‘This is Not a Photograph of Zuko’: how agential realism disrupts child-centred notions of agency in digital play research

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.

KEYWORDS:

• Agential realism
• diffractive methodology
• onto-epistemic injustice
• digital play
• LEGO bricks
• South Africa

Shifting relationality from epistemology to ontology

Provoked by the sustainability crisis, transdisciplinary academic fields of enquiry are currently reconfiguring the relationship between nature and culture, as always already in relation (Walsh, Böhme, and Wamsler 2020). Diverse fields of study, such as science and technology studies (STS), child studies, environmental humanities, and the posthumanities (Braidotti 2019) are rethinking and reimagining relationality. As a transdisciplinary subdiscipline in human geography, scholars in children’s geographies tend to draw on the sociology of childhood with a unique focus on how social constructions are also spatial constructions through concepts such as ‘place’, ‘emotions’, ‘embodiment’, ‘intergenerational relations’, ‘political agency’, ‘scale’ and so on (Kraft, Horton, and Tucker 2014). More recently, new materialism and posthumanism are also informing the research field of children’s geographies, by paying more attention to materiality (see, e.g. Änggård 2015). Importantly, this recent ontological and material turn in the sciences and humanities announces a profound shift from epistemology to ontology in research practices. The inherent complexity of this emergent and complex philosophical field of enquiry has resulted in a ‘first wave’ of posthumanist children’s geographers who enact new materialist and posthumanist theories. Central in such analyses is the agentic role of materials, for example, air (Banerjee and Blaise 2013), glitter (Coleman and Osgood 2019), stones (Rautio 2013) and the gendered human body itself (Blaise 2013). The epistemological and ethico-political difference this makes is highlighted by Lenz Taguchi (2020) in a helpful overview of new materialist analyses of children’s play. Returning to an influential, nonanthropocentric, analysis of a girl playing in the sandpit (Hultman and Lenz Taguchi 2010), she comments on the importance of this work to disrupt research that ‘aims to uncover a reductionist reality’ (Lenz Taguchi 2020, 88). Researching children’s play and relations with the more-than-(Adult)human¹ world of animals, geographies, ecologies and material places (Taylor, Pacini Ketchabaw, and Blaise 2012) involves decentring the (developing) child subject and makes explicit connections with sustainability, environmental education and the Anthropocene (Osgood and Odegard 2022). For Pauliina Rautio (2013) humans are not just related to the environment but constituted by it. Jan Arvidsen (2018) offers an overview of how new materialist and posthumanist scholars challenge humanist understandings of child–nature relationships particularly within the field of children’s geographies. However, often implicit in the (Western) posthumanist literature are universalising claims about ‘the’ human while silent about Indigenous natureculture practices and scholarship. This has rightly been called into question by Black, antiracist and Indigenous scholars who have argued that posthumanists appear unaware of their own location (see, e.g. Nxumalo 2020; Tuck, Mckenzie, and McCoy 2014).

Building on the above scholarship and concerns, this article focuses explicitly on Karen Barad’s agential realism and adopts their notion of situatedness with its ontological starting point of difference rather than identity. Politically radical and philosophically subtle, agential realism is about acknowledging the role of the (White) human subject in taking response-ability for the agential cuts one makes as (human) researcher and at the very same time troubles the Cartesian Subject in its ‘core’, beyond identity, ‘all the way down to the very atoms of existence, and beyond, to a point where individuality is itself undone … ’ (Barad 2007, 362). Agential realism does not try to nihilate the human, but is ‘anthropo-situated’, thereby troubling popular (mis)understandings of Donna Haraway’s notion of ‘situatedness’ as being about identity and location (Barad 2007, 470-1 ftn 45).² The agential realist ontological re-working of relationality is a rejection of oversimplified and non-relational notions of the human as a priori. Still, it does so without claiming that the human doesn’t matter. For Barad, the concept ‘human’ does not refer to individual things (objects) with inherent properties in the world, for example, with agency or with ‘the ability to engage in cognitive functions that make the universe intelligible’ (Barad 2007, 352) but to phenomena.

Benefitting from more recent work by feminist philosopher and quantum physicist Karen Barad and other agential realists (Barad and Gandorfer 2021; Juelskjær, Plauborg, and Adrian 2021), this article foregrounds the distinct contribution agential realism can reconfigure agency in children’s geographies. A detailed and complex material-discursive analysis of a photograph offers an important differentiation within posthumanism, maybe articulating a ‘second wave’ by acknowledging the tension between the posthumanist decentring of the Subject without erasing the Subject. Tracing a photograph not as an object, the so-called ‘material that has agency’, but as a Baradian phenomenon provokes researchers in the field to rethink digital play, as well as agency. The child in the analysis profoundly matters, but when analysed as a phenomenon, other stories can be told that trouble power-producing binaries.

