Public Defence: Audhild Lindheim Kennedy

Audhild Lindheim Kennedy is defending her PhD degree. Her thesis explores the ways in which children in Notodden learn about Rjukan–Notodden industrial heritage and why.

10 Oct

Practical information

  • Date: 10 October 2024
  • Time: 10.00 - 15.00
  • Location: Bø, Room 6-103A
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    • Programme

    It will be possible to attende the public defence digitally: Link to Zoom.

    10.00 Trial lecture: Heritage site narratives and their contestation in Norway and elsewhere: Critical contemporary perspectives.

    12.00 Public defence: Shaping Minds: An Ethnographic Study of Children Learning about Rjukan–Notodden Industrial Heritage

    Evaluation committee

    • First opponent: Professor Christoph Brumann, Max Planck Institute for Social Anthropology, Germany
    • Second opponent: Professor Gro Ween, Museum of cultural history, Norway.
    • Administrator: Heidi Stavrum, University of South-Eastern Norway.

    Supervisors

Any questions?

Audhild Lindheim Kennedy is defending her thesis for the degree philosophiae doctor (PhD) at the University of South-Eastern Norway.Audhild Kennedy

The doctoral work has been carried out at the Faculty of Humanities, Sports and Educational Sciences.

Summary

This PhD thesis explores the ways in which children in Notodden learn about the local World Heritage, mainly through The Cultural Schoolbag. The point of departure for the PhD research is the grey literature known as the local curriculum on the World Heritage in Rjukan-Notodden. Titled "Verdensarven og barneskolen"; translated to English it means World Heritage and the Primary School.

The research shows that the local curriculum is perceived as an educational resource and the thesis describes various educational heritage productions and situations of learning in The Cultural Schoolbag, in the classroom and preschool. Illuminating not only how children learn about local heritage, this thesis also explores why children learn about the local World Heritage. 

The predominant perspective of this thesis may be seen as that of the anthropology of learning and education. Within this field of anthropology, schools are understood as having a leading role in children’s socialisation, thus viewing schools as a determining institution in children’s identity formation and in shaping their sense of belonging to place. But this study may also be seen as a contribution to the field of critical heritage studies as it discusses ways of perceiving and understanding processes of heritagisation at a grass roots level. 

The Cultural Schoolbag productions can be seen as creating an extraordinary space in which learning takes place. Here, the thesis examines this extraordinary space in terms of ritual theory before linking Rjukan–Notodden’s World Heritage status and the heterotopic. This research is concluded by a discussion of why children in Notodden must learn about the local industrial heritage, why this need to socialise children as heirs of the World Heritage – as "verdensarver"? In answering these questions, I draw on Foucault’s concept of governmentality.