Pauliina Rautio

Children who carry stones in their pockets: on autotelic material practices in everyday life

This paper is based on an ongoing empirical journey into the materiality of childrens everyday life environments. The theoretical framework relies on post-humanism relational/new materialism as influenced by Deleuze and Guattari. An inherently rewarding practice, often undertaken by children as if by default – the carrying of stones – is discussed as blurring the unfortunate and artificially produced nature-culture divide.

Mingling and imitating in producing spaces for knowing and being: Insights from a Finnish study of child–matter intra-action

Child–matter relations are often approached teleologically: as serving a distinct purpose often related to socialization and/or development as maturation. Unless these approaches are diversified, children’s relations to their material surroundings are reduced to instrumental activity the significance of which is predetermined and known by adults. This article is based on a study with 12 Finnish children of ages four to seven, exemplifying a new materialist and post-humanist approach to child–matter relations as intra-active. Children’s engagement with ‘things’ is considered intrinsically relevant: as an end in itself. The questions asked are: How do children and their material surroundings intra-act? What is produced in this intra-action? Two characteristics of child–matter intra-action are identified as mingling and imitating. What the intra-action is seen to produce are spaces of open-ended and de-individualized knowing and being.

Finding the Place of Everyday Beauty: Correspondence as a Method of Data Collection

Researching aesthetic engaging with ones surroundings in everyday life led the author to use correspondence as a method of data collection. In this paper she presents her research design and discusses correspondence as an underused method. She introduces the concepts of invisibility, time, and tangibility in defining correspondence as a method. The topic of the correspondence in her research was beauty. In common use beautiful signals that which is desirable. As an evaluative and a future-oriented statement everyday beauty seems to have a place in steering our lives. The participants accounted as beautiful the different meaningful relations they had formed over time to their surroundings. These relations were in constant change as the participants themselves changed over time. The author argues that correspondence is a method that works well in cumulating data for research. It has also proven to be a rewarding method for the participants.

Beauty in the Context of Particular Lives

There is a village in the north of Finland with some thirty inhabitants. While the villagers do not lead the idyllic lives that are sold as images to tourists, they also do not lead lives of depression, alcoholism, poverty, and seclusion—an image generated by research results from the likes of National Research and Development Centre for Welfare and Health. The ill-being of rural northern villages is well documented in large-scale quantitative research,1 but qualitative research on the actual well-being, of what is already good and fulfilling, is scarce. In this paper I present a research project in education in which I have collected the data through a year-long correspondence with four participants from a small village. Letters in this correspondence were exchanged once a month in a way that everyone read everyone’s letters. I asked the participants to write about beauty. The aim of this research has been to find out what kind of place beauty, as defined by the participants themselves, holds in the their everyday lives. In this paper I will discuss some challenges of researching everyday beauty empirically. I will also concentrate on selected findings that highlight the importance of context in discussing experiences and use of beauty. Everyday life2 has been characterized in research by concepts such as “time,” “space,” “rhythm,” and “bodily movement.”3 These concepts embrace an idea of a continuum and refer to everyday life as subjectively experienced and actively engaged in. Everyday life is a contextual process but one that nevertheless defies definitions bound in time and space. This is because as subjectively experienced, it entails simultaneously the past, the present, and the future as necessary for the managing of it. By managing of everyday life I mean a practice that consists of constant reflection, evaluation, and steering, but one that we are mostly unaware of engaging

Engaging with theoretical diffraction in teacher education

ABSTRACT This article presents a study in which we began with a question ‘how to teach theoretical reflectivity in teacher education’, and ended with a sentence ‘there is theoretical diffraction in teacher education’. The research presented in this paper took place in the context of a university course in which we have been involved for the past two years. During the course we simultaneously aimed to teach theoretical reflection and to analyse what was happening as we taught theoretical reflection. For two years we asked: What are students doing while we are trying to engage them in theoretical reflection? We noted that students are engaged in theory, but not in ways easily readable to the educators, and that the process could be called theoretical diffraction rather than reflection. Theoretical diffraction during the course was patterned by existing discursive practices: (1) disciplining emotions and focusing on control and answers; (2) personalising school as the teacher, and personally defending it; and (3) prioritising practice over theory and seeing both as dogma.

‘Overspills’ of research with children: an argument for slow research

ABSTRACT We take on the challenge posed by Horton and Kraftl [2006. “What Else? Some More Ways of Thinking and Doing ‘Children’s Geographies’.” Children’s Geographies 4 (1): 69–95, 71.] that research be ‘slowed down’ through methodological and theoretical routes to acknowledge seemingly trivial details in children’s lives. Based on an ethnographic study in an Australian preschool focusing on children’s place-making in a globalizing world, this paper discusses one event in the home corner to exemplify what we understand as and how we enact methodological slowness. The event is revisited by recognizing the role of the unexpected, the troubling and paying attention to data that overspills the research engagement in conducting ‘ideally preset qualitative research’. Research engagements not only reflect but also produce children’s lives. Researching ‘the global’ is ‘doing the global’ as the frames, practices and traditions of research itself are part and parcel of the so-called answers we produce. As result, a more nuanced and complex understanding of how ‘the global’ is made and circulated by children surfaces.

“A Super Wild Story”: Shared Human–Pigeon Lives and the Questions They Beg

The three coincidentally shared human–pigeon lives discussed in this article challenge the established conceptualization that when species meet habituation occurs, a smoothing over of differences over time because it does not account for the dynamic, affectionate, and productive nature of shared human–pigeon lives. The concept refrain works better. Concepts like habituation and refrain can be thought of as answers to questions posed by the world. Concepts are answers insomuch as they are certain ways of thinking about and acting within the world—always excluding other ways. In living and working with answers, as we do, it is easy to forget the original questions: What did the world ask of us again, and could there be other possible answers? In this article, the kind of answer that refrain is is mapped through three cases of human–pigeon lives. Rather than mechanistic and anthropocentric, refrain is an answer that directs our attention to what is dynamic, unpredictable, productive, and nonanthropocentric. It also offers possibilities to pose new questions.

Work/Think/Play/Birth/Death/Terror/Qualitative/Research

Inspired by work/think/play in qualitative research, we centered the idea of “play” in a qualitative research project to explore what proceeding from the idea of work/think/play might look like and accomplish. We pursued play in an experimental qualitative inquiry over dinner one night at the 2016 Annual Meeting of the American Educational Research Association. Our article centers on one work/think/play inquiry three of us conducted. Through a playful account of how play unfolded in our work/think/play inquiry that evening, we explore research play as generative, deadly, and censored in the context of neoliberalism and other terrors. We reflect on what (good) play does in qualitative research, what our work/think/play/birth/death/terror/qualitative/research accomplished, if anything. Maybe research play is vital, what keeps us fit to do critical qualitative research. Yet research play moves (well) beyond normative rules of much qualitative research. Is it worth the risk? Can we know? Even after?

The Making of “Good-Enough” Everyday Lives: Literacy Lessons from the Rural North of Finland

Successful lives tend to be led and defined through vocabularies of material possessions, economic growth, social connections, and increasing mobility. This approach emphasizes standards of living, the level of which is commonly measured in terms of gross domestic product. As a result, the everyday lives of people in rural areas (by definition faraway and scarcely populated, and typically less economically vibrant than their urban counterparts) are often considered unsuccessful and unproductive by the standards of the wider society.