Diffractive Readings of Data from Observation of Young Children’s Play Through Philosophical Theories: Encounters with a Scarf

This paper is about two researchers’ journey of enlivening the vitality of data from observation of young children’s play with scarves in a mixed-age classroom of 3- and 4-year-olds, by diffractively analyzing data with/through philosophical theories. Researchers endeavored to understand how the encounter with the observer, material agency of a scarf, memories and desires of young children, and discovered that socioculturally constructed meanings were all entangled to generate, disperse, connect, disconnect, and enfold heterogeneous spacetimes and material-discursive plays. Diffractive methodology was adopted to reassemble data while diffracting and intra-acting with theories of Foucault, Deleuze, and Barad. The vitality of play observation data was also entangled with the researchers toward spacetimemattering of data diffracted in-between multiple theories and practices, researchers’ past-present-future, an early childhood classroom and a graduate school classroom, human and non-human, along with our iteratively drawing/blurring their boundaries, and making new connections. We suggest the thinking-with-theory-data would open doors to illuminating the entanglements of space, time, materials, and meanings embedded in the play observation data.