‘What action did you see me do?’: proposing a methodology of choreographed visual montage when re-turning to interview research data

European Early Childhood Education Research Journal ISSN: 1350-293X (Print) 1752-1807 (Online) Journal homepage: www.tandfonline.com/journals/recr20 ‘What action did you see me do?’: proposing a methodology of choreographed visual montage when re-turning to interview research data Soern Finn Menning, Giovanna Caetano-Silva & Karin Murris To cite this article: Soern Finn Menning, Giovanna Caetano-Silva & Karin Murris (18 May 2025): ‘What action did you see me do?’: proposing a methodology of choreographed visual montage when re-turning to interview research data, European Early Childhood Education Research Journal, DOI: 10.1080/1350293X.2025.2502821 To link to this article: https://doi.org/10.1080/1350293X.2025.2502821 © 2025 The Author(s). Published by Informa UK Limited, trading as Taylor & Francis Group Published online: 18 May 2025. Submit your article to this journal Article views: 45 View related articles View Crossmark data Full Terms & Conditions of access and use can be found at https://www.tandfonline.com/action/journalInformation?journalCode=recr20 ‘What action did you see me do?’: proposing a methodology of choreographed visual montage when re-turning to interview research data Soern Finn Menning a , Giovanna Caetano-Silva b and Karin Murris c,d a Department of Education, University of Agder, Kristiansand, Norway; b Department of Language and Literature Teaching, University of Seville, Seville, Spain; c Faculty of Psychology and Education, University of Oulu, Oulu, Finnland; d School of Education, University of Cape Town, Cape Town, South Africa ABSTRACT This paper offers a creative methodology for co-creating and analysing data when conducting research with children, families and practitioners in the early years. Instead of relying heavily on either adult observation or language when, for example, interviewing children, we propose the method of choreographed visual montage. We show the novelty and practical applicability of our posthumanist experimentation with visual and digital research methods through an example from an international research project on digital play and well-being in South Africa. In much detail, we explore the response of “seven-year-old” Dan to our question about how he feels when playing digital games. He answers ‘What action did you see me do?’ and enacts how he "looks" when playing. Affected by this performance and inspired by Erin Manning’s notion of the minor gesture and Karin Barad’s agential realism.], we describe how our creative methodology works and why it matters while staying closely with this example. Listening care-fully to his words, but also going beyond words, the method does justice to the complexity of reality and the relational encounters in-between family members, researchers and the morethan-human – an entanglement that is not only discursive (as in multimodal analysis), but, according to Barad, material and discursive. KEYWORDS Research methodology; nonrepresentational; postqualitative; performativity Choreographed visual montage – a transformative and creative methodology This article responds to the Special Issue’s request for transformative and creative methodologies in early years research. We propose the method of choreographed visual montage as a creative posthumanist methodology for co-creating and analysing data when conducting research with children, families and practitioners in the early years. Much of our work with children is full of moments that go beyond words. We show the novelty and practical applicability of our experimentation with visual and digital research methods through an example from an international research project on © 2025 The Author(s). Published by Informa UK Limited, trading as Taylor & Francis Group This is an Open Access article distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivatives License (http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc-nd/4.0/), which permits non-commercial re-use, distribution, and reproduction in any medium, provided the original work is properly cited, and is not altered, transformed, or built upon in any way. The terms on which this article has been published allow the posting of the Accepted Manuscript in a repository by the author(s) or with their consent. CONTACT Soern Finn Menning [email protected] EUROPEAN EARLY CHILDHOOD EDUCATION RESEARCH JOURNAL https://doi.org/10.1080/1350293X.2025.2502821 digital play and well-being in South Africa. To do justice to events that escape language and pre-designed research questions we propose a creative methodology to analyse – in this case – interview data. In fact, it is the data that provokes this paradigm shift, which we argue for through an example as a means to show how our methodology works. We tell the story of how we asked ‘seven-year-old’ Dan how he feels when playing digital games. It is one of the questions that was suggested for use in the research design (see below) and was used in many, but not all cases, across the four countries. He "answers" not directly but says, ‘What action did you see me do?’ and enacts how he "looks" when playing. Rather than relying heavily on language as a reliable means to represent children’s own experiences, we then turned to the posthumanist literature, to rethink agency with Erin Manning and her notion of the minor gesture. Inspired primarily by the philosophy of Gilles Deleuze