Mingling and imitating in producing spaces for knowing and being: Insights from a Finnish study of child–matter intra-action

Abstract

Child-matter relations are often approached teleologically: as serving a distinct purpose often related to socialization and/or development as maturation. Unless these approaches are diversified, children's relations to their material surroundings are reduced to instrumental activity the significance of which is predetermined and known by adults. This article is based on a study with 12 Finnish children of ages four to seven, exemplifying a new materialist and posthumanist approach to child-matter relations as intra-active. Children's engagement with 'things' is considered intrinsically relevant: as an end in itself. The questions asked are: How do children and their material surroundings intra-act? What is produced in this intra-action? Two characteristics of child-matter intra-action are identified as mingling and imitating. What the intra-action is seen to produce are spaces of open-ended and de-individualized knowing and being.

An Ontological Turn for Childhood Studies?

“…The more explicit consideration of the materiality of children's lives, espoused by ontologically informed approaches, opens up a new world of research inquiry which considers, in addition to the human, the multitude of non‐human forces which intra‐act with and constitute what we come to see and recognise as ‘children’ and ‘childhood’. By positioning children in interdependent, relational encounters with ‘other bodies and matter’ (Hultman and Lenz Taguchi, : 525, 531) we are able to see how children's subjectivities emerge through this intra‐activity with other human and non‐human entities each time anew without the need to claim essence and authenticity (Rautio, : 471‐472).…”

Visual tools as mediational means: A methodological investigation

“…Thus, the constraints of the photographs, their limitations in the act of telling, were a significant part of their material agency and how they played their parts in the situations as material agents. With respect to previous conceptualizations regarding children and materiality (Rautio, 2013;Rautio and Winston, 2013), our observation begins to outline how the use of visual tools is constituted by the entanglement and situated movement between the constraints and flexibility of visual tools and working with them (e.g. Pickering, 1993).…”

Exclusion and reappropriation: Experiences of contemporary enclosure among children in three East Anglian schools

“…This accords with the argument of Barratt and Barratt Hacking (2008: 291), developed in a UK urban setting, that 'the extent of children's local knowledge and attachment is current unknown by adults'. Crucially, this knowledge emerges through what Rautio (2014) has described as the 'mingling' of children and material, and it does so in the face of restrictions on movement and access that limit such 'minglings'.…”

“…The accounts of children's relationships with their environment here reflect this recognition of interdependence: children work, think, and exist, with and through the material world. This emphasis on what Rautio (2014) calls the 'mingling' between children and material enables a shift in discussion 'from knowing about the world towards knowing with the world' (462). We would contest that enclosure disrupts this mingling precisely by restricting movement, restricting everyday banal material encounters, and therefore placing children in a position where they are restricted in what they can 'know with'.…”