Karin Murris
Biographic Data
| ID | 99683 |
|---|---|
| NAME | Karin Murris |
| GIVEN NAMES | Karin |
| FAMILY NAME | Murris |
| SIGNATURE | MURRIS K |
| AFFILIATIONS | University of Cape Town |
| ORCID | 0000-0001-9613-7738 |
| VERIFIED | Yes |
| TOTAL WORKS | 47 |
| TOTAL CITATIONS | 162 |
| AUTHOR COUNT | 46 |
| EDITOR COUNT | 1 |
| FIRST PUBLICATION YEAR | 2000 |
| LATEST PUBLICATION YEAR | 2026 |
| H-INDEX | 7 |
Responding to the ‘small’
Un/Learning Adult Frames of Reference in Death Enquiries
Developmental psychology continues to shape how adults engage with children about death and dying. This influences whether children are included in rituals surrounding human and other‐than‐human bodies. Figurations of the innocent, immature and vulnerable child still dominate adult imaginaries of young children's understandings of mortality. The fabulist picturebook Frog and the Birdsong (1991) by Dutch creator Max Velthuijs opens a radical space…
‘ What action did you see me do? ’
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 method…
I just go headbutt a tree or something’
The relationship between children’s digital play and well-being remains under-researched, with debates often polarised and limited by a lack of holistic studies in diverse global contexts. This article draws on empirical data from an ecoculturally informed study of children’s (6–12) digital play in the United Kingdom, South Africa, Australia and Cyprus to examine how individual and contextual circumstances influence children’s self-led digital pl…
Decentring the child human in qualitative research
Purpose Drawing on the philosophies of Donna Haraway, Rosi Braidotti, Karen Barad, Jane Bennett and Erin Manning, this paper explores five “doing concepts” as methodological tools for qualitative inquiry: “sensing the minor gesture,” “tracing a phenomenon,” “attuning to flows of energies,” “attending to thing-power” and “making-with.” These concepts function as an open-ended “tool box” that resists prescriptive methodologies, instead encouraging …
Teaching Postqualitatively
The purpose of this article is to explore how teachers, scholars, and mentors teach postqualitatively in diverse ways. Teaching postqualitatively does not easily conform with the delivery of set learning outcomes nor does it seek to measure learner progress or teaching quality in prescriptive and traditional ways. Rather, this kind of teaching could be seen as the task of the impossible and calls for the curious seeker and infinite learner, resem…
Childism and philosophy
This article is a conceptual co-exploration of the relationship between philosophy and childism. It draws upon a colloquium in December 2021 at the Childism Institute at Rutgers University. Nine co-authors lay out and interweave scholarly imaginations to collectively explore the concept of childism in critical philosophical depth. Through diverse entry points, the co-authors bring a wide range of theoretical perspectives to this task, some engagi…
Re-storying schools as “research sites” of climate change in the Chthulucene
Inspired by Karen Barad’s agential realism and Donna Haraway’s use of the Chthulucene, our paper profoundly troubles and unsettles the humanist subject that has been the cause of so much trouble. Re-turning to a government primary school in Cape Town as the “research site,” we adopt temporal and spatial diffraction as a postqualitative research methodology. The colonial practices related to land ownership, are not in the past, but remain in its b…
Reconfiguring the use of video in qualitative research through practices of filmmaking
The article shows how film can disrupt human-centred discourses about the use of video technology in qualitative research. Inspired in particular by Deleuze's film philosophy, a detailed analysis of an 'ordinary' event in an early-childhood institution gestures at some of the possibilities that the manipulation of technology can offer. Filmmaking practices, such as framing, tracking, speed changes, reverse motion and use of sound, shape what coun…
Researching digital inequalities in children’s play with technology in South Africa
This paper reports on the South African findings from an international mixed methods study between the LEGO Foundation, Dubit and the Universities of Sheffield (England) and Cape Town (South Africa) on young children’s learning with digital technology. The findings of the study, the first of its kind in South Africa, show the consistency of qualities and experience of play, but also reveal socio-economic, linguistic, ethnic, gender and racial ine…
ChatGPT, care and the ethical dilemmas entangled with teaching and research in the early years
An ecological perspective on children's play with digital technologies in South Africa and the United Kingdom
This paper reports a mixed-methods study of the play of children (3-11) with digital technologies in South Africa (SA) and the United Kingdom (UK), discussing the interrelatedness of access to devices and the Internet, contextual realities, and adult-child relations. An adapted ecological model [Bronfenbrenner (1979) The ecology of human development: Experiments by nature and design. Harvard University Press] guided analysis. Parents and carers i…
Child Studies Multiple
