Abstract:
This paper will present a methodology for co-designed projects with young people focusing on playful engagement with place. Our presentation will build on research by Smith into community-based image-making to mutually construct connections between archives and place and Nelson’s work on examining young people’s everyday literacies and their playful engagement with people, materials and environments to present a pathway to engaging with archaeology and everyday play to critically consider young people’s connectedness with the environment in which we live. This work extends Smith’s Historic England funded research to examine the potential for place-based participatory learning programmes for digital inclusion and Nelson’s work on childhood and play in a post-digital age, to build an inclusive model of healing infrastructure to inform existing models of archaeological and heritage interpretation and to create a new form of inclusive interaction with place and young people that foregrounds playful ways of being.
Young people in urban settings are particularly at risk of loss of connectedness with nature and with place (Soga & Gaston, 2016; Chawla, 2020). This paper will identify pathways for development of long-term relationships with place by acknowledging young people’s human-nonhuman entanglement with their surroundings (Bennett, 2010). We will present our methodology that builds on participatory action research and post qualitative approaches to critically analyse established methods of engaging with both archaeology and young people to reconsider these beyond didactic, static interpretation (of both people and place). We will argue for the radical potential of bringing young people as agents that matter into our broader understandings of place.
There is an urgent need for heritage bodies to engage with contemporary societal challenges and to embed community learning around issues with contemporary resonance with objects and locations with echoes of past activity. This paper will argue that young people’s playful engagement with place has a unique role in re-presenting human impacts on where we live to overlapping audiences, which can also work to enable active engagement at a community-level with place and facilitate the development of long-term relationships with our places of residence.
Young people in urban settings are particularly at risk of loss of connectedness with nature and with place (Soga & Gaston, 2016; Chawla, 2020). This paper will identify pathways for development of long-term relationships with place by acknowledging young people’s human-nonhuman entanglement with their surroundings (Bennett, 2010). We will present our methodology that builds on participatory action research and post qualitative approaches to critically analyse established methods of engaging with both archaeology and young people to reconsider these beyond didactic, static interpretation (of both people and place). We will argue for the radical potential of bringing young people as agents that matter into our broader understandings of place.
There is an urgent need for heritage bodies to engage with contemporary societal challenges and to embed community learning around issues with contemporary resonance with objects and locations with echoes of past activity. This paper will argue that young people’s playful engagement with place has a unique role in re-presenting human impacts on where we live to overlapping audiences, which can also work to enable active engagement at a community-level with place and facilitate the development of long-term relationships with our places of residence.