytning till den omfattande internationella forskning som finns kring barns rättigheter och implementering av konventionen som lag i andra länder

c) har för lite fokus på förutsättningarna för barns/ungas participatoriska rättigheter, och autonoma rätt att fatta beslut och har heller inte granskat den konflikt som finns mellan barns rättigheter enligt svensk lag och barnkonventionens definition av förhållandet mellan barns rätt och föräldrarnas t ex enligt artikel 5 och 14.

d) har underskattat behovet av ett bredare definierat kunskapslyft, med tydligare anknytning till den alltmer växande kunskapen och vetenskapliga forskningen som finns på området

e) har överskattat det juridiska systemets möjligheter att komma till rätta med de iakttagbara bristerna i förverkligandet av barns rättigheter

f) har underskattat kostnaderna för kompetensuppbyggnad och utveckling av praxis och rutiner inom offentlig förvaltning.

Even though fiction and fantasy are fundamental to how childhoods today are understood, thisis a topic that is seldom explored either theoretically or academically. We address the questionof how the relationship between material real and fictive real can be understood in new ways incontemporary society. We suggest that fiction can be understood in other ways than the hithertodichotomized approaches to it, and our aim is to focus on the hybridity that is created throughthe interconnecting word and, as in fiction and childhood and material real and fictive real. Thisarticle explores how fiction can be understood as hybrid and interrelated rather than a pure andseparate phenomenon, and in particular how materiality as something real and fiction as realmingle. This article introduces ways to talk about the fictive real as realunreality and highlightsthe drawbacks that might stem from these concepts since in several ways they re-enact childhoodinnocence and nostalgia, as well as negative differences between childhood and adulthood, wheredifferent childhoods share a subordinate position in society.

Résumé

L’enfant actif, compétent et capable d’autonomie : qualité intrinsèque ou résultat d’un processus de recherche ? Nous proposons dans le présent article d’explorer comment la conception de l’enfant actif, compétent et capable d’autonomie dans ses actions peut être interprétée à la lueur des choix méthodologiques effectués, lesquels exercent une influence directe sur les conclusions de recherche en situation d’observation participante. L’idée sous-jacente à cette étude est d’examiner ce que l’observation participante de type ethnographique peut nous apprendre sur la culture enfantine. Les choix méthodologiques ainsi que la façon dont les chercheurs abordent leur domaine de spécialité sont loin d’être neutres. De plus, ces mêmes choix méthodologiques actualisent en quelque sorte la réalité du sujet à l’étude. Notre article met en évidence la façon dont l’intersection des grandes lignes méthodologiques d’un projet de recherche, de l’approche privilégiée et des interactions chercheur-participant lors de l’étude conditionne la notion-même d’enfant actif, compétent et capable d’agir de manière autonome dans le domaine de la culture enfantine. À partir de l’analyse détaillée d’une étude de cas, nous envisagerons ce que les méthodologies de recherche en général et l’observation participante en particulier nous apprennent sur la conduite d’une recherche.

There is a general idea that research methods help researchers investigate realities “out there”. Recent arguments, however, suggest that research methods are themselves productive, i.e., we can learn about a research topic by investigating aspects and details of the methods used in a research process. The present text investigates methods for gaining access to a research field in a project examining young children’s own (age 9–12 years) notions of sexuality. The article explores how and by whom the issue of children and sexuality is enacted as sensitive when trying to negotiate access to the research field. A whole variety of actors are involved in enacting children’s sexuality: institutions, groups of people, individuals, images, and architectural arrangements. The analysis reveals relationships in which fears, responsibilities, and the cultural attribution of vulnerability (sensitivity) are negotiated by adults, children, and the researcher.

This paper combines sociological perspectives on family display, internet studies on family and private photography and a child studies perspective on the display of children. The paper proposes that blogging practices related to visits to theme and amusement parks in Sweden provide a new arena for people to displayfami-ly-like relationships. In the different displays,adults mainly use pictures of chil-dren in the blogs to demonstratetheir ability to perform family-likerelationships. The paper suggests that thisform of child-centred display,a visualized child-centredness, done during the park visit as well as in the blogging, is part of the construction of contemporary childhoods and what it means to be a child today and has not been theorized in earlier research on the display of family-like rela-tions.