This text is an exploration of collaborative thinking and writing through theories, methods, and experiences on the topic of the child, children, and childhood. It is a collaborative written text (with 32 authors) that sprang out of the experimental workshop Child Studies Multiple. The workshop and this text are about daring to stay with mess, 'un-closure' , and uncertainty in order to investigate the (e)motions and complexities of being either a…
In Conversation with Karen Barad
GoPro(blem)s and possibilities
In response to the call for papers for this special issue and the questions it poses, the authors show how the ontological posthumanist shift of agential realism does not erase but keeps the child human of colour in play, despite the inclusion of the other-than-(Adult)human in its methodologies. Through a montaging technique, the authors explore the philosophical complexity of ‘decentering without erasure’ by re-turning to data from a large inter…
Karen Barad as Educator
This is Not a Photograph of Zuko’
The way in which individualised child agency is already ‘given’ ontologically in digital play research profoundly affects epistemology: how data is produced, analysed and interpreted. Co-created as part of a large-scale international study is a photograph ‘of’ South African six-year-old Zuko playing with Lego bricks. The agential realist diffractive reading of the photo as phenomenon traces transdisciplinary what is already at play materially and…
Risking erasure? Posthumanist research practices and figurations of (the) child
Entanglement
The agential realist notion of entanglement reconfigures the nature of causality and particularly the causal relationship between discursive practices and the material world. Materiality always already involves human discursive practices of boundary-making, territorial-ising and categorising the world in its ongoing reconfiguring. Discursive practices do not just stand for human-based practices. Challenging human exceptionalism, a material-discur…
Non/Representational
A Glossary for Doing Postqualitative, New Materialist and Critical Posthumanist Research Across Disciplines
A Glossary for Doing Postqualitative, New Materialist and Critical Posthumanist Research Across Disciplines gives novices and experienced researchers clear and comprehensible introductions to theories, paradigm shifts and key concepts in postqualitative, feminist new materialist and critical posthumanist research.\n\nThe ten authors, who have a wealth of experience of teaching and conducting postqualitative research, have explored 72 key concepts…
Infantmethodologies
Infantmethodologies is a concept that was playfully invented to gauge philosophical interestin the intersection between infants (or a chid; or infancy; or childhood) and methodologies(and philosophies, theories and concepts). This provocation aims to debate this intersection andweaves thinkers from around the world in order to generate discussion on the question, ‘Howdo we study a child’? Asking this question generates further questions: What pro…
Inhuman hands and missing child
This paper explores an inhuman reading of ‘hands’ with/in visual images of a Finnish literacy lesson. Inspired by Karen Barad’s agential realism and the ontological turn, we disrupt a metaphysics of presence, the temporality of progress and binary logic, to reconfigure the child in literacy practices as a sympoietic phenomenon, always already assembled in human and more-than-human company. We think with/in the concept of ‘touch’ as a method to re…
Anti-Colonial Orientations to Place
The authors bring together decolonial, place attuned, and critical posthumanist orientations to analyze an event during a residential workshop organized as part of a state-funded research project on decolonizing early childhood discourses in South Africa. An invitation during the workshop to grapple with what might be unsettling by attending to the agency of the more-than-human world and its entanglement with unequal human geographies of place, g…
The ‘Missing Peoples’ of critical posthumanism and new materialism
This chapter responds to arguments claiming that posthumanists are unaware of their own location and make universalising claims about ‘the’ human while silent about past and present non-western or Indigenous scholarship, children’s philosophising and their way of life. They are thereby perpetuating coloniality and ontoepistemic injustice. Focusing on the implications for research practices, three examples from practice are woven through, making e…
Diffraction and response-able reading of texts
In this paper, we use a diffractive reading developed by feminist philosopher and quantum physicist Karen Barad, as part of a response-able methodology, in order to consider the claim made by Serge Hein in his paper ‘The New Materialism in Qualitative Inquiry: How Compatible Are the Philosophies of Barad and Deleuze?’ (2016) that the philosophies of Barad and Deleuze and Guattari are incommensurable. Our point of departure is from a stance which …
Diffracting diffractive readings of texts as methodology
Re-turning to our experiences of putting a diffractive methodology to work ourselves, as well as engaging with the writings of Donna Haraway and Karen Barad, we produce some propositions regarding a diffractive methodology for researchers to consider. Postqualitative research disrupts the idea that educationalists can be given tools or techniques to investigate the world objectively, independently and at an ontological distance from the researche…
