ABSTRACT
Onto-cartography has two foundational premises, which offer a distinct and particularly helpful resource for witnessing the social-materialities of childhood. The second premise of onto-cartography is that it is – in principle slightly less critical of correlationist doxa. This chapter explores materialist and object-theories to their logical limits in ways that might appear wilfully esoteric, illogical, perhaps silly, even, but certainly speculative. Michael Gallagher is interested in what he terms a “geology of media”, focused on the technological and earthly manifestations of media – media’s matter. Critically, he argues that “[t]he planetary nature of digital media require analyses that, in line with wider arguments in childhood studies, follow hidden relations across different scales, and address the politics of harmful materialities”. Bryant’s discussions of flow and power – and Gallagher’s of the planetary scale of geologies of media – link nicely to a second style for thinking materials and childhoods: hyperobjects.
