‘She’s nice company and a good friend’: thinking with Haraway to reconceptualise children’s playful interactions with Alexa in the family home

Book chapter


Sakr, M. 2021. ‘She’s nice company and a good friend’: thinking with Haraway to reconceptualise children’s playful interactions with Alexa in the family home. in: Mikats, J., Kink-Hampersberger, S. and Oates-Indruchová, L. (ed.) Creative families: Gender and technologies of everyday life Cham, Switzerland Palgrave Macmillan. pp. 167-188
Chapter title‘She’s nice company and a good friend’: thinking with Haraway to reconceptualise children’s playful interactions with Alexa in the family home
AuthorsSakr, M.
Abstract

The aims of this chapter are to explore the ways in which children think about Alexa – the conversational agent that inhabits Amazon’s The Echo device – and what happens when they playfully engage with it/her in a family context. In particular, the chapter seeks to examine the potentials of children’s play and playfulness with Alexa through Donna Haraway’s concepts of ‘the cyborg’ and ‘making kin’. In Haraway’s post-human philosophy, the cyborg as an entity generates possibilities for troubling a number of divides that we live by (human/non-human; male/female; mind/body). [...]

Research GroupCentre for Education Research and Scholarship (CERS)
Page range167-188
Book titleCreative families: Gender and technologies of everyday life
EditorsMikats, J., Kink-Hampersberger, S. and Oates-Indruchová, L.
PublisherPalgrave Macmillan
Place of publicationCham, Switzerland
SeriesPalgrave Studies in Mediating Kinship, Representation, and Difference
ISBN
Hardcover9783030708023
Electronic9783030708030
Publication dates
Online02 Jun 2021
Print06 Jun 2021
Publication process dates
Deposited26 Jul 2021
Output statusPublished
Accepted author manuscript
Copyright Statement

This is a post-peer-review, pre-copyedit version of a chapter published in Creative families - Gender and technologies of everyday life. The definitive publisher-authenticated version Sakr, Mona (2021) ‘She’s nice company and a good friend’: thinking with Haraway to reconceptualise children’s playful interactions with Alexa in the family home. In: Mikats, Jana, Kink-Hampersberger, Susanne and Oates-Indruchová, Libora, (eds) Creative families - Gender and technologies of everyday life, Palgrave Studies in Mediating Kinship, Representation, and Difference . Palgrave Macmillan, Cham, Switzerland, pp. 167-188. https://doi.org/doi:10.1007/978-3-030-70803-0_8 is available online at: https://www.palgrave.com/gb/book/9783030708023

Additional information

Part of the Palgrave Studies in Mediating Kinship, Representation, and Difference book series (PSMKRD).
Series ISSN: 2752-7352

Digital Object Identifier (DOI)https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-70803-0_8
LanguageEnglish
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