‘She’s nice company and a good friend’: thinking with Haraway to reconceptualise children’s playful interactions with Alexa in the family home

Sakr, Mona ORCID: https://orcid.org/0000-0003-3057-2758 (2021) ‘She’s nice company and a good friend’: thinking with Haraway to reconceptualise children’s playful interactions with Alexa in the family home. In: Creative families: Gender and technologies of everyday life. Mikats, Jana, Kink-Hampersberger, Susanne and Oates-Indruchová, Libora, eds. Palgrave Studies in Mediating Kinship, Representation, and Difference . Palgrave Macmillan, Cham, Switzerland, pp. 167-188. ISBN 9783030708023, e-ISBN 9783030708030. [Book Section] (doi:10.1007/978-3-030-70803-0_8)

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Abstract

The aims of this chapter are to explore the ways in which children think about Alexa – the conversational agent that inhabits Amazon’s The Echo device – and what happens when they playfully engage with it/her in a family context. In particular, the chapter seeks to examine the potentials of children’s play and playfulness with Alexa through Donna Haraway’s concepts of ‘the cyborg’ and ‘making kin’. In Haraway’s post-human philosophy, the cyborg as an entity generates possibilities for troubling a number of divides that we live by (human/non-human; male/female; mind/body). [...]

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