‘This is not a weapon’: Rethinking children's worlding practices with Karin Murris

Abstract

This article draws on the concept of the posthuman child presented by Murris in her book The Posthuman Child, where the child is not understood as an object of study (‘i’ and ‘I’), nor as a subject (‘ii’ and ‘I’), but as a phenomenon (‘iii’). ‘iii’ constructs reality from intra-action with all the human and more-than-human surrounding elements. This research seeks to overcome the adult/child, nature/culture, or body/mind binaries. As opposed to the adult need (‘I’) in which the construction of meanings has a representational character, ‘iii’ carries out a non-representational worlding. In order to carry out our analysis, we conducted three diffractive readings of an event that took place in an Early Childhood Education school with 4- and 5-year-old children, thinking with Murris’ ‘i’, ‘ii’, and ‘iii’. This event facilitated the inclusion of all the agents involved, human (children and adults) and more-than-human (space, environment, materials, etc.). In our analysis, we seek to overcome the epistemic injustice pointed out by Murris. Our article highlights the need on the part of the adult (‘I’) to understand the child's graphic expression not as a representational end product, but as a product resulting from learning (a drawing), arising from intensities and concretised in a material-discursive practice carried out by the child as a phenomenon (‘iii’). This leads us to rethink the learning spaces at school with a need to generate decolonised spaces in which children's freedom to create worlds prevails, generating new knowledge from/in/through intra-actions with other more-than-human agents.