Newness as assemblage: Some insights from case studies of children’s digital play experiences
Submitted by:
Stavroula Kontovourki
Abstract:
The purpose of the presentation is to discuss how a case study methodology allows the understanding of newness as emergent and potentially morphed in the mundane details of children’s digital play. Focusing particularly on the affordances of the specific methodological approach, it explores two issues in researching children’s digital literacies: (a) children’s visibility and “voice” in research; and (b) their positioning in relation to new technologies. Both of these issues have been problematized from the perspective, first, that children enter a particular adult-child relationship when they participate in research (Kontovourki & Theodorou, 2019), and, second, that they are both receivers/consumers and creative users/producers of new digital tools (e.g., Marsh, 2016; Rowsell & Harwood, 2015).
To contribute to this problematization, we draw on data from an international research study, funded by the Lego Foundation and underpinned by the Responsible Innovation in Technology for Children (RITEC) (2021) child-centred framework. The research adapted an ecocultural case study methodology to generate data through interviews with children and their families, videorecordings of children’s play, documentation of children’s digital play with given games, as well as from families themselves as they were asked to share and reflect on clips of videorecorded observations. In this presentation, we focus specifically on cases from the Republic of Cyprus where children’s ecologies of (digital) literacies were reconfigured by the introduction of digital devices and play experiences that were new to them.
We analyze data along two axes and attempt to answer the following questions: what happens to the everydayness of children’s digital literacies when “new” is introduced? How is the house, as a literacy space, transformed upon the introduction of “new” devices and “new” forms of digital play? And, how do our methods for researching this new digital experience, seen as an assemblage of material/immaterial human/nonhuman forces, matter? We thus discuss the potential of different ecocultural methods, including map-making and walking interviews, as forms of representation of children’s digital literacy and play experiences, as well as sites for children’s engagement with texts, material objects, and more-than-human forces. Hence, we contribute to understanding newness as intra-acting with existing ecologies of digital literacies and play, which sheds light to a lived and embodied experience rather than a top-down perspective of continuity and change.
References
Kontovourki, S., & Theodorou, E. (2019). Performative politics and the interview: Unraveling immigrant children’s narrations and identity performances. In S. Spyrou, R. Rosen, & D. Cook (Eds.), Reimagining Childhood Studies (pp. 153-166). London, UK: Bloomsbury Publishing.
Marsh, J. (2016) ‘Unboxing’ videos: co-construction of the child as cyberflâneur, Discourse: Studies in the Cultural Politics of Education, 37(3), 369-380, DOI: 10.1080/01596306.2015.1041457
Rowsell, J., & Harwood, D. (2015). “Let It Go”: Exploring the Image of the Child as a Producer, Consumer, and Inventor, Theory Into Practice, 54(2), 136-146, DOI: 10.1080/00405841.2015.1010847