Abi Hackett
Biographic Data
| ID | 296450 |
|---|---|
| NAME | Abi Hackett |
| GIVEN NAMES | Abi |
| FAMILY NAME | Hackett |
| SIGNATURE | HACKETT A |
| AFFILIATIONS | Sheffield Hallam University |
| ORCID | 0000-0003-4332-8594 |
| VERIFIED | Yes |
| TOTAL WORKS | 29 |
| TOTAL CITATIONS | 94 |
| AUTHOR COUNT | 29 |
| EDITOR COUNT | 0 |
| FIRST PUBLICATION YEAR | 2003 |
| LATEST PUBLICATION YEAR | 2026 |
| H-INDEX | 6 |
Fraying the Edges of Literacies: What Do Post‐Philosophies Produce for Early Childhood Literacies
As two scholars who have read and thought with post‐philosophies, such as posthumanism, we invite a discussion on how post‐philosophies have, and could, open up possibilities for thinking about early literacies. The paper traces the development and contribution of post‐perspectives in relation to early childhood literacies, before identifying three interconnected threads via which post‐philosophies invite us to conceptualize, teach, and research …
A little thing that returns: Refrains and young children’s sense making in museum spaces
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 vocalisa…
How can children and young people have a voice in urban treescapes
Scientific understanding of climate change has, to date, failed to result in sufficient action. This paper proposes that a deficit model of top‐down learning and dissemination in relation to public engagement with science may be part of the problem, particularly when considering the attitudes, values and empowerment of children and young people. Drawing on two cross‐university projects funded by the Future of UK Treescapes programme, in which chi…
Fractured stories and voices of the future; coproduced research with young children and trees
What does it mean to bring very young children into conversations about climate change? Voices of the Future was a 3-year, multi-site project based in the UK, aiming to investigate treescapes through participatory research with children and young people. This paper focuses on a strand of the project that explored playing and making in and with treescapes, with children aged under 5 years and their grownups. We interrogate what it looks like to do…
Grasping the nettle: Arts-informed responses to prickly ethics issues in participatory research with children, young people and families
Giving up the 'Good Research Child
Do you like apples? Do you want to plant trees? Do you love books? Qualitative research with children is peppered with vignettes of what we conceptualise as the 'Good Research Child'. Good Research Children tell stories, plant trees, eat healthily, love reading and engage enthusiastically with researchers as co-playmates. They explore the world with drawings and oral stories and are enthusiastically portrayed by their adult researchers as unique,…
Unlikely Qualities of Writing Qualitatively: Porous Stories of Thresholds, In-Betweeness and the Everyday
In this paper, we seek to intervene in the proposition that there are recognisable or abstract-able modes of doing qualitative writing, and instead affirm that writing from a feminist scholarly perspective is often an embodied, domestic, haptic and serendipitous gesture. Occurring in in-between spaces and moments, in which personal and professional life frequently meld, with porous boundaries, our writing practices appear to talk back rhetoricall…
Opaque reciprocity: Or theorising Glissant's 'right to opacity' as a communication and language praxis in early childhood education
In this article, the authors argue for what douard Glissant terms the 'right to opacity' in teaching and assessing communication and language skills in early childhood education (ECE).We draw from Glissant's writing on Relation, and his interrelated concepts of 'opacity' and 'transparency', to consider two vignettes from sensory ethnographic research conducted in ECE settings: a special education classroom and a nursery.We contest the internation…
Unruly edges: Toddler literacies of the Capitalocene
By troubling notions of time-as-progress and human exceptionality, this paper considers what shifts in conceptualisations of children’s literacies and futures might be possible in the context of faltering of capitalist logics of progress. The paper draws on a 3 year ethnographic study with families and young children in northern England, which asked what might be learnt about young children’s literacies by starting with the everyday in communitie…
Kim Lenters and Mairi McDermott, Affect, embodiment and place in critical literacy assembling theory and practice
More-Than-Human Literacies in Early Childhood
More-Than-Human Literacies in Early Childhood draws on a three-year ethnographic study into the role of place, materiality and the body in the literacies of young children aged 12–36 months. It builds a picture of how children participate in, or become caught up in, literacies and language in the contexts of their everyday lives. Throughout the book, recognised understandings of young children are decentred in favour of experiential knowing of pa…
Infantmethodologies
Infantmethodologies is a concept that was playfully invented to gauge philosophical interestin the intersection between infants (or a chid; or infancy; or childhood) and methodologies(and philosophies, theories and concepts). This provocation aims to debate this intersection andweaves thinkers from around the world in order to generate discussion on the question, ‘Howdo we study a child’? Asking this question generates further questions: What pro…
