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Things and children in play –improvisation with language and matterPauliina Rautioa & Joseph Winstonb

a Department of Teacher Education, University of Helsinki,Helsinki, Finlandb Institute of Education, University of Warwick, Coventry, UKPublished online: 25 Aug 2013.

To cite this article: Pauliina Rautio & Joseph Winston (2015) Things and children in play –improvisation with language and matter, Discourse: Studies in the Cultural Politics of Education,36:1, 15-26, DOI: 10.1080/01596306.2013.830806

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Things and children in play – improvisation with language and matter

Pauliina Rautioa* and Joseph Winstonb

aDepartment of Teacher Education, University of Helsinki, Helsinki, Finland; bInstitute ofEducation, University of Warwick, Coventry, UK

Based on the authors’ studies of material-discursively approached lives of children,this paper addresses the educational relevance of playing, through re-entangling andcomplicating divided, purpose-directed and individualistic conceptualisations of play.The unhelpful binary of conceiving playing as an end (‘free play’) as distinct fromplaying as means (‘guided play’) is argued to render children as subjects of educationwho do not yet know, rather than ones who are capable of also producing knowledgeand challenging ways of knowing and being. The empirical anchoring of this paper isa study in which 12 Finnish children, aged four to seven, gathered once a week for atotal of 11 times to assist an adult researcher in studying ‘things, objects and beings’.Based on insights from this study, an approach to playing as intra-active and comprisingimprovisation with language and matter, is suggested to provide spaces for producingand contesting as well as acquiring knowledge.

Keywords: play; children; materiality; intra-action; language; discourses; wordplay

Playing is often discussed as a form of human activity either inevitable because ofbiological maturation, or as necessary for cultural socialisation (Cohen & Waite-Stupiansky, 2011; McMahon, Lytle, & Sutton-Smith, 2005) but rarely conceptualisedas both simultaneously. Playing is thus approached via the many purposes it is seen toserve – being a means to an end – or via the intrinsic value it is seen to entail – being anend in itself. While both approaches offer diverse and dynamic conceptualizations ofplay, and while it is recognised that play can be an instrumental means to an end as wellas an intrinsic end (Pramling-Samuelsson & Johansson, 2006; also Cheng & Johnson,2010), it is, nevertheless, rare that the simultaneity of play as means and an end isdiscussed (see, however, Wohlwend, 2008). In this paper we proceed to approach thissimultaneity through conceptualising play as intra-active1 – as players becoming capableof knowing in a variety of social and material relations comprising play(ful) encounters.

A core objective of re-entangling the unhelpful binary of play as means or as an end isto contribute to policies and practices of education in which, no doubt for heuristicpressure, simple categories and essentialisations of play are often welcomed over themore complex, undefined and open-ended views (Kuschner, 2007; Siegel, 2006;Wohlwend, 2008). As a concrete result play spaces in educational institutions can bedesigned as compartmentalised and/or thermatised, playtimes defined, and a division intocategorically separate free play and guided play applied (Brown & Renshaw, 2006; Kyttä,2006; Leander, 2002; Lindberg, 2003; Matthews, Stienstra, & Djajadiningrat, 2008;Maxwell, 2007; McInnes, Howard, Miles, & Crowley, 2011). The social, material and

*Corresponding author. Email: pauliina.rautio@oulu.fi

Discourse: Studies in the Cultural Politics of Education, 2015Vol. 36, No. 1, 15–26, http://dx.doi.org/10.1080/01596306.2013.830806

© 2013 Taylor & Francis

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spatial practices of education can thus end up reflecting the binaries of knowing/being ormeans/ends by emphasising the already-known (already-defined), rendering children assubjects of education who either know or do not know rather than ones who are capableof also producing knowledge and challenging ways of knowing and being – a stance longestablished in especially social scientific research of childhood and play (with empiricalexamples by e.g. Burke, 2005; Clark, 2005) but less evident in educational systems andpractices (Engeström, 1987; Rajala, Hilppö, Lipponen, & Kumpulainen, 2013).

Based on the authors’ recent and ongoing empirical studies into the materially and/ordiscursively approached lives of children (see e.g. Rautio, 2013a, 2013b; Winston, 2013)the authors address the educational relevance of playing conceptualised as intra-active:re-entangled and complicated, undefinable and deindividualistic. The overarching researchquestion addressed in this paper is: In which ways do children intra-act with matter inplayful encounters? The two overlapping ways discussed and illustrated are impro-visation with discourses and matter, and improvisation with words and matter – bothcontributing to the production of playing as a space in which ways of knowing and beingare acquired and challenged.

