‘This is Not a Photograph of Zuko’: how agential realism disrupts child-centred notions of agency in digital play research

Abstract

ABSTRACT The way in which individualised child agency is already ‘given’ ontologically in digital play research profoundly affects epistemology: how data is produced, analysed and interpreted. Co-created as part of a large-scale international study is a photograph ‘of’ South African six-year-old Zuko playing with Lego bricks. The agential realist diffractive reading of the photo as phenomenon traces transdisciplinary what is already at play materially and discursively in its specificity. Benefitting from recent work by feminist philosopher and quantum physicist Karen Barad and other agential realists, this article foregrounds the distinct contribution agential realism can make in children’s geographies. Moving away from either zooming in objects, or subjects when analysing data disrupts the adult-human gaze and brings into focus the apparatuses that measure and the relational spacetime entanglements objects are always already part of. Doing justice to the complexity of reality reconfigures digital play and agency as intra-actively relational – essential for reimagining more equitable futures in resource-constrained environments.