From object and subject to phenomenon

As the ‘basic units of existence’ (Barad 2007, 333), phenomena are an ‘ontological primitive’ – not things, bodies, subjects or objects (Barad 2007, 429 ftn 14). The profound implications for research of this ontological move(ment) away from object and subject ontology are illustrated through the critical reading of a photograph. By also paying attention in the analysis to the materiality of concepts and theories, Barad’s agential realism disrupts the micro–macro binary and troubles Newtonian concepts of space and (unilinear) time. For Barad (2017) different spaces and temporalities bleed through one another in the ‘here’ and ‘there’, ‘past’ and ‘future’ in the ‘thick-now’ of the present.

Like other postqualitative scholars (Murris 2021), agential realists raise concern about knowledge production that starts with fixed definitions of concepts. They are not focused on what concepts such as relationality mean (e.g. through definitions), but invite investigations into how certain notions of relationality work to include some and to exclude others as a matter of (in)justice. Agential realists insist that we need to enquire into the ontologies always already at play in Western scientific practices (including the concepts ‘time’ and ‘space’), as these investigations might lead to different material-discursive reconfigurations of concepts (Barad and Gandorfer 2021). So, for example, in this article, the concept of ‘agency’ is not defined upfront, but its meaning is at stake throughout and reconfigured through the analysis of an example. Even ontology as a concept itself is reconfigured from not about what ‘is’ (onto in Latin), but about ‘becoming’.

Particular ontological notions of relationality are always already at play in research and produce boundaries that include and exclude and render certain kinds of inequalities invisible or irrelevant. This claim is investigated through a detailed material-discursive analysis of a photograph of South African six-year-old Zuko playing with plastic ‘Lego’ bricks in a resource-constrained environment. For most children in South Africa, the LEGO brand is too expensive to buy, hence my spelling of ‘Lego’ to indicate that the plastic bricks he is holding are not the ‘real’ thing, but an imitation. However, the aim of this paper is to show the scientific, ethical and (geo)political difference an agential realist analysis makes, so my thought experiment is that the plastic bricks Zuko is holding in his hands (Figure 1) are manufactured by the LEGO Group, a privately held company based in Denmark.

Figure 1. Zuko (6) focuses his ‘camera’ on the researcher.

Zuko features as one of the child participants in a large-scale international Children, Technology and Play project, elaborated on further below. The analysis is mobilised by engaging critically and affirmatively with the socio-constructivist framework of this study and its child-centred deductive coding framework, Learning Through Play Experience Tool (LtPET).³

Something must always be done to data

The agential realist analysis involves a philosophical exploration of child agency as well as the apparatuses⁴ that measure and evaluate children’s play experiences. The investigation moves from observing humans only (recorded on audio and video and in fieldnotes) to what is always already at play ontologically when we research children’s play, materially and discursively. The analysis provokes a different ‘definition’ of agency and therefore reconfigures digital play. It offers opportunities for the materiality and the ‘minor’ politics of play experiences to be foregrounded, crucially important when researching play with technology in the Global South. It allows other than dominant human-centred psycho-socio-cultural-linguistic and medical perspectives to be included in child research. Importantly, striving towards objectivity is achieved, not by disentangling and disengaging the subject from the object (as in much research), but by taking responsibility for how the knowing subject and her apparatuses (e.g. digital technology) are always already ontologically entangled in what is produced (Barad 2007).

Postqualitative researchers call into question what counts as data when perceived as ‘raw’, ‘brute’, ‘inert’, ‘passive’, ‘simple’, ‘concrete’ and ‘lifeless’, waiting to be ‘collected’, ‘extracted’ and ‘coded’, in order to be analysed, interpreted, theorised or used as evidence (Koro-Ljungberg, Ulmer, and MacLure 2018). These ‘post’ scholars work differently with data. As Koro-Ljungberg, Ulmer, and MacLure (2018, 463) argue:

Data thus are always insufficient; something must always be done to them

to render them fit for human consumption. … Data are implicated in deep

questions about the boundaries, or lack thereof, between the word and the

world, between reality and representation, between nature and culture.

In other words what is ‘done to the data’ is always a material-discursive intra-active⁵ production of data/empirical material and emerges as specific entanglements, ‘agential cuts’ (Barad 2007). Continuously asking questions about justice by investigating who and what benefits from the specificity of the agential cuts of the research is an intricate part of doing agential realist research (Juelskjær, Plauborg, and Adrian 2021).

