Methods: researching, after childhood

Although drawing on literatures and examples from a range of sources, the backbone of this book is a series of major, funded, original research projects about children and young people, their- everyday lives and their- environments. Whilst not initially conceived as such, these projects have several overlapping themes that mean that to all intents and purposes they constitute a programme of research about climate change, resources (especially energy), media and materialities. Whether singly or in combination, an original analysis of empirical materials from these projects informs all of the chapters in this book. Therefore, to aid reference and avoid repetition, I introduce the projects and their methodologies briefly below, alongside websites and/or relevant publications that provide further information.

The (Re)Connect the Nexus project (2016-2018) was a major 20-month research collaboration that aimed to examine children and young people’s (aged 10-24) experiences of and learning about the food-water-energy nexus in Brazil. The project involved a collaboration (established in 2014) between British-based human geographers and engineers and education scholars at Sao Paulo State University (UNESP) in Brazil. It sought to generate interdisciplinary insights into, and solutions for, the opportunities and threats faced by children and young people in relation to the environment and environmental resources (characterised as ‘resource-power’ in Chapter 2). In stun, we engaged with nearly 4,000 children and young people, living in the Metropolitan Region of Paraiba do Sul River-Basin and Sao Paulo State North Shore. The region - which sits between the major cities of Sao Paulo and Rio de Janeiro - was chosen because it is socially, economically and geographically diverse and faces a number of interrelating nexus ‘challenges’ (somewhat akin to the ‘intractable’ challenges discussed earlier). Home to 2.1 million people, it is on the face of it one of the richest areas of Brazil, crossed by the Via Dutra, the main highway between Sao Paulo and Rio de Janeiro. Thus, it is home to tourism (in the mountainous area around Campos do Jordao); to government, education and technology industries; and to a vast patchwork of agricultural landscapes - from valley-floor rice fields, to sugar cane farms producing both sugar for food and for bioethanol, to eucalyptus plantations from which paper is derived. However, upon digging deeper, the region is beset by inequalities - from informal and impoverished settlements in smaller cities that pale in comparison in scale with those in the major cities but that nevertheless suffer from many of the same problems to rural poverty in the agricultural regions and along the State’s North Shore (Litoral Norte). The challenges faced are therefore also diverse and intensify with climatic changes - soil degradation, landslides, flooding and. paradoxically, drought, all play a role in and intersect with children and young people’s everyday experiences of food, water and energy.

The project itself included four strands: qualitative research with 48 young people; semi-structured interviews with 64 key professionals from relevant sectors; a large-scale, in-depth survey with over 3,700 yormg people living in the region; and a global video competition (for more details, see Kraftl et al., 2019; for a list of prrblications on the second, third and fourth strands, see www.foodwaterenergynexus.com). The first (reported on in detail in this book) was a programme of in-depth research with 48 young people, aged 10-24. Young people were recruited though schools, workplaces, community groups and NGOs. and we ensured that - within the bounds of qualitative research - they were broadly representative in terms of gender and socio-economic status (using established Brazilian classifications to determine the latter). Research with each young person was intensive: an initial interview, taking between one and two hours, which explored then experiences of different elements of food, water and energy; use of a bespoke nexus smartphone app that asked young people to take geotagged photographs of and comment on aspects of food, water and energy that they encountered during their everyday lives; a follow-up interview (often multiple interviews) lasting sometimes several hours that discussed outputs from the app -most importantly in the production of an individual ‘visual web’ for each young person (see, for instance. Figure 3.4). During that latter stage, young people worked collaboratively with the researchers to choose photographs, place them onto a large sheet of paper and effectively create their own personal ‘nexus’ by drawing on connections and making other observations and illustrations as the conversations progressed. Most of the interviews were conducted in Portuguese, were audio recorded and were translated and fully transcribed before being subject to a detailed thematic analysis involving the whole team.

