Karin Murris

University of Oulu · Faculty of Education

The purpose of this article is to explore how teachers, scholars, and mentors teach postqualitatively in diverse ways. Teaching postqualitatively does not easily conform with the delivery of set learning outcomes nor does it seek to measure learner progress or teaching quality in prescriptive and traditional ways. Rather, this kind of teaching coul...

Die Wechselwirkungen zwischen schulischem Lernen und außerschulischen Erfahrungen von Kindern haben sich als gemeinsames Forschungsfeld von Grundschulforschung und Kindheitsforschung etabliert. Vor dem Hintergrund krisenhafter gesellschaftlicher Entwicklungen, die einen unmittelbaren Einfluss auf das Alltagsleben und die Bildung von Kindern haben,...

The article shows how film can disrupt human-centred discourses about the use of video technology in qualitative research. Inspired in particular by Deleuze's film philosophy, a detailed analysis of an “ordinary” event in an early-childhood institution gestures at some of the possibilities that the manipulation of technology can offer. Filmmaking p...

This article is a conceptual co-exploration of the relationship between philosophy and childism. It draws upon a colloquium in December 2021 at the Childism Institute at Rutgers University. Nine co-authors lay out and interweave scholarly imaginations to collectively explore the concept of childism in critical philosophical depth. Through diverse e...

This text is an exploration of collaborative thinking and writing through theories, methods, and experiences on the topic of the child, children, and childhood. It is a collaborative written text (with 32 authors) that sprang out of the experimental workshop Child Studies Multiple. The workshop and this text are about daring to stay with mess, “un-...

The current move in childhood studies toward posthumanism, new materialism, and agential realism articulates a broader transdisciplinary paradigm shift in the academy. Philosophically reconfiguring who and what counts as (fully) human, challenges dominant views of child as an economic resource and education as an individualizing, teleologically hum...

In response to the call for papers for this special issue and the questions it poses, the authors show how the ontological posthumanist shift of agential realism does not erase but keeps the child human of colour in play, despite the inclusion of the other-than-(Adult)human in its methodologies. Through a montaging technique, the authors explore th...

The way in which individualised child agency is already ‘given’ ontologically in digital play research profoundly affects epistemology: how data is produced, analysed and interpreted. Co-created as part of a large-scale international study is a photograph ‘of’ South African six-year-old Zuko playing with Lego bricks. The agential realist diffractiv...

This paper reports on the South African findings from an international mixed methods study between the LEGO Foundation, Dubit and the Universities of Sheffield (England) and Cape Town (South Africa) on young children’s learning with digital technology. The findings of the study, the first of its kind in South Africa, show the consistency of qualiti...

The diffractive methodology at the heart of the agential realism developed intra-actively by a group of feminist scholars has a central place in Karen Barad’s philosophy, teaching, and scholarly writing. This chapter reworks diffraction as childlike methodology by diffracting through Derrida’s own comments on deconstruction. A string of knots is th...

This chapter introduces the idea that runs throughout the book. Karen Barad as Educator is not a “typical” narrative account of the person, their work, and their life. Troubling the troubled subject of humanism, this introduction describes how “this” book, woven together through “knots”, is not about Barad nor is it about Barad. Yet the un/doing of...

This chapter is an extraordinary meeting with Karen Barad. Diffracting through their own posts on social media, YouTube videos, and scholarly writing Barad is introduced. The chapter articulates a deep respect for how Karen Barad enacts their agential realist philosophy as a non-binary way of life, including how they teach and write—disrupting indi...

This chapter engages with different paradigms in science. It explains why knowing them is necessary for education research and for understanding Barad’s work, which is an essential read for any educator. Barad’s work theorises agential realism by exposing the problems, difficulties, and shortcomings of representationalism (particularly scientific r...

Critical posthumanism is an invitation to think differently about knowledge and educational relationality between humans and the more-than-human. This philosophical and political shift in subjectivity builds on, and is entangled with, poststructuralism and phenomenology. In this paper we read diffractively through one another the theories of Finnis...

Responding to the invitation of this special issue of Childhood and Philosophy this paper considers the ethos of facilitation in philosophical enquiry with children, and the spatial-temporal order of the community of enquiry. Within the Philosophy with Children movement, there are differences of thinking and practice on ‘facilitation’ in communitie...

Inspired by the philosophies of Donna Haraway and Karen Barad, the aim of this paper is to stir up trouble and to double trouble time in education. We trouble how certain views of childhood shape our experience of school time and secondly, we trouble the way in which time as experienced in school, affects how adults relate to childhood. A particula...