Reconceptualising early language development: Matter, Sensation and the More-Than-Human
This article critically interrogates the model of language that underpins early years policy and pedagogy. Our arguments emerge from an ethnographic study involving 2-year-olds attending a day care centre that had begun to hold a substantial proportion of its sessions outdoors. The resultant shift in pedagogy coincided with changes in the children’s speaking and listening practices. We take these changes as a starting point for a reconceptualisat…
Literacy and language as material practices: Re-thinking social inequality in young children’s literacies
No description provided
Lines in the snow; minor paths in the search for early childhood education for planetary wellbeing
This paper explores what place means for early childhood education at a time of global environmental precarity. We draw on fieldwork in Arctic Norway, where kindergarten children spend time with snow for more than half of the year. Children’s movement attunes to the nuances and diversity of the snow, as seasons, temperature, light, wind and weather change the consistency of snow and the possibilities for what can occur. The paper presents data of…
The Capaciousness of No: Affective Refusals as Literacy Practices
The authors considered the capacious feeling that emerges from saying no to literacy practices, and the affective potential of saying no as a literacy practice. The authors highlight the affective possibilities of saying no to normative understandings of literacy, thinking with a series of vignettes in which children, young people, and teachers refused literacy practices in different ways. The authors use the term capacious to signal possibilitie…
Answering the world: Young Children's Running and Rolling as More-Than-Human Multimodal Meaning Making
This paper makes a case for a view of young children's meaning-making in which human actants are not separate from, but deeply entwined in, a more-than-human world. In order to interrogate the more-than-human processes through which multimodal meaning-making emerges, we focus on meaning-making through running and rolling that we have observed in early childhood settings in Finland and the UK. In doing so, we rethink the process of bringing-into-r…
Exploring abstract, physical, social and embodied space: Developing an approach for analysing museum spaces for young children
This paper describes a collaboration between museum staff and university researchers to develop a framework for analysing museum spaces from the perspective of young children. The resultant APSE (abstract, physical, social and embodied) framework draws on spatial theories from childhood studies and architecture to consider children’s museum visiting from a spatial perspective. Starting with space not only foregrounds the role places, objects and …
Young children’s museum geographies: Spatial, material and bodily ways of knowing
In this guest editorial, we outline a new field of children’s museum geographies. We do this by opening up a space for the reader to engage with a collection of papers that trace embodiment, tacit and emplaced knowing, material entanglements and non-representational aspects of experience in accounts of children’s presence in museums. We hope that this special issue will act as an impetus for further working, thinking and collaborating, firstly by…
Coda: Posthumous conversations. A reading group to discuss the work of Dr Elee Kirk
In May 2017, a group of museum researchers and practitioners met to discuss the writing of Elee Kirk (1977–2016), whose pioneering doctoral study of young children visiting a natural history museum connects with our own work and practice in a number of different ways. Kirk [2015. “Budding Photographers: Young Children’s Digital Photography in a Museum.” In Museums and Visitor Photography: Redefining the Visitor Experience, edited by T. Stylianou-…
Vibrations in Place: Sound and Language in Early Childhood Literacy Practices
This article explores how close attention to sound can help one to rethink literacy in early childhood education. Through an analysis of text, audio, video, and photographic data from a sound walk undertaken with a parent and a child, we make two arguments. First, contrary to skills-based approaches that abstract literacy from context, we show how literacy emerges from vibrational entanglements between bodies and places. We provide examples of ho…
Posthuman literacies: Young children moving in time, place and more-than-human worlds
This paper examines the potential of posthumanism to enable a reconceptualisation of young children’s literacies from the starting point of movement and sound in the more-than-human world. We propose movement as a communicative practice that always occurs as a more complex entanglement of relations within more-than-human worlds. Through our analysis, an understanding of sound emerged as a more-than-human practice that encompasses children’s lingu…
Vibrancy, repetition and movement: Posthuman theories for reconceptualising young children in museums
