Collections – Children's Photography Archive

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apostolos — Tue, 28 Sep 2021 21:51:03 +0000

Here you can browse the entire archive.

The Social Life of Chores: Rethinking Work in Childhood

apostolos — Sun, 20 Mar 2022 23:54:23 +0000

The Social Life of Chores: Rethinking Work in Childhood was a postdoctoral research project by Barbara Turk Niskač funded by the Slovene Research Agency (Z6-1881) that ran from August 2019 to July 2021. The project explored conceptualizations of the daily work and play/leisure of primary school children in a rural and urban setting in Slovenia using semi-structured interviews with parents and grandparents, as well as participatory photography and photo elicitation interviews with children. Five grandparents (two men and three women), 23 parents (19 mothers and four fathers), and 26 children (12 girls and 14 boys) between the ages of five and fifteen participated in the study. In total, the elementary school children took 1068 pictures, each of them taking between 12 and 178 pictures. The study was a continuation of a doctoral dissertation entitled Playing at Work, Working at Play: Ethnographic Study of Learning in Early Childhood (2016), which examined the intersection of work and play among preschool children based on ethnographic fieldwork in two kindergartens in 2010, 2011, and 2013. It used participant observation and video ethnography in the kindergartens, semi-structured interviews with educators, parents, and grandparents, and participatory photography and photo elicitation interviews with children ages three to six, and selected parents and educators.

For the postdoctoral study, children were asked to take pictures of how they spent their days after school, including homework, extracurricular activities, hobbies, play, leisure and participation in daily work within the family. From 1068 pictures, Barbara selected 183 pictures to include in the Children’s Photography Archive. Since it was not originally intended for project photographs to be archived with the CPA, additional permissions from parents and children were sought and only pictures from participants who had additionally given consent for their pictures to be presented in the CPA were selected.

The aim of the project was twofold. First, it examined how children actively make meaning through their everyday engagement in work that take place in the family setting. Second, it examined how specific conceptualizations of work and play/leisure are related to different cultural contexts (urban vs. rural) and political and socioeconomic circumstances (from the predominant agricultural domestic economy in the first half of the 20th century to post-World War II socialist Yugoslavia to today’s post-socialist neoliberal economic system) and how these different conceptualizations manifest in children’s daily lives across generations.

The primary school children in this study viewed work as an activity that is an obligation, an activity that requires following someone’s instructions, and that is often boring. In this regard, school was often associated with work, although some children also viewed school work as fun and interesting. Play, on the other hand, was understood as an activity that one does out of inner motivation, an activity where one can do what one wants and have fun. However, the categories of work and play were not clear-cut. They classified activities subjectively, depending on how they felt about doing them. Thus, driving a tractor or harvesting potatoes could be perceived as play, while practicing the clarinet for music school could be perceived as work.

More info on the project can be found here: https://isn2.zrc-sazu.si/en/programi-in-projekti/the-social-life-of-chores-rethinking-work-in-childhood and here: https://antropologijaotrostva.zrc-sazu.si/en/anthropology-of-childhood-2/

Open Theme

apostolos — Mon, 21 Dec 2020 14:44:07 +0000

Our ‘open theme’ collection is made up of submissions we receive from children and young people on a rolling basis. As the title suggests, the theme is open and children and young people are invited to submit their image-making experiments through this theme.

The photographs in this archive are licensed under the Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivatives 4.0 International License. If you would like to use the deposited photographs in academic (research and teaching) and other not-for-profit work you are welcome to. We ask only that you acknowledge the archive and provide a link to it.

You can acknowledge the archive and the ‘open theme’ collection in any writing, presentations or other dissemination or teaching activity with the following sentence: ‘The photographs analysed/presented [delete/replace as appropriate] were sourced from the Children’s Photography Archive ‘s Open Theme Collection’.

It would be great if you could let us know where/when you have used this collection in your research. We also welcome reflective blog posts about using this or any other collection.

