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

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). [...]

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

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