BIN Norden Conference 2027

Title of the presentation: Music Activism as A Practice of Cultural and Political Reworlding 

Tatek Abebe is a Professor of Childhood Studies at the Department of Education and Lifelong Learning, Norwegian University of Science and Technology, where he is a founding member of the research group Critical Childhood and Youth Studies. His research and teaching intersect childhood studies and development studies, focusing on how children and young people navigate and reshape the socio-cultural and political worlds they inhabit, with a particular emphasis on African contexts. He has conducted longitudinal, ethnographic, and participatory research on precarious childhoods, care and intergenerational dynamics, children’s rights, learning and laboring, and youth worldmaking. His recent work examines how young people engage with music as a form of resistance and imagination, exploring its role in struggles for political, cultural, and epistemic justice. Abebe is co-editor of Childhood: A Journal of Global Child Research and the recently published Routledge Handbook of Childhood Studies and Global Development.  

Title of the presentation: Showing the small things: experiments with techniques that attune and attend

A treasure, a misunderstanding, a secret, a fantasy, a problem - things in children’s worlds can remain hidden for many reasons, even if they are still present and important. But how can they become knowable as the focus of research, and how might we design methods that get closer to them? This talk shares an account of developing methodological experiments that attune to the ‘small things’. I will share how I have learned to pay attention carefully but sideways, by making research materials that hint rather than show, and how experiential, immersed research practices might continue to offer insight into children’s lives long after the research encounter is over.  

By sharing practice, this talk is also a sensemaking attempt for techniques in attunement and attention that follow the action without documenting it, or not exactly. I will share examples of projects where, even as we sought to purposefully notice what was emerging, we had to occlude the main focus of the project: the children themselves. We did not plan the work this way; rather, the experiments were a response to practical contingencies that demanded children’s faces and bodies be kept out of view. Shaped by forces outside our control, our experiments yielded partial understandings that emerged only gradually, subject to the invisible pull and push of disciplines, practices and perspectives.  

I will also reflect on emergence in research on children’s worlds, sharing how we sought to reflect the playfulness of the child-focused setting by remaining playful in how we designed the research approach itself. I want to show how, by using video, audio, photography, design artefacts and our own bodies, researchers can attend and attune to the small things, and thus come closer to understanding children’s experiences of their worlds.