Learning Through Play Experience Tool (LtPET)

The empirical⁶ data re-turned⁷ in this paper is from the Children, Technology and Play (CTAP) project (2019–2020)⁸ – a large-scale, international study in the UK and South Africa (Marsh, Murris, and Ng’ambi 2020). The qualitative data were analysed using a deductive coding framework, including the LEGO Foundation’s Learning Through Play Experience Tool (LtPET) and other pre-selected codes fed into coding software and mostly adapted from an earlier study. This mixed-method study was designed by the University of Sheffield and identified how technology impacts children’s play, creativity, and learning (Marsh, Murris, and Ng’ambi 2020). In July 2019, the University of Cape Town was invited to join as a partner by taking responsibility for the research in South Africa. The same design and research instruments were used, although happening simultaneously the teams were more or less working independently.⁹ Separately from the quantitative part of the study (see: Marsh, Murris, and Ng’ambi 2020, 8–35), nine families in the South African study were selected by their teachers and observed in school. The researchers who participated had access to the local communities and could be considered ‘insiders’ (Dwyer and Buckle 2009). The methods used included observations in homes, schools and community spaces, conversations with children, parents, teachers and community partners. Parents took videos, and children used wearable cameras at home, also when the researchers were not there. Parents also created data. In addition, focus group discussions were held with children aged 5–11 in schools. Apart from the deductive coding of all transcripts and observation notes, inductive analysis also took place for the report writing (Marsh, Murris, and Ng’ambi 2020). The ethics guidelines of the British Educational Research Association¹⁰ (BERA) were followed and permission granted by both universities.

On its website, the LEGO Foundation elaborates on its learning through play research in South Africa. Although it concedes that play might be ambiguous and impossible to define (see Sutton-Smith 1997), the ‘core tenets of play’ are: ‘taking risks, making mistakes, exploring new ideas, and experiencing joy’ (Mardell, Wilson, and Ryan 2016). For the analysis of the data, the LtPET operates across a spectrum of children’s choice and adult mediation and is presented in the form of an observational rubric.¹¹ It aims to identify the characteristics of children’s learning through play and each characteristic varies in intensity depending on the individual’s self-efficacy. These five-play characteristics are defined as ‘meaningful’, ‘actively engaged’, ‘iterative’, ‘socially interactive’ and ‘joyful’. Each, in turn, helps assess the quality of the child’s play experience as an indication of learning taking place and moreover what is required in terms of adult mediation to improve the learning experience.

The influence of the material, technology and context on learning through play is also assessed, but importantly, no differentiation is made in the LtPET between physical and digital technologies. Children develop their autonomy by increasingly acting independently (the normative underpinning goal of the instrument) and by becoming more confident in learning new things and by making their own choices. In essence, learning through play is conceptualised as an agentic process located in the child. However, decisions, meaning-making and enjoyment are influenced by peers, adults and other significant others such as teachers or parents and the environment. The research instrument is regularly evaluated and updated by the LEGO Foundation and draws on Albert Bandura’s concept of agency. Bandura is well-known for his self-efficacy and social cognitive theory (SCT). Inspired by a Darwinian non-teleological notion of development, Bandura (2008, 15) proposes that humans are unique in that language and abstract thought has made cognitive agency possible; ‘transcending the dictates of their immediate environment’. Humans’ ‘advanced ssymbolizing capacity’ has given them the power to shape their environment and override environmental influences (Bandura 2008, 15). Agency so conceived positions the human (knowing) subject as separate from, and ‘transcending’ its environment and relations with other humans and more-than-(Adult)humans. Bandura (2008, 18) states that a child is born with no sense of self and needs to learn through observation, imitation and modelling.

Bandura’s humanist notion of child agency is already at play in the LtPET, that is, given – even before the research starts and informs the instruments that measure and evaluate children’s behaviour – also in the CTAP project. With the help of the photograph ‘of’ Zuko in Figure 1, I will argue what has been ‘done to the data’ to ‘render it fit for human consumption’ (Koro-Ljungberg, Ulmer, and MacLure 2018; see quote above). Who and what does the LtPET as an ‘apparatus’ (Barad 2007) exclude, and why does it matter?

Through an agential realist analysis of the same data I show the scientific, ethical and (geo)political difference it makes, when we conceptualise child’s agency instead as always already part of an intra-connected network of socio-political, material-discursive, nature-culture relations.¹² This transindividual analysis resists the sole focus on human’s symbolising capacity (e.g. language), identity and intentional action to assess learning and brings to the fore two onto-epistemic inequalities.

Zuko

The report describes Zuko – one of the child participants in the CTAP study (Marsh, Murris, and Ng’ambi 2020, 57) as follows:

Carla (40) and Alex (44) and their son Zuko (6) live in a

modern, bright and spacious house in Pinelands, Cape

Town. Carla and Alex are White South Africans. Zuko is

Black South African and was adopted when he was a baby.

Both of Zuko’s parents are self-employed. Carla holds a

Masters in Clinical Social Work and Alex has as a Bachelor

of Arts degree but currently works as a software

development manager. Carla is legally blind (she only

has 20% of her vision) and has a hearing difficulty.

