Things worth knowing: Participatory research with children on media cultures and play

Professor John Potter explores how mixed research methods have contributed to understanding the detail of children’s lived experience through qualitative enquiry. He aims to uncover the ‘things worth knowing’ about the details of children’s lives, dispositions and ways of being in the world. Working within the paradigm of the new sociology of childhood, seeing children as being and not simply becoming, John discusses placing their experience at the heart of research and theory building. The projects outlined in the lecture take place in a ‘third space’, in which attempts are made to flatten traditional hierarchies and see children as co-producers of research about their lives. In the era of platformisation, AI, and datafication, John's research, which draws on multimodality, cultural studies and postdigital theory, contributes rich descriptions of children’s lives past, present, and emergent, which speak back to quantitative, reductive, and performative datasets.