Reconfiguring ‘the Other’ in Child Studies With the Camera: Encountering (the) Child as Phenomenon

ABSTRACT

This paper reconfigures ‘the Other’ in child studies through Trịnh Thị Minh‐Hà's notion of the inappropriate / d other as performed in Karen Barad's Diffracting diffraction: Cutting together‐apart (2014). We explore how this notion radically disrupts classical ideas of identity, individualism, human exceptionalism, and Adult‐centrism—exemplified through a playful video clip ‘of’ 7‐year‐old‐Aatu's‐death‐play‐with‐plasticine from the Small Matters project on multispecies death and dying. Un/learning subjectivity that doesn't assume identity a priori is profoundly complex and often misunderstood. We explore what happens when researchers resist following ‘the child’ or ‘a’ child as agential realist scholars tend to do. We argue that this ontological re‐turn involves more than troubling human exceptionalism by attuning to the more‐than‐human (e.g., focusing on air or sofas) or the ‘not‐yet‐fully‐human’. Approaches that retain identity as an important analytic tool might de‐center the human and thereby trouble Western epistemologies , but our enquiry takes a further, and ontologically different, step when starting with difference as differencing . For such a more radical reconfiguring of ‘the Other’ in child studies, we let ourselves be inspired by Aatu's ‘playworlding’—a performative practice that is neither limited to age, nor humans. This ontological turn is a re‐turn to the intense and immersive relationship with time as associated with child(hood). It invites researchers to flip their gaze on how their ‘measuring apparatuses’ and ‘agential cuts’ constitute the Subject ‘child’ and, therefore, child as ‘Other’ in their practices.