Childhood Publics and the Child’s Gaze is a three-part seminar series dedicated to thinking about the various aspects of children’s photography. In each of the three seminars, different speakers address the archival, aesthetic, ethical, legal, and technical challenges and opportunities that children’s photography creates in research and practice.
The second seminar recording, ‘children returning the gaze’, features Wendy Luttrell, Professor of Urban Education and Sociology at the Graduate Centre, The City University of New York, Melissa Nolas, Reader in Sociology at Goldsmiths, University of London, and Anne Chahine, Research Associate, Research Institute for Sustainability, Potsdam. Having as a starting point the question of what happens when we put cameras in the hands of children, the three speakers engage with the ways in which the child’s gaze disrupts public images of children and childhood. They also discuss the ways in which the child’s gaze might help us think afresh about childhood and photography. The second seminar was chaired by Brenda Herbert.
To connect with the Children’s Photography Archive on social media, the CPA is on Instagram and Twitter @ChildPhotoArch
You can also listen to the seminar recording on SoundCloud.
The speakers referred to several works during the session, including:
Wendy Lutrell
- The video that Wendy plays at the beginning of her talk can be found here (for more content from Wendy’s research, see also https://www.childrenframingchildhoods.com/); Wendy Lutrell’s book Children Framing Childhoods: Working-Class Kids’ Visions of Care.
- Elliot Haspel’s book Crawling Behind: America’s Child Care Crisis and How to Fix it
- In reference to Wendy’s post-covid provocation and the interdependence between children and adults, see Julie Spray’s article from 2023 Re-childing the COVID-19 pandemic; and what we lose from the un-childed public
Melissa Nolas
- The Connectors Study; see also the Connectors Study collection hosted in the Children’s Photography Archive
- Marcus Banks’ Visual Methods in Social Research
- Donna Harraway’s Staying with the trouble
- Metaphors we experiment with in multimodal ethnography, by Christos Varvantakis and Melissa Nolas (2019)
- Ariella Azoulay’s The Civil Contract of Photography
- Ben Highmore’s THE GREAT INDOORS: At home in the modern British house
- EU Kids Online 2020 survey
- Picturing What Really Matters: How photo-story research makes the personal, visible
- RE-VISIONING WOMEN AND SOCIAL CHANGE:: Where Are the Children?, by Barrie Thorne
- Gilles Deleuze’s Difference and Repetition
- Infinity Kisses I (Cluny), 1981-87, color photocopies on archival paper, 65 panels of 140 photographs by the artist
- Anne Chahine
- Shawn Wilson’s Research Is Ceremony: Indigenous Research Methods
- Establishing epistemic partnerships through letter-writing: Upcoming article: “It’s a bit like saying: I don’t see colour” – Unpacking Coloniality in Kalaallit Nunaat (Greenland) through Epistolary Collaborative Practice, by Laura Lennert Jensen and Anne Chahine
- Collaborative exhibition-making: Co-Creating Pluriversal Worlds: Reflections On The Virtual Exhibition Decolonial Movements in Kalaallit Nunaat (Greenland), by Laura Lennert Jensen, Vivi Vold, and Anne Chahine
- Future Memory Stories
- Roadmap to decolonial Arctic research
* W. E. B. Du Bois’ and the Idea of Double Consciousness; ‘Been’, ‘being’ and ‘becoming’ children, by Karl Hanson; Embracing the past: Linda Tuhiwai Smith’s 2019 Annual Lecture on Decolonizing Methodologies hosted by the Sociological Review were also works mentioned in the panel discussion.
The seminar series is organized by Sevasti-Melissa Nolas, Brenda Herbert, Zoe Walshe (all Goldsmiths, University of London) and Elina Moraitopoulou (Hamburg University/Aristotle University of Thessaloniki) and the Children’s Photography Archive. The events are part of the Sociological Review Seminar Series and have been funded by the Sociological Review Foundation.