Posthumanist and New Materialist Methodologies: Research After the Child (Children: Global Posthumanist Perspectives and Materialist Theories) 9811527075, 9789811527074

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Children: Global Posthumanist Perspectives and Materialist Theories Series Editors: Karen Malone · Marek Tesar · Sonja Arndt

Claudia Diaz-Diaz Paulina Semenec

Posthumanist and New Materialist Methodologies Research After the Child

Children: Global Posthumanist Perspectives and Materialist Theories Series Editors Karen Malone, Swinburne University of Technology, Hawthorn, VIC, Australia Marek Tesar, The University of Auckland, Auckland, New Zealand Sonja Arndt, The University of Waikato, Hamilton, New Zealand

This book series presents original and cutting edge knowledge for a growing field of scholarship about children. Its focus is on the interface of children being in the everyday spaces and places of contemporary childhoods, and how different theoretical approaches influence ways of knowing the future lives of children. The authors explore and analyse children’s lived embodied everyday experiences and encounters with tangible objects and materials such as artefacts, toys, homes, landscapes, animals, food, and the broader intangible materiality of representational objects, such as popular culture, air, weather, bodies, relations, identities and sexualities. Monographs and edited collections in this series are attentive to the mundane everyday relationships, in-between ‘what is’ and ‘what could be’, with matters and materials. The series is unique because it challenges traditional western-centric views of children and childhood by drawing on a range of perspectives including Indigenous, Pacifica, Asian and those from the Global South. The book series is also unique as it provides a shift from developmental, social constructivists, structuralist approaches to understanding and theorising about childhood. These dominant paradigms will be challenged through a variety of post-positivist/postqualitative/posthumanist theories of being children and childhood.

More information about this series at http://www.springer.com/series/15731

Claudia Diaz-Diaz Paulina Semenec •

Posthumanist and New Materialist Methodologies Research After the Child

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Claudia Diaz-Diaz University of British Columbia Vancouver, BC, Canada

Paulina Semenec University of British Columbia Vancouver, BC, Canada

ISSN 2523-3408 ISSN 2523-3416 (electronic) Children: Global Posthumanist Perspectives and Materialist Theories ISBN 978-981-15-2707-4 ISBN 978-981-15-2708-1 (eBook) https://doi.org/10.1007/978-981-15-2708-1 © Springer Nature Singapore Pte Ltd. 2020 This work is subject to copyright. All rights are reserved by the Publisher, whether the whole or part of the material is concerned, specifically the rights of translation, reprinting, reuse of illustrations, recitation, broadcasting, reproduction on microfilms or in any other physical way, and transmission or information storage and retrieval, electronic adaptation, computer software, or by similar or dissimilar methodology now known or hereafter developed. The use of general descriptive names, registered names, trademarks, service marks, etc. in this publication does not imply, even in the absence of a specific statement, that such names are exempt from the relevant protective laws and regulations and therefore free for general use. The publisher, the authors and the editors are safe to assume that the advice and information in this book are believed to be true and accurate at the date of publication. Neither the publisher nor the authors or the editors give a warranty, expressed or implied, with respect to the material contained herein or for any errors or omissions that may have been made. The publisher remains neutral with regard to jurisdictional claims in published maps and institutional affiliations. This Springer imprint is published by the registered company Springer Nature Singapore Pte Ltd. The registered company address is: 152 Beach Road, #21-01/04 Gateway East, Singapore 189721, Singapore

Acknowledgements

This book would not have been possible without the 19 scholars who engaged with us and our questions so enthusiastically in their interviews. Their work has informed and continues to inform our thinking and research practices with children, and we are extremely grateful to have had the opportunity to speak and engage with them so openly about their scholarship. We’d like to thank the series editors—Sonja Arndt, Karen Malone, and Marek Tesar for turning our idea for this book into a reality and for supporting us on this journey. Your guidance and patience is much appreciated. We’d also like to thank Springer and the editors for helping us put this book together. Thank you to Dr. Taylor Webb, and our colleagues in the 2017 reading group. Special thanks go to Marcelina Piotrowski, Anna Ryoo, and Marie France-Berard. Finally, we’d like to thank our families—Alvaro and Alfonsina and Voytek—for supporting us while we worked on this book. Your love, patience, and encouragement did not go unnoticed. We love you, and of course, THANK YOU!

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In the early months of 2017, the two of us, along with a small handful of graduate students and a willing professor, took part in a reading group centered on the theme of “posthumanist and new materialist” theories in education. This reading group was the result of our curiosity about this growing and diverse body of work that we were becoming increasingly intrigued and puzzled by. Together, we were (re) introduced to concepts like Braidotti’s (2013) “posthuman”, Barad’s (2003) “intra-action” and “diffraction”, “assemblages” (Deleuze & Guattari, 1987), “affects” (Coole & Frost, 2010) “vibrant matter” (Bennett, 2010) as well as non-representational approaches (Thrift, 2008) and postqualitative methodologies (Lather, 2013; St. Pierre, 2011). We had invigorating discussions about what these concepts and approaches not only meant, but what they had the capacity to do. During this time, both of us were also conducting fieldwork with children as part of our doctoral studies—one of us in an early childhood setting, and the other in a primary school classroom. The combination of reading difficult theory alongside the more practical demands of our own fieldwork had a profound impact on our thinking and research practices. We started to re-imagine the parameters of what “mattered” to the children in our studies, and to pay attention to things we once thought were insignificant. Our thinking about data, analysis, and the limits of representation were also being challenged by childhood scholars who were thinking with many of the approaches and concepts we were reading about, and who were putting them to work in interesting and provocative ways. At the same time, we wondered about the challenges that many of these scholars, who do posthuman and new materialist work, encountered in their own research with children. We were curious about how they navigated the tensions as they moved away from child-centered methodologies that “decenter” the child, when children seemed to be so central in educational settings as well as during research (Spyrou, 2017; Prout, 2005). How did they put the various concepts we were encountering in our readings like “diffraction” or “porosity” to work in ways that allowed for different reconfigurations of the child? How did they approach their writing in ways that did not privilege child-centered perspectives? vii

