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Other Objects: piercing childhood

The research context for this work was Carson & Miller's participation as co-applicants, steering group members and convenors of the ESRC funded seminar series, “Generating alternative discourses of childhood as a resource for educational policy making” (http://www.esrc.ac.uk/my-esrc/grants/RES-451-26-0948/read). Carson’s publication was designed to enhance the communication and exchange of ideas about the child and childhood between academic researchers working in education, psychology, art, visual and social anthropology, sociology and museum studies.

This work explores the remembrance of childhood experiences through objects, and the potential for these experiences to shape creative practice and to disrupt accepted narratives of infancy and early years. It draws on the concept of ‘difficult knowledge’ (Pitt & Britzman, 2006) in the context of childhood, relating this to ideas of the ‘uncanny’ in visual culture (particularly in reference to Royle, 2003).

The content of this 4,000 word publication was developed by stimulating dialogue through the exchange of objects and narratives. This approach builds on previous research involving collaborative game-playing and rule-making, and is informed by Deleuze’s (1990) concept of “the ideal game” and Turkle’s (2007) consideration of “evocative objects”.

The work contibuted to the fifth seminar in the series, facilitating interdisciplinary discourse about childhood (http://childhooddiscourses.wordpress.com/events-calender/seminar-5/). An ‘in conversation’ presentation took place between the Director of the V&A Museum of Childhood and the artists. This seminar was delivered to an invited audience that included education policy makers, education theorists, social workers, health practitioners, creative practitioners and postgraduates.

The work was disseminated to an international academic audience in the paper Telling Each Other, Telling the World at the conference Personal Story & Public Appearance, at Tilburg University, Netherlands (28–29 September 2012), and continues to be available online through both the ESRC and the seminar series websites.