ABSTRACT
This chapter revisits and further develops research studies that I have conducted over the past two decades focusing on teenagers and their material worlds. Building on Haraway and Barad’s significant work conceptualizing the field of socio-materiality and new materialism, I explore the notion of storied matter as in fragments of stories and histories that become embedded in objects young people value, share, and make. Applying new materialist theory coupled with Stewart’s work on ordinary affects to define story, the chapter revisits four teenagers and their objects to excavate ways that diffractions and becomings emerge in artifacts that they have shared with me. I ask how we as researchers can attend more carefully to stories brought into the world in multimodal artifacts that teenagers share and value. Turning to the possibilities and potentials of storied matter, we have an opportunity during this precarious contemporary moment post-COVID to do more and be more in the service of young people and their possible futures.
