Babies’ engagements with everyday things : An ethnographic study of materiality, movement and participation

Sammanfattning: This thesis explores how babies (1-18 months old) engage with material things in their everyday lives. The aim is to contribute with theoretical and empirical insights into babies own practices around material things and how attending to these practices can lead to reflections on participation, material culture and everyday space. The empirical material is collected through video ethnographic fieldwork in the homes of seven babies and their families. The empirical material has been analysed through combining cultural analysis with the analytical approach ‘thinking with theory’. The thesis shows that sensoriality and movement is important for understanding babies own engagements with things and that these engagements are not limited to things given to, or intended for, them. Babies also shape the everyday spaces of the families through their movements of things in their homes. The analyses also show that focusing on sensoriality and movement in the meeting between babies and the researcher is a promising contribution to discussions concerning participatory research and ethnographic method. The thesis is theoretically situated within the field of child- and childhood studies.