The infrathin of post-graduate scholarship: Stories of thinking-with/apart/together/alongside (Manchester Metropolitan University)
May 3, 2023 @ 12:00pm EST
Christina MacRae has been a Research Fellow at Manchester Metropolitan University with a focus of early childhood for a little more than 5 years. She is a former nursery schoolteacher, curious about what she might learn from young children through the relations they make with the world through sensing, moving, and thinking/feeling. Her most recent research project was funded by the Froebel Trust to work with slow-motion video as a method for a co-produced ethnography with 2-year-olds in a nursery classroom environment. Alongside her early years teaching experience, she has an interest in art-making and she has participated in collaborative research/arts projects with young children in schools and nurseries.
Laura Trafí-Prats is an art educator and Senior Lecturer at Manchester Metropolitan University’s Faculty of Health and Education. She is a former Associate Professor of art education at the University of Wisconsin Milwaukee. Laura develops collaborative research with children and youth with a focus on art-based and digital eco-sensory methods as ways of inquiring on the lived experience in schools, museums, neighborhoods, and sculpture gardens. She is currently finalizing an ESRC-funded interdisciplinary study across education, architecture and sensory ethnography on mapping the spatial experience in a school building built with funds of the national program Building Schools for the Future. Laura is co-editor of two recently published volumes, one with Aurelio Castro-Varela Visual participatory arts-based research in the city: Ontology, aesthetics and ethics (2022, Routledge), and the other with Chris Schulte, New images of thought in the study of childhood drawing (2022, Springer).
Ruth Churchill Dower is a PhD scholar at Manchester Metropolitan University (UK) exploring the entanglements of movement and relationality in silent children’s embodied expressions. Ruth is thefounder of Earlyarts, a research and training network for early childhood and arts professionals, as well as an accredited trainer, consultant, former teacher, musician, actor and storyteller. Ruth is passionate about fostering creative environments, pedagogies and communities that facilitate the complexity of young children's ideas. Her latest book, Creativity and the Arts in Early Childhood, explores the origins, impacts and conditions for creative potential to be unfolded and how different artforms can inform early childhood practices. Ruth’s most recent academic publications are about improvisation as a teaching tool and pedagogies of body-listening with non-speaking children.
