The Role of Digital Cameras in Child and Researcher Encounters in Preschool

The aim of this article is to analyze how a researcher’s use of digital cameras, with children in preschool, affects the children’s becoming as filmmaking subjects. The material consists of 12 months’ digital videography, during which the researcher took part in children’s own filmmaking. The authors used conceptual tools from Deleuze’s (1986) film theory to analyze an encounter between two children and a researcher as filmmakers. The analysis demonstrates how turning towards and turning away in relation to human (children and the researcher) and non-human (digital cameras, rhythm, music, light) actors actualizes admiration and desire in varying ways. The authors pay special attention to the children’s acting with abstract, constantly moving compositions. The article highlights how the children and the researcher produce different, yet related becomings using digital cameras. Acknowledging such connections between children’s mingling with human and non-human actors provides ways to understand how cameras actualize the potential to decolonize childhood by decomposing and recomposing educational settings.