Towards an Ethico-Aesthetic of Parenting: Sensing Ritornellos of Play with GoPro Data

Abstract

This article argues for an ethico-aesthetic approach to parenting as an alternative to the neoliberalisation of parenting, and its critiques. This ethico-aesthetic approach focuses on affect and the intensification of collective life. In the article, it is explored in connection to a group of parents and children under six who participated in a play event called Moving with lines and light. As parents, researchers and players who participated in this play event, the authors think together with fragments of GoPro data and the concept of the ritornello. They do this as an exercise in sensing the non-linear time of parenting in/with the play through a prolonged, active and relational process of recollection and narration that combines analogic and technologic events. With these, the authors discuss the parenting body in postdevelopmental modes of existence organized around sense, territory and technicity that propel a thinking of parenting beyond practices of symbolic control, and as living ecologies of action.