Paper short abstract:

This paper employs Barad’s concept of timespacemattering to propose re/source/fulness as a lens with which to examine how children co-created rich forms of play and agency via intra-action with material-discursive human and non-human bodies during the COVID-19 pandemic.

Paper long abstract:

This paper adopts a posthumanist lens to (re)consider how children have experienced play during the COVID-19 pandemic. Conceptualising crisis as a moment of pivot, we examine how COVID restrictions disentangled children from many of the usual locations outside of the home where they engage in wider networks of affective relationships. Instead they became (re)situated within the material, discursive, temporal and relational entanglements of home and family, leading some adults to fear that children’s play and agency would inevitably be constrained and even ‘lost’.

The Play Observatory Project (https://play-observatory.com/) has been collecting examples of everyday play over the course of the pandemic from children in an online survey and via ethnographic interviews. Employing Barad’s concept of timespacemattering (2007), we examine some of their contributions and argue that these data challenge this assumption of deficit. We explore how children, as emerging subjects, co-created rich forms of play and agency within this new set of circumstances, via intra-action with material-discursive human and non-human bodies.

Rather than drawing on contested tropes of child ‘resilience’ (Gill & Orgad, 2018) in a time of ‘crisis’, our analysis highlights children’s re/source/fulness. Children identified and created possibilities for play and cultural intra-action via active enquiry, exploration and expression. Engaging with the social, material, discursive, temporal and relational affordances of this intense period of saturation within the context of home and family, children’s play developed deep, creative, and sometimes new, entanglements.

References

Barad, K. (2007). Meeting the universe halfway: Quantum physics and the entanglement of matter and meaning. Durham: Duke University Press.

Gill, R., & Orgad, S. (2018). The Amazing Bounce-Backable Woman: Resilience and the Psychological Turn in Neoliberalism. Sociological Research Online, 23(2), 477–495. https://doi.org/10.1177/1360780418769673