This paper argues for an expanded field of inquiry to conceptualise young children in museums. Drawing on Murris’ [2016. The Post-Human Child: Educational Transformation Through Philosophy with Picturebooks. London: Routledge] analysis of childhood constructions, we discuss how cognitive and socio-constructivist models of the child dominate childhood and museum studies. We argue for the potential of Murris’ figure of the posthuman child to reconc…
Parents as researchers: Collaborative Ethnography With Parents
This article describes a series of studies of young children's experience of place in which parents acted as co-researchers, collecting and analysing data. This approach to research resulted in an emphasis on sensory engagement and embodied experience, for both adults and children. As my own young daughter accompanied me during this research, the boundaries between parent and researcher were further blurred. As research progressed, parents became…
Young Children as Wayfarers: Learning about Place by Moving Through It
This article describes the walking and moving of young children around places. It is based on an ethnographic study of children aged between 24 and 36 months visiting a museum. Drawing on Ingold's (2007) concept of wayfaring, the author argues movement through place creates embodied, tacit ways of knowing and experiencing the world. This embodied and tacit knowledge is not well‐accounted for in dominant models of how young children learn. In this…
Zigging and zooming all over the place: Young children's meaning making and movement in the museum
This article draws attention to the walking and running of young children as a key element of their multimodal communicative practices. In addition, the article argues that the walking and running of young children can be seen as a place-making activity, acknowledging the power of young children to create meaning in their world. Drawing on ethnographic data from ongoing research with young children and their families in museums, I present some ex…
Answering the world: Young Children's Running and Rolling as More-Than-Human Multimodal Meaning Making
This paper makes a case for a view of young children's meaning-making in which human actants are not separate from, but deeply entwined in, a more-than-human world. In order to interrogate the more-than-human processes through which multimodal meaning-making emerges, we focus on meaning-making through running and rolling that we have observed in early childhood settings in Finland and the UK. In doing so, we rethink the process of bringing-into-r…
Vibrancy, repetition and movement: Posthuman theories for reconceptualising young children in museums
This paper argues for an expanded field of inquiry to conceptualise young children in museums. Drawing on Murris’ [2016. The Post-Human Child: Educational Transformation Through Philosophy with Picturebooks. London: Routledge] analysis of childhood constructions, we discuss how cognitive and socio-constructivist models of the child dominate childhood and museum studies. We argue for the potential of Murris’ figure of the posthuman child to reconc…
The Capaciousness of No: Affective Refusals as Literacy Practices
The authors considered the capacious feeling that emerges from saying no to literacy practices, and the affective potential of saying no as a literacy practice. The authors highlight the affective possibilities of saying no to normative understandings of literacy, thinking with a series of vignettes in which children, young people, and teachers refused literacy practices in different ways. The authors use the term capacious to signal possibilitie…
Reconceptualising early language development: Matter, Sensation and the More-Than-Human
This article critically interrogates the model of language that underpins early years policy and pedagogy. Our arguments emerge from an ethnographic study involving 2-year-olds attending a day care centre that had begun to hold a substantial proportion of its sessions outdoors. The resultant shift in pedagogy coincided with changes in the children’s speaking and listening practices. We take these changes as a starting point for a reconceptualisat…
Infantmethodologies
Infantmethodologies is a concept that was playfully invented to gauge philosophical interestin the intersection between infants (or a chid; or infancy; or childhood) and methodologies(and philosophies, theories and concepts). This provocation aims to debate this intersection andweaves thinkers from around the world in order to generate discussion on the question, ‘Howdo we study a child’? Asking this question generates further questions: What pro…
Vibrations in Place: Sound and Language in Early Childhood Literacy Practices
This article explores how close attention to sound can help one to rethink literacy in early childhood education. Through an analysis of text, audio, video, and photographic data from a sound walk undertaken with a parent and a child, we make two arguments. First, contrary to skills-based approaches that abstract literacy from context, we show how literacy emerges from vibrational entanglements between bodies and places. We provide examples of ho…
Exploring abstract, physical, social and embodied space: Developing an approach for analysing museum spaces for young children
