https://orcid.org/0000-0001-9613-7738
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ABSTRACT
The way in which individualised child agency is already ‘given’ ontologically in digital play research profoundly affects epistemology: how data is produced, analysed and interpreted. Co-created as part of a large-scale international study is a photograph ‘of’ South African six-year-old Zuko playing with Lego bricks. The agential realist diffractive reading of the photo as phenomenon traces transdisciplinary what is already at play materially and discursively in its specificity. Benefitting from recent work by feminist philosopher and quantum physicist Karen Barad and other agential realists, this article foregrounds the distinct contribution agential realism can make in children’s geographies. Moving away from either zooming in objects, or subjects when analysing data disrupts the adult-human gaze and brings into focus the apparatuses that measure and the relational spacetime entanglements objects are always already part of. Doing justice to the complexity of reality reconfigures digital play and agency as intra-actively relational – essential for reimagining more equitable futures in resource-constrained environments.
Acknowledgements
I would like to thank the following human members of the South African research team for our ongoing academic conversations and friendship that greatly benefited the writing of this paper: Kerryn Dixon, Theresa Giorza, Joanne Peers and Chanique Lawrence. I would also like to thank the children, parents, teachers, principals and other-than-human involved in the CTAP project and Simon Geschwindt for editing and supporting the writing of this paper.
Disclosure statement
No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author(s).
Notes
1 Arculus and MacRae (Citation2022) use the term more-than-Adult in similar ways to the eco-philosophical term more-than-human. Inspired by their use, I now prefer ‘(Adult)human’ to emphasise that the posthumanist critique of humanism is about the use of the concept of ‘human’ to refer to Adults. The capital letter in Adults is similar to Sylvia Wynter’s (Citation2003) use of the capital letter in Man.
2 For both Haraway and Barad, it is not self-evident that bodies are bounded by their skin. Bodies are not concrete facts in the world. They do not ‘occupy particular coordinates in space and time, in culture and history’ (Barad Citation2007, 376).
3 This research instrument has been developed by the LEGO Foundation. See below.
4 Apparatuses can include both humans and more-than-(Adult)humans, but either way, apparatuses do not pre-exist as individual entities (Barad Citation2007, 434, ftn 65).
5 Intra-action (as opposed to the familiar ‘interaction’) is a Baradian neologism that expresses an ontology whereby relationships don’t assume the prior existence of independent ‘things’ that have independent self-contained existence (Barad Citation2007).
6 ‘Empirical’ is a concept reconfigured by Barad. Concepts don’t refer to object in the world, but to phenomena. See: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=bMVkg5UiRog. Karen Barad. Undoing the Future: Troubling Time/s and Ecologies of Nothingness: Re-Turning, Re-Membering, and Facing the Incalculable. July 2018.
7 Re-turning is a diffractive method of turning data over and over again. Disrupting unilinear time (past-present-future linear sequences) and so-called empty space – Newtonian concepts of spacetime that have made White adult-human exceptionalism possible.
9 One reason for this was the fact that schools in South Africa are open in August (this is when the data collection started), but closed in Sheffield, and the government does not allow research in South African schools to be carried out in the fourth semester of any calendar year.
11 For the LtPET rubric, see: https://www.legofoundation.com/media/2884/an-introduction-to-the-learning-through-play-experience-tool-zooming-in-on-the-five-characteristics.pdf
12 The intra-active entanglement between these concepts (or Baradian ‘phenomena’) is grammatically expressed through the use of a hyphen in the middle. See below for the Baradian neologism of ‘intra-action’.
13 In the field note, Zuko’s real name had been used, here replaced with a pseudonym.
14 Or maybe binoculars? This could then suggest humanimal game viewing. With thanks to Theresa Giorza for this powerful animal-child-Africa-black connection – inherent in how children are positioned in research. See e.g. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ikN-LGhBawQ.
15 The study did not generate much data about children’s play with technology as such. One of the important findings was that the South African children moved seamlessly between the digital and the non-digital, thereby disrupting the binary. This is crucially important when evaluating children’s capabilities in digital play with technology when few have access to technology (and even when they have, often cannot afford Wifi or have no access to it).
16 For the image, see Figure 124 page 131 in the full report, available here: https://www.legofoundation.com/en/learn-how/knowledge-base/children-tech-play/
17 The phrase ‘This Is Not a Photograph of Zuko’ is inspired by Karen Barad’s reference to Magritte’s painting Ceci n’est past une pipe; language does not signify objects (and in this case subjects) in the world (for a further explanation see Ch 3; Murris Citation2016).
18 Karen Barad (in Barad and Gandorfer Citation2021, 62 ftn12) argue that a feminist diffractive reading of quantum of Quantum Field Theory, i.e. ‘threaded through with insights from critical social and political theories’, calls separability itself into question ontologically. See also ‘intra-action’ below.
19 One of the objectives of agential realist analyses is to show the transindividual agency of the relata as part of the phenomenon. The ontology of agential realism enables identification of the hierarchal, exploitative, and extractive practices dependent upon representational theories and their claim to truth. In this case the analysis shows how the adult/child binary works to exclude child in research apparatuses, such as LtPET. See also below, where I argue that the problem with humanist relationality is that it is a priori unequal.
20 Take for example the data produced by the very notion of a ‘selfie’.
21 ‘Meeting the Universe Halfway’ is the main title of Karen Barad’s influential book (2007).
22 Agential realism troubles the new/old binary, as every iteration leaves traces and marks on bodies. Astrid Schrader suggests that we should not confuse change with movement in time. Inspired by Jacques Derrida, Schrader proposes that as researchers, we need to restructure our relationship to time itself: the past isn’t given, closed and fixed, but ‘remains before us’ (Juelskjær, Plauborg, and Adrian Citation2021, 49).
23 Quoted above from Barad (Citation2007, 354) to support the argument that the distinction between micro and macro is human-made and already ‘given’, that is, assumed to be ontologically the case.
25 For examples of how LEGO bricks have inspired aesthetic expressions, see: https://www.theguardian.com/artanddesign/gallery/2008/nov/14/design.
26 See e.g. how LEGO bricks will be found in the ocean thousands of years from now: https://bigthink.com/surprising-science/bermuda-triangle
27 One viable way would be: https://rebrickable.com/
28 LEGO bricks are political, also in their aesthetic use and not ‘just a toy’. Chinese artist Ai Weiwei comments that manufacturers materialise a vision about the future they value through their products. LEGO reversed its decision after first refusing to supply the artist with bricks to create images of missing people as a political statement against the Chinese government. See: https://www.bbc.com/news/world-35299069.
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