Intergenerational and intercultural civic learning through storied child-led walks of Chiang Mai

Abstract

Recent times have witnessed global trends of increased protection of children in public spaces. The participatory arts project The Walking Neighbourhood hosted by Children renegotiates child agency in public spaces by inviting primary school aged children to curate and lead adult audiences on walks of local neighbourhoods. Multiple cities across Australia, Asia, and Europe have hosted The Walking Neighbourhood since 2012. This article focuses on one aspect of that initiative: the Australian-Thai research collaboration for the Chiang Mai child-hosted walks. Through storytelling, the Australian and Thai authors share their sensorial ethnographic encounters of two child-led walks in Chiang Mai to provide lived sensorial affective accounts of children's perceptions and engagement with public spaces. These stories demonstrate how the project provides education for children's independently mobile engagement with their neighbourhoods and public spaces, in that the children competently managed responsibility for their adult audiences, and embraced responsibility for sharing their emplaced connections with a neighbourhood locale. Through participatory arts practice, artists, child hosts, and adult audience members co-construct and interpret exploratory walks of local neighbourhoods to enable enhanced independent mobilities for children, challenging the norms that assert controlled childhoods. Such interdisciplinary, intergenerational, and intercultural experiences can enable reconceptualisation of children and public spaces and new realities for civic engagement and learning for all.