Notions and practices of play are thus re-entangled and complicated in two ways. First,discussed as simultaneously means and ends (knowing and being), and second, ascomplex entanglements of congregational sociomaterial, rather than only individual andinteractional (human to human) activity.

The empirical anchoring of this paper is a study by the first author, Rautio (2013b),in which 12 Finnish children, aged four to seven, gathered once a week for a total of11 times to assist an adult researcher in studying ‘things, objects and beings’ that theybrought to each meeting in a little wooden box they were provided with.

The theoretical framework relies on post-humanism and (new) materialism asinfluenced by Deleuze (e.g. Barad, 2008; Bennett, 2010; Coole & Frost, 2010; Hultman& Lenz Taguchi, 2010). This is to say that knowing and being are approached asinseparable, forming an onto-epistemology (Barad, 2008), that the human beings areunderstood simultaneously as biophysical matter and as socially and discursivelyconstructed, and finally that humanistic individualism is, if not replaced, at least heavilycomplemented with post-humanist relationality (Davies & Gannon, 2009; Fenwick &Edwards, 2011; also Bennett, 2010; and Sørensen, 2009).

Intra-active playing

Unless problematised and also blurred, the binary of play as means to an end (taken tohighlight knowledge) versus play as an end (taken to highlight a way of being) cantranslate from theory into practice via a more heuristic binary of guided play (for desiredends) and free play (for playing as an end in itself) (Miller & Almon, 2009; Santer,Griffiths, & Goodall, 2007; Tassoni & Hucker, 2005). This often results in the locationof free play in early childhood and home settings and guided or ‘scripted’ play to themore institutional educational settings (Miller & Almon, 2009; Pramling-Samuelsson &Fleer, 2009).

Both approaches to play on their own – as a means to an end or as an end in itself – canbe seen to portray an established approach to playing as progress: the former with learningvarious skills, the latter with psychological maturation and socialisation (Cheng & Johnson,2010; also Bühler, 1931; Elkonin, 2005). Such rhetoric assigns a retrospective meaning-making to playing and child-matter intra-actions rather than discussing the events per se:

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the intra-acting as it unfolds and as it comprises means and ends simultaneously and indynamic, transforming rather than predefined relations. Furthermore, play as progressimplies a developmental view of children as beings in progress, as not yet ready. The verynotion of ‘progress’ is thus easily tied to biological markers of development rather thanquestioned as also a social and power-laden notion: progress towards what? Definedby whom? (see Popkewitz, 2008). This runs the risk of leaving children themselvesportrayed as the oblivious agents who engage in play unable to realise or contemplate theends that are comprehensible only to the observing adults because they have alreadyachieved the ends in question themselves. This view leaves unattended the instance ofplaying and the ways in which playing matters to the child in the moment.

Criticising the lack of theoretical rigour in play-research, Cheng and Johnson (2010,p. 257) conclude that the construct of ‘play’ lacks acceptable levels of reliability, validityand clarity. Perhaps so, we suggest, because playing is often unreliable, invalid andunclear. Definitions that address the plurality, elusiveness and non-reducibility of playinginclude the one posed by Feezell (2010). For Feezell, play can be identified simul-taneously as (1) a behaviour/activity, (2) a motive, attitude or a state of mind, (3) a formor structure, (4) a meaningful experience or (5) an ontologically distinctive phenomenon.

In what follows, we propose a focus on play as intra-action. In accepting that play isall: practice, progress and a mode of being and knowing in itself, the emphasis instudying play as intra-active shifts from seeking a definition of what play is (for) towardsthe ways in which playing (re)generates those playing, all in complex relations to eachother. Intra-active playing is thus never ‘free’ but always interdependent, never ‘guided’but always generative and becoming. Intra-active play is about being ‘in it’ together:becoming human beings in relation to one another and to the world.

Subscribing thus to a pluralistic and an essentially open-ended (non)definition ofplaying, we proceed to argue, with illustrations from the mentioned study, that it issensible to concentrate also on how play is and on what it produces rather than only onwhat play is (for). In other words, to address how playing partakes in the producing of thevery subjects/subjectivities, which then engage with purposes that play offers for thosesubjectivities, say learning and socialisation into particular things.

