Birch, J. (2018) Museum spaces and experiences for children – ambiguity and uncertainty in defining the space, the child and the experience. Children's Geographies, 16 (5). pp. 516-528. ISSN 1473-3285
Abstract
Museum designers, curators and educators have traditionally emphasised children as a group of learners but children are also experiencers and players. Exploring frameworks of understanding, based on packaging and person matter intra-actions of new materialism, leads me to propose the development of an imaginative alternative to the learning rhetoric. An alternative lies in thinking collectively about children’s and adult’s museum experiences, offering: a rarely considered presentation of adults and young children as alike and a much-needed unpackaging of the adult–child binary. In proposing a challenge to the generalisability of children’s museum experience, an emphasis is placed on ambiguity and openness of experience. I suggest that matter is acknowledged as agential for children, as for adults and children may more freely be understood as humans entangled with the nonhuman and with each other.
Metadata
Item Type: | Article |
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Authors/Creators: |
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Copyright, Publisher and Additional Information: | © 2018 The Author(s). Published by Informa UK Limited, trading as Taylor & Francis Group. This is an Open Access article distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivatives License (http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc-nd/4.0/), which permits non-commercial re-use, distribution, and reproduction in any medium, provided the original work is properly cited, and is not altered, transformed, or built upon in any way. |
Keywords: | Unpackaging childhood; adult–child binary; museums; new-materialism; spatial design; ambiguity |
Dates: |
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Institution: | The University of Sheffield |
Academic Units: | The University of Sheffield > Faculty of Social Sciences (Sheffield) > Department of Landscape Architecture (Sheffield) |
Depositing User: | Symplectic Sheffield |
Date Deposited: | 28 Mar 2018 14:05 |
Last Modified: | 13 Nov 2020 08:52 |
Status: | Published |
Publisher: | Taylor & Francis |
Refereed: | Yes |
Identification Number: | 10.1080/14733285.2018.1447088 |
Open Archives Initiative ID (OAI ID): | oai:eprints.whiterose.ac.uk:128904 |