and Félix Guattari, the notion of the ‘minor’ disrupts the ‘major’. Existing side-by-side, the major is what is fixed by norms and standards (e.g. neurotypicality) and the minor refers to the struggle with the major (e.g. neurodiversity). In fact, she makes ‘a political case for the necessity of creating techniques and minor gestures that open existence to its perceptual more-than’ (Manning 2016, 14). We were struck by Dan’s words ‘What action did you see me do?’, and especially his bodily movements and his resistance to answer the question as we expected. We then started to experiment with the technology available to us, also drawing on and building on our previous research (Menning and Murris 2024). Our focus was to attune to human and more-than-human relationalities not-yet-given, but still present – the ‘absentpresent’ in fact (Barad 2007, 2014). Listening carefully to Dan in this way matters ethically and politically. We carefully build our argument in five "steps" that, as further explained in the text, do not represent a linear process. In the first section, we re-visit our data about the interview situation in the family’s home. We also reread what we wrote in the research report about this focus child (Scott et al. 2024), but this time while thinking with posthumanist ideas. The second section presents a snapshot of the interview data from our first visit. We emphasise how Dan’s resistance to respond to the interview’s words invited us to view this data differently and to seek research into paths beyond representational, language-based methods. Our non-representational analysis goes beyond multimodal discourse analysis; embracing Dan’s invitation to look at actions rather than words, we also decenter the human when interpreting ‘his’ actions. In the third section, we argue visually that relying only on the words used during an oral interview as a methodology would fail to do justice to the complexity of the relational encounters in-between family members, researchers and the more-than-human – an entanglement that is not only discursive (as in multimodal analysis), but material and discursive. We situate our arguments in the digital play literature and explore how focusing solely on language – typical of most representational research in the social sciences and humanities – leads to injustices by creating binaries that exclude. In the fourth section, we propose a creative and non-representational methodology by reading the interview ‘data’ (Koro-Ljungberg, MacLure, and Ulmer 2018) through a playful choreography of ‘minor gestures’ (Manning 2016) and acknowledge how our creative research draws on an intra-active relational ontology (Barad 2007). In the fifth and last section, we situate our creative methodology and comment on how it makes us respond to data beyond the assumed power-producing dichotomies (adult/child, reality/ fantasy, inside/outside, culture/nature, language/matter, etc.) and argue why this is more inclusive and transformative. 2 S. F. MENNING ET AL. Re-turning to the interview event Our example re-turns to data from a large-scale international research RITEC (Responsible Innovation in Technology and Ethics for Children) (UNICEF 2024) project all three of us were involved with. In partnership with the University of Sheffield, the RITEC project was designed to provide new understandings about the impact of digital play experiences (DPEs) on children’s subjective well-being. Our role was to research the relationship between young children’s digital play and their well-being in the Western Cape, South Africa. With children from no-income or low-income households having limited or no access to computer games, we were curious about the suggested research questions and what they might yield in the South African context. Following on from our previous research with the same collaborator (Murris et al. 2023), we speculated that the very different geopolitical context would again provide an under-researched perspective (Murris et al. 2023). Central in the RITEC project is researching ten children in their home and community contexts. This article focuses on one of four visits to Dan’s (all names used, except researcher’s, are pseudonyms chosen by the participants) home. Ethical issues were addressed in line with the British Educational Research Association Ethical Guidelines for Educational Research (see https://www.bera.ac.uk/publication/ ethical-guidelines-for-educational-research-2018) and the research ethics regulations of all universities involved. Moreover, ongoing assent to participate in the research activities was judged by paying attention to bodily and other expressions. In line with the EECERA Ethical code (Bertram et al. 2024), our processes of asking (oral) consent from children, expresses democratic values and an ethic of respect by ensuring that our methodology regards children as active subjects with rights, especially by our creative use of technology to amplify their diverse voice(s) by focusing on what their bodies can tell researchers. The Ethical Code explicitly encourages respect for the plurality of paradigms at our disposal in the early years that helps to illuminate the complexity of human beings, thus contributing equitably to the research process and to social justice and equity within communities and societies (Bertram et al. 2024, 6). All of the participants in the study were invited to assign pseudonyms for the research writing. Later in this article we explain why showing Dan’s face