A little thing that returns: Refrains and young children’s sense making in museum spaces

Abstract

This paper describes a research collaboration with Humber Museums Partnership, which explored family museum visiting and early language. Drawing from ethnographic observations and continuous audio recordings, this article examines how very young children make sense in museum spaces. We activate Deleuze and Guattari’s concept of the refrain (originally expressed in French as ritournelle, a little return) to analyse vignettes of children’s vocalisations and interactions across galleries, gardens, and play spaces. Counter to the dominant view of early language as relying on a linear “serve and return” between adult and child, we argue that refrains create fragile, rhythmic, and emplaced territories of sense making that exceed conventional meaning and representation. We propose that museums can foster an attention to these affective, embodied dimensions of expression as an important aspect of young children’s museum literacies.

Metadata

Item Type:	Article
Authors/Creators:	Hackett, A. Shannon, D.B. https://orcid.org/0000-0001-7642-0667 MacRae, C. MacLure, M.
Copyright, Publisher and Additional Information:	© 2025 The Authors. Except as otherwise noted, this author-accepted version of a journal article published in Journal of Early Childhood Literacy is made available via the University of Sheffield Research Publications and Copyright Policy under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International License (CC-BY 4.0), which permits unrestricted use, distribution and reproduction in any medium, provided the original work is properly cited. To view a copy of this licence, visit http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/ © The Author(s) 2025. This article is distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial 4.0 License (https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc/4.0/) which permits non-commercial use, reproduction and distribution of the work without further permission provided the original work is attributed as specified on the SAGE and Open Access page (https://us.sagepub.com/en-us/nam/open-access-at-sage).
Keywords:	museums; Deleuze and Guattari; refrain; sound; literacies; language; posthuman
Dates:	Accepted: 1 September 2025 Published (online): 12 September 2025 Published: 12 September 2025
Institution:	The University of Sheffield
Academic Units:	The University of Sheffield > Faculty of Social Sciences (Sheffield) > School of Education
Depositing User:	Symplectic Sheffield
Date Deposited:	17 Sep 2025 10:19
Last Modified:	17 Sep 2025 10:19
Status:	Published online
Publisher:	SAGE Publications
Refereed:	Yes
Identification Number:	10.1177/14687984251379605
Open Archives Initiative ID (OAI ID):	oai:eprints.whiterose.ac.uk:231589

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A little thing that returns: Refrains and young children’s sense making in museum spaces

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