Children's playful musicking: Peer culture within a day-care setting in Singapore

In the field of early childhood education, play has become synonymous with curriculum but is sometimes viewed narrowly as a pedagogical tool to enhance child development. However, it is known from a range of multidisciplinary work that child-initiated and child-guided forms and contexts of playing can offer rich insight into diversity in childhood(s), peer cultures and children's meaning-making. This article draws on an ethnographic study that was conducted in a full-day childcare centre in Singapore and focused on children's everyday world of self-initiated play, improvisation and peer culture. Specifically, it presents examples of songs and rhythmic chants created by a group of 4-year-olds . Such ‘musicking’ is a form of social play that illustrates children’s ways of teasing, relating with others and sense-making within their contemporary social world. The article argues for educators to look beyond the instrumental value of play in the preschool curriculum, inviting all to take some time to allow children's multifarious play activities to influence their adult sensibilities.

From Altered Function to Restriction of Life

This chapter traces the development of children and young people with neurodevelopmental disorders through their later childhood and teenage years. The pattern and severity of impairments in mental function influence their course over time. In addition, the courses fluctuate in response to a series of encounters with potentially harmful influences. Stigma is widespread in many cultures. Physical illness and injury and premature mortality are consequences of several psychiatric syndromes. Economic disadvantage is more frequent for families of disabled people and interacts with other family stresses. Transitions into school, peer cultures, puberty, work, and the virtual world of the internet all tend to take different forms for those whose brain functions are altered by comparison with the rest of the population. All these can be responsible for adverse outcomes of children and young people.

n00bs, Trolls, and Idols: Boundary-Making among Digital Youth

Young people are commonly thought to pursue their interests online without mind to issues of privacy, safety, or an awareness of their digital social environment. Yet, to date, few attempt to document other possibilities in practice in favor of risk-oriented research. Drawing on data collected from a one-year ethnographic study of an online gaming forum inhabited by youth and young adults, I show that participants employ discursive boundary-making strategies to cultivate a regulated social environment. By wielding emic cultural categories as they interact with their peers, the community supports new participants (n00bs), wards off harmful bullies (trolls), and upholds shared ideals (idols). This study will attempt to provide a more comprehensive understanding of how peer cultures emerge and operate online, and can do so in ways that are not necessarily risky or deviant but rather can promote civility.

‘In Virtual Space, You Will Never Die!’

This paper refers to a selected fragment in an ethnographic study on children’s subjectivization processes through digital technologies concerning children’s interaction with the digital world and how their different cultural tendencies reflect virtual space. Children’s digital world experiences, and their new media preferences have become an important part of their peer culture. Studies on children’s peer cultures and on the effects of technological devices on human beings commenced in the 1990s within various disciplines, for example, Aarsand studied children’s interest in computer games, while Turkle focused on human-machine relations. During the 2000s, virtual space changed the trajectories of those studies into other fields. However, studies focusing on people’s interaction with technology have rarely been directly related to children’s agency, or the sociology of childhood. Therefore, this research presents a new approach to childhood studies by using traditional concepts with changing perspectives. The main purpose of this study is to reveal how children’s peer cultures and also individual agencies have been shaped through digital technologies including online activities. For this whole study, various techniques were used to analyse children’s interactions with the virtual world by focusing on their opinions regarding technological development in the world. The parts selected for this paper are based on several clips of interviews, the topics of which are: freedom in virtual space in a comparison with real – virtual worlds on the basis of their limit(less)ness; the possible relations between humans and machines; the possibilities of surviving on ‘internetlessness’; children’s relations with online games according to social media preferences, and interaction with virtual spaces in general.

How A Hashtag Matters – Crafting Response(-Abilities) through Research-Activism on Sexual Harassment in Pre-Teen Peer Cultures

This paper examines what research with children can do and become when it intra-acts with a MeToo hashtag, creative methods, experiences of sexual harassment and the making and travelling of Valentine’s Day cards. The paper is grounded within a creative research-activist project, #MeToo Postscriptum, which aimed to address sexual harassment in pre-teen peer cultures. Analyzing the project, the paper explores how the idea of response-ability manifested in three space-times of the project, and how the material-discursive practices of the project reiteratively reconfigured the conditions of possibilities to respond, react, and act against abusive gendered and sexual child peer cultures. Mapping response-ability through our research endeavours helps theorize the contingent, complex, and entangled ways research-activist methodologies can activate change, enables us to envision response-able practices to counter sexual harassment in young peer cultures, and sensitizes us as scholars and educators to our responsibilities and accountabilities that become recrafted in response.

POLITICS IN SCHOOLGIRL DEBATING CULTURES IN ENGLAND, 1886–1914

ABSTRACTDebating was an important part of schoolgirls’ political education in late Victorian and Edwardian England that has been overlooked in the scholarship on female education and civics instruction. Debates offered middle- and working-class schoolgirls an embodied and interactive education for citizenship. Considering both the content of discussions and the process of debating, this article argues that school debates provided a unique opportunity for girls to discuss political ideas and develop political skills. Debates became intertwined with girls’ peer cultures, challenging contemporary and historiographical assumptions of girlhood apoliticism. Positioning girls as political subjects sheds new light on political change in modern Britain. Schoolgirl debates show how gendered political boundaries were shifting in this period. Within the unique space of the school debating chamber, girls were free to appropriate and subvert ‘masculine’ political subjects and ways of speaking. In mock parliaments, schoolgirls re-created the archetypal male political space of the House of Commons, demonstrating their familiarity with parliamentary politics. Schoolgirl debates therefore foreshadowed initiatives that promoted women's citizenship after partial suffrage was achieved in 1918, and they help to explain how the first women voters were assimilated easily into existing party and constitutional politics.

Moving with Touch: Entanglements of a Child, Valentine’s Day Cards, and Research–Activism against Sexual Harassment in Pre-Teen Peer Cultures

In this paper, we respond to feminist new materialist scholars’ calls to explore what research in the field of gendered and sexual violence can be, do, and become. This paper explores the microprocesses of change within the more-than-human child–card entanglements as part of our research–activist campaign addressing sexual harassment in pre-teen peer cultures. Drawing on one of our creative workshops, we generate three analytical readings that map touch. We focus, first, on the intra-action of bodies, objects, and abstractions that reconfigures painful experiences of harassment for recognition; second, on the affective charge in moments and movements of response and resistance; and third, on what else touch can become when it travels across time–space domains as part of our research–activism. Re-engaging with our research–activism, we propose that different kinds of touch converge into a sensing-feeling, inherently ethico-political, matter-realizing apparatus that reconfigures painful experiences of gendered and sexual harassment for recognition, response, and resistance. Connecting to feminist new materialist endeavors to envision and enact response-able research, we propose that ‘moving with touch’ helps us shed light on the microprocesses of change in generative ways—that is, in ways that recraft response-abilities and invite movement.