Hi, Trude Skogsberg, PhD Student at Østfold University College (HIØ), Halden, Norway and welcome to the Department of Thematic Studies (TEMA) and our research group The Posthumanities Hub at Gender Studies (TEMA G). – We are so pleased to have you here with us on location for this term!
What is your research about?
“I am working on an article-based PhD thesis within the program Digitalisation and Society at Østfold University College. My project investigates how digital meaning-making in a toddler group (0–3 years) emerges in everyday kindergarten practices, as part of a relational and processual field in which humans, green screen technology, materialities and space are entangled through embodied and situated interactions.
A central concern of the project is to explore how humans and more-than-humans co-create digital practices as they emerge in everyday early childhood settings. At the same time, I examine how research with the youngest children comes into being within these practices, as a grounded, co-creative and ethically situated research practice in which methodology and empirical material develop in movement.”
What do you find most exciting or innovative in your research field right now?
“What I currently find most exciting and innovative in the field is the development of theoretical and methodological approaches that make it possible to engage with everyday practices in early childhood education in new ways.
Posthumanist and new materialist research opens possibilities for working with digital meaning-making as something that emerges through intra-active processes between humans, technologies, spaces and materials, thereby challenging approaches that primarily focus on screen-based or individualised digital activities.
Particularly compelling is how concepts such as sympoiesis, intra-action and response-ability provide a language for engaging with both children’s participation and the researcher’s responsibility as something that takes shape in and through the situation.”
Why did you choose to come to the Department of Thematic Studies at Linköping University?
“I chose the Department of Thematic Studies at Linköping University because it hosts a strong and internationally recognised research environment in posthumanist, new materialist and post-qualitative scholarship. This environment offers particularly fruitful conditions for further developing my project, which engages with entanglements of bodies, technologies, materialities and knowledge production.”
What do you hope to achieve during your stay?
“The research stay provides an opportunity to develop my work in dialogue with scholars who engage with related questions of situated knowledge, ethics and methodology. I also hope that my research can contribute concepts, methodological sensibilities and empirical approaches that may be of relevance to others working with children, technology and everyday practices.”
What are you looking forward to during your stay?
“To be a part of a research environment where thinking, methodological experimentation and critical conversations are valued. I welcome discussions that challenge established notions of method, empirical material and theory, and that create space for thinking of research as something that comes into being relationally. I also look forward to allowing my own work to be moved and further developed through encounters with other research practices.”