The Climate Action Network (2018-2020) involved an interdisciplinary collaboration across three countries (Canada, Australia and the United Kingdom) and was based within the feminist, new materialist, decolonising principles of the Common Worlds Research Collective (https://cornmonworlds.net/). As a whole, the network sought to imagine, co-construct and experiment with novel, alternative, perhaps ‘radical’ forms of environmental pedagogy. The focus was generally on younger children, although the Birmingham element (which I led) included work with children aged between 2 and 16. The project as a whole worked through the principle of developing a number of collaboratories, involving researchers, child-/youth-professionals (mainly teachers and day-care providers) in different sites in each country, which were to both provide ‘data’ for the project and also outlast the research. Each collaboratory was themed: the Birmingham theme -given the city’s rich industrial heritage (discussed in depth in Chapter 7) - was ‘ energy’. However, rather than focus only on conventional forms of energy education (i.e. technologies for producing or behaviours for saving energy), we adopted a very broad definition, including forms of embodied, emotional and material energies. Other themes included plastics, rain, trees, flooding and waste (see http://clirnateactionchildlrood.net/).

The collaboratories all took different forms, but the key driver was an elision of collaboration with experimentation (the ‘laboratory’ element of the neologism ‘collaboratory’). Each university team engaged in a long-term relationship with a key educational site. In Birmingham, we worked with St Paul’s Community Development Trust (www.stpaulstrust.org.uk/). The Trust was established in 1973, in Balsall Heath, an area of largely terraced housing, fairly near the city centre, that initially housed workers in Birmingham’s large industrial economy in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. Today, the residents of Balsall Heath are rather different. As a result of other forms of energy - Birmingham being a key locus for immigration during the mid- and late-twentieth century - more than 50% of the population are British South Asian, and particularly of Pakistani descent. The area is also very young in demographic terms - more than 45% are aged under 25, which is far higher than the national average. And Balsall Heath also experiences fairly high levels of socio-economic deprivation - a key indicator being that unemployment (in 2019) sat at over twice the UK average, at 18%.

As a community-based and voluntarily run organisation, the Trust works and has worked to provide educational services and support for the residents of Bal-sall Heath. At the time of writing, it ran several nurseries and day-care centres, a secondary school for young people (largely teenage boys) who had been excluded from mainstream schools because of behavioural, emotional or social differences (BESD), a city farm and a canal boat. Aside from the secondaiy school, which took referrals from across the city, the Trust’s sites were intended to be centred around the needs of local residents. We worked with the Trust’s management and with professionals at each site - as well as with children themselves -to develop a series of activities on the broad theme of ‘energy’. These included several ‘energy walks’ around Balsall Heath, which encouraged children and young people to think about the energy-related challenges facing the area; artistic activities (mainly with younger children), involving painting, throwing, sculpting and making, which sought to explore magnetic, kinaesthetic and gravitational energies; workshops at a local science museum and the use of a number of kits and resources to make alternative energy ‘technologies’, such as wind turbines and solar panels; visits to other key sites across the city, including an exemplar ecohouse and a geological museum; opportunities for free play, imagination and the generation of “speculative fabulations” (Haraway, 2011; see Chapter 7); and, more formal, classroom-based sessions, including opportunities for reflection, questioning and feedback. Although working in somewhat of a post-qualitative frame and thus questioning the status of‘data’ as such, we collected materials and took detailed ethnographic observations of and reflections from ottr work over the period of a year, even though our engagement with the Trust exceed that period. In all, we worked intensively with 49 children dining that time (19 from the playschemes and nurseries, 30 from the secondary' school).

The (Re)Inhabiting the City project was a year-long (2018) collaboration between human geographers, architects and planners at the University of Sào Paulo (USP, Brazil) and the universities of Nottingham and Birmingham (UK). The main aim was to explore the opportunities and challenges of ‘temporary urban interventions’ for dealing with perceived vacancy and dereliction in the urban core of Sào Paulo and cities like it. As Chapter 4 outlines in more detail, we worked in the neighbourhoods of Luz and Santa Ifgênia. Both are close to the city centre and well connected through the city’s bus and subway networks; but both suffer from high levels of socio-economic deprivation, drug use, informal (and sometimes illegal) squatting and physical dilapidation, meaning that many of the twentieth-century apartment blocks characteristic of the areas (Figure 4.3) are abandoned and in a state of disrepair. Drawing on the work of Andres (2012) and Madanipour (2018), we critically analysed the potential for temporary uses - like a container theatre, benches, picnic tables, table tennis tables, play equipment - to ‘enliven’ these spaces.

Thus, we were interested in the capacity for more minor interventions than formal attempts at regeneration or gentrification - that worked from the bottom up with support from the city municipalities (the Prefeitura de Sào Paulo) to encourage ruban residents to be present, to interact and to use public spaces.

