Working with childhoods and energies: critical reflections on specifying and locating the intangible

Abstract

This paper critically reflects upon the work of collaboratories in researching childhoods and energies (‘childhoods-energies’). It compares divergent approaches to thinking with energy, children and young people in Canada and the UK. Although we begin from common conceptual foundations - inspired by feminist, new materialist, posthumanist and Common Worlds perspectives - we focus on tensions, incommensurabilities and differences in our thinkings and doings with energy. Our principal reasons for doing so, are twofold. First, energy is a difficult, slippery, multifaceted phenomenon that cannot be pinned down as readily as the material artefacts or companion species with which childhood scholars are often preoccupied. Moreover, energy - and energy education with children - often attempts to specify and objectify energy by conferring upon its intangibility measurements and acts of commodification. We disrupt these imperatives in diverse ways by examining how other energies emerged in our collaboratories: kinaesthetic, emotional, embodied, spiritual, and more. Second, despite commonalities, we have all been deeply attuned to the particularities of place - in London (Ontario) and Birmingham (UK). We offer vignettes from our collaboratories that elaborate the related-but-divergent forms of doing, knowing, thinking, moving and feeling that emerge from taking energy as a focus for childhood research.

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