Material Ways of Understanding Faith, Difference, and Belonging in Children's Art

• In Event: Moscone Center North Roundtable Session 8
  In Roundtable Session: Faith, Difference, and Socially Just Public Pedagogies

Abstract

This paper draws on data from over 370 children and parents in a multi-sited ethnographic research project, which in part aims to generate and document religious children’s perspectives on their worlds. One of the key approaches used in the study is to bring Muslim and non-Mulsim children together to co-create images of urban futures and faith identity. This artwork, and the wider project develops non-ideological, vernacular and material forms of knowledge about faith, difference and future communities, to inform socially just public discourses on faith and pedagogies of faith and belonging.

The multi-sited ethnographic project takes place in Sydney and Melbourne, Australia, as well as in London and Manchester, UK. The social and political contexts of these cities are comparable. They are all diversifying, but historically white Christian contexts which are often dominated by anti-Islam sentiment and its links to incidences of terrorism (as observed during fieldwork during the Manchester and London attacks in mid-2017).

The paper examines identity, difference and faith belonging in the collaboratively created images of urban futures made by the children. It outlines an ‘intra-active’ process of making where stories and histories unfold through symbol, texture and colour. All participants are regarded as having faith. This may begin for some with faith in a God, or Gods, while for many others, faith is about connectedness to community, family, values, places and rituals. Through its arts-based approach, the paper particularly demonstrates how everyday cultural objects, meanings and identities matter (or perhaps do not matter) in understanding children’s expressions of faith and their sense of belonging. As such, this identifies the need for public, socially just pedagogies of faith to strongly engage children’s material culture and their expressions of faith and future belonging through such media. There are several other lessons learned through the multi-site approach that may be useful for pedagogical explorations.

The fieldwork also indicates that the ways child participants understand, and negotiate, place-based religious discourses and mediated representations of identity and community prompts discussion regarding the extent, and nature, of their media engagement. Recent attacks particularly within the UK context, also provide an opportunity to interrogate the nature, and role, of the “performance” of public memorial in religious and secular community life. Finally, the increasing de-industrialisation and gentrification of a number of project fieldwork sites in both Australia and the UK prompts consideration of the ways young people feel that they identify/do not identify with their home and community (as evidenced through their own observations, and artwork creation) and how, and why, this is potentially shifting over time.

Author

• Anna Catherine Hickey-Moody, RMIT University