Unsettling Silences: Reimagining Child and Youth Culture Through Material Intra-Views

This paper introduces material intra-views as a novel methodological approach for addressing silences and absences in child and youth culture. Situated within a posthuman framework, this approach reconceptualizes culture as an entangled, material-discursive phenomenon co-created by human and non-human actors. It resists anthropocentric views of children as passive recipients of culture, instead recognizing the distributed agency of children, materials, and spaces in shaping cultural practices and knowledge.
Empirical insights are drawn from practice-based research conducted in an art gallery setting, where playful, non-linear workshops engaged children in intra-actions with artistic materials and environments. These material intra-views uncover the "missing middles"—the often-overlooked entanglements between material agency and child agency—revealing how culture is collaboratively shaped through these relational processes. By decentering human subjectivity, the research highlights how children’s embodied and playful encounters with materials generate unexpected outcomes and new forms of cultural knowledge, challenging ageist and humanist paradigms in cultural institutions.
Aligned with the conference theme, this paper demonstrates how material intra-views illuminate dimensions of child culture often ignored by traditional methods. The approach disrupts dominant narratives that frame children as objects of adult control, offering an ethical and material way to foster agency within a more-than-human world.
By articulating the theoretical underpinnings and practical applications of material intra-views, this paper highlights their transformative potential—reimagining child and youth culture as an embodied, relational, and materially situated process where children are active, playful co-creators of knowledge and the futures we collectively shape.