ABSTRACT
In this chapter, the author reviews and discusses a selection of critical and emergent issues in the area of research on young children’s digital literacies and practices. He focuses on what he consider three key issues. First, the challenges, understood as obstacles to overcome, associated with observing young children’s digital literacies and practices. Second, the complexities tied to how young children’s digital practices are represented and conceptualized. Third, the author discusses how research on young children’s literacies is responding to the socio-academic imperative to make research a collaborative endeavour. He considers how these critical questions connect to plausible future research scenarios. The observation of young children and infants is historically the first and one of the most important methods in the study of human development and yet has a contentious position within contemporary studies of childhood. Transferring responsibilities to children in the data-gathering process, in itself, construes children as agentive.
