Abstract
The aim of this article is to analyze how a researcher’s use of digital cameras, with children in preschool, affects the children’s becoming as filmmaking subjects. The material consists of 12 months’ digital videography, during which the researcher took part in children’s own filmmaking. The authors used conceptual tools from Deleuze’s (1986) film theory to analyze an encounter between two children and a researcher as filmmakers. The analysis demonstrates how turning towards and turning away in relation to human (children and the researcher) and non-human (digital cameras, rhythm, music, light) actors actualizes admiration and desire in varying ways. The authors pay special attention to the children’s acting with abstract, constantly moving compositions. The article highlights how the children and the researcher produce different, yet related becomings using digital cameras. Acknowledging such connections between children’s mingling with human and non-human actors provides ways to understand how cameras actualize the potential to decolonize childhood by decomposing and recomposing educational settings.
Highlights
Digital tablets and cameras are used in different ways during research studies conducted in preschool settings
We explore children’s and adults’ becoming in film events in a Swedish preschool using concepts from Deleuze’s (1986) film theory when analyzing video ethnographic films
The children were invited to make films about their preschool, and the task was formulated as an open-ended question: ‘How would you describe your preschool in film?’ It was not a learning event connected to a predetermined goal or to the curriculum, but an open ended question for the children to examine and be creative with
Summary
Digital tablets and cameras are used in different ways during research studies conducted in preschool settings. The role of digital recording devices is enhanced when, in addition to filming children, children’s own films become part of a researcher’s data collection, knowledge production and results (Eckhoff, 2015, 2017; Elfström Pettersson, 2017; Magnusson, 2018) Such an interpretational framework, grounded in Gilles Deleuze’s philosophical thinking, understands adults and children as adjacent to each other, rather than being in fixed binary opposing positions as a developed ‘adult’ or a developing ‘child’ (Bohlmann & Hickey-Moody, 2019). We explore children’s and adults’ becoming in film events in a Swedish preschool using concepts from Deleuze’s (1986) film theory when analyzing video ethnographic films This means that the analysis is founded on a relational ontology within which children and the adult are regarded as ‘equal’ producers of matter, rather than positioned as ‘child’ or ‘adult’. We focus on understanding how digital cameras come to matter in children’s and a researcher’s becoming in a child institution, and the research question guiding the analysis has been: What is the role of digital cameras in child and researcher encounters in a preschool setting?
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