Inimkond: Pihla Siim
The next lecture from the series "Inimkond: current issues in anthropology and beyond" will be by ethnologist Pihla Siim (University of Tartu/ University of Eastern Finland) who has studied Estonian families in Finland and focused extensively on children's perspective.
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iCal calendarTranslocal everyday life from children’s perspective: experimenting with methods
While working in a project on children’s experiences and understandings of mobility, I strongly felt that interview method that worked with adults was not sufficient with younger children. This lead me to do participant observation and to try alternative fieldwork methods, storycrafting and drawing, while working with Estonian children living in Finland.
Working together with Keiu Telve, we have tried storycrafting method (Karlsson 2013) with children aged 3 to 10 years. When applying the storycrafting method, the child is asked to tell a story, the researcher writes it down, word by word, and reads it aloud to the child after which the child may correct the story until s/he is content with the outcome. We have modified the method a bit to fit our objectives, i.e. we have worked with small groups, mostly 2–4 children, and given children a certain broad theme for the story.
We have found this method challenging but fruitful, enabling children to express their personal experiences and emotions through imaginative stories. Working in group makes it also possible for children to negotiate these experiences with each other.
Our Kone foundation funded project (Inequalities in Motion, PI: Laura Assmuth, 2016–2018) team includes a visual artist, a journalist, and a documentary filmmaker. I will also shed light on our ways to work together, which has further encouraged the use of different kinds of output of the research results, i.e. combining factual and fictional elements.
Karlsson, Liisa. 2013. “Storycrafting Method – to Share, Participate, Tell and Listen in Practice and Research.” The European Journal of Social and Behavioural Sciences 6: 1109–1117. doi:10.15405/ejsbs.88.
BIO
Pihla Maria Siim is Junior Research Fellow at the University of Tartu, Department of Estonian and Comparative Folklore. She is currently also working at the University of Eastern Finland, in two projects related to Inequalities of Mobility, led by prof. Laura Assmuth. Siim’s research interests are related to narrative research, children and mobility, multilocality and family relations in Estonian–Finnish transnational space. Her recent publications focus on folkloristic fieldwork practices, family storytelling, ‘doing family’ through practices of silence, questions of belonging and translocal care.
New book:
Assmuth, L., Hakkarainen, M., Lulle, A., & Siim, P.M. (Eds.) 2018. Translocal Childhoods and Family Mobility in East and North Europe. Palgrave.www.palgrave.com/gp/book/