in the still and moving images is an ethical endeavour. At the time of writing, it has been almost a year since our first visit to Dan, a 7-yearold(the child’s age has been struck through as a material-discursive gesture to trouble the way in which we routinely add age to young bodies), and his family. Their home is in Thornton, a newish middle-class suburb in the Western Cape, inhabited by mainly black and coloured people - since apartheid South Africans self-identify race or reject racial categorisation altogether. We re-turn to ‘the data’, re-membering events are never closed, in the sense that ‘the past is never left behind, never finished once and for all’ (Barad 2007, 181). The past (e)merges iteratively with a future in the present, always mattering differently in worldly becoming. Each time we ‘go back’ or re-turn to the four home visits, they resonate differently, amplifying and condensing scenes, smells, sights and sounds. For posthumanist Karen Barad (2014), re-turning is not a reflection of a past experience, but a diffractive attunement to new relations; it is about reading ‘traces of what might (yet) have happen(ed)’ (p. 168). Each time we meet in short writing retreats online, the family is still becoming with us as we thinkwith the data. Our writing now re-turns to some of the shared moments with this EUROPEAN EARLY CHILDHOOD EDUCATION RESEARCH JOURNAL 3 family - a "family" not only composed of humans (Murris, Reynolds, and Peers 2018), while allowing the data to become something else. Welcome to Dan’s home – unimportant details? Arriving early, we (Soern, Karin, Giovanna and Carol, a co-researcher) park near the house and discuss our plan for the visit. We go through the interview guide from the university whose research design was used for the fieldwork across the four countries. There are few people and no children playing on the street or the grass around it. The roads seem dedicated to the few parked cars and the dead leaves and sticks blown by the fierce summer wind (see the video in Figure 6). The cawing of curious crows is threaded through our audio recordings. Dan’s parents are very interested in the project and are hospitable. Each time we visit, we are greeted not only by the humans, but also by more-than-human beings (Figure 1), such as bottles of cold water, power cuts, FIFA, solar panels being installed, family tales about cooking together and Dan’s movements around the house. Matter is an integral part of the family’s stories. Accommodating in-between bodies We enter through a short hallway to a living room with an L-shaped sofa. Re-turning to the data, we notice a cushion with (human) family photographs printed on the fabric (on Figure 1. Welcome to the family. 4 S. F. MENNING ET AL. the sofa, left in Figure 2). Carol tells Dan and his dad that she would like to ask some questions about Dan’s digital gaming practices. Dan is sitting on the couch, nodding his head and smiling. He ‘fidgets’ with the sofa and the pillow. It is difficult to resist interpreting his bodily movements negatively (see, e.g. Murris and Babamia 2018). His legs and feet move non-stop: toes touch toes, toes touch ankles, toes touch table, toes touch carpet … (see Figure 2). The limits of representational methodologies Holding a sheet of paper with semi-structured questions suggested for use by researchers in each of the four participating countries, Carol continues to ask questions. Although obviously bored with the whole exercise (Figure 2), Dan generously accommodates us at first with short replies to some questions while nodding to others. Sometimes, he just smiles, his eyes moving inquisitively from Carol to his dad, and he uses the pillow to hide his body. At some point, Carol asks him to tell us about his family. He looks at his dad, who encourages him to reply, and shouts ‘You!’ urging his father to reply to the next question instead. It is in this orchestra of questionnaires, stretching legs, dribbling feet, short answers or none at all, pillows with and without human faces, awkward silences, iPhones, a professional camera, cheeky smiles, a candle as a tribute to Dan’s aunt who like his grandmother also died of COVID, that the following exchange takes place: 00:31 Carol: It’s hard when there’s lots of people all looking at you, hey Dan? All the attention on you. 00:40 Father: What is one thing, one thing you like to do? 00:46 Carol: Do you want your dad to answer for you? Do you know what he likes to do, Dad? 00:51 Father: Oh yes. He loves playing video games and he loves, he’s quite in on the marine life. But it’s more of the, some are fictitious creatures. But he knows all these facts, so he always tells me every day about these prehistoric sharks. And he loves playing, he loves playing outside as well. He likes playing soccer, and whatever games. Physical games. He likes watching his YouTube videos. 