J Spray
Biographic Data
| ID | 33420 |
|---|---|
| NAME | J Spray |
| GIVEN NAMES | J |
| FAMILY NAME | Spray |
| SIGNATURE | SPRAY J |
| AFFILIATIONS | Ollscoil na Gaillimhe – University of Galway |
| ORCID | 0000-0001-7382-8704 |
| VERIFIED | Yes |
| TOTAL WORKS | 19 |
| TOTAL CITATIONS | 40 |
| AUTHOR COUNT | 19 |
| EDITOR COUNT | 0 |
| FIRST PUBLICATION YEAR | 2018 |
| LATEST PUBLICATION YEAR | 2026 |
| H-INDEX | 4 |
Working Beyond Anthropology Across Different Epistemic Cultures
The ASAANZ conference in Dunedin in 2023 was a catalyst for this conversation about anthropological practices of interdisciplinarity which we have glossed as working across different epistemic cultures. In this piece, we canvas the concept of disciplines as epistemic cultures, argue for the continued need for disciplines, and discuss the benefits of engagement across epistemic cultures when addressing certain research, policy and educational matt…
We Can Tell More Than One Story
Childhood studies’ long concern with elevating children’s perspectives has focused attention on “voice” rather than researcher-participant dialogue, precluding critical attention to the normative adult researcher voice. This article investigates how cocreating comics with children about the COVID-19 pandemic engaged a different researcher voice and produced different representations of pandemic childhoods. Making comics with children aged 7–11, I…
Breathing Together
The Public-in-Waiting
Scholars globally have noted children’s invisibility in public discourse about the COVID-19 pandemic, reflecting social constructions of childhood as a segregated and private world. Though children represent a significant proportion of the “public” in “public health”, children’s roles are rarely considered in the institutions or political approaches that drive public health policy. Yet social theory suggests children’s representation in public di…
Through the Zoom window
Virtual technologies gained popularity during the COVID-19 pandemic for use in research, including research with children. As scholarship from the field of science, technology and society (STS) suggests, technologies are never neutral, but embedded with social values and, as such, used by people to navigate identities and relationships. Building on childhood studies research that has shown how children appropriate and use research tools, this art…
Re-childing the Covid-19 pandemic; and what we lose from the un-childed public
For several decades childhood scholars have noted children's systematic exclusion from public in many risk-averse societies, a disappearance exacerbated during the COVID-19 pandemic. While many have noted the impoverishing effects for children from such exclusion, during my stay in a New Zealand Managed Isolation and Quarantine (MIQ) facility, I came to ask, what does society lose when we un-child the public? Through a feature comic, I draw the s…
How do embodied experiences of asthma influence caregiver conceptual models
Love and agency in ethnographic fieldwork with children
Analysing emotions such as love can enable new ways of understanding human relationships and deepen reflexive ethnographic practice. Love in research with children, however, carries a unique set of implications due to children's structural vulnerability, the power imbalances and abuses that manifest in many adult-child relationships, and cultural taboos on love expressed between adults and children. Yet, the ability to elicit love and affective c…
What Do Arts-Based Methods Do? A Story of (What Is) Art and Online Research With Children During a Pandemic
This comic draws viewers behind the final product and into the process of arts-based research. Specifically, we focus on research produced over Zoom during the Covid-19 pandemic. Based on a study of asthma caregiving, we illustrate how a 10-year-old study participant, Becca, and researcher Hannah connected in embodied, sensory and material-spatial ways across digital space through the making and unmaking of art forms using simple sensory-sculptur…
Disruption in Bio-Psycho-Social Context
Children growing up during the COVID-19 pandemic have seen unprecedented restructuring of their childhoods through lockdowns, virtual schooling and other public health measures. Theories of biographical disruption developed from individual experiences of life-altering diagnoses predict that unforeseen events such as the pandemic will restructure individual perceptions of their future life narrative. Such theories have been developed from adult ex…
Locating transport sector responsibilities for the wellbeing of mobility-challenged people in Aotearoa New Zealand