Providing extensive examples of the conditions of children's everyday consumption as well as how children themselves understand issues of work, money, scarcity, and consumer products, this book challenges the prevailing theories of consumption and opens up new ways of thinking about children. Arguing that consumption simultaneously reflects on the changing social role of children, family relations, market interaction, and state regulations, this account marries consumer studies with perspectives that emanate from the disciplines of childhood sociology and the history of childhood. With contributions from novice and established researchers, it generates consumer values no longer based on the idea of the naive or competent child.

Today, people know what is happening around them through radio, television, newspapers and the like. With the advance of the telecommunication technology, people are now also familiar with the use of personal computers, the Internet and so on. The mass media is now regarded as essential for keeping people up to date with the world around them. In view of this, the innovation of a new curriculum, media education or the study of the mass media, has been recommended. This book examines the prevailing perspectives regarding media education in different countries around the world and what kinds of research is being conducted in the field of media education.

Den 4 september 1956 inleddes de första reguljära tvsändningarna av Radiotjänst (sedermera Sveriges Radio och därefter SVT) och detta brukar ses som televisionens officiella startdatum. Under de följande dryga 50 åren har teknikutvecklingen inom medieområdet varit enorm. Mycket har hänt bara under de senaste tio åren med hänvisning till Internet, mobiltelefoni och spelindustri. Dagens barn och unga växer upp i ett tekniktätt samhälle. Tekniken, precis som innehållet i och användningen avmedier formar kunskapsflöde, vardagsliv och inte minst sociala relationer.

Detta avsnitt baseras på statistik från Medierådets rapport Ungar & Medier 2008 som i form av enkäter har undersökt 1 000 barns (9–12 år) och 1 000 ungas (12–16 år) medievanor. Totalt svarade 69 procent, det vill säga 1 395, barn och unga på enkäten. Det finns inga signifikantaskillnader mellan barn och unga i studien, däremot kan det finnas signifikanta skillnader i användningen av olika medier mellan barn och unga. Könsfördelningen av dem som svarat är jämn; 51 procent flickor och 49 procent pojkar.

I en vanlig svensk livsmedelsbutik finns tusentals olika varor. De allra flesta är förpackade, klädda i färger, bilder, symboler och tjusiga varunamn som vi möter när vi ska hitta rätt mjölk, lämplig middagsmat och en god frukostmarmelad. I frukt- och delikatessdiskarna kan man se och kanske vidröra själva varan, annars är det förpackningarnas beskriv ningar av maten som vi köper.Den här boken handlar om hur förpackningarna omgestaltat våra konsumtionskulturer. Hur de förändrade produktionen, distributionen och konsumenternas vardag och villkor i butiken. Handeln rationali serades och alla de problem som hade att göra med hållbarhet, för varing och långa transporter kunde lösas. Från betjäningsbutiker med försäljning över disk gick vi till snabbköp där kunden på egen hand plockar sina varor. I det nya masskonsumtionssamhället ökade också antalet varianter av en och samma vara och varumärket blev det som tydligast skiljde dem åt.Boken berättar också om hur förpackningarna intagit en viktig plats i våra vardagliga visuella miljöer. Inte bara i butikerna utan också på annonspelare, tidningssidor, i köksskåpen och på frukostborden. Den förpackade maten ger oss möjlighet att välja stil, värderingar och kanske rent av identitet. En burk varmkorv eller ett paket rättvisemärkt kaffe i varukorgen berättar olika saker om oss. Förpack ningarnas bilder på den färdiga maten visar hur trevligt vi kan få det vid middagsbordet men talar sällan om för oss vad vi egentligen äter. Bakom arbetet med boken ligger ett fl erårigt samarbete mellan Nordiska museet och Linköpings universitet.