Troubling troubled school time
Inspired by the philosophies of Donna Haraway and Karen Barad, the aim of this paper is to stir up trouble and to double trouble time in education. We trouble how certain views of childhood shape our experience of school time and secondly, we trouble the way in which time as experienced in school, affects how adults relate to childhood. A particular relationship to and experience of time is nowadays prominently fostered and cultivated in educatio…
The Epistemic Challenge of Hearing Child’s Voice
Philosophy with Children, the Stingray and the Educative Value of Disequilibrium
Journal Article Philosophy with Children, the Stingray and the Educative Value of Disequilibrium Get access Karin Saskia Murris Karin Saskia Murris University of the Witwatersrand, Wits School of Education, P Bag 3, P O Wits 2050, Johannesburg, South Africa Correspondence: (from 1 January 2009) Karin Murris, University of the Witwatersrand, Wits School of Education, P Bag 3, P O Wits 2050, Johannesburg, South Africa; (until 1 January 2009) Newpor…
Rhodes Must Fall
Critical posthumanism focuses on difference, rather than identity, and queers humanist philosophy that has its roots in western metaphysics, which has had a strong humanist articulation since Descartes. Humanism centres on the autonomous adult self as sole source of knowledge production, and instils binaries that marginalise, divide and dichotomise the 'other' in age, race, ethnicity, ability and sexuality. Postcolonial theorising interrogates th…
Can Children Do Philosophy
Some philosophers claim that young children cannot do philosophy. This paper examines some of those claims, and puts forward arguments against them. Our beliefs that children cannot do philosophy are based on philosophical assumptions about children, their thinking and about philosophy. Many of those assumptions remain unquestioned by critics of Philosophy with Children. My conclusion is that the idea that very young children can do philosophy ha…
Infantmethodologies
Infantmethodologies is a concept that was playfully invented to gauge philosophical interestin the intersection between infants (or a chid; or infancy; or childhood) and methodologies(and philosophies, theories and concepts). This provocation aims to debate this intersection andweaves thinkers from around the world in order to generate discussion on the question, ‘Howdo we study a child’? Asking this question generates further questions: What pro…
Risking erasure? Posthumanist research practices and figurations of (the) child
The Provocation of an Epistemological Shift in Teacher Education through Philosophy with Children
Experience indicates that the questioning and democratic nature of the community of enquiry can be demanding and unsettling for teachers, presenting unaccustomed challenges and moral dilemmas. This paper argues that such significant episodes in the practice of Philosophical with Children (PwC) offer rich opportunities for wider critical reflection on epistemological and pedagogical questions for teacher education and continuing professional devel…
Taking Age Out of Play
This paper emerges from experiences of putting picturebooks, philosophy with children and posthumanism into play. Responding to Derrida's notion of a ‘return to childhood’, we propose a different move of ‘re-turning to child/ren’, drawing from various entangled sources. First, the figuration of posthuman child (Murris, 2016) disrupts the conception of temporality that takes development and progress as inevitable. The posthuman child expresses the…
Being Children
Situated in the context of children’s rights, this article reports on a study involving children from 11 countries and 5 continents in philosophical discussions about concepts of child and childhood. Here we focus on seven of those countries. In a previous study, two of the authors explored in what kind of society children would like to live. The present study directly addresses one of the issues arising from that study: to investigate what child…
Intra-generational education
This article discusses the idea of intra-generational education. Drawing on Braidotti’s nomadic subject and Barad’s conception of agency, we consider what intra-generational education might look like ontologically, in the light of critical posthumanism, in terms of natureculture world, nomadism and a vibrant indeterminacy of knowing subjects. In order to explore the idea of intra-generationalism and its pedagogical implications, we introduce four…
An ecological perspective on children's play with digital technologies in South Africa and the United Kingdom
This paper reports a mixed-methods study of the play of children (3-11) with digital technologies in South Africa (SA) and the United Kingdom (UK), discussing the interrelatedness of access to devices and the Internet, contextual realities, and adult-child relations. An adapted ecological model [Bronfenbrenner (1979) The ecology of human development: Experiments by nature and design. Harvard University Press] guided analysis. Parents and carers i…
Introduction to the Special Issue
Child as Educator
Child Studies Multiple
