Abigail Hackett

Title of Thesis:

How do families with very young children (18-36 months) make meaning in a museum?

Details:

The aim of my research is to understand what happens when families with very young children (age 18-36 months) visit a museum, and what the experience is like for both parents and children. I am interested in what families with children aged under three years do in museums and how museum visiting plays a role in their lives. Why do families with such young children visit the museum, and what do they get out of it? What do such young children make of the museum environment, filled with unfamiliar objects, spaces, text and actions, all of which rely mainly on written language and the visual for their meaning?

My research takes an ethnographic approach. I am interested in the sensory, emplaced and embodied nature of being in a museum (drawing on Pink, 2009). In addition, I have become interested in what Soje calls `the spatial turn´ (Soje, 1981: ix). I have found the concept of giving precedence to space as an equal player in the historicity-sociality-spatiality construction of meaning extremely generative, and plan to read further in this area, in order to consider the role of space, place and place making in my research.

I also draw on multimodality (Kress, 1996, 2010) in order to understand the meaning making that seems to be carried out by young children and their families in museums. Throughout this work, I ground my perspective in the new sociology of childhood, in that I recognise the agency of young children as social actors, and attempt to understand the museum and their actions from their perspective (James and Prout, 1997, Christenson and James, 2008). In this task, I also recognise the specialist knowledge parents and carers have of their own children, and plan to work with them as co-researchers, building understanding collaboratively.

My research will be carried out at two museum sites in South Yorkshire, Clifton Park Museum in Rotherham, and Weston Park Museum in Sheffield.