Videography as Refrain

Abstract

A public park adjacent to an inner-city preschool invites children and their teacher into new encounters with the world, literacy and themselves. The park and preschool are situated in the inner-city of Johannesburg, South Africa. In this article, the researcher performs as mutated-modest-witness of events that unfold in lively materialdiscursive encounters between children, grass, friendship, a pen, cement table, sand, sticks, the alphabet and daylight. The agential realism of Karen Barad and the nomadic thinking of Deleuze and Guattari offer ways of re-imagining ‘the child in the park’. Diffracting with repeated viewings of video clips the researcher finds that forward and reverse movement and stops in different moments throughout repeated viewings of the same video footage produces different and new ‘stories’ about the events and the children involved. Conceptions of ‘child’ as literacy learner and of researcher-as-writer mutate through this diffraction which instantiates a non-representational videography practice.