This text is an exploration of collaborative thinking and writing through theories, methods, and experiences on the topic of the child, children, and childhood. It is a collaborative written text (with 32 authors) that sprang out of the experimental workshop Child Studies Multiple. The workshop and this text are about daring to stay with mess, 'un-closure' , and uncertainty in order to investigate the (e)motions and complexities of being either a…
Children’s development, capability approaches and postdevelopmental child
This article explores how three well-known conceptual frameworks view child development and how they assume particular figurations of the child in the context of the South African National Curriculum Framework for Children from Birth to Four. This new curriculum is based on a children’s rights framework. The capability approaches offer important insights for children’s rights advocates, but, like psychosocial theories of child development, assume…
Reggio Emilia Inspired Philosophical Teacher Education in the Anthropocene
In this paper, we give a flavour of how, against the odds, Reggio-Emilia-inspired pedagogical documentation can work in reconceptualizing environmental education, reconfiguring child subjectivity and provoking an ontological shift from autopoiesis to sympoiesis in teacher education. Working posthuman(e)ly and transdisciplinarily across three foundation phase teacher education courses at a university in South Africa, we situate our teaching within…
Listening-as-Usual
Can Children Do Philosophy
Some philosophers claim that young children cannot do philosophy. This paper examines some of those claims, and puts forward arguments against them. Our beliefs that children cannot do philosophy are based on philosophical assumptions about children, their thinking and about philosophy. Many of those assumptions remain unquestioned by critics of Philosophy with Children. My conclusion is that the idea that very young children can do philosophy ha…
‘The ‘Wrong Message’
Philosophy with Children, the Stingray and the Educative Value of Disequilibrium
Journal Article Philosophy with Children, the Stingray and the Educative Value of Disequilibrium Get access Karin Saskia Murris Karin Saskia Murris University of the Witwatersrand, Wits School of Education, P Bag 3, P O Wits 2050, Johannesburg, South Africa Correspondence: (from 1 January 2009) Karin Murris, University of the Witwatersrand, Wits School of Education, P Bag 3, P O Wits 2050, Johannesburg, South Africa; (until 1 January 2009) Newpor…
The Provocation of an Epistemological Shift in Teacher Education through Philosophy with Children
Experience indicates that the questioning and democratic nature of the community of enquiry can be demanding and unsettling for teachers, presenting unaccustomed challenges and moral dilemmas. This paper argues that such significant episodes in the practice of Philosophical with Children (PwC) offer rich opportunities for wider critical reflection on epistemological and pedagogical questions for teacher education and continuing professional devel…
Student teachers investigating the morality of corporal punishment in South Africa
Practitioners of education in South Africa (SA) struggle painfully between the extremes of its authoritarian and deeply religious roots that prescribe blind obedience to people in authority and their elders, and the demands of open-mindedness, critical thinking and also solidarity required for democratic citizenship. A particular pedagogy was used with some 400 student teachers to investigate philosophically the rights and wrongs of corporal puni…
The Epistemic Challenge of Hearing Child’s Voice
Child as Educator
Listening-as-Usual
The Posthuman Child
The Posthuman Child combats institutionalised ageist practices in primary, early childhood and teacher education. Grounded in a critical posthumanist perspective on the purpose of education, it provides a genealogy of psychology, sociology and philosophy of childhood in which dominant figurations of child and childhood are exposed as positioning child as epistemically and ontologically inferior. Entangled throughout this book are practical and th…
The Philosophy for Children Curriculum
Intra-generational education
This article discusses the idea of intra-generational education. Drawing on Braidotti’s nomadic subject and Barad’s conception of agency, we consider what intra-generational education might look like ontologically, in the light of critical posthumanism, in terms of natureculture world, nomadism and a vibrant indeterminacy of knowing subjects. In order to explore the idea of intra-generationalism and its pedagogical implications, we introduce four…
Rhodes Must Fall
Critical posthumanism focuses on difference, rather than identity, and queers humanist philosophy that has its roots in western metaphysics, which has had a strong humanist articulation since Descartes. Humanism centres on the autonomous adult self as sole source of knowledge production, and instils binaries that marginalise, divide and dichotomise the 'other' in age, race, ethnicity, ability and sexuality. Postcolonial theorising interrogates th…
Being Children