wellbeing is a central tenet in the Aotearoa New Zealand government's Transport Outcomes Framework. Yet considerations of how place mediates diverse opportunities for wellbeing seldom identify how decision-making on transport and pedestrian infrastructure affects these opportunities. Considering the lived realities of older people and people with disabilities with a specific focus on Indigenous people, we argue it is particularly important to ide…
Drawing Perspectives Together
Reflecting on drawing together , a methodological intervention I developed through two child‐centered ethnographic projects, I explore what happens when researchers draw together with children. While anthropologists of childhood have called for critical attention to the use of child‐friendly participatory methods such as drawing, few have considered how researchers participate in these methods. Yet drawing is embedded with value‐laden cultural no…
Not Breathing Easy
Recent health policy in the United States encourages an outsourcing of labor from professional practice into domestic spaces, where in theory, medical professionals supply the training, technologies, and guidance needed to discharge responsibility for care to patients or caregivers. Mattingly et al. (2011) term this labor "chronic homework," describing the relationship between the assigning and undertaking of medical care at the borders of profes…
Towards a child‐centred public health
Children's perspectives rarely appear at strategic levels in public health. Policy‐makers can hold adult‐centric assumptions about children, and may be uncertain about how to interpret and apply children's perspectives in policy. Yet how children experience and perceive health interventions can shape the success of services. What, then, might child‐centred approaches to health policy consider? Through ethnographic work in New Zealand, I document …
Beyond awareness
Where Have All the Children Gone? Against Children's Invisibility in the Covid-19 Pandemic
Notes1 https://www.instagram.com/p/CAUvntwnQ3H/?utm_source=ig, Posted May 18 2020.2 Jean Hunleth, “Zambian Children’s Imaginal Caring: On Fantasy, Play, and Anticipation in an Epidemic,” Cultural Anthropology 34, no. 2 (May 2019): 155-86. https://doi.org/10.14506/ca34.2.01.3 Jean Hunleth, Children as Caregivers: The Global Fight Against Tuberculosis and HIV in Zambia (New Brunswick, NJ: Rutgers University Press, 2017).4 Julie Spray, The Children …
Social group dynamics predict stress variability among children in a New Zealand classroom
The Value of Anthropology in Child Health Policy
A bstract Working at the nexus of medical anthropology and the anthropology of childhood, this article challenges three assumptions often embedded in child health policy: (1) children are the passive recipients of healthcare; (2) children’s knowledge of illness and their body can be assumed based on adult understandings; and (3) children’s healthcare can be isolated from their social relations. I explore these themes through the case study of a 2…
Learning Without Lessons
Where Have All the Children Gone? Against Children's Invisibility in the Covid-19 Pandemic
Notes1 https://www.instagram.com/p/CAUvntwnQ3H/?utm_source=ig, Posted May 18 2020.2 Jean Hunleth, “Zambian Children’s Imaginal Caring: On Fantasy, Play, and Anticipation in an Epidemic,” Cultural Anthropology 34, no. 2 (May 2019): 155-86. https://doi.org/10.14506/ca34.2.01.3 Jean Hunleth, Children as Caregivers: The Global Fight Against Tuberculosis and HIV in Zambia (New Brunswick, NJ: Rutgers University Press, 2017).4 Julie Spray, The Children …
Drawing Perspectives Together
Reflecting on drawing together , a methodological intervention I developed through two child‐centered ethnographic projects, I explore what happens when researchers draw together with children. While anthropologists of childhood have called for critical attention to the use of child‐friendly participatory methods such as drawing, few have considered how researchers participate in these methods. Yet drawing is embedded with value‐laden cultural no…
Beyond awareness
Not Breathing Easy
Recent health policy in the United States encourages an outsourcing of labor from professional practice into domestic spaces, where in theory, medical professionals supply the training, technologies, and guidance needed to discharge responsibility for care to patients or caregivers. Mattingly et al. (2011) term this labor "chronic homework," describing the relationship between the assigning and undertaking of medical care at the borders of profes…
What Do Arts-Based Methods Do? A Story of (What Is) Art and Online Research With Children During a Pandemic
This comic draws viewers behind the final product and into the process of arts-based research. Specifically, we focus on research produced over Zoom during the Covid-19 pandemic. Based on a study of asthma caregiving, we illustrate how a 10-year-old study participant, Becca, and researcher Hannah connected in embodied, sensory and material-spatial ways across digital space through the making and unmaking of art forms using simple sensory-sculptur…