Carla and Alex each have their own home office and use

their own laptops, as well as a bigger monitor. They both

have iPhones and the family has an iPad … 

The human-centred description focuses on Zuko, his mum and dad, their ages, their work, their qualifications, the technology in their possession, how they use it, and their (dis)abilities. During the first home visit, one of the researchers records the following:

… .Zuko¹³ started building a truck, but then, watching me, built a camera and stood before me to take pictures of me, as I was taking pictures of him. We laugh. Zuko reminded me that I was also being watched.

(Field note, Observation, 28/08/2019)

When analysing the photo in Figure 1 from a child–human-centred perspective, we see Zuko holding a camera¹⁴ made out of plastic bricks that are passive and inert. It is Zuko’s intentional actions and competencies that have turned the bricks into a ‘camera’.¹⁵ Taking on the role of the researcher, he turns his attention (‘camera’) to the researcher herself. This happens during the first home visit. Zuko’s switching of the gaze not only takes the researcher by surprise, but also greatly affects her. It fills her with delight that Zuko can show how confident and relaxed he is with a virtual stranger. He obviously feels at ease with her. Also, this is another example of how the cultural meaning children attach to being photographed is used by a child in their play (Änggård 2015, 11). So out of everything else that is going on in the moment, the researcher takes a photo of him taking a photo of her and selects this event to write about in her field notes. She is so excited about what happened that she shares it on the project’s Whatsapp group for us all to enjoy, and it becomes the project’s icon in South Africa. We use it in presentations, print it on leaflets and on posters advertising the CTAP project. But what makes this photo interesting data and for whom?

Using the LtPET to analyse this (account of the) experience, it is clear that Zuko’s play is very advanced. He deliberately makes changes to how bricks are supposed to be used. He is not just mimicking adults around him; he is symbolically taking on the role of the adult researcher. One could argue that he clearly feels a sense of accomplishment and shows the relevance of the experience in his collaborative play that involves the adults. As an only (and adopted) child, he is used to playing with and/or in the company of adults. Parent interviews indicate that his parents tend to respond to his play positively and like to engage with him. For example, during a home visit, the following encounter between Zuko and his mother is recorded¹⁶:

Carla:

You’re having to take all my work apart, I thought I was doing it all wrong. Hmm, seems. That’s okay, that’s how I learn. Not that piece.

Zuko:

Wait, wait, wait, wait, wait, wait, wait, wait.

Carla:

Can those be the feet?

Zuko:

Yup. Yes, yes, yes, yes, yes and now do you know what you have to do? You have to make a diamond.

Carla:

A diamond?

Zuko:

Out of little LEGO guys.

Carla:

Look at that, I can see the diamond.

Zuko:

Yup. Half a diamond.

Carla:

Okay. I need to focus on making a diamond.

Zuko:

You need like one guy, two guy, three guy, four guys. You need to make four guys to make a whole diamond.

Carla:

So, I’m focusing on that.

Zuko:

Focus Mom, if you get distracted, you might just look at that and do your work and when you show me it, you might just make a rocket.

Carla:

Then we in trouble, eh? Then we got trouble, I’ll be doing the wrong thing.

Zuko:

Don’t say that, you could just be distracted by what you’re talking about.

Zuko’s home context greatly contributes to his reversal of adult/child roles, turning around the gaze. His ‘camera’ faces the adult researcher. He shows a good meta-awareness of the situation and as such, one could argue, displays mature cognitive skills and awareness for his age. Zuko is very confident in the presence of adults. He is also familiar with LEGO bricks, unlike many other children in South Africa, as evidenced by the quantitative data (Marsh, Murris, and Ng’ambi 2020, Section 2). Zuko is so confident that he sometimes resists adults intervening too much in his play. For example, in one parent interview, Carla makes the following comment:

He’s like, can’t I just do my own thing? Yeah, that’s kind of his usual orientation with learning is let me make my own thing, let me try it myself, why do I have to follow instructions?

The instructions referred to are the ones in new LEGO packs. Carla tends to insist that Zuko follows the instructions first. But when asked to do so, he tends to not play with the game at all.

Zuko’s individualistic approach to play is noticed by the researcher in her observations during school and home visits.

All the time, Zuko shows himself working individually. There is a moment in the classroom when teacher let students play with LEGO and, in the first moment, Zuko only takes the piece and uses it in his own construction.

(Field note, Observation, 28/08/2019)

The concept ‘individualistic’ here should not be confused with the ontological kind of individualism that agential realism disrupts. Zuko’s play experience is coded, interpreted and evaluated using research instruments that are individualistic in two distinct, but intricately related ways. The distinction between the epistemological and the ontological is often confused, but appreciating how they are related, and work differently, and why this matters (scientifically and ethically) is key to understanding the current paradigm shift in postqualitative research practices.

