This paper will present analysis and reflections from an ongoing PhD-study asking what can be learned about learning and development, when explored from young children’s (0–3-year-olds) perspectives in their everyday lives in and across their families and nurseries.

In Denmark and transnationally there has been a growing focus on the importance of early learning. In Danish ECEC-policies the importance of language, children’s communities and perspectives is foregrounded as significant areas of young children’s learning. Pedagogical practice is prompted to arrange learning environments accordingly. Learning though tends to be conceptualized as teaching, highlighting adult-child interactions and both childrens perspectives and communities as means to achieve and optimising learning outcomes. Rather than understood or theorized from the young children’s perspectives, engagements and activities with each other and their material surroundings.This presentation explores how young children take up the social and material arrangements they live their life in, in unpredictable ways. By analysing the children’s attentions and embodied orientations in the sociomaterial arrangements they participate in, the analysis points to ways young children pursuit subjectively meaningful engagements with each other and with objects, both here-and-now and how these engagements develop as over time, related to the children’s personal standpoints and interest. Insisting on exploring learning and development from young childrens perspectives and their engagements as both meaningful and transformative, challenges dominant political ideas on how to arrange and promote ‘good learning environments’ for young children.

The empirical data stems from 1,5-year ethnographic field study, following 6 children in their everyday lives in nursery and with their families. It consists of participatory observations, Sound recordings, photos and in-situ interviews with adults and older children (siblings).The theoretical point of departure is taken in psychology from the standpoint of the subject, with inspirations from both cultural historical psychology and Ingold’s phenomenological anthropology.

As digital technologies increasingly shape everyday life, parasocial interaction and relationships have become central to many people's lives. From social media to subscription platforms like OnlyFans, from dating apps to AI companions, the social self is reorganized into asymmetrical, half- and one-sided formats that offer immediate convenience at the cost of shifting principles of social mechanisms and social organizing. While causality has yet to be shown, at the same time, increasing individualization, loneliness, and experiences of an alienated state of living in disconnection from the body and the world are already traceable.

Based on a multi-method research program, including interviews, surveys, experimental and observational studies, and digital ethnographies, the study presents an integrative concept of the shaping of the parasocial self, depicting how parasocial mechanisms are integrated into everyday life to fulfil social needs, address emotions, regulate, and construct identity. Parasocial forms of interaction are shown to offer immediate gratification and convenience, yet reveal ambivalences: from dating app fatigue and AI-induced emotional investment to relational dissonance in partnerships and affective dependency on mediated others.

The findings are presented as an integrative conceptualization of parasociality, and the graduated becoming of the parasocial self as a constitutive condition of subjectivity in neoliberal digital societies, serving effective push- and pullfactors. The concept of the parasocial self is discussed in terms of mechanisms and meanings, epistemic hierarchies, and broader modifications of sociality, depicting how subjects are both a product and a producer of parasociality, caught between agency and subjugation to algorithmic control.

In contemporary Japan, the erosion of foundational connections—such as community, family, and company—that once supported people's lives has led to an increase in complex life challenges that cannot be addressed by traditional "targeted support." Consequently, the existence of people caught in the "gaps between systems" is becoming increasingly visible (Abe, 2007). We need the creation of open "spaces" within communities that transcend institutional frameworks limiting assistance recipients, spaces where anyone can drop in.

With this awareness, this presentation focuses on a space (X) where residents voluntarily gather to engage in creative improvement activities. Specifically, I examine the "Character Design Competition" project, which is planned to raise social awareness about children in need of support. Through this, activities that connect adults through enjoyment and hobbies have the potential to lead to unprecedented forms of child support is argued. For example, one of the project's initiators, who had always enjoyed ANIME and MANGA, pointed out that anime and manga have the potential to draw attention to children who need support. In the "Character Design Competition" project, participants' individual images of children become enriched. Many ideas that were initially unplanned emerged one after another (including manga, merchandise, and collaborations with YouTubers). Several members of "X" realized that the same project being undertaken within administrative services needs greater accountability but lacks authenticity on this issue. Such an activity can be seen as a form of “Art-based research” (Leavy, 2015) that enables people to engage with subjects in a fun way. Rather than planned support activities, the participants' connections forged through shared enjoyment paradoxically broadened their interest in children who need support.

Reference

Abe, A. (2007). Genndai nihon no syakaiteki haijo no genjou [Present condition of social exclusion of present age in Japan]. In H. Fukuhara (Ed.), Syakaiteki haijo/housetsu to syakai seisaku [Social exclusion/inclusion, and social policy] (pp. 129–152).Kyoto: Horitsu Bunka-Sha.

Leavy, P. (2015). Method Meets Art (2nd ed): Arts-Based Research Practice. Guilford Press.

