Black Dots and Wandering Sounds. Aesthetic-Visual Approaches and Agency in Research with Children and School Concerts

Research Topic/Aim
This presentation addresses aesthetic-visual approaches and agency in research with children and school concerts performed by professional musicians and their instruments. Supported by the Danish Arts Foundation, the non-profit organization Live Music in Schools initiates concerts for children in the Danish compulsory school system each school year. With the aim of exploring and gaining knowledge about children’s engagement and experiences with school concerts and how notions of agency can be understood in this regard, the presentation examines: In what ways can aesthetic-visual approaches and methods create knowledge about agency and children’s encounters with school concerts?
Theoretical Framework
The research draws on theories and approaches to children’s encounters with school concerts as relational and aesthetic-performative processes (Illeris, 2009). I refer to posthuman theories about creation of knowledge and human and non-human agency (Barad, 2007) and the child as decentered and in processes of becoming-with materiality and the world (Murris, 2016).
Methodology/Research Design
The project is collaborative and uses arts-based research approaches including sensitive participation in classes before and at the concert and in interviews with children afterwards (Blomgren, 2025). The interviews were video recorded and involved children’s drawings. Inspired by abductive analysis and diffractive reading, the analysis turns to vibrating and glowing moments creating affect.
Expected Results/Findings
The analysis and findings are not absolute but promote encounters with school concerts in which children’s relations with instruments, musicians, and music are vital and vibrant matters and valuable to the children. In these intra-related and imbricated processes, agency is performed in various ways, also during the interview-setting.
Relevance to Nordic Educational Research
Bringing posthuman theories into aesthetic-visual and educational research challenges rooted understandings about child centeredness and disturbs dichotomies about child/adult, being/becoming, and materiality/human. It calls upon developing approaches and methods, which include materiality as symmetric co-players in creation of knowledge and in children’s lives (Falkenberg, 2022).