Part 3
My contribution discusses the role of aesthetic agency and communication in the early years, and the existential role of aesthetic practices in the formation and transformation of self and world amongst young children. Drawing on multidisciplinary research, I suggest that infancy research and aesthetics can cross-pollinate in fruitful ways, contributing to a better understanding of the role of the aesthetic in human life. This however requires methodological reflection on how we use the term “aesthetic” – an issue that will at least be articulated in the talk.
BIO: Pauline von Bonsdorff has been Professor of Art Education at the University of Jyväskylä, Finland since 2002. Her research interests include arts as practices of self- and word-formation, and the role of aesthetics in childhood, emphasising agency, embodiment, imagination and intersubjectivity. She has also published on environmental and urban as well as phenomenological aesthetics.
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Pauline von Bonsdorff (2018). The Child's Curriculum: Working with the Natural Voices of Young Children Colwyn Trevarthen (ed.) et al. OUP: 126–138
Bonsdorff, P. V. (2021). On Equal Terms? : On Implementing Infants’ Cultural Rights. In E. Eriksen Ødegaard, & J. Spord Borgen (Eds.), Childhood Cultures in Transformation : 30 Years of the UN Convention on the Rights of the Child in Action towards Sustainability (pp. 37-53). Brill
Stephen Malloch and Colwyn Trevarthen (2008, eds.). Communicative Musicality Exploring the basis of human companionship. OUP
Daniel N. Stern (2010). Forms of Vitality: Exploring Dynamic Experience in Psychology, the Arts, Psychotherapy, and Development. OUP