Child-matter intra-action

The study on which this paper builds and from which it derives its illustrations is one byRautio in which 12 Finnish children aged four to seven became co researchers of ‘things,objects and beings’. These children were provided with small, plain wooden boxes withlids and instructed to bring these boxes to research meetings, filled with whatever theychose and whatever would fit in the box. This group of one adult researcher and a varyingnumber of children met up 11 times during a half-year period. Each child attended at leastfive of the meetings; most children attended almost all 11.

Half of the meetings took place in a large hall that used to be a library at the university.As the research proceeded, the renovation plans for the hall proceeded and the researchspace would be different each time. The research design was intentionally such that asmuch randomization as possible took place. The objective of this was to conduct researchthat resists, as best it can, the tendencies evident in educational research in whichcomplexity and open-endedness of phenomena are sacrificed for seeming certainty andclosure (see especially, Lenz Taguchi, 2010; MacLure, 2006; and also Cheek, 2007).

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In addition to the research spaces being unpredictable, the instruction given to theparticipating children was simply to arrive with their boxes filled with ‘things’. Rautioprogressed to develop no systematic way of documenting the meetings. Most times shewould bring an audio recorder to record what was talked about and would also bringalong a camera in order to take photos of the things that the children brought in theirboxes. Sometimes she jotted down some notes. A few times she did no documentationwhatsoever, rather relying on embodied remembering and recalling of the events.

In complicating her research reality in such a way, Rautio found a way to concentrateon what was taking place in the moment. She had to make choices in the moment (andnot only afterwards when analysing data) of what to pay attention to, what to react to,what to try and remember – and how to remember, how to encounter in order not toreplicate but to somehow ‘know differently’ for later reflection (on embodied researchpractices, see Woodyer, 2008).

The methodology Rautio engaged in and created for researching play among otherthings, was itself deeply playful: improvisation for a purpose within a fluid structure. Thisis to say that being conversant with conventional methodological tools for qualitative datacollection, documentation and analysis, she would apply these flexibly in the moment andin response to each situation, rather than determining set methods beforehand. In need ofan overarching methodological label, her approach could be labelled as post qualitativelyinformed (Jackson & Mazzei, 2012; Lather, 2007), multimodal observant participation2

(for a more comprehensive methodological discussion see Rautio, 2013b).The transcripts presented in this paper are based on audio recordings of two research

meetings. As the focus of much of the discussion is on improvisation with languageas/and matter, the selected data are mainly verbal/recorded. Other modes of datadocumentation have provided discussion of child-matter intra-action less based onlanguage and more with embodied activities (see Rautio, 2013b).

Ethical issues pertaining to research which is fundamentally open-ended have to dowith the mutual emerging of subjects in relation (Davies & Gannon, 2009). This yieldsthat the procedural ethical guidelines are at best few, and the emphasis is on relationalethics: a continuous and situational awareness of ethical responsibilities in working withyoung people (Gildersleeve, 2010; Rallis & Rossman, 2010). In this research ethicaldecisions were addressed not only prior to but throughout each meeting. Children wererecruited by spreading the word through kindergartens and by word of mouth. A specialconsent form was drafted for and reflected on with children in order to facilitate theirunderstanding and decision-making with regard to participation. During the meetingsmoments of opting out – when for instance a child chose to retreat to the background –were considered as momentary declines to participate, but would not necessarily be takenas final decisions to stop participating in research. Various routes for children to express achoice of leaving the research were continuously offered: through parents, through directtalk, through not insisting long-term commitment but taking one meeting at a time.

Things play with children

Language is one ‘thing’ that plays with children. Understanding language as material, asform rather than mere function, is central to an understanding of how language generatesplay (Bomer, 2003). Cook (2000), for one, argues that the nursery rhymes, common to allcultures, are more form-driven than meaning-driven. Sounds and rhythms are dependenton patterns, and meanings result from their material form rather than shape it (see also

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Winston, 2013). Language can thus be taken as if using children: as words, patterns,sounds and rhymes having their own imaginative dynamic, offering their owncontribution in the child-matter encounters.

One of the guiding research questions relevant to the focus of this section was: Whatare the ways in which children sustain openness to their material environments?‘Openness’ is understood here as relating to surroundings in a creative rather than in apredefined way: viewing elements also in relation to ongoing intra-action rather than onlyas elements with fixed sociocultural meanings. This section highlights one such way: theimprovisation with language, namely discourses – socially expected patterns of usinglanguage (Gee, 1996; Sawyer, 1997; Wohlwend, 2008) – in order to be able to addressand be addressed by one’s environment in ways that both acknowledge and challenge thevalidity of these discourses.

