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 child or a researcher. The theoretical and methodological processes presented here offer an opportunity to shake the ground on which individual researchers stand by raising questions about scientific inspiration, theoretical and methodological productivity, and thinking through focusing on process, play, and collaboration. The effect of this is a questioning of the singular academic ‘I’ by exploring and showing what a plural ‘I’ can look like. It is about what the multiplicity of voice can offer research in a highly individualistic time. The article allows the reader to follow and watch the unconventional trial-and-error path of the ongoing-ness of exploring theories and methods together as a research community via methods of drama, palimpsest, and fictionary.

This study examines the everyday family life of 12 families across Sweden. The study aims to explore the ways in which material things figure in the enactment of everyday family life, that is, how family life is accomplished in interaction between children, parents and material things during everyday activities. The empirical material consists of 45 hours of video recordings of the families’ everyday lives and was produced mainly by the families themselves (40 hours) and the thesis author (five hours). The recordings contain the families’ interactions during everyday, routine activities, (e.g., mealtimes), including sibling interaction and conflicts. During these interactions, different aspects of everyday family life emerged as important to the participants, such as moral issues and practices of intimacy.

This thesis takes an explorative approach to the study of family life by weaving together Studies in Social Interaction, including multimodal interaction analysis, Child Studies and themes in Science and Technology Studies. The methodological approach illuminates, through micro-focused analysis, how material things and children figure in the enactment of family morality and practices of intimacy in sibling- and child-parent interaction.

The results show that serious negotiation and conflicts occurred continuously in siblingand child-parent interaction. In such negotiations and conflicts family morality was enacted which typically related to negotiating local family rules about in/appropriate behaviour with material things. Equally prevalent were family members’ engagements in practices of intimacy and care. Such practices were framed by affective, playful and joyful activities with each other and with material things, even when such activities went against the participants moral expectations of how the activities should be carried out. As such, this study demonstrates how material things are intertwined with, and are central in, the constitution of family morality and intimacy, in practice. This thesis contributes to discussions about how complexities of social phenomena can be explored and embraced through a focus on actors that have tended to fade into the background of research on family life, such as material things and children. 

This study examines the local enactment of mealtime rules during everyday family dinners. The data is approached through multimodal interaction analysis and through concepts which reconceptualize materiality and agency. The study found that mealtime rules were generated and sometimes sustained in the continuous interaction between parents, children and food and mealtime things, especially in relation to material textures, for example liquid, solid, can roll, elastic. Family mealtime rules moreover affected how family morality emerged. The study found that family morality was about much more than parental concerns with childrens eating, rather, it was likewise about play and enjoyment.

The present study examines sibling’ conflict trajectories with a specific focus on acts of sabotage –deliberate obstruction or destruction of activities with an object. Multimodal interaction analysisis used to understand how siblings’ conflicts are organised through multiple (verbal and embodied)practices. We further draw on childhood studies that focuses on children’s material practices anduse the term enactment to better understand human-nonhuman relations. The study found thatchildren put considerable time and energy into configuring deceptive bodies that both organisedand disrupted their local moral orders.