Hidden Worlds: A Geography of Childhood Multispecies Secret Places
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-
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Other Finnish
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University of Oulu
Unit and faculty
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- Doctoral Researcher
Researchers
Project description
My PhD thesis, titled "Hidden Worlds: A Geography of Childhood Multispecies Secret Places," supervised by Pauliina Rautio and Tuure Tammi, aims to develop a comprehensive understanding of childhood secret places. This research seeks to contribute to the well-being of both children and the environment by establishing principles that respect children and their multispecies companions' rights to privacy, embrace risk, and help to navigate current and future uncertainty times.
Childhood secret places – including physical places like treehouses or dens, but also digital and virtual secret places inside video games or a child’s imagination – inhabit an ambivalent place in discourses on children and childhood. On the one hand, often nostalgic academic literature promotes their existence as supporting children’s development. On the other hand, due to concerns about children's safety and a desire to regulate their education and surroundings, adults more frequently attempt to manage, monitor, and restrict children's mobilities, temporalities, and spaces, limiting their capacity to have and maintain secret places. The two competing narratives – benefits for children’s development and worries over their safety – leave a crucial gap in scientific understanding: what is the meaning of these places for children themselves and those these places are shared with.
This PhD located at the intersection of (early) childhood studies and children’s geographies produces a more holistic view by examining and expanding the current narratives on secret places of children and their companions to answer the main research question of: how can narratives on childhood secret places be decolonized from adult and minority-Western dominated perspectives to acknowledge non-developmental, collaborative, joyful and difficult expressions of this phenomenon?.
To accomplish this work, the phenomenon of secret places will be mapped in three work packages including a theoretical exploration, methodological development, and empirical research. Diverse philosophical, cultural and historical sources will be weaved together with an empirical study conducted in the North of Finland, using the innovative method of inviting the public to send anonymous postcards in line with a research-creation approach. These postcards are then curated into a digital anarchive. This newly developed method responds to the ethical challenges related to researching childhood secret places of privacy, trust and power relations, while also challenging the adult/child binary and concepts of authenticity relating to childhood experiences and children’s voices. Including new materialist and posthumanist perspectives will challenge the romanticizing, colonizing but also risk-avoidant and adults-controlling-children narratives.
This research will further scientific understanding of the phenomenon of childhood secret places. Furthermore, it promotes a transformation in understanding human's relationship to the world, emphasizing epistemological humility and the importance of respecting privacy, embracing risk, unknowing and lack of control while facing today’s uncertain times with joy and playfulness.
Didn't find a postcard to send in but still want to participate in the project? You can download a postcard here, write and/or draw about your childhood secret place(s) on it and send it to the following address to have it included in the digital anarchive!
Kristina Vitek
Kasvatustieteiden ja psykologian tiedekunta
PL 8000
90014 Oulun yliopisto
Hidden Worlds was part of the University of Oulu's Researchers' Night on 27th of September 2024. Visitors were able to "visit" some re-created secret places and left their own stories on their childhood secret places. More information about Researchers' Night can be found on the event's website: https://www.oulu.fi/en/events/researchers-night
An article on the project was published in Kaleva on 17 May 2024, read it here!
English translation: To this day, at the age of 56, I remember my childhood hiding places were a dense grove of trees near my home where there were large rocks that we would often hide behind. When I was at home, my hiding place inside was a bedside drawer where I would lie down and pull the drawer under the bed.
English translation: The secret place of my childhood was at my grandparents' house under the stairs, I could even still go there because it was such a magical little nest/den, I would eat my packed lunch there and wonder what I would paint and that's where a lot of my art inspirations were born. I was happy in that moment, accompanied as a little one by my cat and my dog. Thank you
English translation: As a child, I spent a lot of time on my own - although with my cousins in the countryside at my grandmother's house, we would get together as a group. Popular places were the roof/edge of the feed tower attached to the barn building. That's where you climbed up the “feed chute”. The top of the barn was also an obscure, dusty hiding place where the cats would have their kittens. But a very special hiding place was the currant bushes, where you could get fresh berries from the bushes and stare at the sky. I would often find myself in the middle of a large clump of bushes, huddled by a green mossy rock. Surrounding it was a lawn where lady's mantle was also growing. After the rain, it was nice to step out and smell the wet leaves in the dew. My childhood home in the church village was near the cemetery, which was higher than the surrounding area. It seems odd that the cemetery scared - I was only interested in the old, large headstones in particular. The pine forest was also a place where you could enjoy eating berries all by yourself in the autumn. So there was not just one place, but several
English translation: The secret places of my childhood are connected to summers and holidays at my grandmother's house. Secret places in my grandmother's house in the countryside were for example an outdoor sauna in the nearby woods and a barn. These were places to play, hide and spy on adults. Lovely memories!