This paper describes a collaboration between museum staff and university researchers to develop a framework for analysing museum spaces from the perspective of young children. The resultant APSE (abstract, physical, social and embodied) framework draws on spatial theories from childhood studies and architecture to consider children’s museum visiting from a spatial perspective. Starting with space not only foregrounds the role places, objects and …
Parents as researchers: Collaborative Ethnography With Parents
This article describes a series of studies of young children's experience of place in which parents acted as co-researchers, collecting and analysing data. This approach to research resulted in an emphasis on sensory engagement and embodied experience, for both adults and children. As my own young daughter accompanied me during this research, the boundaries between parent and researcher were further blurred. As research progressed, parents became…
Young children’s museum geographies: Spatial, material and bodily ways of knowing
In this guest editorial, we outline a new field of children’s museum geographies. We do this by opening up a space for the reader to engage with a collection of papers that trace embodiment, tacit and emplaced knowing, material entanglements and non-representational aspects of experience in accounts of children’s presence in museums. We hope that this special issue will act as an impetus for further working, thinking and collaborating, firstly by…
Seen and unseen: Using video data in ethnographic fieldwork
Purpose – The purpose of this paper is to report on video making in two different contexts within the Community Arts Zone research project, an international research project concerned with the connections between arts, literacy and the community. Design/methodology/approach – At one project site, researchers and parents from the community filmed their children making dens with an artist. At another site, a professional film crew filmed young peop…
Giving up the 'Good Research Child
Do you like apples? Do you want to plant trees? Do you love books? Qualitative research with children is peppered with vignettes of what we conceptualise as the 'Good Research Child'. Good Research Children tell stories, plant trees, eat healthily, love reading and engage enthusiastically with researchers as co-playmates. They explore the world with drawings and oral stories and are enthusiastically portrayed by their adult researchers as unique,…
Opaque reciprocity: Or theorising Glissant's 'right to opacity' as a communication and language praxis in early childhood education
In this article, the authors argue for what douard Glissant terms the 'right to opacity' in teaching and assessing communication and language skills in early childhood education (ECE).We draw from Glissant's writing on Relation, and his interrelated concepts of 'opacity' and 'transparency', to consider two vignettes from sensory ethnographic research conducted in ECE settings: a special education classroom and a nursery.We contest the internation…
Unruly edges: Toddler literacies of the Capitalocene
By troubling notions of time-as-progress and human exceptionality, this paper considers what shifts in conceptualisations of children’s literacies and futures might be possible in the context of faltering of capitalist logics of progress. The paper draws on a 3 year ethnographic study with families and young children in northern England, which asked what might be learnt about young children’s literacies by starting with the everyday in communitie…
Lines in the snow; minor paths in the search for early childhood education for planetary wellbeing
This paper explores what place means for early childhood education at a time of global environmental precarity. We draw on fieldwork in Arctic Norway, where kindergarten children spend time with snow for more than half of the year. Children’s movement attunes to the nuances and diversity of the snow, as seasons, temperature, light, wind and weather change the consistency of snow and the possibilities for what can occur. The paper presents data of…
Neanderthals as fiction in archaeological narrative
The authors deconstruct the fictional image of Neanderthals, showing why we see them in the way we do
Neanderthals as fiction in archaeological narrative
The authors deconstruct the fictional image of Neanderthals, showing why we see them in the way we do
Zigging and zooming all over the place: Young children's meaning making and movement in the museum
This article draws attention to the walking and running of young children as a key element of their multimodal communicative practices. In addition, the article argues that the walking and running of young children can be seen as a place-making activity, acknowledging the power of young children to create meaning in their world. Drawing on ethnographic data from ongoing research with young children and their families in museums, I present some ex…
Children’s Spatialities: Embodiment, Emotion and Agency
Drawing from a wide range of disciplines, including anthropology, sociology, architecture and geography, and international contributors, this volume offers both students and scholars with an interest
Seen and unseen: Using video data in ethnographic fieldwork
