Childhoods and children in Visual Culture: conceptions and photoetnographic narratives

Abstract

This article highlights the importance of Visual Culture for the historical and social understanding of the conceptions of children and childhoods constituted in light of the theoretical assumptions of Sociology of Childhood, as well as, emphasizes the use of the photoetnographic narrative to understand reality in scientific researches, specifically related to childhood. For that, it presents three imaginary narratives produced from the images of children prepared in scientific research in Brazil, based on the epistemological and empirical presuppositions of History and Sociology of Childhood. It is a qualitative and descriptive study, of photoetnographic strategy, that includes an analysis produced in the light of a multireferential, critical and transdisciplinary, perspective. Through the photoetnographic narratives, the study revealed that childhood is constituted by the multiplicity of human societies, in which each age and context offer children possibilities for cultural creation and appropriation, thus triggering new and unusual forms of life, where children create for themselves strategies of survival and resistance. In this sense, thinking about the universe of children’s cultures in the perspective of Visual Culture requires a constant movement of reflection on how these spaces reflect conceptions and images of children and contribute to the formation of these cultures.