About the project

The Connectors Study was a comparative and multimodal ethnography of the relationship between childhood and public life, and especially the emergence of social action in childhood, organised around to aims and objectives: (1) providing rich data sources for making within and between country comparisons about the ways in which children encounter, experience and engage with public life; (2) generating theory on children’s participation from the bottom-up, that is anchored in diverse settings, including non-Western, and that takes advantage of the current rupture to established socio-economic realities to ask questions about the future of social action.

The study took place in three cities (Athens, Hyderabad, London) and the research team engaged with a total of 45 children, aged 6-9, and their families who brought a diverse range of familial, cultural, economic, racial, and ethnic experiences to the sample. The fieldwork took place from October 2014 until June 2017.  Fieldwork included between seven to nine formal data collection visits to each child and their family with each visit lasting from 2 hours to a full-day depending on child/family availability. We used a range of methods with the children (drawing, maps, interviews, participant observation, photography, walking tours) resulting in both textual and visual data, as well as generating extensive researcher fieldnotes. We have also formally interviewed parents, and informally discussed study themes with children’s significant others who have crossed our paths during the fieldwork (e.g. friends, grandparents, other family members, and school teachers or other professionals). Data have been analysed using both conventional approaches (e.g. thematic analysis supported by NVivo) as well as more post-qualitative approaches that focus on ethnographic moments and bring together different modes and media from the data collected. The project has produced 45 heterogeneous, rich and multimodal ethnographic biographies, and we have been writing and developing theory around the key concept of ‘childhood publics’ and children’s relationships to public life including how this might be mediated by idioms, play, talk, imagination, memory, and the non-human.

Beyond methodological and theoretical interventions into the literature on children’s participation, the study succeeded in developing a public engagement strategy that also contributed to the theory of childhood publics by working with the children in the study to create and co-curate a public exhibition, in common (London, November 2017; Hyderabad, December 2017; Athens, February 2018). Exhibitions focused on children’s photographs and photo-stories which were created by study children during the fieldwork; they also exhibited quotations from children about public and private life. Learning from the exhibition fed back into the analysis of the ethnographic case histories and of childhood publics. Following on from this initial experimentation with practices for inventing childhood publics, it is through the study that the world’s first ever children’s photography archive has been established. This is a major cultural intervention into discourses, practices and histories of childhood, childhood publics, children’s citizenship, and archival practice with and for children. The Children’s Photography Archive (a beta version) is currently being developed through further funding from the European Research Council. You can read about the CHILDPHOTOARCHIVE project here.

An archived version of our original and very popular project blog can be accessed here.

A full list of publications from the project can be found here.

Project team

From left to right: Vinnarasan Aruldoss (Research Fellow, Hyderabad); Claire Prater (Project Coordinator); Robyn Long (Research Assistant); Christos Varvantakis (Research Fellow, Athens); Melissa Nolas (Principal Investigator). Not pictured: Madhavi Latha (Research Assistant, Hyderabad).

The project team were supported by local research collaborators (Thalia Dragonas and Nelly Askouni, both National and Kapodistrian University of Athens, and Uma Vennam from SPMVV Tirupati), a scientific advisory group (Jo Moran-Ellis, University of Sussex; Johanna Motzkau, Open University; David Oswell, Goldsmiths College; Charles Watters, University of Sussex), and an ethics board (Gina Crivello (chair), Oxford University; Ilina Singh, Oxford University; Anna Fielder, Privacy International).

Funder

European Research Council (ERC-StG-335514).