POISED Quarterly 5.2.2026 at 15-16 (UTC+2): Child(hood), childing and death, Prof. Karin Murris (University of Oulu)

Our POISED Quarterly seminar continues with Karin Murris, who is Professor of Early Childhood Education at University of Oulu. In her presentation, Murris proposes childing as a post-age, postqualitative research methodology that radically reconfigures agency, identity, and “the Other” in child studies.

Through a playful video clip of seven-year-old Aatu’s death-play with plasticine, Murris explores how childing unsettles human exceptionalism, adult-centrism, and the assumption that subjectivity or identity precedes research. Rather than following “the child” as a bounded subject, she asks what becomes possible when we attend to difference as differencing through Aatu’s playworlding—a practice not limited to age or the human. This ontological re-turn invites researchers to turn the gaze back on their own measuring apparatuses and agential cuts, and how these constitute “the child” as Other.

The seminar is held in Zoom and can be accessed via this link. You are warmly welcome!