Purpose – The purpose of this paper is to report on video making in two different contexts within the Community Arts Zone research project, an international research project concerned with the connections between arts, literacy and the community. Design/methodology/approach – At one project site, researchers and parents from the community filmed their children making dens with an artist. At another site, a professional film crew filmed young peop…
Young Children as Wayfarers: Learning about Place by Moving Through It
This article describes the walking and moving of young children around places. It is based on an ethnographic study of children aged between 24 and 36 months visiting a museum. Drawing on Ingold's (2007) concept of wayfaring, the author argues movement through place creates embodied, tacit ways of knowing and experiencing the world. This embodied and tacit knowledge is not well‐accounted for in dominant models of how young children learn. In this…
Posthuman literacies: Young children moving in time, place and more-than-human worlds
This paper examines the potential of posthumanism to enable a reconceptualisation of young children’s literacies from the starting point of movement and sound in the more-than-human world. We propose movement as a communicative practice that always occurs as a more complex entanglement of relations within more-than-human worlds. Through our analysis, an understanding of sound emerged as a more-than-human practice that encompasses children’s lingu…
Vibrancy, repetition and movement: Posthuman theories for reconceptualising young children in museums
This paper argues for an expanded field of inquiry to conceptualise young children in museums. Drawing on Murris’ [2016. The Post-Human Child: Educational Transformation Through Philosophy with Picturebooks. London: Routledge] analysis of childhood constructions, we discuss how cognitive and socio-constructivist models of the child dominate childhood and museum studies. We argue for the potential of Murris’ figure of the posthuman child to reconc…
Parents as researchers: Collaborative Ethnography With Parents
This article describes a series of studies of young children's experience of place in which parents acted as co-researchers, collecting and analysing data. This approach to research resulted in an emphasis on sensory engagement and embodied experience, for both adults and children. As my own young daughter accompanied me during this research, the boundaries between parent and researcher were further blurred. As research progressed, parents became…
Exploring abstract, physical, social and embodied space: Developing an approach for analysing museum spaces for young children
This paper describes a collaboration between museum staff and university researchers to develop a framework for analysing museum spaces from the perspective of young children. The resultant APSE (abstract, physical, social and embodied) framework draws on spatial theories from childhood studies and architecture to consider children’s museum visiting from a spatial perspective. Starting with space not only foregrounds the role places, objects and …
Young children’s museum geographies: Spatial, material and bodily ways of knowing
In this guest editorial, we outline a new field of children’s museum geographies. We do this by opening up a space for the reader to engage with a collection of papers that trace embodiment, tacit and emplaced knowing, material entanglements and non-representational aspects of experience in accounts of children’s presence in museums. We hope that this special issue will act as an impetus for further working, thinking and collaborating, firstly by…
Coda: Posthumous conversations. A reading group to discuss the work of Dr Elee Kirk
In May 2017, a group of museum researchers and practitioners met to discuss the writing of Elee Kirk (1977–2016), whose pioneering doctoral study of young children visiting a natural history museum connects with our own work and practice in a number of different ways. Kirk [2015. “Budding Photographers: Young Children’s Digital Photography in a Museum.” In Museums and Visitor Photography: Redefining the Visitor Experience, edited by T. Stylianou-…
Vibrations in Place: Sound and Language in Early Childhood Literacy Practices
This article explores how close attention to sound can help one to rethink literacy in early childhood education. Through an analysis of text, audio, video, and photographic data from a sound walk undertaken with a parent and a child, we make two arguments. First, contrary to skills-based approaches that abstract literacy from context, we show how literacy emerges from vibrational entanglements between bodies and places. We provide examples of ho…
Answering the world: Young Children's Running and Rolling as More-Than-Human Multimodal Meaning Making
This paper makes a case for a view of young children's meaning-making in which human actants are not separate from, but deeply entwined in, a more-than-human world. In order to interrogate the more-than-human processes through which multimodal meaning-making emerges, we focus on meaning-making through running and rolling that we have observed in early childhood settings in Finland and the UK. In doing so, we rethink the process of bringing-into-r…
Literacy and language as material practices: Re-thinking social inequality in young children’s literacies