Through the Zoom window
Virtual technologies gained popularity during the COVID-19 pandemic for use in research, including research with children. As scholarship from the field of science, technology and society (STS) suggests, technologies are never neutral, but embedded with social values and, as such, used by people to navigate identities and relationships. Building on childhood studies research that has shown how children appropriate and use research tools, this art…
How do embodied experiences of asthma influence caregiver conceptual models
Love and agency in ethnographic fieldwork with children
Analysing emotions such as love can enable new ways of understanding human relationships and deepen reflexive ethnographic practice. Love in research with children, however, carries a unique set of implications due to children's structural vulnerability, the power imbalances and abuses that manifest in many adult-child relationships, and cultural taboos on love expressed between adults and children. Yet, the ability to elicit love and affective c…
Re-childing the Covid-19 pandemic; and what we lose from the un-childed public
For several decades childhood scholars have noted children's systematic exclusion from public in many risk-averse societies, a disappearance exacerbated during the COVID-19 pandemic. While many have noted the impoverishing effects for children from such exclusion, during my stay in a New Zealand Managed Isolation and Quarantine (MIQ) facility, I came to ask, what does society lose when we un-child the public? Through a feature comic, I draw the s…
Disruption in Bio-Psycho-Social Context
Children growing up during the COVID-19 pandemic have seen unprecedented restructuring of their childhoods through lockdowns, virtual schooling and other public health measures. Theories of biographical disruption developed from individual experiences of life-altering diagnoses predict that unforeseen events such as the pandemic will restructure individual perceptions of their future life narrative. Such theories have been developed from adult ex…
Social group dynamics predict stress variability among children in a New Zealand classroom
The Value of Anthropology in Child Health Policy
A bstract Working at the nexus of medical anthropology and the anthropology of childhood, this article challenges three assumptions often embedded in child health policy: (1) children are the passive recipients of healthcare; (2) children’s knowledge of illness and their body can be assumed based on adult understandings; and (3) children’s healthcare can be isolated from their social relations. I explore these themes through the case study of a 2…
Towards a child‐centred public health
Children's perspectives rarely appear at strategic levels in public health. Policy‐makers can hold adult‐centric assumptions about children, and may be uncertain about how to interpret and apply children's perspectives in policy. Yet how children experience and perceive health interventions can shape the success of services. What, then, might child‐centred approaches to health policy consider? Through ethnographic work in New Zealand, I document …
Beyond awareness
Where Have All the Children Gone? Against Children's Invisibility in the Covid-19 Pandemic
Notes1 https://www.instagram.com/p/CAUvntwnQ3H/?utm_source=ig, Posted May 18 2020.2 Jean Hunleth, “Zambian Children’s Imaginal Caring: On Fantasy, Play, and Anticipation in an Epidemic,” Cultural Anthropology 34, no. 2 (May 2019): 155-86. https://doi.org/10.14506/ca34.2.01.3 Jean Hunleth, Children as Caregivers: The Global Fight Against Tuberculosis and HIV in Zambia (New Brunswick, NJ: Rutgers University Press, 2017).4 Julie Spray, The Children …
Locating transport sector responsibilities for the wellbeing of mobility-challenged people in Aotearoa New Zealand
wellbeing is a central tenet in the Aotearoa New Zealand government's Transport Outcomes Framework. Yet considerations of how place mediates diverse opportunities for wellbeing seldom identify how decision-making on transport and pedestrian infrastructure affects these opportunities. Considering the lived realities of older people and people with disabilities with a specific focus on Indigenous people, we argue it is particularly important to ide…
Drawing Perspectives Together
Reflecting on drawing together , a methodological intervention I developed through two child‐centered ethnographic projects, I explore what happens when researchers draw together with children. While anthropologists of childhood have called for critical attention to the use of child‐friendly participatory methods such as drawing, few have considered how researchers participate in these methods. Yet drawing is embedded with value‐laden cultural no…
Not Breathing Easy
