Treåringar, kameror och förskola – en serie diffraktiva rörelser

Abstract

The aim of this thesis is to examine what happens when three-year-olds are given access to digital cameras, and what shape and form children’s photographic capacity takes within the framework of everyday pre-school activities. The notion that young children in pre-school rarely get to use cameras themselves, and that they take part in photographs produced by pre-school educators as part of an ongoing documenting practice rooted in the curriculum is the point of departure. The study has been conducted through an ethnographic approach further strengthened by post-qualitative thinking, where the research material was produced together with children in two different pre-schools. This material includes the children’s intra-actions with the cameras as well as the photographs that emerge during the course of the study. The thesis moves within a posthumanist theoretical framework, with a special focus on new materialism and agential realism, where humans and non-humans are seen as mutual performative agents. The theoretical perspective permeates the entire study, and does not, therefore, only serve as a support for analyses. Through diffractive readings, the results show that children and cameras approach pre-school and its visual events in a manner that is not recognisable in previous experiences of how pre-school and the life of children have formerly been made visible. In this study, the children use the cameras to create resistances and to look back at the educators, as well as to show what relations come into being with materials, peers, places, spaces and knowledge formation. The children, together with the cameras, also make visible the power of the eye to direct and display, where the cameras also come to be an aesthetic tool with the capacity to both see and make visible in everyday life. This, in turn, also brings to light aspects of ethics and leads to the breaking up of more traditional and normative photographic actions and expressions.