Stories of shimmer and pollution: understanding child-environment aesthetic encounters in urban wilds

Abstract

This study is a reaction to the paucity of research on children’s aesthetic encounters in living environments that are increasingly troubled by pollution, urban development and climate change. We ask how child-environment aesthetic encounters unfold in urban wilds and seek to identify the tensions and transformations that such encounters create. Our understanding of child-environment aesthetic encounters has been inspired by post-human and relational philosophies that allow us to delve into the transformational potentials of aesthetics. Drawing on ethnographic research through digital storying workshops in a Finnish primary school, we used an experiential-visual-textual method of rhizomatic patchworks for thinking with five children’s stories about aesthetic encounters in an urban forest. Through our inquiry, child-environment aesthetic encounters emerged as complex, discordant and dynamic intertwinements of adverse and pleasurable dimensions. In the children’s stories, sensuously rich encounters with matter, plants, animals, places, pollution and other humans encompassed shimmering and enchanting sensations. These aesthetically infused encounters in urban wilds affected the ways in which the children moved with and explored the environment. Our study broadens understanding of the aesthetic encounters through which children and the more-than-human world are mutually transformed, offering new insights for education to support children growing up in rapidly changing environments.