"This Is Not a Photograph of Zuko": Moving Away From Child-Centered Notions of Agency in Digital Play Research

• In Event: AERA Roundtable Session 2
  In Roundtable Session: Disquieting Materialities: Foucault and Contemporary Theories in Education

Abstract

The way in which individualised child agency is already ‘given’ in digital play research profoundly affects epistemology: how data is produced, analysed and interpreted. A posthumanist diffractive reading of a photo ‘of’ South African six-year old Zuko, co-created as part of a large-scale international study, traces what is already at play materially and discursively. The key findings are two onto-epistemic inequalities that emerge when child agency is reconfigured as part of an intra-connected network of human and more-than-human relations. Response-able science includes opportunities for the less-human (child) and more-than-human (matter) also to respond. Doing justice to the complexity of reality in this way reconfigures agency as relational - essential for reimagining more equitable futures in resource-constrained environments.

Author

• Karin Saskia Murris, University of Oulu