A representational reading of the photo

Focusing on Zuko in data-analysis is typical of child-centred epistemologies. Knowledge about Zuko and his digital play experiences emerges through close observation, conducting focus groups and interviews with him and his significant others – all focusing on him as an individual (in relationships with others). Ontologically, Zuko is an individual body, bounded by his skin, that moves in space and through time. He is surrounded by other bodies with whom he is in relation, but as an individual, he is also separate from them, and this includes the photograph ‘of’ him (Figure 1). The photograph as data can work in a representational way, in that, the photo is seen as evidence of what Zuko was doing with the bricks in a world ‘out there’, ‘there’ and ‘then’. In representational research practices, it is assumed that the event took place objectively and external to the inner and mental world of both child and researcher. In this child–human-centred way of analysing, the researchers’ focus is on how the plastic bricks have been put together in a particular way by Zuko and what this signifies. They speculate and deductively infer what is going on in his mind and actions: his intentions, frustrations and joy; how meaningful the experience is. They try and find evidence about his agency in transferring the experience (of learning through play) to other aspects of his life. They draw conclusions about the significance of the particular material arrangement of the bricks in terms of his development and where his play can be measured on the LtPET scale. Although the transferability of Zuko’s experience cannot be judged yet with the available data, his play experience is clearly active, joyful, iterative and socially interactive. Making room for taking account of children’s experiences (as understood by adults) is important, but what else is going on as a matter of fact? What is it we might be missing when we focus only on the child human, and why does it matter?

‘This is Not a Photograph of Zuko’¹⁷

The above analysis of the photo in Figure 1 using the LtPET is a representational reading. It assumes that the photo represents what as a matter of fact happened in space and time (Vannini 2015). But this reading of the photograph-as-data relies on the Cartesian subject/object binary that assumes a Western metaphysical divide between culture/nature, human/world, mind/body, etc. The researcher sees herself as separate and detached from the photograph (as object) to be analysed. As a human, Zuko is given much greater value than the plastic bricks, which are inert objects – mere passive instruments in his hands and subjected to his cognitive intentions that express independent agency, self-efficacy and symbolic meta-awareness. So, does this mean that a humanist reading of the photograph positions Zuko as a capable, fully-human being?

Not so. Although Zuko might be responding at that moment to the bricks in his own way, he is not having agency in how this photograph is read as data – or any of the observations for that matter. The LtPET is designed by adults for adults. Child humans have not been part of the team of designers of the LtPET. Also, the research(er) does not put Zuko in the position that allows or enables him to respond to the particular analysis itself. As Barad explains in an interview, scientific analysis has to contain ‘a certain responsiveness’, which is ‘an agential realist understanding of response-ability’. They argue that being in touch (and not at a distance) is part of response-ability, making it possible for the other to respond and make a difference (Barad in Barad and Gandorfer 2021, 21). This would mean here that Zuko, aware of the research context, would be enabled to respond to the criteria that measure his digital play experiences and influence the kind of interventions he receives. Also, the analysis should comprise stories that express the relation between Zuko and other human and more-than-(Adult)human bodies as part of the phenomenon. Although an agential realist engagement with the photo does not centre around the child-human, in its move to de-centre the human, it does not erase the child, for example, by ignoring that Zuko is focusing his home-made ‘camera’ on the researcher. The latter is also part of the phenomenon, but there is much more going on, stories we otherwise miss. However, it is crucial that these stories express agential inseparability¹⁸ as part of response-able science and are not human-centred.

Of course, in the case of the CTAP project, mutual agency as a theoretical notion had not been built into the research apparatus. Still, the technology makes it possible to endlessly re-turn to the data – data that never stays the same (Koro-Ljungberg, Ulmer, and MacLure 2018). As mentioned previously and explored in more detail below, in agential realism, the units of analysis are phenomena, not separate subjects (Zuko) or objects (photo, LEGO bricks, iPhone etc.), but their intra-action. For example, in this case, the researcher’s iPhone is part of the phenomenon of co-creating data. The camera is not a politically innocent and epistemologically neutral medium capturing the (singular) event in which differently sized humans are intertwined. Unlike the humanist notion of ‘interaction’, the neologism ‘intra-action’ indicates that ‘[t]o be entangled is not simply to be intertwined with another, as in the joining of separate entities, but to lack an independent, self-contained existence’ (Barad 2007, p. ix).

As part of an agential realist relational ontology, it is not the case that all ‘agents’ (or relata) are equal in the sense of being as much agentic within the relational phenomenon. The relations are asymmetrical,¹⁹ and this certainly holds for Zuko in this project and the relations he is part of (e.g. with his parents, teachers, LEGO bricks, camera). The research set up is a ‘doing to’, maybe a ‘doing with’, but surely not a ‘doing by’ Zuko, in terms of apparatus design (LtPET) or data analysis. In that sense, like most children in research, Zuko is positioned as a less human than the adult human researcher. Unpacking this further, the deep onto-epistemic inequality built into humanist research of this kind is how the relationship between adult and child is conceptualised and, in particular, how knowledge is mediated and subsequently how Zuko’s behaviour is measured using the LtPET.