That children are often ready to ‘count in’ the more-than-human elements in theirsurroundings is often confused as naivety or natural scientific confusion to be addressedwith more education (see Gebhardt, Nevers, & Billman-Mahecha, 2003; Rautio, 2011;Tipper, 2011). Traversing the fine line between what is considered fiction and what real,considering walls and furniture as human-like participants, as the children in thefollowing passage do, has little to do with confusion or naivety, and all with playfulimprovisation skirting around a socially expected way of accounting presence:

Niko: Will there be other children this time?Researcher: No, it seems like this is it.Jake: There’s only five of us.Researcher: Yes.Theo: (To the researcher) If we count you…Jake: Oh yeah, then there’s six.Researcher: Do I count?Jake: No.Researcher: Why not?Leo: Because you’re not a child.Niko: Actually you count because otherwise you would not be here. Because all that

there is here counts … but then we’d have to count all those machines. Nah.Researcher: If you counted all that there is here, what would you get?Leo: Like, perhaps, like tens. Or eleven. All of the walls and furniture would need to

be counted.

Niko, Jake and Theo, as well as the participating researcher know full well what theconventional discourses are – of counting, of ‘counting in’ – yet they begin to improvisewith these. And they are all ‘in it’ as well; the absurd and the playful fuse with theserious, the material with the abstract, the children with adults and the humans with wallsand machines.

Unconventional or playful improvisation with language, examples of which are amplewithin poetry, for instance, remain as curiously different domains for children and forgrownups, however. Poets and authors such as Gerard Manley Hopkins (1844–1889) orLewis Carroll (1832–1898), for example, would distort language by inventing words; theformer out of necessity (combining two words to invent one that is needed for describingreality – ‘yestertempest’, ‘firedint’, footfretted’ and the like3) – the latter out of a keenand playful sense of the absurd, as with his poem Jabberwocky in ‘Alice through theLooking-glass’. Hopkins’ work is seen as difficult and adult, whereas Carroll’s is seen aschildish and for children, but as adults and professional authors, they are both consideredto have engaged in inventing and creating through a distortion of sense rather than an

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indulgence in non-sense (Lucas, 1997). When it is children inventing and distortinglanguage, however, they are often either seen as ‘natural poets’ (Sloan, 2001) or asincapable of producing ‘proper’ poetry (Livingston, 1984; Sloan, 2001).

The question of whether children’s wordplay is art or not, misses, in our view, a crucialpoint: that children and adults engage in wordplay or improvisation much for the samereasons. For both children and adults the world turns into linguistic representations that inturn generate further possibilities of encountering, improvising with and being improvisedby the very world (Wohlwend, 2008).

The relevance for education that the discussion in this section has highlighted is therealization that when conceptualised as intra-active playing can provide a relatively risk-free space in which both the ‘already-known’ (i.e. conventional, socially agreed on) isacquired and at the same time challenged (Wohlwend, 2008, p. 134). For instance, thediscursive elements of conventional educational encounters ‘learner-child’, ‘teacher/knower-adult’ to name but the two most obvious actors, can become addressed as existingbut at the same time challenged – as the passage in this section on ‘who counts’ shows us.

This is thus a space in which to create and invent, as well as to locate and address themany ‘forces’ that contribute to the formations of various subjectivities in practices ofeducation as well as in arenas of everyday life of children and young people in theirrespective cultures and societies. Playing, then, could be taken up and taken seriously ineducation also outside of early years as offering a space for engaging with the world inorder to critically address the ways in which the world – other people, other beings,material conditions, natural resources, discourses and political forces – makes us.

And children play back

To approach playing as intra-active makes room for exploring the congregational agency(Bennett, 2010) of beings and things, both material and immaterial (like scents andsounds). The notion of congregational agency refers to an idea that agency, an ability toact in a certain way, is not an individual’s possession or skill, and rather arises only asresult of gatherings of many kinds of things and beings, differing with each situation. Inalignment with this, the guiding research question addressed in this section is: In whichways do children exist as part of child-matter intra-action in play? ‘Existing’ refers hereto possible subjectivities that are created in intra-action, rather than pre-existing that intra-action. One such way, discussed in this section is the improvisation with words in relationto social and material things, events and encounters and in order to try out and to producediverse, at times contradictory subject positions, feelings and thoughts.

The following lengthy transcript illustrates the social and material evolving andlayeredness of an event to which many kinds of accidents and intentions, materials,sounds and feels, and other people contribute. It provides an example of an event which,if read through either looking for the possible ‘means’ or discussing the intrinsic ‘end’,would perhaps leave the resulting multi-layered improvisation invisible.

