Frames of meaning: Children's representational practices and images -in -use

The primacy of the visual in our culture has huge implications for the study of contemporary youth culture. Given the amount of time that children spend making and consuming images, it has become critically important to understand the complexity with which children relate to and through visual information. In this thesis I use an ethnographic approach to explore the ways in which a group of eleven students at an elementary school in a northeastern city participate in visual culture.1.;Visual culture consists of a culturally specific set of practices used to communicate with images. When considering visual culture, we must look to three sites of meaning to understand how images gain cultural significance and operate socially: the site of the image's production (how the image is made), the site of the image itself, and the site of the image's audiencing and reception (how the image is seen and understood). This thesis coheres around these three sites to explore the children's participation in visual culture using photography to represent themselves and their worlds.;The following research questions were designed to explore how these children participate in visual culture and use images for social purposes: (1) How do the children in the study participate in visual culture? (A) What do the children say about their representational choices? (B) When representing aspects of their lives in photographs, what do the children choose to photograph? (C) How do children read their own images and the images of their peers?(2) How are images used by the children socially? (A) How are the photographs used to make sense and make meaning of their social worlds and to negotiate social roles and relationships? (3) How are images used by the children to negotiate, construct and perform identities?;Children are now growing up in a visual age. They use images to make sense and make meaning of their social worlds. This dissertation explores the children's social use of images, and what children do when they participate in visual culture.;1This study is part of a multi-year project under the direction of principal investigator, Dr. Wendy Luttrell.