Tobias Samuelsson

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.

Swift transport versus information gathering : telemedicine and new tensions in the ambulance service

Swift transport used to be the predominant way ambulance services provided care. During the past few decades, advanced information and communication technologies have increased the amount of patient information that ambulance crews can transmit to hospitals. The ambulance service has thus, in principle, been transformed from a swift transport unit into a complex information-gathering unit. The new telemedicine technologies available to crews are linked to demands concerning organizational changes and alterations in work procedures that challenge traditional ways of providing “good” ambulance care. In this article, we draw on both ethnographic observations and concepts from the field of science and technology studies to demonstrate how established work practices and complex local situations format the ambulance crews’ use of information-gathering technologies. We highlight how ambulance crews employ strategies of localization, including taming and deliberate nonuse of telemedicine technologies, to align these technologies with their established stance about how everyday ambulance care is best implemented.

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’.

Developing ecological literacy in a forest garden: children’s perspectives

ABSTRACT Today, cities become more dense, green spaces disappear and children spend less time outdoors. Research suggests that these conditions create health problems and lack of ecological literacy. To reverse such trends, localities are creating urban green spaces for children to visit during school time. Drawing on ideas in ecological literacy, this study investigates school children’s perspectives on a forest garden, a type of outdoor educational setting previously only scarcely researched. Data were collected through walk-and-talk conversations and informal interviews with 28 children aged 7 to 9. Many children in the study expressed strong positive feelings about the forest garden, the organized and spontaneous activities there, and caring for the organisms living there. We observed three aspects of learning in the data, potentially beneficial for the development of children’s ecological literacy: practical competence, learning how to co-exist and care, and biological knowledge and ecological understanding.

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.