The authors bring together decolonial, place attuned, and critical posthumanist orientations to analyze an event during a residential workshop organized as part of a state-funded research project on decolonizing early childhood discourses in South Africa. An invitation during the workshop to grapple with what might be unsettling by attending to the...

Spaces tend not to “announce themselves through verbal language”, hence the popularity of video-research because it enables visibility of “the complex set of bodily presences and absences, movements in the space, material details, colours, sounds, and rhythms” (Mengis, Nicolini and Gorli, 2016, pp. 2, 4). Moreover, videography enables repeated play...

Conceptions of child and childhood have been variously (re)constructed by adults throughout history, and yet systematic questioning of the epistemological, ontological, political, and ethical assumptions informing these conceptions remains a relatively new field of academic inquiry. The concepts of child and childhood are philosophically problemati...

Karin Murris’ interview elaborates on the “posthuman” child, as well as decolonizing teacher education. Inspired by the work of Karen Barad, Karin speaks profoundly about reading and writing diffractively. For Karin, diffraction in research means that instead of finding an “answer,” diffraction opens up different possibilities to think through and...

This paper explores an inhuman reading of ‘hands’ with/in visual images of a Finnish literacy lesson. Inspired by Karen Barad’s agential realism and the ontological turn, we disrupt a metaphysics of presence, the temporality of progress and binary logic, to reconfigure the child in literacy practices as a sympoietic phenomenon, always already assem...

Discourses and relations of child/adult and early education are super-permeated with ideas and practices of authority and boundary-making. In early years' practices, deeply important beliefs and assumptions about who or what has authority and who or what should create the boundaries of everyday activity often go unquestioned. This produces differen...

Childing: A Different Sense of Time Cara's "Image-nings" - In this chapter we tell the story of the impact of a Childhood studies course on Cara, one of the students, through images she made of Karin ( the lecturer). Striking is how Cara's course "Image-nings"(her journal documentation) express a shift in subjectivity, disrupting the lecturer/stude...

This paper emerges from experiences of putting picturebooks, philosophy with children and posthumanism into play. Responding to Derrida's notion of a ‘return to childhood’, we propose a different move of ‘re-turning to child/ren’, drawing from various entangled sources. First, the figuration of posthuman child (Murris, 2016) disrupts the conception...

In this paper, we use a diffractive reading developed by feminist philosopher and quantum physicist Karen Barad, as part of a response-able methodology, in order to consider the claim made by Serge Hein in his paper ‘The New Materialism in Qualitative Inquiry: How Compatible Are the Philosophies of Barad and Deleuze?’ (2016) that the philosophies o...

A rapidly increasing number of books and articles are written about posthuman pedagogies in schooling, but practical pedagogical guidance for preparing student teachers in higher education for such a dramatic ontoepistemic shift is slow coming forward. Inspired by Rosi Braidotti’s (Metamorphoses: Towards a materialist theory of becoming. Blackwell...

This article explores how three well-known conceptual frameworks view child development and how they assume particular figurations of the child in the context of the South African National Curriculum Framework for Children from Birth to Four. This new curriculum is based on a children’s rights framework. The capability approaches offer important in...

Re-turning to our experiences of putting a diffractive methodology to work ourselves, as well as engaging with the writings of Donna Haraway and Karen Barad, we produce some propositions regarding a diffractive methodology for researchers to consider. Postqualitative research disrupts the idea that educationalists can be given tools or techniques t...

This chapter gives an overview of how the substance ontology of Western philosophy thrives on the power producing Nature/Cuture dichotomy, has caused asymmetical violence, infiltrated everyday language, created academic divisions, produced hierarchical categories and classifications, and underpins colonialism and colonising notions of relationships...

In this paper, we give a flavour of how, against the odds, Reggio-Emilia-inspired pedagogical documentation can work in reconceptualizing environmental education, reconfiguring child subjectivity and provoking an ontological shift from autopoiesis to sympoiesis in teacher education. Working posthuman(e)ly and transdisciplinarily across three founda...

Literacies, Literature and Learning: Reading Classrooms Differently attends to pressing questions in literacy education, such as the poor quality of many children’s experiences as readers, routine disregard for their thinking and the degrading impact of narrow skills measurement and comparison. This cutting-edge book moves beyond social, psychologi...

Motivated by the still visible signs of colonialism and lack of transformation at the University of Cape Town (UCT), black South African student Chumani Maxwele threw human feces at the statue of British colonist Cecil Rhodes on March 9, 2015. The action led to the removal of the statue, during which the author took a photo of black South African f...