CLAN – Children-Animals Friendships

apostolos — Sat, 14 Aug 2021 15:39:41 +0000

CLAN – Children-Animals Friendships: challenging boundaries between humans and non-humans in contemporary societies, is a research project funded by FCT, the Portuguese Science and Technology Foundation [PTDC/SOC 28415/2017] that explores the relationships between children and companion animals, in the context of family and domestic life. Running between 2018 and 2022, the project asks whether children-animal practices challenge interspecies barriers, fostering more cooperative relationships with the nonhuman world. Such practices are taken within the wider context of family practices, namely parental education styles, as well as their relationships with material culture, at home. Between October 2019 and July 2020, we visited 24 Portuguese, middle-class, urban families, living in the Lisbon Metropolitan Area. Families were chosen according to double criteria: living with one or more children aged 8-14; living at least with one dog or one cat, for at least 6 months. This last criterium was meant to address the fact that dogs and cats are most prevalent in Portuguese families, according to the pet industry. Other species could, nevertheless, add up to it. Putting in place a qualitative multimethod approach, we resorted to in-depth interviews, participant observation, visual methods and photo-eliciting interviews. Fieldwork developed in two stages. Firstly, we interviewed both the child and the parent; animals were observed, as were their interactions with children. Secondly, we selected 12 of the 24 children, to whom we offered a photo camera and asked to take pictures of their pets in the following two weeks. Children were asked to put themselves “in the paws” of their pets, and try to describe visually “how is it to be an animal in this/my home?” In 2020, the Covid-19 pandemics hit the CLAN project, delaying the second phase of fieldwork, and clearly impacting the results. The main difference was that families were now obviously spending much more time at home, hence in the company of their animal companions, either in lockdown, or working or studying remotely. This clearly changed the dynamics with the companion animals, their expectations on their humans’ company and behaviour, and even the composition of the household. Between phases one and two, some families faced grief for the death of their pet, other adopted one (more) pet, and almost all families developed new routines of work and home living, which also included animals. Therefore, quite unexpectedly, CLAN opened a window to peek into the shared lives and vulnerability of children and their companion animals during such unexpected times, marked by the collective trauma of impending disease, death and grief, spatial lockdown and freedom restriction. During the two weeks of the exercise, which unfolded in June and July of 2020, the 12 children took 762 pictures. We then sat together and, through a photo-eliciting interview, asked the children to talk about the exercise, the photos, and explain the context in which they had been taken. We didn’t ask children to give a title to each photo. However, children did talk extensively about their pets’ preferences, personalities, loves and hates, as well as the context of the picture itself. We use in vivo excerpts of their discourses as contextual captions to the pictures. When this information is lacking, we ourselves explained the context of the photo; these cases are identified within [square brackets]. As the CPA was not initially planned as part of CLAN’s methodology, we asked for children’s and parents’ specific consent to use their work for this purpose. Participants were anonymized, which implied excluding almost all photos that specifically identified children by showing their faces. For the purpose of this archive, all photos were tagged according to a pre-given list of tags used in the Archive, to which we added another three tags, most frequent in our sample and which were not yet included in the list: laptop; posing for the picture/staged photo; chilling out/ resting. Of the total corpus of 762 photos, we selected 131 to be part of the Children Photography Archive (CPA). In this selection, we followed a two-step criterion: firstly, we kept all photos chosen by the children themselves, during during the photo-eliciting interviews; secondly, we kept the photos that better portrayed the lives of animals in that particular home and family, from our researcher’s point of view. This meant following the thread of a Weberian ideal-type approach, some families giving more insight than others into some topics. Picturing children’s lives with pets across practices of feeding, bathing, walking, playing or sleeping, we hope that this sub-sample contributes to our sociological imagination around “how is it to be a pet in a Portuguese middle class home”. Among the themes that run across children’s visual accounts of the lives of their pets, we find domestic themes, linked to practices of care: bathing, feeding, sleeping, taking to the vet, walking. But also themes in which the children and their pets go out of the private sphere, and meet public life through contact with street cat colonies, adoption of free roaming cats or dogs, playing in the street/outside, walking in the neighbourhood, or going out in nature, e.g. for a swim at the beach or in the lake. We also find that children’s animal worlds are inclusive, made not only of “their own” pets, but rather of all animals that are part of a wider personal network made of neighbours, family, friends, colleagues at school. Three members of the CLAN team worked on this specific task for the CPA: Verónica Policarpo (PI, coordination, photo selection, validation and consolidation, presentation of research), Joana Catela (post-doc researcher, photo analysis, classification/tagging and selection, interview analysis to retrieve children’s quotes, translation of quotes) and Clara Venâncio (junior researcher, database organisation and preparation, photo classification, interview analysis). The photo-eliciting interviews were conducted by Verónica Policarpo (PI), Vasco Ramos (former post-doc researcher), and Henrique Tereno (former junior researcher). More info on the project’s website: https://humananimalstudies.net/en/clan/

Connectors Study

apostolos — Mon, 21 Dec 2020 14:43:04 +0000

A collection of 880 photographs from the ERC Connectors Study (2014-2019) taken by children aged 5-9 in Athens, Hyderabad, and London. The Connectors Study explored the relationship between childhood and public life, focusing on children’s encounters, experiences and engagement with politics broadly defined. Children participating in the study were given digital cameras by researchers to take photographs of things that mattered to them, things they cared about and which they felt were important to share with researchers and the wider world. A selection of these photographs can be found below. One of the classification systems that is used in the CPA for this and other collections (see filter ‘photo contents’) below emerged from the 880 photographs from the Connectors Study and is an example of user-led categorisation and curation. You can read more about the ERC Connectors Study here and access relevant publications here.

You can acknowledge the archive and collection in any writing, presentations or other dissemination or teaching activity with the following sentence: ‘The photographs analysed/presented [delete/replace as appropriate] were sourced from the Children’s Photography Archive ‘s ERC Connectors Study collection (ERC-StG-335514). The ERC Connectors Study explored the relationship between childhood and public life. The photographs were taken by children, aged 5-9, who were asked to take photographs of things in their everyday lives which mattered to them. In this paper/presentation [delete/replace as appropriate] the photographs are used to [state the aims / use of the images for your own work here]….’.

It would be great if you could let us know where/when you have used this collection in your research. We also welcome reflective blog posts about using this or any other collection.