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ABSTRACT
We take on the challenge posed by Horton and Kraftl [2006. “What Else? Some More Ways of Thinking and Doing ‘Children’s Geographies’.” Children’s Geographies 4 (1): 69–95, 71.] that research be ‘slowed down’ through methodological and theoretical routes to acknowledge seemingly trivial details in children’s lives. Based on an ethnographic study in an Australian preschool focusing on children’s place-making in a globalizing world, this paper discusses one event in the home corner to exemplify what we understand as and how we enact methodological slowness. The event is revisited by recognizing the role of the unexpected, the troubling and paying attention to data that overspills the research engagement in conducting ‘ideally preset qualitative research’. Research engagements not only reflect but also produce children’s lives. Researching ‘the global’ is ‘doing the global’ as the frames, practices and traditions of research itself are part and parcel of the so-called answers we produce. As result, a more nuanced and complex understanding of how ‘the global’ is made and circulated by children surfaces.
Disclosure statement
No potential conflict of interest was reported by the authors.
Notes
1 A home corner is an area separated usually in any preschool to play with miniature home equipment and enact stories of family life.
2 In New South Wales, Australia, preschools are state or community provisioned and operate during the same hours as schools, from 9 am to 3 pm. Dominantly four but also three years old children are enrolled for a couple of days during the week. They teach the national early learning curriculum and are nationally regulated. Preschools are generally small, including a few teaching rooms with about 20-25 children in each who are taught and cared for by two educators (one educator is either a four-year university-trained teacher or three-year diploma (which is gained at a technical and further education institution)-trained educator and another educator who has six-months-long certificate of child care).
3 For example, the special issue edited by Horton, Kraftl, and Tucker (Citation2008); children being caught up in research by Pyer (Citation2008); rhythmanalysis of school journeys by Kullman and Palludan (Citation2011); about the banality of everyday by Rautio (Citation2013); emotional events that ‘haunt’ and return in research by Hadfield-Hill and Horton (Citation2014) and openness, messiness and ongoingness by Pyyry (Citation2015) to list but a few who engaged with the challenge in this journal.
4 The ‘I’ engaged in the actual research per se is the first author. However, this paper is a result of collaboration between both authors: of reconfiguring, retheorising and re-analysing in retrospect the events the first author and her research participants had gone through.
5 I do not want to propose a scale-based view of space here, rather argue that popular views on children’s engagements with the world use these limiting notions of place. I am rather in agreement with Massey’s (Citation1991) approach, who proposed a relational view of space where space is bound into local and global networks that act to configure particular local places (Massey Citation1991, 29).
6 Children’s names are real names and they and their families have chosen to use those in publications.
7 Ingold draws on C. Wright Mills’ idea of ‘intellectual craft’ in this concept. As a researcher tries to make sense of a situation, they use different concepts and theories to test whether the situation is resolved. In this process, there is no hard line between research, life, theory and methods; they come together as a whole person in a form of an intellectual craft.
8 See further on how socio-economic expectations and policies around educational care are actually shaping the preschool space in Gallagher (Citation2013).