How can we know about children’s everyday lives in a digitally saturated world? What is it like to grow up in and through new media? What happens between the ages of 7 and 15 and does it make sense to think of maturation as mediated? These questions are explored in this innovative open access book, which synthesizes empirical documentation of children’s everyday lives with discussions of key theoretical and methodological concepts to provide a unique guide to researching childhood and youth. Researching Everyday Childhoods begins by asking what recent ‘post-empirical’ and ‘post-digital’ frameworks can offer researchers of children and young people’s lives, particularly in researching and theorising how the digital remakes childhood and youth. The key ideas of time, technology and documentation are then introduced and are woven throughout the book’s chapters. Research-led, the book is informed by two state of the art empirical studies – ‘Face 2 Face’ and ‘Curating Childhoods’ – and links to a dynamic multimedia archive generated by the studies.The ebook editions of this book are available open access under a CC BY-3.0 licence on bloomsburycollections.com. Open access was funded by University of Sussex, UK.
Rachel Thomson is Professor of Childhood and Youth Studies at the University of Sussex, UK. Liam Berriman is Lecturer in Digital Humanities/Social Science at the University of Sussex, UK.Sara Bragg is a Senior Research Fellow in the Education Research Centre, University of Brighton, UK.
Foreword, David BuckinghamAcknowledgments 1. Everyday Childhoods: Time, Technology and Documentation, Rachel Thomson, Liam Berriman and Sara Bragg 2. Recipes for Documenting Everyday Lives and Times, Rachel Thomson with Susi Arnott, Lucy Hadfield, Mary Jane Kehily and Sue Sharpe 3. Protection, Participation and Ethical Labour, Rachel Thomson with Ester McGeeney 4. Spectacles of Intimacy: The Moral Landscape of Teenage Social Media, Liam Berriman and Rachel Thomson 5. Materialising Time: Toys, Memory and Nostalgia, Liam Berriman6. The Work of Gender for Children: Now You See It Now You Don’t, Rachel Thomson, Sara Bragg and Mary Jane Kehily 7. Tracing the Affects of Contemporary Schooling, Sara Bragg 8. Recipes for Co-Production with Children and Young People, Liam Berriman and Kate Howland with Fiona Courage 9. A Fellow Traveller: The Opening of an Archive for Secondary Analysis, Jette Kofoed 10. Researching as a Popular and professional Practice, Rachel ThomsonAppendix 1: The Story of the Study, Rachel Thomson Appendix 2: The Cast, Liam Berriman Glossary ReferencesIndex
From its opening pages, the leading authors guide us through a nuanced engagement with key theoretical ideas about contemporary technological change and the lives of young people subtly synthesised with rich and detailed empirical case studies. This book, set apart from the rest, is tender and responsive to both the participants and the data. It is insightful in quite profound ways. This is a book from which to learn and to change one's practice as a researcher and a social thinker.