Kindergarten children’s digitized conduct of everyday life

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Abstract

The relation between a child’s everyday life and digital media technologies is complex and complicated. To what extent children think them subjectively relevant for their lives and subsequently use meanings transmitted by domesticated technologies in the contexts they live in/with and move through,
depends on the specific socio-material conditions they were and are confronted with in practice. Meanwhile children have the possibility to act differently in relation to these conditions. Consequently children are neither merely objectively determined by the technologies, nor can they completely determine their
perceptions and actions with and through the technologies. This
is to counter widespread one-sided notions that the childtechnology
relationship can be explained as an either-or relationship: Instead both agents are inextricably intertwined. Karen Barad’s concept of intra-action may be valuable for understanding this relationship in such a two-sided manner.
However, studies building on an agential-realist perspective often neglect that children face concrete dilemmas when trying to integrate digital media technologies into institutionalized practices. These dilemmas persist over time, which points to the fact that the conditions shaping practice cannot be grasped and questioned via relationalist descriptive accounts (“snapshots of practice”). Empirical material I collected praxiographically in a kindergarten suggests that children try to collaboratively overcome concrete dilemmas and tackle contradictory demands in the institution. Hence the paper makes the fundamental argument that the children’s particular actions are directed
towards something more general, towards possibilities and limitations for contributing to the kindergarten practice via their technology-related meanings, and thus towards conjointly conducting their everyday lives.
OriginalsprogEngelsk
Publikationsdato2012
StatusUdgivet - 2012
Begivenhed4S / EASST 2012 Joint Conference: Design and displacement - social studies of science and technology - Copenhagen Business School, København, Danmark
Varighed: 17 okt. 201220 okt. 2012

Konference

Konference4S / EASST 2012 Joint Conference
LokationCopenhagen Business School
Land/OmrådeDanmark
ByKøbenhavn
Periode17/10/201220/10/2012
AndetAnnual Meeting of the Society for Social Studies of Science (4S) Held jointly with European Association for the Study of Science and Technology (EASST)

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