Although the team did not directly work with children, matters concerning children and young people cut across the project in various ways - from observations of children’s play in what was a challenging place to grow up, to the installation of play equipment, to the wider demographic context that these are (even in Brazilian terms) demographically ‘young’ neighbourhoods. Methodologically, we worked together to develop observational methods and post-occupancy analyses that drew on established methods from our respective disciplines: ethnographic observations and note-taking; measurements of light intensity, sound levels, heat and humidity; quantifications of pedestrian and other traffic; land-use mapping; sketching and photography. These methods were developed over a six-month period and focused upon particular carefully chosen sites in Luz and Santa Ifgénia (both with and without temporary interventions).

The Plastic Childhoods project (2018-2020) forms a major component of the empirical research and the conceptual work for this book. The project aimed to explore the many ways in which childhoods and plastics are ‘entangled’ in both historical and contemporary contexts. Although taking the form of an individual fellowship, the funding for the project enabled collaboration with artists, digital media analysts, environmental nanoscientists and schoolteachers, as well as with a core group of 13 young people at a secondary school in Birmingham. The 18-month project began shortly after the airing of the final episode of David Attenborough’s flagship Blue Planet II series on the BBC, which drew attention to the problem of plastics in the world’s oceans. Although framed by serious and multiple environmental and health concerns about plastics (see Chapter 9), the project sought to take a step back: to ask what were and are the ways in which children’s lives are implicated with plastics and to ask how these might be valued or judged in ways that are not necessarily all negative. The project comprised three components, two of which (the digital media analyses and biosampling), in then particular form and scope, had, at the time of the research, never before been attempted by childhood studies scholars and were thus, to my knowledge, entirely novel.

The digital media analyses (discussed in more detail in Chapter 5) involved interrogating posts on Twitter and a major online selling platform.² For Twitter, an Application Programming Interface (API) was used to ‘scrape’ for tweets related to childhood and/or plastics and/or the environment. In collaboration with Andrew, the digital methods specialist, I developed a lexicon of search terms that we refined as tweets were scraped in the fir st month of data collection, including a number of hashtags relating to relevant recent events (such as the #climatestrikes). The TwitteR R package was used to perform the scrape and then convert the data to .csv files. The files contained the text of the tweet, the user ID (not included in the book to preserve anonymity), date/time information and the number of retweets and favourites. Tweets were scraped between November 2018 and March 2019, yielding over 1.3 million tweets. From there, we analysed the data in a number of ways. In this book I focus on hashtag networks (visualisations of tweets and retweets, as in Figure 5.1); tweet density (a graphical depiction showing the intensity of tweets over time, as in Figure 6.3); and - acknowledging the challenges of doing so - a sentiment analysis of ‘positive’ and ‘negative’ tweets using the get_nrc_sentiment function from the syuzhet R package (see Chapter 5). In addition, after a detailed read through these tweets, the text of particular tweets was taken as indicative of particular debates, sentiments or material things.

For the online selling platform - and for what we termed ‘online archaeologies’ -a similar API was used to search for particular kinds of objects put up for sale. We concentrated very deliberately on a subset of objects that were stereotypically redolent of modem. Western (especially British) childhoods and with gendered nouns associated with them - such as toy cars and dolls. An initial scrape - which yielded similar results to the Twitter scrape in terms of text, users, etc. - was then refined into a number of thematic categories, guided in part by the online selling site’s interface (see discussion in Chapter 5), in part by the terms used by users in postmg objects for sale and in part via our own iterative analysis of obvious themes/categories we were finding (Table 5.1 provides an overview). In total, the scrapes yielded nearly 6.7 million items. After a detailed read through subsets of entries for each category, we chose particular objects for further analysis -capturing indicative examples for each category and sub-category and taking screenshots of images and text about the items for sale.

The biosampling work was part of a programme of interdisciplinary research in a local school in Birmingham. In collaboration with environmental nanoscientists, artists and teachers, we conducted intensive, post-qualitative and cross-disciplinary research with a group of 13 secondary school children, aged 11-15. The children opted to take part in the workshops - on ‘plastics’ - as their chosen enrichment session for the summer term of 2019 (April-July). Of the children who took part, eight were boys and five were girls. The school recruits from diverse areas of Birmingham and. although in such a small sample it is of course not possible to be representative, students came from very' different parts of the city, from diverse socio-economic backgrounds, and different ethnic groups (five were White British; the remainder were British Asian, although from families with ties to Iran, India and Pakistan).

