The technological socio-materiality of kindergarten children’s conduct of everyday life

The conduct of everyday life concept has been enormously fruitful for theorizing how persons come to live their lives across diverse social contexts as participants in and contributors to social practices. However, social practice research still needs to investigate in a more detailed manner the relevance of material artifacts for conducting one’s everyday life. Everyday artifacts such as media technologies heavily shape the concrete socio-material arrangements in specific practices, hence co-constituting the scope of imaginable action possibilities.
The presentation builds on insights drawn from a four-month researcher participation in a kindergarten practice. It argues that the relevance of media technologies can only be investigated in relation to the various perspectives of the other practice participants. The main focus is put on the children’s perspectives, as it is their conduct of everyday life which tends to be most easily ignored when studying the subjective relevance of everyday technologies in and across practices.