Noora Pyyry

‘Sensing with’ photography and ‘thinking with’ photographs in research into teenage girls' hanging out

In this paper, I approach photography as a multisensory practice that can deepen participant engagement in youth research. I argue that this engagement opens up possibilities for embodied reflection. I focus on the creative potential of both ‘sensing with’ photography and the event of ‘thinking with’ photographs by discussing two inter-connected methods: photo-walks and photo-talks. The insights are based on my research into the ways in which teenage girls live and hang out with their urban environments. My thinking draws on writings within material or ‘post-human’ geographies, non-representational theory and participatory research.

Learning with the city via enchantment: photo-walks as creative encounters

In this paper, I approach learning as a process of rethinking the world that happens via the surprising experience of “enchantment.” This process becomes possible by dwelling, that is, by forming meaningful multisensory engagements with ones surroundings. I present my arguments by discussing photo-walks that students conducted in Helsinki as part of a geography-learning project. During the photo-walks, learning happened with the spaces of hanging out. In contrast to common understandings of learning, this learning with the city is non-instrumental: it is making the familiar unfamiliar by paying attention to the particular in everyday spaces. Methods such as photography are understood as creative encounters that can help in re-cognizing the world and fostering ones ethical sensitivity.

Geographies of Hanging Out: Connecting Everyday Experiences with Formal Education

The above quote is from a participant’s evaluation of a project carried out in the spring of 2013 in Helsinki, Finland, as part of a ninth-grade geography course. The aim of the project, ‘Geographies of hanging out’, was for the young people to reflect on their spaces and practices of hanging out, and to produce new understandings of their home city. The quote suggests that the girl was moved by the project, that the experience was somehow affectual. The feeling that geography can be fun is essential here, since in this chapter I approach learning as something that becomes possible through being meaningfully engaged with a process of working collaboratively. To do this, I will talk about mental mapping by young people of their hanging out and places that matter to them in the city. Rather than treating the mental maps produced by the participants as complete representations of their everyday geographies, I understand them as mappings. Conceptualised in this way, maps are spatial practices that are transitory and fleeting; they are never finished (Kitchin and Dodge, 2007). The emphasis is, therefore, on the process of exploring, drawing and learning together, rather than on any clearly assessable outcomes. When space is left for improvisation and mapping takes place within an atmosphere of friendship, the fear of making mistakes is reduced and learning can be fun.

More-than-human playful politics in young people’s practices of dwelling with the city

Abstract This paper is a conceptual argument for more-than-human playful politics in young people’s practices of spending their free time in the city. Reworking of urban space happens in a mode of playful experimentation and emerges from human-material encounters in the city: it arises from ‘dwelling with’. This understanding grants agency to the material world and has consequences to how we conceptualize everyday politics. Spatial reworking in ‘dwelling with’ is a more-than-human endeavor in which the city plays an active part: it is joint-participation. When young people are playfully engaged with the city, they are open to being differently with ordinary things and spaces. Openness to difference cultivates meaningful being-in-the-world and makes it possible to rework the city through new associations. Events of reworking become political in certain landscapes. Everyday spatial politics, then, is not always ‘serious business’ of political coordination – it can also arise from spontaneous intra-active play with the city.

Thinking with broken glass: making pedagogical spaces of enchantment in the city

Abstract In this paper, I explore thinking that happens in children’s meaningful engagement with the city. To open up my argument, I discuss two events during which children are caught up in intra -active play with things and spaces. I argue that this mode of being joyfully engaged with one’s surroundings is key to what Jane Bennett (2001) calls enchantment. This experience can be described as a sudden moment of wonder-at-the-world: it is an inspiring event, of being moved by something. It is a disruption that can open up new reflection. Because enchantment is highly affectual, it deepens one’s engagement with the world: it fosters dwelling with. By this, I refer to making a home for oneself in the world, with the world. I approach this engagement and thinking with an acknowledgement of the capacity of the material and non-human world to provoke effects in human bodies: things and spaces thus take part in meaningful everyday encounters that make dwelling with possible. This more-than-human understanding allows for alternative ways of conceptualizing learning. Clean-cut categorizations such as ‘learner’, ‘urban’, ‘nature’, and so on become problematic, and learning is re-conceptualized as an ongoing, non-linear and rhizomatic event in which knowing and being are always tied together. While playing, children are open to the unexpected: they are dwelling with the city and take part in creating new pedagogical spaces of enchantment.

Geographies of Hanging Out: Playing, Dwelling and Thinking with the City

In this paper, I approach thinking as something that takes place in playful encounters with the city: it is then always connected to doing. New reflection emerges in everyday action with everything that comes together in a given event. This understanding is based on a posthuman acknowledgement of the capacity of the material world to produce effects in human bodies: urban spaces take part in the event of hanging out, that is, they can make things happen. I focus my discussion on the possibilities for experimentation that hanging out in the city opens up. Because hanging out is wonderfully aimless, time and space is cleared for dwelling with the city, and then re-cognizing the world. To deliver my argument, I illustrate vignettes from a study on young people’s hanging out in San Francisco. By presenting the concept of hanging-out-knowing, I draw attention to the importance of young people having the time and space to be with their peers without strict plans and schedules.