No description provided
Lines in the snow; minor paths in the search for early childhood education for planetary wellbeing
This paper explores what place means for early childhood education at a time of global environmental precarity. We draw on fieldwork in Arctic Norway, where kindergarten children spend time with snow for more than half of the year. Children’s movement attunes to the nuances and diversity of the snow, as seasons, temperature, light, wind and weather change the consistency of snow and the possibilities for what can occur. The paper presents data of…
The Capaciousness of No: Affective Refusals as Literacy Practices
The authors considered the capacious feeling that emerges from saying no to literacy practices, and the affective potential of saying no as a literacy practice. The authors highlight the affective possibilities of saying no to normative understandings of literacy, thinking with a series of vignettes in which children, young people, and teachers refused literacy practices in different ways. The authors use the term capacious to signal possibilitie…
Kim Lenters and Mairi McDermott, Affect, embodiment and place in critical literacy assembling theory and practice
More-Than-Human Literacies in Early Childhood
More-Than-Human Literacies in Early Childhood draws on a three-year ethnographic study into the role of place, materiality and the body in the literacies of young children aged 12–36 months. It builds a picture of how children participate in, or become caught up in, literacies and language in the contexts of their everyday lives. Throughout the book, recognised understandings of young children are decentred in favour of experiential knowing of pa…
Infantmethodologies
Infantmethodologies is a concept that was playfully invented to gauge philosophical interestin the intersection between infants (or a chid; or infancy; or childhood) and methodologies(and philosophies, theories and concepts). This provocation aims to debate this intersection andweaves thinkers from around the world in order to generate discussion on the question, ‘Howdo we study a child’? Asking this question generates further questions: What pro…
Reconceptualising early language development: Matter, Sensation and the More-Than-Human
This article critically interrogates the model of language that underpins early years policy and pedagogy. Our arguments emerge from an ethnographic study involving 2-year-olds attending a day care centre that had begun to hold a substantial proportion of its sessions outdoors. The resultant shift in pedagogy coincided with changes in the children’s speaking and listening practices. We take these changes as a starting point for a reconceptualisat…
Unruly edges: Toddler literacies of the Capitalocene
By troubling notions of time-as-progress and human exceptionality, this paper considers what shifts in conceptualisations of children’s literacies and futures might be possible in the context of faltering of capitalist logics of progress. The paper draws on a 3 year ethnographic study with families and young children in northern England, which asked what might be learnt about young children’s literacies by starting with the everyday in communitie…
Unlikely Qualities of Writing Qualitatively: Porous Stories of Thresholds, In-Betweeness and the Everyday
In this paper, we seek to intervene in the proposition that there are recognisable or abstract-able modes of doing qualitative writing, and instead affirm that writing from a feminist scholarly perspective is often an embodied, domestic, haptic and serendipitous gesture. Occurring in in-between spaces and moments, in which personal and professional life frequently meld, with porous boundaries, our writing practices appear to talk back rhetoricall…
Opaque reciprocity: Or theorising Glissant's 'right to opacity' as a communication and language praxis in early childhood education
In this article, the authors argue for what douard Glissant terms the 'right to opacity' in teaching and assessing communication and language skills in early childhood education (ECE).We draw from Glissant's writing on Relation, and his interrelated concepts of 'opacity' and 'transparency', to consider two vignettes from sensory ethnographic research conducted in ECE settings: a special education classroom and a nursery.We contest the internation…
A little thing that returns: Refrains and young children’s sense making in museum spaces
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 vocalisa…
How can children and young people have a voice in urban treescapes
Scientific understanding of climate change has, to date, failed to result in sufficient action. This paper proposes that a deficit model of top‐down learning and dissemination in relation to public engagement with science may be part of the problem, particularly when considering the attitudes, values and empowerment of children and young people. Drawing on two cross‐university projects funded by the Future of UK Treescapes programme, in which chi…
Children's Rights and Participation (21 works) · Sociology (21 works) · Psychology (15 works) · Art (13 works) · Epistemology (12 works) · Aesthetics (10 works) · Linguistics (10 works) · Literacy, Media, and Education (9 works) · Pedagogy (9 works) · Posthumanist Ethics and Activism (9 works)