Anna Sparrman

Video recording as interaction: participant observation of children's everyday life

This article investigates methodological and analytical implications of video-based techniques for conducting participant observations with children (6–8 years of age). Video-based data are used to illustrate arguments concerning how children use different interaction strategies while being observed with a video camera. It is also argued that visual recordings constitute a source of knowledge in their own right. Hence, a strong claim is made concerning the importance of researchers reflecting upon recording procedures. The article also offers a discussion of some methodological issues that play a crucial role in video recording young childrens peer interactions. The article emphasizes the need to attend to and reflect on all components of the research process, including procedures for data collection and visual analysis, as well as how the visual material is reproduced in the written text.

Ambiguities and paradoxes in children's talk about marketing breakfast cereals with toys

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

Film as a political and educational device: talk about men, male sexuality and gender among Swedish youth

This article explores how upper secondary school pupils (16–18 years of age) talk about sex trafficking in mixed‐gender groups after having seen the Swedish film Lilya 4‐ever directed by Lukas Moodysson. An initiative to show the film during school hours was taken by the Swedish government in July 2003. The aim was to promote gender equality and decrease the sex trade. A video ethnographic study was undertaken in three media classes during film viewing and teacher‐led follow‐up discussions. The present article, drawing on critical discourse analysis, visual culture and positioning theory, demonstrates how pupils approach close‐up scenes of sexual abuse primarily by talking about men and male sexuality. Female and male pupils collaborate with teachers to construct men and male sexuality as an extensive structural problem in society with no hope for change. The analyses also show how gender differences are constructed in classroom interactions around the film.

Enacting (real) fiction: Materializing childhoods in a theme park

Even though fiction and fantasy are fundamental to how childhoods today are understood, this is a topic that is seldom explored either theoretically or academically. We address the question of how the relationship between material real and fictive real can be understood in new ways in contemporary society. We suggest that fiction can be understood in other ways than the hitherto dichotomized approaches to it, and our aim is to focus on the hybridity that is created through the interconnecting word and, as in fiction and childhood and material real and fictive real. This article explores how fiction can be understood as hybrid and interrelated rather than a pure and separate phenomenon, and in particular how materiality as something real and fiction as real mingle. This article introduces ways to talk about the fictive real as realunreality and highlights the drawbacks that might stem from these concepts since in several ways they re-enact childhood innocence and nostalgia, as well as negative differences between childhood and adulthood, where different childhoods share a subordinate position in society.

Towards a critical approach on children and media

Throughout the 1990s, we have seen an increasing amount of research that approaches children as competent agents in society. Children have simultaneously been constructed as such by the commercial market, consumer research, and media research and even at the policy level in the UN Convention on the Rights of Children and in school curricula (Buckingham, 2007; Cook, 2005; Gee, 2003; Sparrman, 2008). Despite the fact that the competent child has become a common way of viewing children, it can be seen how this stance is concurrent with approaches in which children are viewed as naı̈ve, innocent and in need of protection (Buckingham, 2000). Approaching children as either competent or as innocent and in need of protection generates, for instance, generational dilemmas. This can be seen in regard to children’s actual consumption of new media, one argument being that children are the first to know and the last to understand (Miller, 2006), i.e. children need protection from computer games (cf. Arriaga, Esteves, Carneiro, & Monteiro, 2006; Ellneby, 2005; Kautiainen, Koivusilta, Lintonen, Virtanen, & Rimpelä, 2005), and the other being that they are more competent than adults in handling digital games (cf. Gee, 2003; Tapscott, 1998). As concerns media policy regulations, self-regulations and legislations relative to children, it is mainly the naı̈ve and innocent child in need of protection who is in focus. However, there is reason to questionwhat exactly it is wewish to protect children from? Toanswer suchaquestion,weargue thatwehave tomovebeyond thedichotomies createdby conceptions such as the competent versus the innocent child. Constructions of children as presumed innocents and as victims of media and consumption have been calledmoral panics (Cohen, 1972/1987; Critcher, 2003). On the one hand, moral panics stress young people’s incompetence and have a tendency to view children as a homogenous entity, lacking age, gender, ethnicity or class. Additionally, aspects such as time, place or situation seem to be of minor concern. On the other hand, moral panics also highlight some of the inconsistencies in viewing children as active and competent media users, because the whats, whens and hows of the competent child are often unreflected (Buckingham, 2000). This could be explained by the fact that the distinction between the innocent and competent child often makes relevant other contradictive dichotomies such as leisure and education, evil and good, low and high culture, dichotomies that simultaneously create distinctions between childhood and adulthood (cf. Aarsand, 2007b; Prout, 2005; Sparrman, 2002). By approaching media from the interdisciplinary research field of what we call Critical Child Studies, rather than through a specific medium such as television, intersections between policies, everyday practices, and notions of media, children and childhood are brought into focus. By Critical Child Studies we mean research that

Pog game practices, learning and ideology : Local markets and identity work.

The present study draws on ethnographic work in an after-school centre for 6 to 8 year-old children, focusing on visual culture and its role in children-s everyday interaction and informal learning ...

The ontological practices of child culture

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 children’s 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’.

Doing good parenthood : ideals and practices of parental involvement

This edited collection shows that good parenthood is neither fixed nor stable. The contributors show how parenthood is equally done by men, women and children, in and through practices involving di ...

Doing Good Parenthood

This edited collection shows that good parenthood is neither fixed nor stable. The contributors show how parenthood is equally done by men, women and children, in and through practices involving di ...

Introduction: Doing Good Parenthood

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 should be studied empirically and in context. Therefore, the particularities of Denmark and Sweden as contexts are briefly introduced. Finally, we argue that parenthood is to be understood in relation to childhood, and the doing of good parenthood should 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.