What is already at play?

To sum up, the objective of the LtPET as research apparatus is for designers and educators to observe children’s behaviour in the moment (or at least have these moments represented through video and other technology). Then researchers use the concepts in the LtPET rubric to categorise where, for example, Zuko is in his development (in terms of self-efficacy) and to identify the support he needs (from adult humans). But as we have seen, the LtPET concepts show another inequality in the deductive framework that leaves the child human as the outsider, not an insider of the research. The subject (researcher) and object (child) are understood here as separately determinate pre-given entities and the measurement is performed by adults on individual children through abstract concepts, such as joyfulness. What is already given here ontologically puts the subject (of any age) at a distance and outside the range of analysis (Barad and Gandorfer 2021, 21). However, as a matter of fact, observers and theorisers are an integral part of knowledge production (Barad and Gandorfer 2021, 23–24).

Moreover, the LtPET also puts the object, or matter, outside the range of analysis. In response-able science, not only the less-human, but also the more-than-human (matter) can be liberated from its so-called passive, inert dumbness by giving it access to being articulated through stories (giving matter an opportunity to respond). This co-emergence of matter and meaning in the making of the world produces more complex understandings and expressions of reality (Iovino 2015, 72, 82). Plastic bricks are the materialisations of, and bring us in touch with, past experiences, places, and generations. For example, LEGO bricks materialise powerful nostalgic re-memberings of my own playing-with the sets we owned as a family, as well as with my own children, but these memories are not owned by a subject, nor are they individualised. My memory stories are not retrieved by me as ‘the neutral observer of my lived experiences’ (Millei et al. 2018).

The humanistic notion of the child as an autonomous subject, independent and detached from its environment, has been deconstructed for decades by postmodernists and poststructuralists and reconstructed by proposing a concept of child that is ‘situational, contextual and discursively inscribed’ (Hultman and Lenz Taguchi 2010, 525). Building on the significant work of these ‘post’-scholars, postqualitative researchers argue that even the focus of the former on language (the discursive) has been at the expense of doing justice to the mutually agentic role of matter. The world studied in child studies tends to be a social world in which only humans matter, thereby neglecting all other non-human forces that are also at play (Hultman and Lenz Taguchi 2010, 526). Agential realism proposes a relational ontology that does not accept a humanist subjectivity as pre-given. The latter positions a child, like Zuko, as a developing human being, existing separately from his environment in Newtonian space and time, even before the analysis performed by an adult gets started. The problem with this kind of relationality is that it is a priori unequal: it presupposes superiority of the human over its environment and adult over child in, what Bandura (2008, 15) claims, humans’ ‘advanced symbolizing capacity … transcending the dictates of their immediate environment’. Instead, how can we understand Zuko in his ontological and agential inseparability by switching optics and read Figure 1 diffractively as a phenomenon? What difference would this make?

Barad (2007, 354) argues that the distinction between micro and macro is human-made and arbitrary (already given); human bodies are also an assemblage of ‘subatomic particles – including, electrons, quarks, positrons, antiquarks, neutrinos, pions, gluons, and photons’. And as biologist McFall (2017, M52) points out: ‘our bodies are not only – not even primarily – composed of cells from our close kin’. The ontological possibility of drawing a line between the micro and the macro is based on using a particular kind of (human) optics and human-centered way of knowing the world that makes it possible to see matter as static and not dynamic (Barad 2007). This raises the questions, what are we not noticing and what surprises are we missing (and do not even realise we are missing) because of our choice of optical apparatus that measures?

Barad’s relational notions of intra-action and entanglement disrupt micro/macro binaries and rework notions of contiguity and identity, getting inside our skin and reworking ontologically who we are (Barad 2007, 466). Despite their size, smartphones have transformed who and what humans are and how they behave.²⁰ These ‘things’ call us to reconfigure matters of scale and put into question the micro/macro binary of a world that is not only uncertain (epistemological) but also indeterminate (ontological). Indeed, matters of scale tend to be already given, and size is always already at play before research starts – ‘matter and meaning are mutually articulated’ (Barad 2007, 152).

Meeting the universe halfway²¹ is a transdisciplinary pursuit and does justice to the complexities of the real world that researchers study. In a material-discursive reading of the photograph, both Zuko and the bricks are mutually performative transindividual agents (Barad 2007, 2013). This way of using a diffractive optics, rather than a reflective humanist lens (Giorza and Murris 2021), helps researchers to start ontologically from difference, not identity, and then trace (not map) how differences produce new be(com)ings. The human and more-than-(Adult)human (e.g. concepts, land, building, plastic, phone, curriculum documents, LtPET, research questions, research funding, teacher, pedagogies, parents, Zuko) and different temporalities are always already shot through the ‘now-moment’ when a photograph is taken (Barad 2017).

