Trial lecture - time and place
Adjudication committee
- First opponent: Professor Guy Merchant, Sheffield Hallam University, UK
- Second opponent: Professor Karen Wohlwend, Indiana University, USA
- Chair of committee: Professor Anders Mørch, Department of Education, University of Oslo, Norway
Chair of defence
Professor Palmyre Pierroux, Department of Education, University of Oslo, Norway
Supervisors
- Professor Hans Christian Arnseth, Department of Education, University of Oslo, Norway
- Professor Kenneth Silseth, Department of Education, University of Oslo, Norway
Summary
Play is a fundamental activity in young children’s lives. In early childhood, literacy— understood as the social practices of meaning making—and play are closely related. Research has demonstrated how new forms of literacy emerge through young children’s play as socio– technological conditions change. Today, new media technologies are posited to be entangled with young children’s lives in ways that disrupt assumed digital–analog binaries. Still, there is a lack of empirical in-depth research on young children’s contemporary play under these new posited conditions. Furthermore, there is a lack of empirical in-depth research on the messy, contingent, and nonsensical dimensions of young children’s contemporary play with new media technologies. Rich accounts and tools to contingently capture the new dimensions and forms of play are important because they allow educators, parents, and others in close contact with young children to facilitate meaningful and pleasurable everyday experiences.
In this dissertation, ethnographic fieldwork—supported by video recordings, photography, and field notes—among young children playing with new media technologies at home and in preschool is presented. The dissertation is situated in the sociomaterial theorizing of agential realism and nonrepresentational affect theory. I aim to explore how new literacies emerge as new media technologies are brought together through and across moments of young children’s contemporary play. The research objectives, corresponding to the empirical, conceptual, and methodological contributions of the dissertation, are as follows:
1. Account for the literacies of young children’s contemporary play with new media technologies.
2. Identify and explore productive theorizing and concepts to study the literacies of young children’s contemporary play with new media technologies.
3. Identify and explore how the literacies of young children’s contemporary play with new media technologies can be studied.
In Article I, coauthored with Professor Hans Christian Arnseth (University of Oslo) and Professor Kenneth Silseth (University of Oslo), we analyze a video excerpt of three young children who are playing Minecraft with wooden and synthetic blocks in a preschool common room. Through playful dwelling, the children take part in messy configurations of gaming features, hands, bodies, and blocks. Even with no digital devices present, assumed digital–analog binaries are unsettled, and forms of postdigital play emerge.
In Article II, coauthored with Professor Christian Ehret (University of North Carolina), we analyze video excerpts of two young children’s playdates at home, where they watch YouTube, play Minecraft on a Nintendo Switch, and play with construction playthings. The children take pleasure in moving through postdigital playscapes by taking part in the enactment of recurring refrains, which resonate and register as felt across diverse events. The refrains enacted in our case are characterized by the facilitation, embrace, and encouragement of intensely felt, disruptive moments of surprise. These idiosyncratic movements of flows and interruptions form felt touchpoints of the children’s friendship.
In Article III, I analyze young children collecting cones, leaves, and insects in their neighborhood and preschool, and young children collecting stars, toads, and rainbows while playing Super Mario Run on an iPad in their bedroom. The children answer the world by allowing their collections to unfold in shifting, porous relationships with their surroundings, and allowing chance-like encounters to participate in the movement of their collecting. These ways of collecting resonate across diverse events, regardless of their assumed status as digital or analog. Their appreciation of the contingencies of collecting is not an abstracted sensibility but is grounded in the material conditions of early childhood characterized by tensions with their surroundings.
Through in-depth research of a group of young children at home and in preschool, my inquiries show how contemporary early childhood play unsettles assumed digital–analog binaries. The idiosyncratic arrangements of bodies, blocks, and bytes in their play allow for a feeling of unpredictability, which the young children facilitate, embrace, and encourage. To understand this play, the concepts of the postdigital, the refrain, and answering the world are further developed. Through a broad ethnography in tandem with sociomaterial theorizing, I demonstrate how research can move beyond young children’s discrete interactions with digital devices to broader postdigital playscapes.
The pedagogical implications of my inquiry may be that educators, parents, and others in close contact with young children to facilitate new dimensions and forms of play critically should evaluate assumptions of clean cuts between the digital and analog, and sensitively feel for the flows and interruptions of play through and across moments. The dissertation adds examples of such critical and sensitive practices.