Paper short abstract:

Weaving Knowledge is a film about making, material culture and childhood in West Africa. In four episodic narratives called 'weaving knowledge', 'transforming matter', 'making patterns', and 'constructing designs' the film poetically depicts the forms of knowledge embedded in children's lives.

Paper long abstract:

This film was produced as part of the British Academy funded research project “Development and Education in the Vernacular for Infants and Children (DEVI)” based in West Africa. The film is an output in the larger project to identify the local epistemologies and pedagogies that families in poor communities deploy to support their children’s education in the early years.

Discussant: Film Producer, Professor Karen Wells (Birkbeck). She is the author of three research monographs, “Childhood in a Global Perspective” (Policy, 3rd edition, 2021), “Childhood Studies: making young subjects” (Polity, 2017) and “Visual Cultures of Childhood” (Rowman and Little 2020). She is book reviews editor of the journal Children’s Geographies, and a board member of the journal Global Studies of Childhood. She is currently involved in two significant book projects, as co-editor of the forthcoming Routledge Handbook of Childhood Studies and Global Development and Bloomsbury’s forthcoming Handbook of Theory in Childhood Studies. She is PI of two global challenges research projects with British Academy, one on translanguaging in Amhara region, Ethiopia and one on community approaches to early learning in rural villages in West Africa.