Photo of Anna Sparrman

Anna Sparrman

Professor

In my research, theories of visual culture is combined with children, consumption, child culture and sexuality. I addresses how norms and values are enacted between children, adults, and the material world in children's everyday life practices.

Visual Studies

Theories of visual culture and visual studies provide the main umbrella concepts for my research. As a form of social and cultural theory, visual studies questions and analyzes taken for granted, everyday visual practices. My research asks questions such as: Who can look at whom and who is allowed to be seen?

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.

Video presentation

Anna Sparrman talks about her research on children, consumption, child culture and sexuality

In Anna Sparrmans research, theories of visual culture is combined with children, consumption, child culture and sexuality. She addresses how norms and values are enacted between children, adults, and the material world in children's everyday life practices.

Research Projects

Research Field

Publications

2024

Anna Sparrman (2024) Barn, visuell kultur och vardagssexualitet Sexualitet, identitet och relationer i skolan: F-6 och fritidshem, p. 73-94 (Chapter in book)
Anna Sparrman (2024) Unlearning the child: An ontological politics outlook Educational Philosophy and Theory (Article in journal) Continue to DOI
Myung Hwa Baldini, Rebecka Tiefenbacher, Effrosyni Terzoglou, Joacim Strand, Veronica Hällqvist, Emilia Holmbom Strid, Olga Anatoli, Anna Sparrman, Marek Tesar (2024) Listening to children and young people in Sweden: Practices, possibilities, and tensions Global Studies of Childhood, Vol. 14, p. 214-226 (Article in journal) Continue to DOI

Child Studies multiple - Collaborative play for thinking through theories and methods

This text is an exploration of collaborative thinking and writing through theories, methods, and experiences on the topic of the child, children, and childhood. It is a collaborative written text (with 32 authors) that sprang out of the experimental workshop Child Studies Multiple. The workshop and this text are about daring to stay with mess, “un-closure” , and uncertainty in order to investigate the (e)motions and complexities of being either a child or a researcher.

Culture Unbound

Through the looking-glass: Alice and Child Studies Multiple

This is NOT an article about Alice in Wonderland. It is about the figure of Alice-the-child and an exploration of the contemporary theoretical research field of Child Studies. What if, I ask, Lewis Carroll’s Alice had been one of the sources drawn upon when forming child research theories? The idea is to explore how the fictive child character Alice in Wonderland enacts key theoretical concepts in Child Studies. Out of this exploration grows the idea of Child Studies Multiple.

Through the looking-glass

Children’s sexual citizenship Changing notions of the sexual child

“It seems as though a dark view of children and sexuality has arisen since the political changes of the 1980s. Our own contemporary worries about the omnipresent paedophile limits the case for sexual citizenship for children because it refutes the political space and agency that needs to be created for this to happen.”

Anna Sparrman, “Children’s sexual citizenship: Changing notions of the sexual child” in Changing Childhoods, 22 September 2020.

Making culture - Children’s and young people’s leisure cultures

Making culture is a research anthology focusing on children’s and young people’s leisure culture. Nineteen researchers from the Nordic countries have been invited by the Nordic Agency for Cultural Policy Analysis (Kulturanalys Norden) to explore, describe and analyse how children and young people act as cultural ‘doers’. The anthology provides researchers, policymakers and practitioners with insights and analyses on children’s and young people’s culture.

Download or order the book: Making culture

CV

CV, assignments & networks

CV in short

  • 2021-2025
    Professor II in Children's culture, Department of Arts and Cultural Studies, Inland Norway University of Applied Sciences, Norway.
  • 2021-2023
    Deputy Head of Department, Department of Thematic Studies, Linköping University.
  • 2013
    Professor in Child Studies, Linköping University
  • 2009
    Docent in Child Studies, Linköping University
  • 2002
    PhD in Child Studies, Linköping University

Assignments

  • Advisory board for the Childism Institute
  • Editorial board for Childhood
  • Advisory board for research project “(Re)configuration of parenthood: Political agendas entangling everyday family life”, Roskilde University 

 Previous assignments

Scientific Advisory Panel for MISTRA-SAMS

Video

 

Other research platforms

 

News

Organisation