Zooming with Babies: Troubling a Shared Present
DOI:
https://doi.org/10.18357/jcs202320501Keywords:
Zoom, babies, pandemic, discursive, timeAbstract
This paper outlines how the specific constraints of virtual communication technology have stirred new thinking around what kind of research and what knowledge is produced with babies. During Zoom sessions, the 2–4-month-old babies were frequently present but out of shot, or glimpsed as a small limb or movement or sound on the other side of the screen. The babies’ bodies, movements, and sounds exceeded the boundaries of the screen. Through a posthuman lens, presence, time, and agency unravel the Zoom screen as an active participant that interferes with what can happen in a shared present in a liminal space.
Downloads
References
Archibald, M., Ambagtsheer, R, C., Casey, M, G., & Lawless, M. (2019). Using Zoom videoconferencing for qualitative data collection: Perceptions and experiences of researchers and participants. International Journal of Qualitative Methods, 18, 1–8. https://doi.org/10.1177/1609406919874596 DOI: https://doi.org/10.1177/1609406919874596
Bennett, J. (2010). Vibrant matter: A political ecology of things. Duke University Press. DOI: https://doi.org/10.1215/9780822391623
Cortés-Morales, S., Holt, L., Acevedo-Rincon, J., Aitken, S., Ladru, D, E., Joelsson, T., Kraftl, P., Murray, L., & Tebet, G. (2021). Children living in pandemic times: A geographical, transnational, and situated view. Children’s Geographies, 20(4), 381–391. https://doi.org/10.1080/14733285.2021.1928603 DOI: https://doi.org/10.1080/14733285.2021.1928603
de Freitas, E. (2015a). The moving image in education research: Reassembling the body in classroom video data. International Journal of Qualitative Studies in Education, 29(4), 553–572. https://doi.org/10.1080/09518398.2015.1077402 DOI: https://doi.org/10.1080/09518398.2015.1077402
de Freitas, E. (2015b). Classroom data video and the time-image: An-archiving the student body. Deleuze Studies, 9(3), 318–336. https://www.jstor.org/stable/45331818 DOI: https://doi.org/10.3366/dls.2015.0190
Gannon, S. (2016). “Local girl befriends vicious bear”: Unleashing educational aspiration through a pedagogy of material-semiotic entanglement. In C. A. Taylor & C. Hughes (Eds.), Posthuman research practices in education (pp. 128–148). Palgrave Macmillan. DOI: https://doi.org/10.1057/9781137453082_9
Garthwaite, K., Wright, K., Patrick, R., & Power, M. (2020). Researching poverty in the pandemic: Thinking ethical issues and challenges. Social Policy Association. http://www.social-policy.org.uk/spa-blog/researching-poverty-in-the-pandemic-thinking-through-ethical-issues-and-challenges-by-kayleigh-garthwaite-et-al/
Haraway, D. (2016). Staying with the trouble: Making kin in the Chthulucene. Duke University Press. DOI: https://doi.org/10.2307/j.ctv11cw25q
Higgins, M. (2016). Decolonising school science: Pedagogically enacting agential literacy and ecologies of relationships. In C. A. Taylor & C. Hughes (Eds.), Posthuman research practices in education (pp. 186–205). Palgrave Macmillan. DOI: https://doi.org/10.1057/9781137453082_12
Howlett, M. (2021). Looking at the “field” through a zoom lens: Methodological reflections on conducting online research during a global pandemic. Qualitative Research, 22(3). https://doi.org/10.1177/1468794120985691 DOI: https://doi.org/10.1177/1468794120985691
Ivinson, G., & Renold, E. (2016). Girls, camera, (intra)action: Mapping posthuman possibilities in a different analysis of camera-girl assemblages in research on gender, corporeality and place. In C. A. Taylor & C. Hughes (Eds.), Posthuman research practices in education (pp. 168–185). Palgrave Macmillan. DOI: https://doi.org/10.1057/9781137453082_11
Lemke, J. (2009). Multimodal genres and transmedia traversals: Social semiotics and the political economy of the sign. Semiotica, 173, 283–297. https://doi.org/10.1515/SEMI.2009.012 DOI: https://doi.org/10.1515/SEMI.2009.012
Mazzei, L. (2007). Inhabited silence in qualitative research: Putting poststructural theory to work. Peter Lang.
Murris, K. (2016). The posthuman child: Educational transformation through philosophy with picture books. Routledge. DOI: https://doi.org/10.4324/9781315718002
Pacini-Ketchabaw, V., & Nxumalo, F. (2014). Posthumanist imaginaries for decolonising early childhood praxis. In M. N. Bloch, B. B. Swadener, & G. S. Cannella (Eds.), Reconceptualising early childhood care and education (pp. 131–143). Peter Lang.
Stewart, K. (2007) Ordinary affects. Duke University Press. DOI: https://doi.org/10.1515/9780822390404
Taylor, C. (2016). Edu-crafting a cacophonous ecology: Posthumanist research practices for education. In C. A. Taylor & C. Hughes (Eds.), Posthuman research practices in education (pp. 5–24). Palgrave Macmillan. DOI: https://doi.org/10.1057/9781137453082_2
Downloads
Published
How to Cite
Issue
Section
License
Authors contributing to the Journal of Childhood Studies agree to release their articles under the Creative Commons Attribution-Noncommercial 4.0 International license. This licence allows anyone to share their work (copy, distribute, transmit) and to adapt it for non-commercial purposes provided that appropriate attribution is given, and that in the event of reuse or distribution, the terms of this license are made clear.
Authors retain copyright of their work and grant the journal right of first publication.
Authors are able to enter into separate, additional contractual arrangements for the non-exclusive distribution of the journal's published version of the work (e.g., post it to an institutional repository or publish it in a book), with an acknowledgement of its initial publication in this journal.
