Vibrancy, repetition and movement: posthuman theories for reconceptualising young children in museums

Abstract

This paper argues for an expanded field of inquiry to conceptualise young children in museums. Drawing on Murris' [2016. The Post-Human Child: Educational Transformation Through Philosophy with Picturebooks. London: Routledge] analysis of childhood constructions, we discuss how cognitive and socio-constructivist models of the child dominate childhood and museum studies. We argue for the potential of Murris' figure of the posthuman child to reconceptualise children in museums. This perspective offers a greater focus on the potency of objects themselves, and the animacy of the non-human aspects of the museum. It is also underpinned by a theoretical shift from representation to nonrepresentation [Anderson, B., and P. Harrison. (2010) "The Promise of Non-representational Theories." In Taking-place: Non-representational Theories and Geography. Farnham: Ashgate], presenting us with new ways to address questions such as 'what does that mean?' when we observe children's learning in museums. Working with data that has proved resistant to interpretation across a range of research projects, what we call 'sticky data', we elaborate on three themes emerging from this reconceptualisation: vibrancy, repetition and movement.

Culture by babies: Imagining everyday material culture through babies’ engagements with socks

“…But in order to take seriously the seemingly momentary and unguided, we need to let go of our focus on long-term accountability, evaluation and learning (Rautio, 2013: 402). For the babies in my study, socks seemed to be one of those small things that, while defying logical explanation, seemed to matter to the babies (MacRae et al, 2018: 510). While babies’ access to objects is certainly limited, by their caregivers for example, Lupton (2013b: 4) argues that babies’ investment of affection, loyalty and emotions in the things they themselves choose can be understood as agential.…”

“…While I could not instantly point to why socks would be more interesting to focus on than other objects the babies were engaging with, I chose to stay with the feeling of excitement that came from finding yet another instance of babies engaging with socks. The babies' engagements with socks could be described as 'sticky data ' (MacRae et al, 2018) in the way in which they got stuck in my mind, astonished me and kept puzzling me.…”

On the relational autonomy of materials: entanglements in maker literacies research

“…Humanistic concepts such as “giving voice,” or “granting agency,” seem futile to us if we think with posthumanism and the affective turn (Rowsell and Shillitoe, 2019) as opening up possibilities to listen more, attune to our senses, amplify our research perspectives and reject rational objectification in the fashion that traditional qualitative research pulls us to do (St. Pierre, 2017). Engaging in such awareness of the senses and response‐ability (Haraway, 2016) calls for ‘sticky’ work (Ahmed, 2014; MacRae et al, 2018; Rowsell et al, 2018), and literacy researchers must resist the urge to always make research and literacies clean, proper and orderly. What then does the relational autonomy of materials look like in entanglements between matter, humans and non‐humans?…”

Family meshworks: children’s geographies and collective ambulatory sense-making in an immersive mathematics exhibition

“…We also complicate arguments focusing on how families and family relationships shape children's geographies or vice versa (Holloway 2014) by centering the experiences, actions, and agency of a young child in interaction with older family members while viewing verbal expression as part of a holistic communicative and spatial ecology that includes physical movements like walking, touching, and gesturing (e.g. Hackett 2014Hackett , 2016MacRae et al 2018).…”