Crows: Young Nordic Children’s Aesthetic Explorations of Crows

Abstract

Drawing on an ongoing visual ethnographic project (Pink in Doing visual ethnography: Images, media and representation in research. London, Sage, 2007) about young children’s aesthetic explorations, in this chapter, I explore different encounters with diverse matter in a creative reuse center called a “Remida”, in a Nordic context. As a researcher, I use the concept of aesthetic exploration to highlight the multisensory complexity of young children’s play and learning. In the Remida’s blackbox—a dark space is created for exploring recycled materials using digital and analog tools—sight is weakened, and other senses are heightened. Darkness, light, shadows, and materials are analyzed as agentic co-creators that command our attention as humans (Bennett in Vibrant matter: A political ecology of things. Duke University Press, Durham, London, 2010). Becoming entangled with data, exploring material relations, through photos, videos, and sound recordings of young children’s aesthetic explorations of crows, I unpack sensorial texts through a hypermodal lens. This lens represents the coalition between multimodality and hypertextuality such as text, visual, and audible units.