Exploring Materiality in Childhood: Body, Relations and Space

Exploring Materiality in Childhood: Body, Relations and Space explores the multiple ways that childhood and materiality are intertwined and assembled. Bringing together a diverse range of authors, this topical book makes a scholarly contribution to our understanding of the entanglements of materiality and childhoods in international contexts.

Chapters explore how various environments and material resources, including technologies and consumer goods, affect children’s lives. The book caters to a diverse range of theories, in sociomaterialist, posthumanist, post-anthropocentric and more-than-human research, critically exploring the boundaries of these theoretical approaches with diverse empirical cases. These wide ranges of perspectives develop alternatives to human-centred approaches in understanding children and childhoods. With its diverse theoretical and methodological choices, the book also serves as a versatile example for how to conduct research with children and on childhood.

This book will be of great interest for academics, researchers, and postgraduate students in childhood studies, early childhood education, social sciences, cultural sciences and sociology.

Maarit Alasuutari is Professor of Early Childhood Education at the University of Jyväskylä, Finland. Her field of study includes childhood studies, parent-professional collaboration, early childhood education policy and documentation in early education.

Marleena Mustola is Senior Lecturer of Early Childhood Education at the University of Jyväskylä, Finland. She specialises in multidisciplinary childhood studies and her current research interests include children’s rights and participation, posthuman philosophy and childhoods in social media.

Niina Rutanen is Professor in Early Childhood Education at the Faculty of Education and Psychology, University of Jyväskylä, Finland. Her research focuses mainly on transitions in early childhood education and pedagogies for infants and toddlers.