What makes me happy, and what makes me scared? An analysis of drawings made by Norwegian and Palestinian children

Abstract

In this article, we present and discuss a project in which children in two different environments, in Palestinian refugee camps in Lebanon and in the south-eastern part of Norway, were given the opportunity to express themselves through drawings. We investigate how differently – and how similarly – the children express themselves when they were given the same task. We invited 48 children to draw two pictures each with the topics:

1. What makes you happy?

2. What makes you scared?

Our research questions are:

1. How similar (or how different) are the representations of happiness and fear in the drawings of the two groups of children?

2. Will there be patterns in the representations inside each group of children?

We concentrate on what the children's drawings represent, and do not make detailed analyses of the children's drawing style. The theoretical basis for our study is social semiotics.

Keywords:

• children's drawings
• social semiotics
• ideational metafunction
• context of culture
• context of situation