Can a Research Space Be a Third Space? Methodology and Hierarchies in Participatory Literacy Research

“Back Then it was Only Men Who Worked in These Kinds of Fields”: Observing Little Sparks Through the Prism of Affect and Gender in Maker Literacies Research

“…This iterative, participant‐generated process provides snapshots into the range of experiences students go through as they engage in maker literacies. While partially representational, this documentation provides students with a way to also digest their emotions and reactions (Lemieux et al., 2020)—actions that otherwise go unseen—and delve into what Hawley and Potter (2022) call a third space for research that prioritizes action, becoming, undoing linear learning, attuning to and valuing process over product. When engaging with these actions of undoing, both researchers and participants can be more attentive to ebbs and flows as well as blockages in learning trajectories, all the while humanizing processes that foster a sense of recognition and belonging.…”

Children’s production of place and (third) space during Covid 19: Den building, filmmaking and the postdigital in the Play Observatory

“…Nevertheless, much of what we will describe later in the article in analysing the submissions to the observatory happens in a 'playful' third space in which hierarchies are flattened, in the photographs submitted of home life altered under lockdown, between family members in the media productions, between researchers and families in the interviews and in response to the dramatically shifting and changed nature of daily life during the Coronavirus emergency. The third space, with its parallel and eventually intersecting origin in both architecture and sociocultural theory (Bhabha, 1994;Gutierrez, 2008;Lefebvre, 1991), has a much less literal and more metaphorical meaning, closer to more recent formulations which reject the idea that it is tied to specific locations or more traditional notions of power relations (Hawley and Potter, 2022;Potter and McDougall, 2017). Whilst this makes shared meanings more problematic, third space theory has value in that it invites us to consider intercultural, communicative phenomena in our research, permeated with porous expertise from all social actors in the process.…”

Theory-building in the social, material and postdigital worlds of play: Participatory research and multimodal discourse analysis

“…His role only becomes apparent by paying attention to emphasis, intonation and expressive emphasis in the mode of speech. The social media role reporter roleplay is embedded in the play, a cultural touchstone on which to draw when listening back, with the research itself becoming part of the play, flattening the hierarchies between researcher and researched, generating a 'third space' of meaning-making between them (see also Hawley and Potter, 2022).…”

“…When faced with the kinds of data we collected, and given the relevant positionings of the researchers, maintaining discrete forms of analysis would not have enabled us to work in an interdisciplinary way, to engage in what we are doing now, seeing episodes from multiple viewpoints, ‘stacking stories’, to borrow a further concept from Burnett and Merchant (2019). In the work of both projects, we positioned multimodal discourse analysis not only as a tool for approaching the ‘mess’ of the social world (Law, 2004) but as a tool to think with, to allow us to dwell in a position of ‘unknowing’ in a ‘third space’ (Hawley and Potter, 2022; Vasudevan, 2011). Arguably this is what is needed in ongoing learning from the kaleidoscopic vitality of children’s play (Opie, 1994) and in their participation as researchers in both ‘Playing the Archive’ and ‘The Play Observatory’.…”