The visual documentation of education for pedagogical purposes focuses on preschool children’s activities and is used by educators to improve their understanding of children while strengthening their own professionalism. By analysing three educational TV programmes concerning visual documentation in preschools, this paper challenges the positivistic way visual documentation is portrayed. Moreover, it questions political documents and the TV programmes’ unproblematic description of children as always ready to be visually documented. Applying a child perspective and children’s perspectives, the paper demonstrates that there is a fine line between being documented and surveilled using visual technologies. The paper describes how doing on-looking-ness (onlooker) versus being looked-at-ness (looked at) can be understood as specific discursive formations.

Purpose – The purpose of this paper is to understand, from children's perspectives, the commercial marketing strategy of selling breakfast cereals with “insert toys” targeted at children.

Design/methodology/approach – The study is based on four focus group interviews conducted with 16 children (8-9 years of age) concerning 18 different breakfast cereal packages. The theoretical framework integrates childhood sociology, critical discourse analysis and talk-in-interaction. This theoretical and methodological combination is used to show how children, in local micro settings of talk, make use of the discourses that are available to them to produce and reproduce social and cultural values about marketing with “insert toys”.

Findings – The present findings suggest that, from children's perspectives, “insert toys” are constituted by cultural and social patterns extending far beyond the “insert toy” itself. For example, the analysis shows that it is not biological age that defines what and how consumption is understood.

Research limitations/implications – The focus group material provides understandings of marketing strategies and consumption practices from children's perspectives. When the children talk about children and adults, hybrid agents of the “child-adult”, the “adult-child” and the “childish child” are constructed. These hybrids contradict research that dichotomizes children and adults likewise children's understandings of consumption based on age stages. Accordingly, age is rationalized into an empirically investigated category rather than being used as a preset category set out to explain children's behaviours.

Originality/value – Analysis of the focus group interactions shows that the way the market and marketing as well as children and adults are talked about is crucial to understanding children's and parents' actions as consumers.

   Det handlar om hur människor i olika sammanhang samspelar och skapar mening. Gemensamt för bokens skribenter är att de är eller har varit doktorander för  professor Karin Aronsson vid Institutionen Barn och tema Kommunikation, vid Linköpings universitet. Sedan mitten av 1980-talet har institutionen erbjudit en dynamisk forskningsmiljö för personer med intresse för samtal, kulturella uttryck och socialt liv i och utanför institutionella sammanhang. Boken vänder sig till studenter, lärare, forskare samt praktiker med intresse för samtal, kulturella utryck och andra vardagliga fenomen som t.ex. tolkade samtal, flerspråkighet, visuell kultur, kamratrelationer, läsning, bildanvändning, grupparbete, etc. Kapitlen i boken kan med fördel användas såväl inom utbildning, arbetsliv som på fritiden för att fördjupa förståelsen av igenkännbara vardagliga fenomen och öka kunskapen om dessa fenomens komplexitet och mångfacetterade betydelser.

Här ger arton forskare som alla varit doktorander till professor Karin Aronsson sin beskrivning av olika former av vardagliga fenomen. Det handlar om hur människor i olika sammanhang samspelar och skapar mening. Gemensamt för de författare som bidrar i boken är att de är eller har varit doktorander vid Institutionen Barn och tema Kommunikation, vid Linköpings universitet. Sedan mitten av 1980-talet har institutionen erbjudit en dynamisk forskningsmiljö för personer med intresse för samtal, kulturella uttryck och socialt liv i och utanför institutionella sammanhang.

Här ger arton forskare som alla varit doktorander till professor Karin Aronsson sin beskrivning av olika former av vardagliga fenomen. Det handlar om hur människor i olika sammanhang samspelar och skapar mening. Gemensamt för de författare som bidrar i boken är att de är eller har varit doktorander vid Institutionen Barn och tema Kommunikation, vid Linköpings universitet. Sedan mitten av 1980-talet har institutionen erbjudit en dynamisk forskningsmiljö för personer med intresse för samtal, kulturella uttryck och socialt liv i och utanför institutionella sammanhang.