Written by: Diane R. Collier - Brock University, St. Catharine’s, Canada
Abstract: Researching online is often assumed to be difficult, distant, and flattened. Building relationships with young children is often said to be best done in person. This paper traces relations and events between a researcher working remotely from home with young children and their teacher working on photographic literacies in their classroom. The ways in which relationships emerged and were enacted are discussed. Thinking beyond narrow definitions of literacy to literacies, the analysis builds on Latour’s network of relations as used in Brandt and Clinton’s literacy-as-action to think about how literacies travel and engage with human and nonhuman actors. Framing literacy-as-event as proposed by Burnett and Merchant emphases how literacies can be playful, unpredictable, and emergent. While ‘following the iPad-baby-Diane,’ this paper shows how children improvised and played with metaphors and the researcher and built care and connection while performing literacies in online digital spaces. Relational online research was enacted as children were imitating and ‘becoming-with’ a distant researcher. Considering tools and innovative digital literacies practices as embedded in assemblages, it is possible to see intimacies and imagine literacies-as-relations across material and digitised spaces.
Keywords: relational research, assemblage, literacies, becoming, intimacy, iPads, online research, digital literacy