Guo, Bin; (2025) Investigating family interactions and collective knowledge production in a museum. Doctoral thesis (Ph.D), UCL (University College London).

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Abstract

This qualitative exploratory case study investigates how young children and their families interact with each other, museum spaces, exhibits and staff, examining how these interactions contribute to collective knowledge production in a museum in England. The study adopts Activity Theory as its theoretical framework, within a posthumanist philosophy, challenging modernist, often dichotomous divisions in knowledge production (e.g. private/public, adult/children, nature/culture, human/non-human). It also advances methodological approaches for researching young children’s museum experiences, moving beyond human-centric and adult-centric research traditions. The study adopted a multimodal approach to analyse family interactions contextually. The data was collected through video-recorded observations and post-visit semi-structured interviews with 15 family groups with two-to-five year-old children, and semi-structured interviews with nine museum staff members from various teams. The findings revealed that family interactions unfolded through fluid, multi-sensory engagements, involving both human and non-human agents. Children and their families demonstrated strong emotional connections with the two galleries, often engaging with the museum spaces in ways that extended beyond the intended institutional design. The object selection, interactive settings, rich content and family elements incorporated within the gallery design successfully engaged young children. Attending to the intra-actions helped unpack the complexity of the dynamic and multi-sensory nature of museum visits by young children and their families. The discussion explores how families, museum staff and the museum itself continuously negotiate their collective learning objectives, rooted in the long-established contradictions in museum practices due to the private-public divide regarding knowledge production. This study addresses the agency distributed among human and non-human relational networks, understanding the flexible, collective, contextual and unpredictable knowledge making processes that occur in museums. It contributes to the ongoing debates about the conceptualisation of young children and childhood, exploring children’s roles and their participation in research processes, recognising the potentialities offered by a posthuman childhood studies lens.

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