Knowing the World Through Your Body: Children’s Sensory Experiences and Making of Place

Abstract

In this chapter, we discuss what theoretical considerations of place, embodiment and sensory perception, drawn from phenomenologi-cal anthropology, human geography and media studies, can bring to the study of children’s experiences in environments that traverse the physical and the digital. In doing so, we advance a steadily growing area of research that goes beyond mainstream psychological and developmental approaches to childhood studies and instead takes into account sensory and ‘more-than-representational’ modes of inquiry and lived experience. We propose an understanding of children’s environments as composed of material and immaterial -invisible and imagined — entities, and of children as perceivers, makers and ‘knowers’ of ever-changing configurations of place. This, we will argue, has implications for the kinds of questions we ask of young people’s lifeworlds and the methodologies through which we might explore them. Yet, rather than prescribing how to research children’s sensory experiences of place, our conceptualisations of place, embodiment and sensory perception aim to provide a coherent theoretical framework that might offer new methodological and analytical routes within increasingly interdisciplinary contexts of research.