Volume 49, Number 1, February 2024

EN:

Childhood studies’ long concern with elevating children’s perspectives has focused attention on “voice” rather than researcher-participant dialogue, precluding critical attention to the normative adult researcher voice. This article investigates how cocreating comics with children about the COVID-19 pandemic engaged a different researcher voice and produced different representations of pandemic childhoods. Making comics with children aged 7–11, I asked: What does it mean for researchers to speak in speech? I suggest that shifting researcher voices can help researchers recognize the conventions that allow adults to colonize spoken conversation with children, denaturalizing adult voice and allowing us to tell more than one story.

EN:

This study focuses on children’s voices as they were presented in Swedish newspapers during the COVID-19 pandemic. It explores the ways in which journalists featured children’s experiences of everyday life during a time of crisis. A descriptive, thematic text analysis of 83 articles resulted in four prominent themes: children’s voices as a mouthpiece for or against school closure, children as cocreators of a new normal daily life, children as responsible and caring citizens, and COVID-19 as a magnifying glass for existing vulnerabilities in everyday life. The selection and representation of children’s viewpoints was adult led and limited, and the study thus calls for further research on media constructions of children/childhood and related consequences.

EN:

This paper emerges from the journey of a group of early childhood educators seeking to reconnect with land in meaningful and ethical ways. Reorienting from humancentric views, the authors explore “lively storytelling” to bring attention to overlooked stories and create alternative ways of being and thinking. We are called into new relations and ecological entanglements through a sensitive and responsive attunement to the soundscapes of Lynn Creek and Hastings Creek in Vancouver and Bow River in Calgary. Our engagement encompasses a posthumanist framework while weaving interdisciplinary studies in environmental humanities, materiality, and architecture to encourage generative inquiries and dialogue in early childhood classrooms and communities.