Abstract
The book Children Framing Childhoods: Working-Class Kids’ Visions of Care by Wendy Luttrell is a powerful book that centralizes the voices of children, specifically illuminating how working-class kids frame their childhoods—through photographs and related meanings and contexts. The book is based on an extensive archive of photographs and audiovisual materials, consisting of over 2,000 photographs, and 65 hr of video- and audiotaped individual and small-group interviews with a racially and ethnically diverse group of children at ages 10, 12, 16, and 18. In the interviews, the children discuss their photos, why they took them, and which images they wished to share with their peers and teachers.
Through six chapters, including a prelude and postlude, Luttrell introduces her participants, provides insight into their lives, and shares their stories and pictures. The Prelude introduces some of the research participants including the setting: “Welcome to Park Central School.” Dr. G. says, “I want to introduce Kendra and Alanzo, two of our fifth-graders who will be participating in your project.” In addition to introducing Kendra and Alanzo, Jeffrey is introduced here. Luttrell highlights that in the categories used by the school, Kendra is black, and Alanzo and Jeffrey are both Hispanic. The book comes with a useful website (childrenframingchildhoods.com) that collects together photographs taken by the children who participated in the research project upon which this book is based. Luttrell encourages people to view the galleries on the website before they read the book, let their eyes be drawn to what grabs their attention, immerse themselves in the images, and ask themselves why this might be. The website also houses five videos—Luttrell refers to the videos in terms of “collaborative seeing,” as the videos intentionally blur the borders between research and art, analysis and evocation, looking and feeling, ethics and aesthetics, and seeing and knowing. Each video or “digital interlude” is placed in relationship to a thematically related chapter, but each of them can also be viewed apart and out of sequence from those chapters.
The book has a strong and powerful focus on how social inequalities, especially related to class, race, and gender, shape how the children and young people learn and express what they feel entitled to, constrained by, and how they envision their future possibilities (p. 6). As Luttrell argues on page 15, One regrettable, dominant habitual vision that this book engages and refuses is deficit and damage-based seeing—a way of seeing that ignores the resources of poor and working-class kids of color, their families, and communities, blames them for the state of their schools, and often results in excessive attempts to control and punish students this limited way of seeing happens, in large part, because the educational system has failed, since its founding, to engage Black and Brown children in helping re-train our lenses (which have all too often been white, Anglo, middle class, monolingual, color-blind, or colorevasive).
Within this, visual research is offered as having the promise, the possibility to interrupt or upend our lenses—but it does not do so automatically, necessarily, or by default. Its transformative potential is limited by its practitioners’ willingness to look critically and, I argue, to see differently.
Chapter 1, entitled “Ways of Seeing Diverse Working-Class Children and Childhoods,” centralizes working-class children’s agency and subjectivity—their desire to conduct their lives on their own terms. This chapter pays attention to the children’s efforts to exercise their agency within white, middle-class, adult-controlled institutions and conventions, using their cameras to combat invisibility. Here, Luttrell argues that “their visual narratives (photographs and videos) offer an alternative to dominant versions of individualism—in this case, the competitive, performative individualism expected and rewarded in modern American schooling” (p. 22). Chapter 2, on “The Everyday Politics of Belonging/s,” starts off with a picture provided by Kendra (aged 10) of an apartment building, with the title “this is where I belong.” The pictures and stories of children are accompanied by powerful descriptions and analyses. For example, Kendra’s way of showing and speaking about her home dwelling is discussed in terms of being exemplary for the way it establishes her story of belonging (p. 51). The journey from home to school and its significance as a collective endeavor among family and friends appear as a common theme in the children’s images (some good examples here are Vivian, Crystal, and Angel’s stories and photographs, pp. 52–70); this journey is discussed in more detail in Chapter 3.
Chapter 3, entitled “Motherhood, Childhood, and Love Labor in Family Choreographies of Care,” starts off with Antonio who has a “tough home situation” (p. 85). The chapter sheds a light on “choreographies of care”—a concept meant to highlight the constellation of resources, people, rhythms shaped by different occupational demands and shifting schedules, feelings, and intimacies of family living (p. 86). Here, Luttrell also draws attention to the role that gender, race, class, and culture play in perceptions of what counts as parent involvement. For example, the notion of care as gendered is reflected in the way in which the children (both boys and girls) consistently chose to photograph their mothers, making their care work visible and highlighting their mothers’ goodness, nurturance, value, and presence. This focus on mothers is taken further in Chapter 4 on “School Choreographies of Care: Being Seen, Safe, and Believed” (p. 121), which sheds a light on the notion of “helping out,” care, and reciprocity, with the children expressing their own desire to “help out” those who cared for them (p. 145). Chapter 5, “That’s (Not) Me Now: Development, Identity, and Being in Time,” considers how the young people, now in their late teens, return to their childhood photographs, reflecting upon their past selves, how they used their cameras to represent their present lives, and “what matters most.” This chapter weaves together an array of visual and textual material: childhood photographs and individual interviews about them. In the final chapter, Chapter 6, “The Freedom to Care,” Luttrell reflects on the contribution of the book and how the photographs, narratives, and counternarratives of care that the children presented challenge deficit perspectives about both working-class upbringings and the underresourced schools that serve these populations. Here, Luttrell views the children’s perspectives of care, and the way in which this played out over the course of the project, through a neoliberal capitalist lens structured and limited by gender, race, and class biases.
Overall, the most powerful and crucial of the children’s stories and photographs is the depth that is manifested in their profound and basic understanding about care—that care is work, something that requires time, effort, resources, and coordination, as well as attention and investment; it is also mundane, necessary, and arduous and affectively linked with social units and spaces (in this case, family, school, friendship circles, and communities). Care, then as Luttrell argues, is the basic currency of community—indeed, in a democratic society, it is the precondition of freedom itself.
