Becoming-child(ren) becoming-power-full
Becoming-child(ren) becoming-power-full Children’s questions are poorly understood if they are not seen as question-machines. (Deleuze & Guattari, 1987, p. 256)
opening to power-fullness Using the term ‘powerfull-ness’ as a way of problematising conventional notions of power, being powerful and empowerment (Sellers, M., & Honan, 2007), in this plateau, I foreground the power relations between me, as adult-researcher, and Tim, as child-research participant, in which relationships embedded in the modernist adult|child binary and researcher/research participant interactions are entwined. All too often young children’s expressions of how they understand the workings of their worlds are either not understood or not listened to. Even when my intentions to ensure the data generating of the research project was a conjoint endeavour with the children, I inadvertently fell prey to the research taking over and to being party to compromising Tim’s flows and expressions of power-fullness. After a second encounter with Tim, his forthrightness led me to understand the (mis)placement of power relations. The idea of children becoming power-full draws on Deleuzian and Foucauldian notions of power, which I understand as power-fullness, and brings these alongside the concepts of empowerment and whakamana in the Aotearoa New Zealand early childhood curriculum. In foregrounding Tim’s expressions of power-fullness, empowerment is disrupted. Tim’s challenging question~statements directed at me on two different days – You following me everywhere we go! and You’re following us! Why are you following us? – were statements and directives to not follow him and his friends; the question was rhetorical. But, it was not until the second interchange that I understood the implications for Tim. In the first situation, I missed the machinics of his enacting of power relations and did not hear his expression of flows of power-fullness. Through the second interchange, I came to actually understand Deleuze and Guattari’s quite simple statement: ‘Children’s questions are poorly understood if they are not seen as question-machines’ (Deleuze & Guattari, 1987, p. 256) and to understand the machinics of Tim’s power-full flows.
flows of power-fullness Both Foucault and Deleuze work with the understanding that power is a force in perpetual motion that flows through social networks, an affect that is operational. This is a reminder that Tim’s relationship with me is only a part of the network of power-full(ness) at play in the two data 184