When Pens Speak: Rethinking Field and Material in A Posthumanist Educational Ethnography with Children

• In Event: AERA Poster Session Sunday 7:45 am
  In Poster Session: Childhoods, Materials, and Critical Learning Encounters

Abstract

This article explores how material agency shapes ethnographic encounters in educational research through a posthumanist lens. Drawing on Karen Barad’s agential realism, we examine how pens emerge as active participants in fieldwork with children. Through small stories drawn from two independent ethnographic studies in early childhood education and home literacy practices, we trace how pens intra-act with researchers, children, and spaces to co-produce knowledge and reconfigure the concepts of field(s). Rather than treating fields as a fixed site solely navigated by the ethnographer, we conceptualize them as emergent, plural, and more-than-human phenomena. By engaging with pens as agents of intra-action, this study invites a rethinking of both materiality and field in qualitative inquiry, offering methodological reflections for posthumanist ethnography.

Authors

• Bonan Liu, University of Muenster

• Ziwen Mei, University of British Columbia