In recent years, we have witnessed a growing polarization of political and ideological positions in public debate. The debate has moved from face-to-face forums to the digital environment. From a historical-cultural perspective (Wersch, 1998), we understand that the mediating tools used in social communication in this context, such as social networks and various digital media, with their characteristics, limitations, and possibilities, could be conditioning expression and, therefore, the internalization of discourses and affective-symbolic logics that tend toward extremism and the radicalization of messages (Marantz, 2020).

On the other hand, those of us who participate in these scenarios maintain a perception of freedom. We consider ourselves radically autonomous, while unknowingly cooperating with our own domination or surveillance. Hypnocracy (Xun, 2025) is based precisely on this paradox: the more intensely we experience the feeling of choice, the more deeply rooted the criteria by which we are classified, evaluated, and/or normalized become. Predictive algorithms, security protocols, and risk management systems do not need to prohibit; it is enough to filter, order, and hierarchize our possibilities for action and present them as agency-driven and spontaneous options, as proposed by Foucault's (2007) notion of biopolitics and governmentality, because we believe that we are witnessing a new phase: it is no longer just a matter of managing populations, but of governing from within the subject's own self-relation, that is, the way in which they think of themselves as free agents.

In this context, radical discourses, such as anti-feminist and anti-immigration discourses (Elis & Bhatia), and even those that imply a subhumanization of “others” (immigrants, minorities, women, etc.) (Teo, 2020), are consumed and recreated in monochromatic digital environments that reinforce confirmation biases and, therefore, the polarization of citizens' attitudes.

This dark political and social landscape has led us to inquire, within the framework of projects in which different scenarios of activity and social groups interact, those conditions that could build bridges between subjectivities that would otherwise remain isolated and, at present, opposed. From our practice in emancipatory projects in disadvantaged communities in contexts of cultural diversity, in which we have participated for 30 years, we have observed the emergence of hybrid scenarios of activity and hybrid psychological agents, which we will present as transformative possibilities (Macías-Gómez-Estern, 2020; 2021; Macías-Gómez-Estern et al., 2025).

These scenarios and agents have emerged throughout the process of face-to-face participation in activities with low levels of formalization, often mediated by artistic languages (e.g., music), and have generated systems that are resilient to crises and emancipatory transformations in the different groups and individuals participating (Martínez-Lozano et al; 2023; Lalueza et. al, 2024; Macías-Gómez-Estern & Lalueza, 2024). In this presentation, we will share our ongoing reflections on these ideas.

Our contribution is therefore situated at the intersection of political philosophy and critical psychology, and questions those other possible figures of the subject that can operate as counter-devices against the new regimes of power.

References:

Ellis, B. D., & Bhatia, S. (2019). Cultural psychology for a new era of citizenship politics. Culture & Psychology, 25(2), 220-240.

Foucault, M. (2007). Security, territory, population: Lectures at the Collège de France, 1977-1978.

Lalueza, J.L.; Martínez-Lozano, V. & Macías-Gómez-Estern, B. (2024). University-community partnerships as “hybrid contexts of activity”: learnings from two projects with Roma children in Spain. En M.W. Mahmood, M. Faulstich Orellana & J. Cano (eds). University-Community Partnerships for Transformative Education: Sowing Seeds of Resistance and Renewal, pp. 265-282. Springer Nature.

Macías-Gómez-Estern, B. (2020). "Hybrid psychology agent": Overcoming the about/for dichotomy from praxis, Theory & Psychology, 30 (3), 430-435. https://doi.org/10.1177/0959354320923726

Macías-Gómez-Estern, B. (2021). Critical Psychology for community emancipation: insights from socio-educative praxis in hybrid setting. In Machin, R. (Ed.) The new waves in Social Psychology and Psychoanalysis. Empirical and theoretical tendencies and Challenges. Palgrave-McMillan (pp.25-54).

Macías-Gómez-Estern, B. & Lalueza, J.L. (2024). Navigating I-positionings in higher education Service Learning as hybrid scenarios: a case study, Language, Culture and Social Interaction, 45, 100805.

Macías-Gómez-Estern, B., Martínez-Lozano, V., & Lalueza, J.L (2025). Re-envisioning collaborative university-community engagement through a critical ethnographic lens: transformative hybrid scenarios. Ethnography and Education, 1–20. https://doi.org/10.1080/17457823.2025.2565009

Marantz, A. (2020). Antisocial: Online extremists, techno-utopians, and the hijacking of the American conversation. Penguin.

Seco-Martinez, J.M. (2025) La democracia Despierta. Frente al capitalismo de vigilancia. Aconcagua

Teo, T. (2020). Subhumanism: The re‐emergence of an affective‐symbolic ontology in the migration debate and beyond. Journal for the Theory of Social Behaviour, 50(2), 132-148.

Wertsch, J. V. (1991). Voices of the Mind: A Sociocultural Approach to Mediated Action. Harvard University Press.

Xun, J. (2025). Ipnocrazia. Trump, Muske l’architettura della realtà. Edizioni Tlon.