01: 28 Carol: So, you have quite a lot … some favourite video games. What’s your favourite video game that you play? I’m sure that you can tell me. Do you have a favourite one? Or do you have a few? (…) 01:57 Dan: I don’t know. (…) 02:27 Father: Just mention one game that you like. 02:34 Dan: I can’t. (…) 00:01 Father: What was the games you were playing by Shaun. The interactive ones on the Wii? What was that that you were playing? I don’t know what it was, I couldn’t see what you were playing. I just saw you were moving around with the controllers. What was that that you were playing? Figure 2. Bored toes and fingers all over and under … . EUROPEAN EARLY CHILDHOOD EDUCATION RESEARCH JOURNAL 5 (…) 00:43 Dan: What action did you see me do? The box above is formatted with lines around it to articulate the rigidity, linearity and boundedness of this research method. The transcript reflects the adults’ dominance in getting Dan to answer their questions. The adults keep asking and repeating similar questions in order to verbally extract answers to their preset questions, without taking into account what Dan’s body was telling them. Transcripts tend to start living an independent life as data, that is, decontextualised from the more-than-human relations they are part of, including the technology (see Dixon et al. 2024). Often used for analysis without access to video or other visual data (for reasons of research ethics), what bodily moments ‘tell’ as an intricate part of the data is often not taken into account. The box’s formatting ‘silences’ certain material and more-than-human elements of the interview:the movements of Dan’s legs, the way the pillow would choreograph with him lying on the couch, his subtle resistance to the interview, etc. In this way, we demonstrate materially a transcript’s limits as a representation of what is happening in the living room. The photo/video technology also enables us researchers to re-turn to the visual data and describe his resistance. Despite all this pressure on Dan to comply with the adults’ demands to answer their questions about his favourite game and how it made him feel, he tells us that the answers can be found in his gestures, which the technology allows us to think – with (Haraway 2016). When asking, ‘What actions did you see me do?’, he basically answers his dad’s question about what he was playing at his uncle’s: ‘Don’t come at me with words – just look at my actions’. It was the encounter with Dan’s gestures that inspired us, researchers, to be more playful in our research methodology. As we will see below, by tracing Dan’s engagement with video games, particularly the football game FIFA, our interview questions are responded to differently. His imaginative play later during the same visit is threaded through the ‘now’ of his response. Before discussing this further, we turn to the literature focusing on the limitations of working only with language-based and representational methods. Why are representational and interpretational methodologies sedimenting the major? The example of a semi-structured interview in the box above is one of many in which research on children’s play is approached through the logic of representation in which language is at the centre of what matters (see, e.g. MacLure 2013). The prevalence of language-based tools to categorise and interpret the world can even be evidenced when research is focused on digital play (see Loudoun, Boyle, and Larsson-Lund 2022). Interestingly, it seems as if the virtual nature of digital play might generate even more reliance on language. This might be because of the difficulty of observing what is ‘really going on’ in a play situation and how to measure or find evidence, for example, about children’s well-being, which is the focus here. Accordingly, the literature highlights the use of specific tools or even their design (Disney and Geng 2021; Edwards and Bird 2017; Murris et al. 2023), while interview-based methods and other forms of data collection (videos, pictures, etc.) are also mentioned (LEGO Foundation 2020; Loudoun, Boyle, and Larsson-Lund 2022; Murris et al. 2023). 6 S. F. MENNING ET AL. Data is not "passive", "raw" and "inert" waiting to be "collected", "extracted" and "coded" – simply ready for our decisions on how best to report on them (Koro-Ljungberg, MacLure, and Ulmer 2018). To render them ‘fit for human consumption’, ‘something must always be done to them’, and they are ‘implicated in deep questions’ about boundary-making practices and what is included and excluded (Koro-Ljungberg, MacLure, and Ulmer 2018, 806–807). A representational-led perspective would assume researchers can retrieve information that re-presents Dan’s postdigital play (Dixon et al. 2024). In this research paradigm, the researcher is distanced from the world she represents through words (Barad 2003). As Erin Manning (2016, 1) puts it, we can say this type of research ‘organizes itself according to predetermined definitions of value’ (Manning 2016, 1; our emphasis). This framing in advance (even if temporarily), epistemologically and ontologically, is aligned with what Mazzei (2017), drawing on Gilles Deleuze, refers to as the ‘major language’ of research. Moreover, this is from an ‘outside other’ perspective ontologically. A good example of this is the Learning through Play Experience Tool (LEGO Foundation 2020), which uses language-based predetermined categories ranging from ‘I am doing this because I have to’ to ‘I am enthusiastic about trying this again’, or from ‘I don’t understand the purpose of the experience’ to ‘I recall the experience and use it to understand other things’. These statements are applied by adults to evaluate children’s agency in (digital) play (For a posthumanist critique of this tool, see: Murris 2022b; Murris et al. 2022a). Other research also builds on pre-established criteria (by adults when researching children’s experiences). For instance, Disney and Geng’s (2021) emphasise only the social aspect of learning when children play with digital devices. In the same vein, the tool developed by Veresov and Veraksa (2022) aims to