The broad theoretical scope of visual studies brings together images, gaze, materiality, visualization, and the institutionalization of the visual in the everyday life of both humans and non-humans. A particular focus is on the ways in which norms and values are reproduced in and through the visual.
I research visual culture in combination with the topics of child culture, consumption, sexuality, materiality, children and childhood and visual research methods. I am especially interested in the ways in which these topics intertwine, entangle and cut against one another (see below).
Children and childhood
What is a child? This may seem a simple question. Yet child studies research shows how children and childhood are continuously ‘being done’ or enacted in and through practice. Theoretically, I am responsible for the concept Child Studies Multiple. This concept opens up research which stays with the instabilities, mess, fluidity, relationality, hybridity and complexity which are all part of enacting children and childhood. Child Studies Multiple questions the assumption that children are consolidated and uniform, replacing it with the notion of the heterogeneous child who multiplies in all directions. Child Studies Multiple combines theories of child studies with visual studies and with Science and Technology Studies (STS), Actor Network Theory (ANT), and posthumanism. My research mainly concerns children aged from six to twelve years, examining the enactment of children and childhood in and through practices by both children AND adults.
