“Barn(e)makt” or “børnemagt” child power is a familiar discursive motto in Nordic child culture and the study thereof. It signals the importance of giving children agency and voice in society, as described in the United Nations Convention on the Rights of the Child (1989). The convention also applies in digital arenas (UNCRC General Comment No. 25, 2021), and with this panel, we wish to examine, discuss and conceptualise digital child power from such a rights-based perspective. The politics that are formed in relation to children’s digital practices rarely take children’s perspectives directly into account. As we shall see, this leads to a range of problems that create democratic distance between adults and children, often limiting children’s agency. Moreover, it threatens the already scarce incorporation of children’s sense making processes in what the digital is and should be in the future. The paper presentations showcase this through concrete examples of how agency can be determined as a result of distributed power relations (Rammert, 2015). Thereby, our conceptualisation of power takes an empirical point of departure. We explore in situ practices and pedagogies that elucidate the nuanced poetics of children’s digital cultures. In doing so, we also consider the political implications, keeping critical rights-based perspectives on inequalities and power imbalances in mind. Consequently, our examinations of relations between children, digital technologies, and other relevant actors consider the conditions under which children may or may not be empowered, and what we can do about it.The experimenting community – a pedagogy for agencyThe presentation will frame both the experimenting community and the open laboratory as a pedagogy for agency and change. In a globalized and digitalized world an adequate pedagogy is needed to give children and young people the possibility to act in and change the world around them. The suggestion is the experimenting community, where children, teachers and pre-school teachers find their own use for any given media, technology and narrative including generative artificial intelligence (Thestrup, 2024). This takes place in an open laboratory which is open to the entanglement of digital and analogue, open to the world around the institution and equal cooperation with people around the world (Thestrup, 2022). It all takes place through common playing and experimenting (Gauntlet, 2023) and finally defining a certain use. It might be local or partly consisting of already existing cultural expressions, but for the participants in the experimenting community it is new.Keywords: The experimenting community; The open laboratory; Entangled technologies; Common play
Klaus Thestrup (Thu,) studied this question.