Reading bodies as phenomena

Diffraction as methodology (Murris and Bozalek 2019) disrupts representational descriptions of photos. The photo is neither a purely factual or neutral ‘capturing’ of Zuko, nor is the photo as data a representation of what happened independently from the researcher’s gaze. Such claims confirm or reinforce existing inequalities (Barad in Juelskjær, Plauborg, and Adrian 2021, 151) between adult and child, human and more-than-human. Analysing data diffractively involves installing oneself in an event of ‘becoming-with’ the data (Haraway 2008, 16). It involves not uncovering the (symbolic) meaning behind the image in a representational way but instead reading the visual other-than-human body as a phenomenon. This means taking into account as many of the infinite elements that are dispersed as multiplicities in spacetime – always already entangled with the photograph. In the ‘now’, time is diffracted through itself: past, present and future enfold through one another in a non-unilinear manner (Barad 2010; 2017). Matter, Barad explains (2007, 118) is the sedimenting historicity of practices/agencies and an agentive force in the world’s differential becoming. Importantly this also includes symbolic readings, but not as something that happens in the mind. Meaning-making is always already a specific material doing or enactment of the world in its iterative becoming.

Researchers are also entangled with the phenomenon, activated by the photograph in its becoming data. Analysing the photo of Zuko’s learning through play is a separate event from what actually happened in the home. Transcripts, visual (still or moving) images do not enable researchers to go back in (unilinear) time and analyse what was ‘really going on’, in or with the child, but are ‘new’²² material-discursive events, and emerge only as ‘new’ events with the reading of the data (Murris and Menning 2019). Moreover, such iterative and diffractive engagement with ‘the’ data not only involves cognition, but also a be(com)ing affected by the experiences of bodies in relation, which cannot be contained, is not always articulable, nor expressible, or maybe even beyond words.

With an agential realist analysis the very constitution of matter – the photo, the iPhone taking the photo, the plastic bricks, Zuko – are not objects or things, but phenomena, so always already entangled in less-than, more-than and other-than-(Adult)human relations. Participation in these existing relational networks is uneven. Tracing the infinite entanglements transdisciplinary exposes the limitations and the political implications of only using the dominant socio-cultural lens in child studies research. For an agential realist, objects are materialised (e.g. economic) practices, gendered (Osgood 2019) and ‘congealed labor’ (Barad in Juelskjær, Plauborg, and Adrian 2021, 138). Zuko’s skin – an assemblage of ‘subatomic particles’²³ – is touching the bricks – made of hard plastic, bright colours and its distinct smell, also an assemblage of ‘subatomic particles’ (Barad 2007, 354). This kind of touching troubles notions of temporal and spatial scale itself (Barad 2007).

LEGO bricks can be used and reused: ‘Bricks made today, fit those made more than 40 years ago’.²⁴ In an important sense, the toy is the plastic. See for example, how it has been designed by its inventor G.K. Christiansen (see: https://drive.google.com/file/d/1Z4Fh7OritDwby01PZLxad8Nd5YiQ_aMR/view?usp = sharing). Both toy, and plastic are inventions by humans for humans. The bricks’ material durability is an asset (for humans) and an integral part of the design, has inspired a wide variety of aesthetic expressions,²⁵ but its durability is also an environmental curse.²⁶ LEGO bricks are made from crude oil-derived acrylonitrile butadiene styrene (ABS) plastic. Oil is a finite resource and its exploitation causes significant CO2 emissions. ABS does not biodegrade and the plastic’s ‘‘cycle of life’ practically interferes with every other cycle of life, present and future’ (Iovino 2015, 81). Plastic is more or less indestructible and keeps its molecular form indefinitely (or at least for millennia). Although ABS can be recycled, it is not usually collected in most household recycling schemes²⁷ (for a further discussion, see: Murris 2022, 62–63).

It is clear that the specificity involved in the agential realist work of tracing the material-discursive elements of the phenomenon of the photo ‘of’ Zuko, also involves responding to the land and children’s geographies. It is also worth mentioning that the laboratory where these material innovations are developed is in Billund, Denmark, while the factories are in countries where labour is cheap, and working conditions are unlike those in Denmark. These toys that middle-class children can afford are produced mainly by cheap labour elsewhere when, at the risk of bankruptcy, LEGO relocated its factories (China, Mexico). Arguably, these are also places where more children live. Like all matter, plastic bricks are political,²⁸ and so is the technology used to create the data (iPhones, GoPros, etc).

