Rachel Holmes | Manchester Metropolitan University (original) (raw)

Rachel Holmes

Rachel Holmes is Professor of Cultural Studies of Childhood at the Education and Social Research Institute, MMU.

Research Interests
Her research interests lie across the interstices of applied educational research, social science research and arts-based research within cultures of childhood. Her interests are located around notions of 'childhood territories' such as ways childhood becomes imag(in)ed through fictional, documentary and ethnographic film; children's child(self)hood, identities and objects and ways to (left)field childhood via opening up off-centre research methodologies.

Research Projects
Economic and Social Research Council (ESRC) Seminar Series Award: Un-easy childhoods: innovating theory, practices and ethics through interdisciplinary research. Principal Investigator (2010-2011)

ESRC Follow-on Funding Scheme Award: Addressing 'problem behaviour' in the early years: an innovative film resource. Principal Investigator (2010-2011)

ESRC Grant Scheme Award: Becoming a Problem: How Children Acquire a Reputation as 'Naughty' in the Earliest Years at School 0.5fte Researcher (Principal Investigators Professor Maggie MacLure and Professor Liz Jones) (2006-2008)

Action for Children: Evaluation of the Mother and Baby Unit, HMP Styal Project Researcher (2009-2010)

Stockport Metropolitan Borough Council and SureStart Fatherhood Project. Project Co-Director (2009-10)

The Manchester Museum: Alchemy Enquire Project Co-Director (2007-2008)

The Esmée Fairbairn Foundation: consultancy to undertake strand 8/2 Primary Schools and Other Agencies Primary Review Research Briefing, Director Professor Robin Alexander, Cambridge University - Research Consultant (2007-2008)

The Esmée Fairbairn Foundation: Imaginative Journeys Project Director (2006) The Esmée Fairbairn Foundation: The Lion's Story Project Director (2004) The Esmée Fairbairn Foundation: Birth to Three Training Matters Project Research team member (2002-2006)

DfES/SureStart: Birth to Three Matters Project Core research team member (2001-2002)

The Esmée Fairbairn Foundation: Playgroup Project - Comparative study of UK and Northern Ireland Research team member (2001)
Phone: 01612472059
Address: Education and Social Research Institute
Manchester Metropolitan University
Birley
53 Bonsall Street
Manchester
M15 6GX

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Papers by Rachel Holmes

SAGE Publications Ltd eBooks, 2014

International review of qualitative research, May 1, 2014

Full bibliographic details must be given when referring to, or quoting from full items including ... more Full bibliographic details must be given when referring to, or quoting from full items including the author's name, the title of the work, publication details where relevant (place, publisher, date), pagination, and for theses or dissertations the awarding institution, the degree type awarded, and the date of the award.

International Journal of Qualitative Studies in Education

This piece is written from the middle of a nursery school carpet, the Covid-19 pandemic and an in... more This piece is written from the middle of a nursery school carpet, the Covid-19 pandemic and an interdisciplinary methodology of participant sensation . As two researchers from the larger research collective, Odd , we are caught up with children’s improvisations in the opaque folds of the nursery assemblage. In the non-human and human complicity that bubbles up and slides around our own recalcitrant habits of possessive individualism, colonialism, white privilege, and the bleed of times pre- and mid-pandemic, we pull a thread from nursery’s fusional weave, a moment in 2018 between child and researcher in which the child’s consent to be more than one within nursery’s fleshy organ-isation, now rubs up against heightened anxieties of viral contagion. We take time to attune to the wonder of this moment, one small instance of the ephemeral nature and vital importance of intimacy in pre-pandemic, and it mid- and post-pandemic implications

International Journal of Art & Design Education, 2020

This paper charts an on‐going process emerging from a collaborative project between Manchester Ar... more This paper charts an on‐going process emerging from a collaborative project between Manchester Art Gallery, and early childhood researchers and practitioners, who are currently working together to develop a new learning space for families. It revolves around the potential of exhibiting a collection of bonbonnieres in this space. These little 18th Century pots, originally filled with sweets or breath mints, are colourful and depict fanciful animals that have an almost cartoon like quality that may resonate with younger children. Yet the contents that once lay inside would have been cut from plantations by the hands of enslaved people. Sugar, in all its sweetness, is intrinsically linked to Britain’s colonial history. Sections of a poem by Tina Otito Tamsho‐Thomas (http://revealinghistories.org.uk/smoking‐drinking‐and‐the‐british‐sweet‐tooth/objects/bonbonniere.html) are emplaced throughout to unambiguously contextualise the bonbonniere as a symbol of enslavement legacy, sugar trade h...

Cultural Studies <=> Critical Methodologies, Jul 2, 2013

ABSTRACT

Curious Minds, Sep 30, 2019

Project reports ………………………………………………………………………………. 12 2.1 Moving together: a dance collaboratory in ... more Project reports ………………………………………………………………………………. 12 2.1 Moving together: a dance collaboratory in the nursery Martenscroft and Company Chameleon ……………………………………. 2.2 Will there be fragile things? Ribblesdale Nursery School and Manchester Museum………………..