English translation: When I was in primary school-aged, I often climbed the trees growing next to the road leading to my house. My favourite spot was a combination of aspen and pine trees growing close together, which were sturdy, well-branched, safe. I climbed very high, from where I could see my home’s yard, vegetable gardens and open fields. The aspen leaves’ rustling, and the scent of pine were wonderful, I had a safe hiding place there. Sometimes, when no one was in the yard, I would take a fast walk on the top of the aspen, project myself and sing. The feeling of freedom and independence was overwhelming. When I was older, my hiding place was in my grandmother's attic, behind the chimney. There I read my aunt's old Friday papers and marvelled at the deck my uncle, killed in the war, had made.
English translation: When I was a kid, my way to school was 800m, which felt like a long way. On the way home, I often stopped under a big tree, about halfway, to daydream and take a nap. The tree was next to the footpath, at the top of the biggest hill of the trip. We lived close to the city, so passers-by would occasionally pass by.
English translation: As the eldest child in a big family, there was a lot to do, especially in the summer. There was always: Home now! To watch the little ones, while mum goes to the laundry, milking, going to the store...etc., etc.! A particularly good hiding place was the potato field’s furrow. There, lying in the middle of the field, you could read books in peace and quiet, even adult books, when no one would think that I was reading in the middle of the potato field, hiding.
English translation:
PYHÄNTÄ AHOKYLÄ Pond size about 300m x 400m
SWAMP - STREAM - MÖLÖKKÄ POND
Mölökkä was a pond refuge for me, where one can fish, swim and pick cloudberries from the swamp and pick lingonberries and blueberries from the ridge. The scents were 22m high measured from the pond. A pond with a very steep shore and deep.
English translation: The secret hiding place of my childhood was a storeroom in the sauna building, which was called "puoji" in the dialect of Meänkieli. In the summer we also slept there - Mum let us decorate it to our liking with lace curtains on the window and rag rugs on the floor.
The puoji were used for storing clothes and other things like Christmas decorations and it was nice to rummage through them from time to time.
English translation: My home burnt down when I was 5 years old. (Germans burnt it) We were in evacuation. I liked playing hide and seek, and shout (Here I am).
Summers we swam in Kemijoki and winters we skiied when we had time off. Mom and dad were lovely and dear to me. We were not rich, but we had bread [i.e. means of income or sustenance] when we worked hard ourselves.
English translation: When summer came we took small trunks and twigs of birch and built a hut. The whole summer we spent in this hut after coming back from work. That's how our whole summer was spent, nicely.
English translation: If I did something bad or pranked, I went into hiding high up in a rowan tree or underneath my grandma's big skirt. Mom told me off and the whip [vitsa = a thin branch or twig of birch] was hung over the door to warn me. When they looked for me, grandmom would say that there he is running down along a ditch with his white hair flickering! I was afraid of cars.
English translation: Big open prairie. A place where you never got lost even if you travelled for days on end, you always found a way back home. Food was to be found in nature all the time, as long as you knew where to look. :) Animals were plenty and different kinds. People were scarce but when you met them they told stories, shared wisdoms and "gossip". I rode my horse bareback and without a bridle, my horse always knew where to go, when to escape beasts, when to rest. It was my best friend and the most amazing horse on Earth. People tried to buy it off me many times but I would not sell it. It fought against thieves till their bitter end.
English translation: Our siblings and other relatives' children had a "secret house" at a grandmother's house in Lapland. It was a play-place in a nearby forest, sheltered by large trees. Adults were never seen there. Toys for the secret house play were found in nature. We cooked play food and made 'traps' to see if anyone else had been in the hut. It was also fun to sing our own funny songs and tell jokes in the hut without the adults hearing everything. We listened to the rustling of the forest, and sometimes it was exciting not knowing where all the sounds were coming from. We are over 30 years old, and the hut still came back very vividly.
English Translation: A secret and special place in my childhood is my father's old homestead, where in an abandoned field grew a huge number of tall willowherbs/fireweeds. The willowherbs/fireweeds were so tall, and I was so small, that when I walked there, all that could be seen of me was the top of my head. It was a good place to play with my cousins!
English translation: As a child, I escaped into books. At the age of 10, I fell in love with the books of the Bronten sisters. My most relaxing moments were spent in my imagination, hanging on the moor with my skirts wet. Even now, when I have nothing to do, I think of places I’ve never visited, but which feel so familiar.
English Translation: The secret place of my childhood was an old red hay barn with big round bales of hay inside. My friends and I used to build rooms and corridors in and between them. The most special place was the 'kitchen' in one corner where we often ate snacks and treats.
Here you can find the data privacy notice for scientific research participants according to EU General Data Protection Regulation Art. 13 and 14 for the project "Hidden Worlds: A Geography of Childhood Multispecies Secret Places".
Data privacy notice in English: https://unioulu-my.sharepoint.com/:b:/g/personal/kvitek21_student_oulu_fi/EQnyfULASBpHvDDF3EfaNrkBds9aNQIgQUgEtm6xOLzUbw?e=KlRkLW
Tietosuojaseloste suomeksi [Data privacy notice in Finnish]: https://unioulu-my.sharepoint.com/:b:/g/personal/kvitek21_student_oulu_fi/EQaZr1EX_AhGopOzKtIz_2YBhs4B6ao81YnReH8n8duhIg?e=OhWzmG