The students took part in a programme of workshops that we co-developed with the school. Some of the workshops were fairly straightforward opportunities to learn about and discuss plastics - indeed, it transpired that in many cases, the students knew more than we did and were well versed on recent coverage about plastics (part of the reason they had chosen to take part in the project). Other-workshops required different forms of engagement, however. In one, we encouraged students to engage in a more tactile, material, multisensory way with plastics by attempting to sort them into different plastics (there are six mam types used in most forms of packaging) not only by sight and by technical markings but by the very feel of the plastics. In another (described in detail in Chapter 8), we worked with local artists. General Public, to create a series of ‘totem poles’ designed to disrupt our (and their) by-then established knowledges of and relationships with plastics. For another, we developed a bespoke Plastic Childhoods app (based on the (Re)Connect the Nexus app), which enabled students to take photos of and conunent on plastics they found in the course of their everyday lives, routines and movements around the city. The app activity was followed up with an interview, lasting around an hour, which took a similar form to the ‘visual web’ exercise undertaken with Brazilian young people.

The final, most groundbreaking (literally, in some senses) and also most controversial part of the workshops was the use of biosampling. After a nine-month process of obtaining ethical and risk assessment clearance (about which more details in Kraftl et al., forthcoming), all of the students were trained to take samples of tap water and soil, using standard equipment used by environmental scientists for the collection of environmental samples. In addition, some (but not all) of the students consented to give samples of breath (via an EBC or Exhaled Breath Condensate instmment) and urine. All of the samples were analysed at a laboratory at the University of Birmingham using Fourier-transfonn infrared spectroscopy (FTIR) and inductively coupled plasma mass spectrometry (ICPMS), which are able to determine - usually in parts per billion (ppb) - the presence of 27 elements (mainly metals) as well as plastics, as they circulate around, into, through and out of children’s environments and their bodies. Uniquely, as I discuss in Chapters 4 and 8, this offered a way to ‘decentre’ children - and to explore ‘entanglements’ of the bio and the social - in ways that are not only unprecedented in childhood studies scholarship but, at the tune of writing, had never been systematically used and analysed by even environmental nanoscientists themselves.

Beyond the digital methods and workshops, the Plastic Childhoods project provided resources and time for a systematic review of both academic and other literatures (including news coverage) about plastics, childhood and the environment, as well as of fascinating work in archaeologies of childhood. These materials were supplemented by secondary research for the Energy Beyond Technology project. The latter provided resources for a series of systematic reviews about academic research on, and key global case studies of, children’s engagements with energy - particularly beyond learning about sustainable energy technologies. Materials from these reviews are analysed throughout the book, but especially in Chapters 5 and 7.

Critically, in the Plastic Childhoods and other projects - and in accordance with Bogost (2012), whose work I discuss in depth in Chapter 8 - the intention was never, and should never be, to view engineering, or architectural, or digital media, or biosampling techniques as ‘solutions’, either to the questions posed about the status of childhood studies (e.g. Punch, 2019) or ongoing questions about the potential for new materialist and post-humanist methods to really ‘decentre’ childhoods (both discussed in Chapter 2). Rather, and again in line with my intention to think and do after childhood, they were used to carefully but significantly rephrase these questions: to ask what it might mean for children and childhoods to move in and out of focus, in arts of (not) noticing (Chapter 4). They also requir ed engagement in deep, detailed, time-consuming (in some cases more so than actually collecting the data), sometimes difficult, but always rewarding conversations, across disciplines, wherein it became clear, for instance, that the biosampling results only made sense in light of what we also knew about children’s everyday routines, mobilities and agency - from the app and from simply asking them. I am not suggesting that interdisciplinarity is the solution either - indeed, I develop in this book a set of further insights and tools around speculation, narrative and inodes of thinking that perhaps require interdisciplinary insights to make them work but could be deployed in other (perhaps more conventional, perhaps more radical) ways. Indeed, the whole premise of thinking and doing, after childhood, is not to invent or impose a new paradigm, but it is to introduce a set of new ways of thinking and doing that I hope might inspire a range of responses and which might enable childhood studies scholars to push, even further, at the challenges invoked by non-representational, new materialist, post-humanist, OOO, critical race, queer and generational theorists.