Smruthi Bala Kannan
Dept of Childhood Studies, Rutgers University Camden
Why?
Health Hygiene and Sanitation Discourses
Ethnography with Children in School
Tamil Nadu, India
Why?
Dissertation titled ‘Clean Bodies in School’
What?
Exploratory and Subjective Map-making
How?
Prompts
Materials
Constraints
Theory
Children’s agency/voice
Navigation ---> Wayfinding ←-- Wayfaring
Critical Cartography
Questions
What do the children pay attention to?
How they decide on navigation?
How do they relate to their environment?
Object-Trails
Appadurai, Arjun. 1988. ‘The Social Life of Things: Commodities in Cultural Perspectives.’University of Cambridge Press.
Drazin, Adam. 2015. “To live in a materials world”. The Social Life of Materials: Studies in materials and society (ed. Adam Drazin and Susanne Küchler). NY and London: Bloomsbury. pg. 3-28.
Question: how do objects enter, move through, and exit children’s attention?
Prompt: Follow an object or a material through different trajectories.
Object-Trails
Time Layering
Lefebvre, H. (2004). Rhythmanalysis: Space, time, and everyday life (S.Elden, & G.Moore, Trans.). London: Continuum.
Question: how do different rhythms/cycles of bodies, institutions, and environmental entities interact in a place?
Prompt: 1) they create a timeline of their daily routine, 2) they chart out the everyday/or seasonal routine changes in a place
Time Layering
Emotion Mapping
Ahmed, Sara. 2004. The Cultural Politics of Emotion. Routledge.
Question: how do the children feel in different places?
Prompt: they map how they felt as individuals and as a group in different settings
Emotion Mapping
Conclusion
Research for Children/ on Children ----> Research with Children
