Broadly speaking, I am cultural geographer. My research interests fall into two broad categories: children and young people's media cultures; and materiality and embodiment in early childhood. The sections below expand upon each of these interests in slightly more detail.
My PhD research was concerned with the practices and consequences of reading shonen manga (Japanese comics marketed primarily at an audience of teenage boys). My thesis is about how readers encounter and assemble the dispersed elements presented to them on the page (words and pictures, panels and gutters) in order to produce a story that seems to reside within the material text itself and be available to any competent reader. While, for the most part, the stories readers find in the texts are similar (and presumably resemble the stories their creators intended to tell a variety of readings can be produced from the same text. These differences emerge and are worked through in fannish debates about the 'canonical' manga text which often take place online. My thesis also explores issues surrounding multi-mediation and cross-cultural and adaptation and translation of manga and anime texts.
I am also interested in how children and young people engage with and experience violence in media texts. Building upon aspects of my PhD, which explored the 'epic' and the 'awesome' as articulated in readers' experience and discussions of fight scenes in manga , I am interested in exploring how children and young people relate to 'violent' media texts and what they do with them.
I am currently working on a project called 'Baby Steps', which explores how various objects and materials are implicated in the emergence of young children's mobility. The project investigates the invention, design, marketing and use of a range of different objects and materials (including shoes, baby walkers, push-along toys, buggies, stairs and stair gates, among other things) for promoting or impeding young children's mobility. The project combines video ethnography with young children and their families, with interviews with designers and manufacturers and documentary and archival research.
The 'Baby Steps' project forms part of my broader interests in materiality and embodiment in early childhood. I am also interested in the role of objects and materials in early childhood education. My previous research has investigated on the social, spatial and material organisation of early childhood classrooms and the notion of 'participation' in childhood research.