Reconfiguring play as material-discursive

Two philosophically very different analyses of one child’s play with technology in South Africa show the difference an agential realist reading makes in terms of science, ‘micro’-politics and ethics. It puts forward the argument that the way in which the relationship between the human and the environment is philosophically theorised, profoundly affects how data is produced, analysed and interpreted. LtPET’s critical analysis of the deductive coding framework shows how apparatuses matter scientifically and ethico-politically in terms of what they include and exclude. An agential realist reading of a photo of six-year-old Zuko does more justice to the complexity of reality. Doing response-able science moves away from human-centred discourses that focus on child agency currently dominant in child studies research. It opens up possibilities to allow the less-human (‘black’ child) and the more-than-human (plastic bricks and the iPhone) to respond. The agential realist analysis shows how the material matters, the scientific differences it makes and what the ethico-political implications are in terms of onto-epistemic inequalities by omitting the materiality of play experiences in analysis and the less-human.

Harker (2007) suggests that we need to resist trying to pin down what play is by giving definitions. Instead, he suggests we need to write, ‘alongside playing as difference, without trying to inhabit it’ (Harker 2007, 53). This powerful gesture towards taking age out of play (Haynes and Murris 2019) is an ontological turn towards reconfiguring play as material-discursive. As Zuko turns the camera towards us and plays with our adult gaze, the agential realist reading of Figure 1 makes explicit (at least) two important insights in terms of onto-epistemic inequalities and play. Firstly, when child agency is reconfigured as part of an intra-connected material-discursive network of human and more-than-human relations, response-able science includes opportunities for the less-human (child) to respond. Secondly, doing justice to the complexity of reality in this way also includes making it possible for the more-than-(Adult)human (matter) to respond. Reconfiguring digital play and agency as relational is essential for reimagining more equitable futures in resource-constrained environments.

Moving away from a socio-cultural symbolic ‘correct’ reading of the image to a transdisciplinary tracing of relationalities within the phenomenon brings a different subjectivity and ‘definition’ of play into existence that always already includes the material. Moreover, so-called ‘symbolic’ readings, are, in fact, ‘matterphorical’ readings of texts (Barad and Gandorfer 2021). Matter and meaning cannot be separated, because meaning-making is always already a specific material doing or enactment of the world in its iterative becoming. It is for this reason that the two readings offered here are not seen as mutually exclusive readings. In a diffractive analysis, different modes of analyses are always already threaded through one another, but they can be articulated differently through particular agential cuts for which the researcher is response-able. Importantly, objectivity is worked towards, not by disentangling and disengaging the subject from the object (as in much research), but by taking responsibility for how the knowing subject and her apparatuses (e.g. digital technology, LtPET) are always already ontologically entangled in what is produced.

Both the ‘technology’ used playfully by Zuko, as well as the recording instruments by the researchers, move the analysis from interaction to intra-action, from object to phenomenon. Ahistorical and apolitical readings are resisted by not just ‘seeing’ some-thing in the here and now, but by diffracting through different temporalities and (geopolitical) spaces. This shift makes explicit the micro-politics of human and more-than-human relations when playing with plastic bricks (e.g. who has access to them, who produces them, the labour relations involved, its aesthetic uses and the environmental costs). Including the materiality of play experiences helps to de-centre the child-human in analysis and also moves beyond familiar dichotomous thinking between people and matter, destruction and construction (Penfold and Odegard 2021). The agential realist analysis has shown the complex multiplicity of children’s play with plastic bricks by attending to the material-discursive.

An ontological reworking of the LtPET tool reconfigures agency as not something that individuals have but are always already part of (Barad 2007). The transindividual analysis of Zuko shifts the focus from child-human skills and competencies in digital play to the politics of the material-discursive network of relations of which both child-human and plastic bricks are a part.

What it means to be human is not neutral, but political and cannot simply taken as given when digital play research starts. The LtPET tool as a human-centred and adult-centred apparatus (not allowing the child to respond to the analysis itself) poses serious questions about human intervention in knowledge production without methodologically accounting for it in terms of its human-centred access to reality. Western notions of agency are at odds with the current drive to decolonise children’s geographies research. They retain and reinforce onto-epistemic inequalities.

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).

Additional information

Funding

The Children, Technology and Play project was funded by the LEGO Foundation. The work in this paper was supported by the National Research Foundation of South Africa under Grant number 129306.

Notes

1 Arculus and MacRae (2022) 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 (2003) 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 2007, 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 2007, 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 2007).

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.

8 see:https://www.legofoundation.com/en/learn-how/knowledge-base/children-tech-play/

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.

10 See: https://www.bera.ac.uk/publication/ethical-guidelines-for-educational-research-2018

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 2016).

18 Karen Barad (in Barad and Gandorfer 2021, 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 2021, 49).

23 Quoted above from Barad (2007, 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.

24 From: https://www.lego.com/en-us/aboutus/news/2020/september/sustainability/

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.