Situated in the context of children’s rights, this article reports on a study involving children from 11 countries and 5 continents in philosophical discussions about concepts of child and childhood. Here we focus on seven of those countries. In a previous study, two of the authors explored in what kind of society children would like to live. The present study directly addresses one of the issues arising from that study: to investigate what child…
Keeping the question ‘what comes after postmodernism?’ open
Keeping the question ‘what comes after postmodernism?’ open." Educational Philosophy and Theory, 50(14), pp. 1600–1601
Reggio Emilia Inspired Philosophical Teacher Education in the Anthropocene
In this paper, we give a flavour of how, against the odds, Reggio-Emilia-inspired pedagogical documentation can work in reconceptualizing environmental education, reconfiguring child subjectivity and provoking an ontological shift from autopoiesis to sympoiesis in teacher education. Working posthuman(e)ly and transdisciplinarily across three foundation phase teacher education courses at a university in South Africa, we situate our teaching within…
Children’s development, capability approaches and postdevelopmental child
This article explores how three well-known conceptual frameworks view child development and how they assume particular figurations of the child in the context of the South African National Curriculum Framework for Children from Birth to Four. This new curriculum is based on a children’s rights framework. The capability approaches offer important insights for children’s rights advocates, but, like psychosocial theories of child development, assume…
Taking Age Out of Play
This paper emerges from experiences of putting picturebooks, philosophy with children and posthumanism into play. Responding to Derrida's notion of a ‘return to childhood’, we propose a different move of ‘re-turning to child/ren’, drawing from various entangled sources. First, the figuration of posthuman child (Murris, 2016) disrupts the conception of temporality that takes development and progress as inevitable. The posthuman child expresses the…
Introduction to the Special Issue
Diffraction and response-able reading of texts
In this paper, we use a diffractive reading developed by feminist philosopher and quantum physicist Karen Barad, as part of a response-able methodology, in order to consider the claim made by Serge Hein in his paper ‘The New Materialism in Qualitative Inquiry: How Compatible Are the Philosophies of Barad and Deleuze?’ (2016) that the philosophies of Barad and Deleuze and Guattari are incommensurable. Our point of departure is from a stance which …
Diffracting diffractive readings of texts as methodology
Re-turning to our experiences of putting a diffractive methodology to work ourselves, as well as engaging with the writings of Donna Haraway and Karen Barad, we produce some propositions regarding a diffractive methodology for researchers to consider. Postqualitative research disrupts the idea that educationalists can be given tools or techniques to investigate the world objectively, independently and at an ontological distance from the researche…
Inhuman hands and missing child
This paper explores an inhuman reading of ‘hands’ with/in visual images of a Finnish literacy lesson. Inspired by Karen Barad’s agential realism and the ontological turn, we disrupt a metaphysics of presence, the temporality of progress and binary logic, to reconfigure the child in literacy practices as a sympoietic phenomenon, always already assembled in human and more-than-human company. We think with/in the concept of ‘touch’ as a method to re…
Anti-Colonial Orientations to Place
The authors bring together decolonial, place attuned, and critical posthumanist orientations to analyze an event during a residential workshop organized as part of a state-funded research project on decolonizing early childhood discourses in South Africa. An invitation during the workshop to grapple with what might be unsettling by attending to the agency of the more-than-human world and its entanglement with unequal human geographies of place, g…
The ‘Missing Peoples’ of critical posthumanism and new materialism
This chapter responds to arguments claiming that posthumanists are unaware of their own location and make universalising claims about ‘the’ human while silent about past and present non-western or Indigenous scholarship, children’s philosophising and their way of life. They are thereby perpetuating coloniality and ontoepistemic injustice. Focusing on the implications for research practices, three examples from practice are woven through, making e…
Navigating the Postqualitative, New Materialist and Critical Posthumanist Terrain Across Disciplines
Troubling troubled school time
Inspired by the philosophies of Donna Haraway and Karen Barad, the aim of this paper is to stir up trouble and to double trouble time in education. We trouble how certain views of childhood shape our experience of school time and secondly, we trouble the way in which time as experienced in school, affects how adults relate to childhood. A particular relationship to and experience of time is nowadays prominently fostered and cultivated in educatio…
Sociology (36 works) · Epistemology (28 works) · Posthumanist Ethics and Activism (22 works) · Psychology (19 works) · Philosophy (18 works) · Philosophy (15 works) · Political science (15 works) · Computer Science (14 works) · Children's Rights and Participation (13 works) · Pedagogy (13 works)