Wednesday, 4 October 2017
16:00-17:30
Brooks Building, Room 2.10 , Brooks Building, Room 2.10
Working From Entanglement – developing moving and zooming approaches to children’s things and doings
Dr Riikka Hohti, University of Oulu, Finland
My work connects the concept of entanglement (Barad) to childhood studies and education in order to attend to the complexities of current childhoods. For me, entanglement allows engaging in non-reductive ways with things and doings that matter to the children and thus exploring the untamed and controversial dimensions of childhoods. Because entanglement is about open-ended and co-constitutive relationality, it necessarily sets inquiry in motion and encourages other than only linear research procedures.
In the seminar I will present my doctoral study (2016) in which I examined life in an elementary school class based on free-flowing observations, thoughts and stories written by 10-year-old children as ethnographers. The study focused on the mattering of tiny, funny and seemingly irrelevant things brought up by the children in their writings. I also experimented with various narrative analytical strategies in order to explore the complexities of time and space, and to look for alternative ways of writing analysis beyond representations.
My current research interests are child-animal-relationships, affirmative critique, and children’s digital assemblages. In the presentation, I will share some empirical and narrative engagements and deal with the challenges of resisting humanist individualist and instrumental approaches within these new projects. How to keep the examination detailed but open? How to foreground nomadic movement and ‘fluid in-between flows of data, experience and information’ (Braidotti 2002)?
Biography: PhD Riikka Hohti works as a researcher at the intersections of multidisciplinary childhood studies and education. Her doctoral dissertation (2016) examined children’s perspectives into primary school classroom while developing ethnographic and narrative approaches to work with children’s observations, thoughts and stories in non-representational and complexity-sensitive ways. Riikka is currently involved in two projects, focusing on children and animals (AniMate project, University of Oulu), and children and smart technologies in schools (post doc research). These projects share a posthumanist theoretical underpinning and a post-qualitative and nomadic methodological approach aiming at flexibility and movement.
Event contact Elaine Sheehan · E.Sheehan@mmu.ac.uk