Conference Agenda

This paper examines cinema not as a pedagogical instrument, but as a practice that can itself articulate educational relations. Rather than asking how film should be adapted to educational aims, it investigates how certain camera practices already enact modes of study, attention, and world-relation that resonate with philosophical conceptions of education. The central objective is to rethink educational cinema beyond transmission, participation, or effectiveness, and to conceptualize it instead as an aesthetic and relational practice that opens a shared space of attention and study.

The paper takes Sept Promenades avec Marc Brown (Creton & Barré, 2022) as a case. The film follows a paleobotanist and a small crew during a series of walks through landscapes in Normandy, recorded on 16mm film. For a significant duration, the images captured by the camera are withheld from the viewer. What is shown instead are gestures of stopping, handling, naming, and waiting. Only later do the plants appear, assembled as a silent herbarium accompanied by spoken names. This temporal and perceptual structure is not treated as a narrative strategy, but as a pedagogical articulation in its own right.

Conceptually, the paper situates this film in dialogue with three intertwined strands of thought. First, it revisits early debates on educational cinema, where film was valued for its capacity to reveal aspects of the world inaccessible to the naked eye, yet gradually subordinated to predefined learning outcomes and instrumental pedagogical frameworks. Against this background, Sept Promenades can be read as a reactivation of educational cinema’s original promise, while suspending its drive toward mastery, efficiency, and explanation.

Second, the paper draws on recent work in philosophy of education and aesthetics, particularly Estelle Zhong-Mengual’s notion of an ecology of attention and Masschelein and Simons’ concept of scholé, to frame education as a practice of attending rather than knowing. From this perspective, learning is not defined by knowlegde acquisition or participation, but by the creation of conditions in which attention can linger, hesitate, and remain undecided. The time opened by the film is thus understood as a suspended, non-productive time that resists both instrumental pedagogy and self-centered forms of engagement.

Third, the conceptual framework engages film theory and philosophy of technology to think the camera as an active condition of perception. Drawing on Gilbert Simondon’s theory of individuation, the 16mm camera is approached not as a neutral recording device but as a technical milieu that shapes gestures, temporality, and modes of relation. The analog camera enforces delay, bodily commitment, and uncertainty: images are not immediately available, and seeing is separated from knowing. This interval is not a lack to be compensated, but a space in which perception can emerge relationally.

The paper’s objective is not to argue that film becomes educational only through guidance or ethical instruction. Rather, it shows how Sept Promenades articulates a pedagogy that supports the work of the camera itself. Gestures of naming, careful handling, and shared presence do not redirect the camera practice toward educational ends, but accompany it, intensify it, and allow it to unfold. In this sense, the film stages education as a collective practice of study, where attention is directed outward.

By conceptualizing educational cinema as an aesthetic practice of attention and relation, this paper aims to contribute to ongoing philosophical debates on education, technology, and perception, and to propose a non-instrumental understanding of pedagogy grounded in encounter rather than transmission.

In response to the Call this paper rethinks the figure of ‘the Other’ in child studies through a posthumanist and quantum-inspired reconceptualisation of child, camera, and death. It draws on Small Matters: An Intra-generational project on Multispecies Death and Dying (Research Council of Finland, 2023-2026; www.small-matters.com), an international project concerned with how young children encounter multispecies death in a time of ecological and humanitarian crises. The project disrupts developmental narratives and articulates more uncertain ways of knowing by calling for a deeper consideration of world-making, specifically who and what are included in what matters in education research (Tammi & Rautio, 2025). Although dying features in young children’s everyday lives, many educators avoid it as too sensitive to discuss in school. However, in a world that is changing and experiencing overlapping crises (pandemics, wars, species extinction, climate change, etc.), it is urgent to ask what education can offer as a response to environmental and ecological loss and grief. How do young children experience multispecies death and dying, and how can we adults learn from and with them? We explore these questions by attuning to small matters as part of (child) agency. Small matters matter (Barad, 2013). But while death permeates children’s everyday worlds, it is often avoided in education as developmentally inappropriate according to Piagetian theorists (following Nagy, 1948). We ask instead: What becomes possible if child studies learns from children’s engagements with multispecies death rather than positioning them as epistemically deficient?

The central research question therefore is: How can child, camera, and ‘inanimate’ matter be encountered as “inappropriate/d others”, not as separate entities but as phenomena emerging through entangled relations and what does this mean for rethinking otherness in childhood studies?

The paper responds to European and international debates on decolonising philosophy of early childhood education, child studies (Murris & Osgood, 2022), posthumanist research (Braidotti, 2013) and environmental humanities. It challenges humanist assumptions that position the child as a bounded, developing subject and the more-than-human as passive matter (Murris, 2022). Instead, we work with the notion of the “inappropriate/d other” (from Trịnh Thị Minh Hà in Karen Barad, 2014), which troubles taxonomic identity categories and the self/Other binary. Difference is not a relation between pre-existing entities but emerges through agential cuts within phenomena. Theoretically, the paper brings together:

• Agential realism (Barad): reality is constituted through intra-action; apparatuses (including cameras) help produce what becomes determinate.
• Posthumanist child studies: the child is not a pre-given fleshy subject but a relational, more-than-human becoming.
• Despret’s concept of “instauration”: the dead are not simply absent but can be brought into different planes of existence through relational practices.

This framework allows us to reconfigure the child as a quantum phenomenon (as posthuman child; Murris, 2016) rather than an individual subject, and the camera not as inert recording device but as co-constitutive research apparatus (Menning & Murris, 2023). The paper thus shifts child studies from representing children to examining the material–discursive practices that co-produce child, other, and difference. By situating these ideas in multispecies death - a pressing global concern - the paper contributes to international conversations on ecological grief, posthumanist ethics, and epistemic injustice. It argues that reconfiguring otherness in childhood studies is not only a theoretical move but an urgent ontological and ethical one in the Anthropocene.