A 'Small and Thick' Portrait of Kabelo's Digital Play

This article analyses the part of a broader ethnographic narrative portrait of a boy called Kabelo that deals with his everyday digital play. Kabelo lives and schools in Soweto, South Africa and was followed over 16 months. His portrait is a response to the dearth of sociological knowledge on the everyday digital lives of African children. A social justice orientation combined with critical ethnography, narrative inquiry and portraiture provided the conceptual and methodological framework and guided the use of a range of qualitative data collection strategies. Through activity systems analysis (ASA) (Engestrom 2015) the interrelationships and tensions within his world of digital play are anaysed. The study concludes that Kabelo's relative access to mobile digital technologies illuminates his mobilities within and between his world of digital play and enables his voice, agency and capabilities. However, tensions exist based on the misrecognition of the subject's agency and capabilities in policy. The study recommends the socially-just recognition of digital play capabilities as part of a list of children's play capabilities for inclusion in policy and formal learning systems. Attention to the production of small and thick digital ethnographies to complement big and broad data is also recommended.