Video Documentaries as Tertiary Artifacts: A Tool for Tracing the Transformations of Children's Sleeping Practices?

• In Event: Fairmont Roundtable Session Four
  In Roundtable Session: Studies on Expansive Learning: Examining Multimodal and Discussion-Based Data (Table 14)

Abstract

In this paper, I explore the methodological opportunities afforded by video-documentaries to study children’s sleep practices from a cultural-historical activity theory perspective. In specific, I ask how such tools could help us overcome the translation gap (Gruber et al. 2016) regarding children’s sleep. Although our understanding of children’s sleep has advanced significantly over the last 50 years, this knowledge seldom translates to good policy and practice. Through a speculative analysis of literature on documentaries and social change, I conceptualize video-documentaries as non-representational tertiary artifacts (Wartofsky 1979; Redmon 2019). As such, video-documentaries, paired with change labories (e.g. Engeström 2007), represents one potential avenue for closing the translation gap from a 4th generation cultural-historical activity theory perspective.

Author

• Jaakko Hilppö, University of Helsinki
  Presenting Author