Abstract
This article argues for an ethico-aesthetic approach to parenting as an alternative to the neoliberalisation of parenting, and its critiques. This ethico-aesthetic approach focuses on affect and the intensification of collective life. In the article, it is explored in connection to a group of parents and children under six who participated in a play event called Moving with lines and light. As parents, researchers and players who participated in this play event, the authors think together with fragments of GoPro data and the concept of the ritornello. They do this as an exercise in sensing the non-linear time of parenting in/with the play through a prolonged, active and relational process of recollection and narration that combines analogic and technologic events. With these, the authors discuss the parenting body in postdevelopmental modes of existence organized around sense, territory and technicity that propel a thinking of parenting beyond practices of symbolic control, and as living ecologies of action.
Highlights
This article argues for an ethico-aesthetic approach to parenting as an alternative to the neoliberalisation of parenting, and its critiques
(1987) argue that ritornellos emerge from chaos, the chaos of entering a territory that is strange, like a room whose floor is covered in white paper, and where parents are invited to move following the movements and rhythms of children, as it happened in Moving with lines and light
Lucy and Laura discussed repeatedly how the images from chest-mounted GoPros carried by children made it impossible to produce a retraceable and consistent figuration of the play, and provided resistant and difficult data that we found generative
Summary
Discourses around family life and childrearing have been increasingly economised, rationalised and highly governed, which make many speak of a neoliberalisation of parenting The problem that we want to grapple with in this article is not how marginal and vulnerable populations deviate, resist, or access any given standard of good parenting, but to think parenting with the outside-of-the subject and the vital force of life We do this by working in an alternative paradigm, the ethico-aesthetic. Rotas 2015), early childhood studies (Dahlberg 2016; Hackett 2017; MacRae 2019; Trafí-Prats 2018, 2019), and environmental education (Rousell and Cutter-McKenzie-Knowles 2018), we understand an ethico-aesthetic paradigm as one that engages in sensuous and affirmative becomings with bodies, materials and technologies that endanger the perpetuation of neoliberalized parenting by generating embryos of other possible parental worlds (Rolnik 2017). Can introduce generative conditions that open up the possibilities of thinking social research by intensifying and radicalising its practices and lifestyles (Manning and Massumi 2014)
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