A few children sit at a table doing different things with their boxes. They have crayons,sanding paper, scissors and all kinds of odd things they have brought with them. Niko4

and Jake sit next to each other, facing Leo on the other side of the table. Theo sitsnear Leo:

Leo: It’s a shame I don’t have any tape. I could have changed the colour (of this box)to blue.

Theo: Or black.

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Leo: Black is my favourite colour. [Uses a black crayon] Yes! I can colour it like this.[…] Hold on, can I fix this colour if I recolour with that one? No. Can’t. I couldcolour this dark green. Yes, this works! WOW! This is a mysterium, there’ssomething red in here…

Researcher: A mysterium? You mean where the red comes from?Leo: It might be from this crayon. I’m trying now [with sanding paper] what happens

… Yes, no white now. Oops, there’s dust …

Leo tries various crayons to colour his box. He is engaged in intra-action with the box(rough unfinished surface) and the crayons (waxy) as well as with language: narrating hisactions out loud. His talking is overly dramatic in how it sounds (loud, deep), how it isplotted (as a mystery) and how the words are both picked and invented (‘mysterium’).The most identifiable players are the box, the crayons, Leo, language, and the oneshearing (not necessarily listening to) Leo. The notion of ‘intra-active play’ begins to liveup to its ambiguity. Leo’s intra-action with crayons and the box is many means and endsat once: staged, fun, strategic, surprising and unplanned. There are more than just theintentions and plans of Leo that contribute to the evolving of the play/event.

Leo stages his intra-active play with the box through playing with words – inventing,dramatising, plotting – to which the surprises provided by the crayons and the sandingpaper contribute. He has fun in working with the box and the crayons, yet targets hisspeaking to someone in the interest of getting a friend (i.e. representing himself as onewithout a friend). The playing going on is both strategic and unplanned, both controlledand uncontrollable by Leo.

The playing is unplanned and uncontrollable by Leo mainly with regard to theserendipitous material contributions. Producing dust as the consequence of trying toremove red crayon from a white-painted knob on the lid of his box with sanding paper isa genuine accident and a surprise to Leo:

Leo: Yeah, and I have this that the wax comes off and I get that white dust, look. Dust. I gotfilth! Hold on! This might beat Niko and Jake because I have a dustwheel! Good. Ihave a duster. Hold on … how can I dust the two?

Theo: That’s the mystery.

At the same time the playing of Leo and the box is strategic and controlled by Leo via hisverbalizations which seem like an intentional act of trying to invent a linguistic ‘fit’ forwhat is taking place; aligning words with the world (Winston, 2010). As he is searching forthis fit, he proceeds to produce ever new verbalisations and names for what is happening.And with these new descriptions, his actions with the materials at hand change and evolve.From random dust to owner and inventor of a dust wheel, and later on a duster (and evenfurther a ‘dustey’) that might yield him social advantage: ‘This might beat Niko and Jake’.

Leo increases his invented, playful words coining ‘twirlcolour’ – a word reminiscent ofHopkins himself – and ‘dust-equipped lid’, referring to his impressively coloured dust asa scent: an aroma:

Leo: I’ll colour this a little different still … and, boy, do I have the aromas! There. Wohoo, Ihave twirlcolour. And a dust-equipped lid.

Jake: [Makes a hole in his box with a screw.] It’s coming through soon. It already did.Theo: Why did you make a hole like that?Leo: I have a hole too.Theo: I don’t. I left it at home.

The deep-rooted ideas of language arising in and taught and learnt solely in a human-to-human interaction become challenged if we think of Leo’s intra-action with the box, the

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crayons, the sandpaper and Jake and Theo. Language is not just social or merely inter-human, it is also material: motivated by and complexly related to all things material(Kress, 2003; Rowe, 2008). ‘Twirlcolour’ was produced in intra-action, used in a materialand social context and generated further, simultaneously material and social/discursiveopportunities for all involved:

Researcher: What has Leo … invented?Leo: I’ve invented a dustey. Why didn’t anyone else make a duster? Niko, will you

come and dust as well?Niko: Not just now. In a minute. If only I could [… trying to press a pin to his box lid]Leo: I CAN’T BELIEVE IT! I got white again. I put all of the dust in there.Niko: Alright. There it is!Leo: This would make a good action-play. To blow the dust off the lid and try to find

it all again. Pretty challenging.Leo: [To the researcher …] I wonder why nobody is coming to play with me over

there?Researcher: I can come. What do I need with me?Leo: Nothing. I just needed a friend.

