Adventures requiring care and recklessness: a playful archive

This chapter offers a Playful Archive which t(h)reads a path through research undertaken in childhood studies over the author’s past decade, insisting that uncertainty, speculation, and curiosity displace conventions that rest upon a search for knowability, linearity, and solutions. The intention is for this Playful Archive to weave the promise of postfoundational inquiry through a series of provocations and propositions. The partial glimpses offered through images, poetry, and accounts of speculative research practices gesture towards the potential that doing research differently can make in pursuit of making a difference in the world – research is understood as affective, unruly, and ultimately activist in the difference it makes in how it comes about, in the act, and how it lingers and haunts long after. The chapter works with a range of feminist theories and philosophies but is most heavily indebted to Haraway and her invitations to seriousplay, go visiting, and engaging in practices of worlding as a means to reorient both thought and practice. The chapter seeks to address the reorienting questions: What gets overturned or displaced when engaging in postfoundational research? What are you making room for? The chapter contends that complexifying what research is, how it is done, and what it generates involves bringing matter, affect, philosophy, ethics, and theory together to push aside taken-for-granted practices and pursue research in an altogether different key.

This is an Accepted Manuscript of a book chapter published by Routledge in Postfoundational Approaches to Qualitative Inquiry on September 29, 2023, available online: http://www.routledge.com/9781032287911