Knowing from the Inside, 2022

Writing with Deleuze in the Academy, 2018

This chapter draws on data from research on 'Textures of food: diffracting eating relationships i... more This chapter draws on data from research on 'Textures of food: diffracting eating relationships in an early years setting' which is about young children's embodied engagements with food. The research was based in a nursery in the northwest of England that is known to have high levels of poverty and offers free places to 'disadvantaged' 2 year olds. The assemblage moves beyond the linear accounts of UK policy narratives around 'healthy eating' and 'balanced diet' in the early years that force children's relationships with food into binary positions such as having a 'healthy appetite' or being 'fussy eater'. Instead, it harnesses the concepts of 'becoming' and 'difference' to open up the potentialities of a machinic food assemblage, where alternative forms of monstrous life, created between heterogeneous entities at mealtimes, are recognised as in circulation in the early years setting. The assemblage will examine one particular 'monstrous' story about how a child experiences the limits of her own body while finding her 'self' affectively entangled with food and other entities. It foregrounds the affective relationships she has with food in order to understand why some children enjoy eating, whilst for others, it is a situation that is fraught with tension, anxiety and frustration. Methodologically, the assemblage turns to the post-humanities, which offer opportunities, as well as produce particular challenges, in relation to ways of 'being' and 'knowing' as a researcher. Our entanglements in this assemblage draw in visual, auditory and tactile bodily intra-relationalities, as the event becomes co-produced in the interrogation of what is beyond or more-than-human.

Springer International Handbooks of Education, 2018

The aim of this chapter is to rethink 'thought' in qualitative inquiry. We attend to possibilitie... more The aim of this chapter is to rethink 'thought' in qualitative inquiry. We attend to possibilities that open up when we turn our attention to habits, ordinary affects and methodological creations that are integral to the ways in which we think. The challenge of putting new materialism and post-humanism to work requires significant ontological and epistemological shifts. Nevertheless, it is only by shifting the ground on which specific knowledge claims are made that we can potentiate a different logic which in turn can alter both thinking and, importantly, early years practice. Thus this chapter will resolutely refute general ideas or models of what constitutes familiar objects in early childhood settings, for example 'the cardboard box', or 'the snowman' [sic]. Instead, such models, in situating them within a 'zone of indeterminacy' (Massumi, 1993, p. 99) are, as a consequence freed from habitual assumptions-assumptions that, in our view, delimit the possibilities of what is possible. The chapter works with objects and processes, deliberately avoiding foregrounding the child, to leave the uncertainty and ambiguity of which things are in play, alive in the text. Through experimental methods the chapter will draw on two early years projects: 2-curious (a programme of continued professional development for early years practitioners in Manchester, UK) and Knotknowing Diversity in Early Childhood (a research project reexamining 'multicultural education' in an early years setting in London, UK) as generative examples of the potential of the entanglements observed during ethnographic research that take matter and materiality as their starting place.

Children's Geographies, 2017

This paper argues for an expanded field of inquiry to conceptualise young children in museums. Dr... more This paper argues for an expanded field of inquiry to conceptualise young children in museums. Drawing on Murris' [2016. The Post-Human Child: Educational Transformation Through Philosophy with Picturebooks. London: Routledge] analysis of childhood constructions, we discuss how cognitive and socio-constructivist models of the child dominate childhood and museum studies. We argue for the potential of Murris' figure of the posthuman child to reconceptualise children in museums. This perspective offers a greater focus on the potency of objects themselves, and the animacy of the non-human aspects of the museum. It is also underpinned by a theoretical shift from representation to nonrepresentation [Anderson, B., and P. Harrison. (2010) "The Promise of Non-representational Theories." In Taking-place: Non-representational Theories and Geography. Farnham: Ashgate], presenting us with new ways to address questions such as 'what does that mean?' when we observe children's learning in museums. Working with data that has proved resistant to interpretation across a range of research projects, what we call 'sticky data', we elaborate on three themes emerging from this reconceptualisation: vibrancy, repetition and movement.

Nursery World, 2012

An observational classroom study by Rachel Holmes, Maggie MacLure, Liz Jones and Christina MacRae... more An observational classroom study by Rachel Holmes, Maggie MacLure, Liz Jones and Christina MacRae can give practitioners some revealing insights.

Three core questions The three core questions that the Family Learning team at Manchester Art Gal... more Three core questions The three core questions that the Family Learning team at Manchester Art Gallery would like this evaluation to address are: 1. What learning takes place in the Clore Art Studio and how can we optimise this learning environment in the future? 2. Which audience or age group benefit the most from this space and how can we talk about their experiences? 3. What is the role of the artist and the volunteer in facilitating the space? In order to address each of these questions members of the Manchester Metropolitan University evaluation team gathered qualitative data that included observations including filmed documentation of children, families, young adults, teachers, members of the Family Learning Team and volunteers when engaged with/in the Clore Art Studio Space. Additionally interviews were undertaken with the Family Learning Manager, volunteers, parents, teachers, the artists that helped to design the Studio space and the artists that facilitated the space across...

Working with Young Children in Museums, 2020