Altered States of Academia

Tag: Childhood

  • Contemporary Childhood: Secured by Design

    Birkenshaw, C. (2024) Beckett Park: Climbing Frame [Photograph]. Leeds. © Claire Birkenshaw. Claire Birkenshaw “We [have built] playgrounds that are so monumentally boring that any self- respecting child will go and play somewhere else” (Gill, 2024, quoted in Levelling Up, Housing and Communities Committee, 2024, p.7). Like the attending Levelling Up, Housing and Committee MPs,…

  • A brief genealogy of British art’s influence on imagining childhood innocence

    Claire Birkenshaw In his book, Imperial Nostalgia, historian Peter Mitchell (2021, p.3) powerfully reminds us that: “The violence of the past is ongoing in the present; not only structurally, in that it is built into the foundations of the society in which we live, but in more subtle, more constitutive ways: in the words we…