Interview as intraviews: A hand puppet approach to studying processes of inclusion and exclusion among children in kindergarten

In this article I will illustrate how our understanding of the interview situation changes when we rethink it with some of the concepts from Karen Barad’s notion of agential realism. With concepts such as ‘apparatuses’, ‘phenomena‘, ‘intra-action’ and ‘material-discursive’ (Barad, 2007) it becomes possible to focus more extensively on how matter matters in the interview situation. Re-thinking the interview as an intraview1, I argue that Barad’s concepts will enhance our awareness not only of how the researcher affects the interview but also of how certain kinds of materiality in interview situations do not merely refer to passive entities but must be understood as matter that matters. To illustrate my points I will analyse how bringing a puppet with me to interviews with 4-6 year old children seemed to interfere with the interview situation creating unforeseen diversions in ways that influenced the children’s ways of responding to my questions and re-negotiated the positions of interviewer and interviewee.