Anne-Li Lindgren

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.

Gender and Generation in Swedish School Radio Broadcasts in the 1930s: An Exploratory Case Study

This paper proposes a method for studying historical radio dialogues with participating children. It is an in-depth method focusing on the interaction in dialogues and the aim is to get an understanding of discursive change in a historical perspective, and more specifically how radio dialogues can be understood as sites for negotiations on citizenship norms and values. The focus is on changed notions of gender and generation. Choice of topic, turn taking, and the distribution of questions and answers are analyzed as parts of an ongoing struggle between power relations in which contemporary gender and generational orders were challenged. Thus, the staring point is Critical Discourse Analysis but it is applied on historical material and adapted to radio dialogues. The argument put forward is that the method presented can increase the understanding of how notions of gender and generation have been challenged in everyday practices, here in the form of everyday radio dialogues with participating children. The highly politicized but non-commercial public school broadcasts gave children a voice as competent and active citizens in new ways, and especially in programs produced by female teachers. In particular, these programs transgressed traditional boundaries concerning notions of gender and generation and thus understandings of childhood.

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’.

Towards an ethics of sexuality – alternative feminist figurations and a (boy) child: a close reading of a prize-winning sex education manual from the early twentieth century

ABSTRACT Sex education has been a major concern that has run in parallel with the creation of the modern concept of childhood (innocence) in Western societies. When priests opposed sex education for children, teachers and physicians advocated the need for education. In Sweden, in the early twentieth century, two female physicians wrote a prize-winning manual about sex education. In this paper, I present a close reading of the manual with a focus on how the (boy) child and (mother) woman were presented. The analysis aims to read the manual in three ways pointing to how it communicated resistance to otherings of the female body: (i) one reading focusing on how the female and (boy) male bodies were imagined, (ii) a second reading informed by Freudian theory and, (iii) a third reading guided by contemporary feminist studies which highlight, among other topics, the importance of investing in a representation of femininity defined by women. I will show how the authors gave an alternative interpretation of the mother–child-father relationship compared to Freud, and that they did so by writing their bodies into the text. The analysis shows how a striving towards an ethics of sexuality, including gender equality, have been part of the sex education genre for many years, and can serve as an inspiration today.

Materializing fiction: teachers as creators of play and children as embodied entrants in early childhood education

ABSTRACT This paper presents an in-depth analysis of verbal and visual presentations of a Swedish version of a pedagogy of play as presented in educational broadcasts during the early 1990s and late 2000s. The analysis shows how fiction materializes discursively and through material props in the play activities and how fiction becomes an agentive force making both human and non-human bodies act in new ways. Thus, when the fictional and real mingle in materializations, new ways of being and becoming in adult–child relations are made possible. It is argued that professionals take positions as insecure and vulnerable players being looked at by the children, and the children take positions as engaged onlookers of the professionals’ play. In the concluding discussion, the implications for how adult–child relations are played out in new and complex ways, potentially transforming traditional dichotomous understandings of adult–child relations and positions in preschool, are further developed.

The Ontological Choreography of (Good) Parenthood

The aim of this study is to unpack the notion of family togetherness as constitutive of good parenthood during visits to child cultural establishments like amusement parks, theme parks and children’s museums. The analyses challenge earlier assumptions of intensive family togetherness – such as closeness, spending time together and cohesion – by showing how togetherness is being done through the interdependence of proximity and distance. The study illustrates how good parenthood is made up of heterogeneous material and non-material entities such as patience, waiting, trust, wallets, mobile phones, age and the like; what is here called “the ontological choreography of (good) parenthood”. The article draws on theories of doing family, making parents and family practice.

Stereotypes at Work in Classroom Interactions : Pupils Talk about the Police in School Cinema Activities in Sweden

The empirical investigation in this paper develops the perspective of media in education by focusing on how the use of film in education stimulates the production of cultural, societal and social values and norms in school when pupils talk about “the police” in school cinema activities in Sweden. “Police” is regarded as a keyword and stereotype and the analysis focuses on how difference is created and negotiated between pupils and between pupils and teachers. Moreover, the paper highlights how acknowledging or disavowing difference is used by the pupils to position themselves. The result suggests that pupils create the police as negative and positive sign to gain position as: (1) included in a welfare society and (2) as problem solvers in the classroom (and society).

Childhood re-edits: challenging norms and forming lay professional competence on YouTube

This article presents the initial findings of research into how YouTube culture can become an arena for young YouTube videographers to remodel mainstream, sub-cultural, and media content (YouTube clips, music, film content, and viral memes). We juxtapose analyses from both media and child studies to look at the ways in which preferred images and notions of the “good” and idyllic childhood are re-edited into a possible critique of the prescribed Swedish childhood. Also, we look at ways in which these media-literate actors use YouTube to display their skills in both media editing and social media “savvy.” We discuss how “lay” professional competence in digital culture can be inherent in a friction between popular (childrens) culture and social media production, where simultaneous prowess in both is important for how a mediatised social and cultural critique can emerge.