'I once wore an angry bird t-shirt and went to read Qur’an': asymmetrical institutional complexity and emerging consumption practices in Pakistan

This article brings together theories of institutional logics and the exploration of the lives of tweens in Pakistan to understand how emerging consumption practices fit within Pakistani children’s daily lives, and how institutional complexity that includes the dominance of religion under Pakistani Islamization is negotiated to separate and maintain the differences between them. We identify resolutions to asymmetrical institutional complexity in the consumption of character T-shirts: spatial–temporal practices, visual practices, symbolic substitution practices and single logic practices. We contribute to an understanding of how consumption happens in an Eastern Muslim culture, and how multiple institutional logics shape the consumption practices of children, by articulating how halal consumption practices, far from being essentialist, or presented as market segmentation, form from negotiations and reflections at the boundaries where Islam and Market logics meet

Putting posthumanist theory to work to reconfigure gender in early childhood: when theory becomes method becomes art

This article seeks to disrupt contemporary cultural imaginations about children and childhood; we offer some provocations to think differently about the regulation and governance of gender by taking a step back to consider children and childhoods more expansively and generatively, as becomings. Underpinning these concerns is the principal objective to explore ways in which posthumanist theorizing can be translated into posthumanist methodology through arts-based practice. In an attempt to illustrate how we have approached this we revisit several core onto-epistemological dilemmas posed by Lather (1993) when she asks: what counts as valid knowledge? Which then leads us onto ask what counts as data? What does data do? And what do we do with what the data does? By experimenting with a range of mediums (photography, artwork and poetry) ‘in a game of cat’s cradle’ (Haraway, 1994) we explore the potential that posthumanist approaches offer to extend and stretch the parameters that have come to shape established ways of knowing and becoming in early childhood