The multilayered playing that was evident in the intra-action of Leo, Niko, Theo, all oftheir boxes and various other things can be read via various means to an end. Forinstance, the box can be made to appear as a vessel for Leo to gain social capital and tomake friends. The interaction between Leo, Theo, and Jake can be read as a gendereddiscourse of hegemonic masculinity, as a battle for status and hierarchies.5 To realise thatthe box was never merely a means to an end for Leo but both a means and an end,however, is to acknowledge that as the box became a ‘dustey’ it produced Leo as friend-seeking and the box as friend-attracting – and simultaneously Leo as a content participantin an engaging play.

The relevance for education that the discussion of this section highlights is that whenplaying is conceptualised as intra-active – as entangled, complex and deindividualised – ityields space for risk-free playing with words, producing contradictions and logicaldiscontinuity (Leo being simultaneously lonely/sad and engaged/happy) which in mostother educational spaces would in all likelihood be considered as unwanted. Playingcreates opportunities for addressing and experiencing our being human in incongruentand nonsensical ways, thus highlighting openings for improvisation, transformationand flexibility of our perceived ‘selves’ or subjectivities. In complexly relational playwe can both explore the kinds of subjectivities we take on (e.g. ‘friend’, ‘child’, ‘adult’,‘knower’) and to challenge them with the help of unplanned and unexpectedcontributions from other entities in play with us.

Conclusion

This paper sets out to suggest that the notions and practices of play can be re-entangledand complicated in two ways: the first, into being simultaneously means and ends(knowing and being), and second, into being complex entanglements of congregationalsociomaterial, rather than only individual and interactional (human to human) activity.The educational relevance of this is the realisation of playing as creating of spaces inwhich the social and material relationality of education can be experienced and addressed.The ways in which our knowing and being are both conditioned and cajoled into creativeimprovisations by not just ourselves, nor our human others but by a multitude of entitiesin relational intra-action – teachers, books, mothers, allowances, pets, winters, coughs and

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sneezing, darkness, affection – calls for strategic under designing (Fischer, 2011, p. 52)rather than rigorous defining and designing of play.

The pressures of accountability that many educational institutions now face globally aremanifest often in closed and controllable rather than open-ended pedagogical practicesand ways of conceptualising education, however (MacLure, 2006; see also Miller &Almon, 2009). A core objective of fusing the unhelpful binary of play as means or an endhas been to contribute to practices of education in which adult educators’ understandingof play matters to ways and degrees in which play is controlled or designed (McInneset al., 2011).

The kind of improvisation identified in this paper refers to creativity that relies onthe already existing, rather than – arguably unrealistically – presupposing entirely newknowledge or inventions (see also Sawyer, 1995). To improvise is thus to both get toknow, to acquire knowledge as already out there and to then challenge, take apart, fuse,blur and dismantle it – to improvise with deconstructed remains in order to producetransformation, new understandings and new possibilities.

A practical contribution of conceptualising play as comprising improvisation withlanguage and matter, can be the relocation of adults from either side of the conventionalbinary – hands-on controlling or hands-off enabling – into participants in the intra-activeimprovisation which requires fluctuating and dynamic rather than fixed and predeter-mined engagement from all involved.

AcknowledgementsThis work was supported by funding from the Academy of Finland (Grant number 255432).

Notes1. For the distinction between ‘interactive’ (i.e. two independent entities taking turns in affecting

each other) and ‘intra-active’ (i.e. two interdependent entities co-emerging through simultaneousactivity), see especially Karen Barad (2007).

2. Distinction between participant observation and observant participation needs to be accountedhere: in the former the researcher takes turns in engaged participating and distant observing,whereas in the latter, in the observation of participation, the focus is on the relations andinteractions of all of the people involved, researcher included and with his/her everyday socialand professional skills employed as an inseparable part of the research (e.g. Cottle, 1977;Tedlock, 1992).

3. These are taken from just a few lines of one poem ‘That nature is a Heraclitean fire and of thecomfort of the resurrection’. See Selected Poems of G.M. Hopkins, James Reeves (Ed.), 1967,London: Heinemann.

4. All names are pseudonyms.5. While all of the excerpts in this paper are of boys’ activities, and even typically so: identified as

acting upon material products to compete with other children (see Blaise, 2005), a gendereddiscussion remains outside of the scope of this paper at present.

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