provide evidence of children’s development by researching the value of digital games. These measuring apparatuses (Barad 2007) are representational and co-create realities in play research. Interpreting Dan’s interview data representationally would position us as ‘outside’ interpreters (Murris et al. 2023). Working with the inside/outside binary as representational research does, we could, for example, speculate that Dan is too shy to reply, but this would mean an erasure of the way children often make meaning and communicate playfully by moving their ‘bodymind’ (Murris 2016) (as we will discuss later on). What we might regard as an insufficient response from Dan could lead us to conclude that the questions themselves are somehow inadequate or that our language is too difficult, in other words, that the tool might need adjustment (see Morse 2018). However, the methodology itself is not under the spotlight; it is how we interpret the data. This is critical because there are moments when explanations defy language, and Figure 3. Beyond the transcript. EUROPEAN EARLY CHILDHOOD EDUCATION RESEARCH JOURNAL 7 digital play becomes more about how bodies affectively come to matter together (Hollett and Ehret 2014). As MacLure (2013, 664) puts it, ‘what appears to be troublesome for qualitative methods is the manifestation of the body in the cerebral work of research’ – for example, when Dan insists ‘You!’, or when his feet speak louder than his voice (see Figure 3). The work with children is full of those moments that go beyond words (e.g., Hackett 2022; Thiel 2020). To be clear, what is not at stake is that we are looking for different ways of representing bodily modes of communication that go ‘beyond words’ (e.g. the attention paid to gestures in multimodal discourse analysis). The focus is not on the child doing and finding out about his intentions and reasons for doing something, but on the child becoming-with and as part of the material world. This shift is about attuning to relationalities not yet given. We resist interpreting bodily movements on the ‘outside’ of Dan’s body, which supposedly signify how Dan feels on the ‘inside’. Instead, we foreground how human and more-than-human bodies connect in unexpected ways and what this makes possible. So, we speculate and wonder: What happens when human and more-than-human bodies of the living room respond in-the-moment and resist the words in transcripts and the predetermined taken-for-granted criteria for how to conduct play research (see Figure 3)? How can we do justice to all these moments that escape our pre-designed questions and erase child through data ‘drained of affect’ (MacLure et al. 2010, 545). How can researchers respond to data differently, and why does it matter and for whom and for what? Representational analyses that rely on objectifying language can be "violent" and lock humans, especially children, out of particular racialised and ethnic contexts – like Dan and his family – in boxes that claim to tell the truth about who/what they ‘are’ (Thiel and Dernikos 2020), or where they should be in terms of development (Lenz Taguchi 2010). It is necessary, therefore, to reconsider the truths we hold on to when researching (post)digital play (Murris et al. 2023) for other accounts to become possible – those that are less adult-centric, or that rely heavily on language. We are building on the writings of other posthumanist researchers (e.g. Linnea Bodén, Hillevi Lenz Taguchi, Lisa Mazzei) and especially Erin Manning who all have argued for more performative and non-representational research methods. Our research is distinctive in how visuals contribute to a creative choreographic data analysis. It aims to explore how to attune to minor gestures with the relational invitation to be ‘asking at every juncture what else life could be’ (Manning 2016, 8). We explore this further below by first addressing the role of minor gestures in this research and then dedicating a section to our methodological propositions. Why not (only) the interview and the transcript: inventing methodologies to highlight minor gestures Maggie MacLure (2016, 6) argues that ’[r]epresentation bifurcates the world into signifiers and signifieds, subjects and predicates, discourse and materiality, nature and culture, words and worlds, essences and appearances, government and people, genus and species’. What is in-between these categories, in-between responding and not responding to our questions, playing or not playing – what Manning (2016) calls the ‘minor gestures’ – remains invisible in representational research. Representationalism divides and pins down the world through language and its territorialising categorisations 8 S. F. MENNING ET AL. of self, others, places, and times – narratives that are fluid, unpredictable and lack boundaries, clear beginnings or endings. The montage of shots in the last video (Figure 6) moves fluidly, creating new connections and disrupting the binaries between inside/outside, digital/physical, body/mind, conscious/unconscious, as well as play, non-play and pretend play. The film exemplifies mobility as we move across the different spaces and places, from the car to the living room, to the back garden to interview inside and outside. Movement and mobility are part of Dan’s approach to digital play as he fluidly moves between digital play, pretend digital play and playing real football in the yard. Methodologically, the three visual techniques enacted in this article can be used