Recent health policy in the United States encourages an outsourcing of labor from professional practice into domestic spaces, where in theory, medical professionals supply the training, technologies, and guidance needed to discharge responsibility for care to patients or caregivers. Mattingly et al. (2011) term this labor "chronic homework," describing the relationship between the assigning and undertaking of medical care at the borders of profes…
How do embodied experiences of asthma influence caregiver conceptual models
Love and agency in ethnographic fieldwork with children
Analysing emotions such as love can enable new ways of understanding human relationships and deepen reflexive ethnographic practice. Love in research with children, however, carries a unique set of implications due to children's structural vulnerability, the power imbalances and abuses that manifest in many adult-child relationships, and cultural taboos on love expressed between adults and children. Yet, the ability to elicit love and affective c…
What Do Arts-Based Methods Do? A Story of (What Is) Art and Online Research With Children During a Pandemic
This comic draws viewers behind the final product and into the process of arts-based research. Specifically, we focus on research produced over Zoom during the Covid-19 pandemic. Based on a study of asthma caregiving, we illustrate how a 10-year-old study participant, Becca, and researcher Hannah connected in embodied, sensory and material-spatial ways across digital space through the making and unmaking of art forms using simple sensory-sculptur…
Disruption in Bio-Psycho-Social Context
Children growing up during the COVID-19 pandemic have seen unprecedented restructuring of their childhoods through lockdowns, virtual schooling and other public health measures. Theories of biographical disruption developed from individual experiences of life-altering diagnoses predict that unforeseen events such as the pandemic will restructure individual perceptions of their future life narrative. Such theories have been developed from adult ex…
Breathing Together
The Public-in-Waiting
Scholars globally have noted children’s invisibility in public discourse about the COVID-19 pandemic, reflecting social constructions of childhood as a segregated and private world. Though children represent a significant proportion of the “public” in “public health”, children’s roles are rarely considered in the institutions or political approaches that drive public health policy. Yet social theory suggests children’s representation in public di…
Through the Zoom window
Virtual technologies gained popularity during the COVID-19 pandemic for use in research, including research with children. As scholarship from the field of science, technology and society (STS) suggests, technologies are never neutral, but embedded with social values and, as such, used by people to navigate identities and relationships. Building on childhood studies research that has shown how children appropriate and use research tools, this art…
Re-childing the Covid-19 pandemic; and what we lose from the un-childed public
For several decades childhood scholars have noted children's systematic exclusion from public in many risk-averse societies, a disappearance exacerbated during the COVID-19 pandemic. While many have noted the impoverishing effects for children from such exclusion, during my stay in a New Zealand Managed Isolation and Quarantine (MIQ) facility, I came to ask, what does society lose when we un-child the public? Through a feature comic, I draw the s…
We Can Tell More Than One Story
Childhood studies’ long concern with elevating children’s perspectives has focused attention on “voice” rather than researcher-participant dialogue, precluding critical attention to the normative adult researcher voice. This article investigates how cocreating comics with children about the COVID-19 pandemic engaged a different researcher voice and produced different representations of pandemic childhoods. Making comics with children aged 7–11, I…
Learning Without Lessons
Working Beyond Anthropology Across Different Epistemic Cultures
The ASAANZ conference in Dunedin in 2023 was a catalyst for this conversation about anthropological practices of interdisciplinarity which we have glossed as working across different epistemic cultures. In this piece, we canvas the concept of disciplines as epistemic cultures, argue for the continued need for disciplines, and discuss the benefits of engagement across epistemic cultures when addressing certain research, policy and educational matt…
Sociology (15 works) · Medicine (12 works) · Children's Rights and Participation (11 works) · Political science (9 works) · Psychology (8 works) · Gender Studies (7 works) · Early Childhood Education and Development (6 works) · Gender Studies (6 works) · Aotearoa (5 works) · Nursing (5 works)