separately, in any order or on their own. They are not prescriptive guidelines to be followed but help ‘lay out a plane for new inquiry that is different every time’ (St. Pierre 2019, 12). Our playful choreographies are (new) experimental ways of straying from transcripts and field notes. They make it possible to focus on data that ‘did not work’ but that is also productive (Banerjee and Blaise 2017). How does this methodology de(con)structs child-centrism and languagebased interviews in postdigital play? It is by experimenting with the possibilities of video/image, as Giorza (2019) and others have done that we can construct new understandings of researching with children instead of perpetuating what MacLure et al. (2010, 544) call the ‘everyday banality of the normal child’. We sympathise with their plea that ‘new thought seems especially urgent in research concerning young children, buried as they are under the weight of psychological and educational narratives that frame them into generality and string them out along the predictable plot of "normal" development’ (MacLure et al. 2010, 544). They argue that ‘[c]hildren who offer resistance, whether intentionally or not, to the disciplinary embrace of this emplotment risk becoming invisible or deviant’ (MacLure et al. 2010, 544). This resonates with our non-representational postqualitative analysis of Dan. Whether conscious or not, his facial expressions, bodily movements and language (e.g. ‘WHYYY?’, ‘YOU!’) make us not only smile but, at the same time, interrogate the usual subject positions adults create for children. Moving away from the major gesture of the spoken word to the minor gesture of corporal expression, we think-with (Haraway 2016) the work of Manning (2016) on the minor gesture. We wonder what other ways of be(com)ing child and doing postdigital play emerge when research methodology is non-representational. The visual techniques make us painfully aware of our positioning as adults and how the overly language-based research design committed us to ‘the view from above’ of the outsider researcher (Haraway 1988, 590). Conforming to the major instead of the minor would be akin to conforming to the transcripts and field notes as revealing the ‘truth’ about Dan’s life, his postdigital play practices and his well-being. However, when we choreograph what he is "doing", which exceeds the words used to represent his actions, we sense the potential of the minor gestures as that which produces these ‘affirmative differences’ (Manning 2016, 222). It is "there", "present" in our data echoing through, for instance, Dan’s questioning ‘WHYYY?’. This goes beyond the usual major ways of doing research. Choreographing these minor gestures allows us to work beyond a ‘taken for grantedness’ modality – the assumption that when children consciously reply in words, they provide information that accurately represents how they think and feel. Our methodology reveals what different bodies can do EUROPEAN EARLY CHILDHOOD EDUCATION RESEARCH JOURNAL 15 (Manning 2016, 4) and that other elements also require attention to do justice to the complexity of the event (vitality, performativity, corporeality, sensuality and mobility). As we choreograph (with) the minor gestures of Dan’s unusual facial expressions ("steps" 1 and 2) and through the more-than-human agents in the house (step 3), we invite the tales of footballs, birds, pillows and pools to come to the fore: ‘the minor invents new forms of existence, and with them, in them, we come to be’ (Manning 2016, 2). When we choreograph (with) minor gestures through our creative methodology, we are not trying to capture them, as this is not possible, but rather, we are trying to tune into their potentialities. We collage, re-animate, re-connect as a creative way of working with the multiple "directions" that, for example, postdigital play might entail at that event, in that family and with us as researchers. But we also acknowledge that these minor gestures are both those that are bound to the situation and diverge from grand gestures and those that remain open. While non-representational forms of scholarship have been criticised for lacking adequate focus on issues related to power dynamics, social injustices and political matters (Vannini 2015), we have shown that this methodological approach is transformative and deeply political to re-focus our attention on affective and relational forms of research that foreground what bodies can do (differently). Acknowledgements This research was produced as part of the Responsible Innovation in Technology for Children (RITEC) project. This project was co-founded with the LEGO Group and funded by the LEGO Foundation and aims to create practical tools for businesses and governments that will empower them to put the well-being of children at the centre of digital design. Disclosure statement No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author(s). Funding This research was funded by the LEGO Foundation. Giovanna Caetano-Silva was supported by the grant [PRE2020-094747] funded by Ministry of science, innovation and universities, Government of Spain. Finally, we would like to thank the anonymous reviewers for their comments that helped to strengthen the writing. ORCID Soern Finn Menning http://orcid.org/0000-0002-9263-4689 Giovanna Caetano-Silva http://orcid.org/0000-0002-8819-473X Karin Murris http://orcid.org/0000-0001-9613-7738 References Banerjee, B., and M. 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