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This book—Research After the Child—was our attempt to better understand some of these questions. To do this, we reached out to several prominent scholars who have taken up many of the challenges brought forth by the ontological turn and engaged with each one in an in-depth interview about their work. These scholars are at the forefront of posthuman and new materialist research with children, and they have become central to our thinking about what research might look like if we set aside human-centered methodologies. Within the broad field of early childhood studies, this has meant an interrogation of, and move away from child-centered methodologies toward those that “decenter” the child. Posthuman and new materialist theories and approaches complicate the notion that children are the products of either social or biological forces. Many of the scholars in this book discuss how children are entangled within the social, material, and discursive practices in ways that demand other research methodologies to understand those relationships. As they show, this opens up opportunities to focus on children’s relations with human and more-than-human others and on generative ways of understanding children’s agency as something beyond human capacity. Discussions about research methodologies have long been present in the field of early childhood studies. Since the 1980s, scholars concerned with the dominant role that psychology and child development theories had in defining what a normal childhood looks like, started to open spaces for debate. For example, scholars interested in reconceptualizing early childhood education (Bloch, Swadener, & Cannella, 2018) have continually challenged notions of the “child” and “childhoods” that labeled and constrained children’s lives. Among these critiques, childhood scholars had come to challenge the limited and often very adult-centric ways of understanding children as well as child-centered methodologies (see: Blaise, 2014; Burman, 2007; Grieshaber & Cannella, 2001; Kessler & Swadener, 1992; Lubeck, 1998). The unprecedented challenges that children are facing in the global, environmental, social, and economic crisis has become an urgent call for early childhood researchers. For scholars in this collection, it is imperative to rethink the foundations of what it means to be a child and their relationships with the more-than-human world. Much of this diverse work pushes the boundaries of qualitative research and seeks to reconfigure methodological notions of, for example, voice, experience, data, and agency in order to attend to the more-than-human (Jackson & Mazzei, 2012; Koro-Ljungberg et al., 2017; Mazzei, 2016). This effort certainly welcomes interdisciplinary approaches inspired by broader debates in a diverse range of disciplines including affect studies, feminist studies, cultural geography, science studies, and philosophy. As the interviews in this book highlight, the methodological and ontological attention to decenter the child through posthumanist and new materialist approaches unsettle dominant discourses and practices that position the child as a given, coherent, agentic, and knowable subject that moves through specific developmental stages. What many of these approaches attend to instead, is how the child is always already entangled with human and more-than-human others, and how these various entanglements come to matter. In the context of the proliferation of research

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methodologies, we are aware that the term posthumanist and new materialist methodologies may not be precise or accurate enough to describe the myriad methodologies the scholars in this collection engage within their research. In this book, we use the terms to signpost approaches that embrace (albeit in varying ways), relational perspectives in which relationships are privileged over singularity. It is on this note that we are also humbly reminded of our privilege that enabled us to think, write, and live on the traditional, ancestral, and unceded territories of the Musqueam Nation. As uninvited visitors in what is now known as the coastal city of Vancouver in the province of British Columbia in Canada, we wish to acknowledge the systems of knowledge(s) that have become displaced and devalued in place of more dominant Western ontologies and epistemologies. Moreover, in thinking and writing about posthuman and new materialist approaches, we strive to keep in mind that Indigenous peoples around the world have long related to and protected the land in ways that honor the intimate connections between humans and the more-than-human world.

Traveling Conversations The interviews in this book took us to different places, both literally and figuratively: New York, Copenhagen, Vancouver, and to virtual locations including Wee Jasper, Australia, the U.K., Finland, and South Africa. Multiple forces including jetlag, time differences, noisy spaces, busy schedules, unreliable internet connections, among many others, all informed the different ways we came together to think through questions related to “research after the child”. As many of the scholars in this book think with the work of others, and often conduct research collaboratively, the various intersections and entanglements provided exciting opportunities to deeply engage with research from multiple contexts. The many overlaps and divergences in projects, approaches, and lines of inquiry enabled for rich, but also difficult conversations about a variety of issues related to doing research with children. We structured the interviews around some of the key questions that were emerging for us—conceptual/theoretical, working in the field with children, and writing/representing research, although many interviews ventured to other areas and addressed different issues and concerns. However, a core question in each interview was about how the scholars thought about methodological practices that decenter the child in their research. What does this look like in theory and in practice? What are the implications of a decentered childhood, and what new questions, practices, and ways of being does it make possible? The very material forces of time zones and life commitments made some interviews challenging to conduct in person, but we were fortunate to be able to meet with the following scholars for our interviews: Iris Duhn, Sylvia Kind, Karen Malone, Fikile Nxumalo, Pauliina Rautio, and Christopher Schulte. The interviews conducted in person were edited by us for clarity. Our “virtual” interviews were conducted with: Mindy Blaise and Veronica Pacini-Ketchabaw, Riikka Hohti, Peter

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Kraftl, Jayne Osgood, Margaret Somerville, and Affrica Taylor. Some of the contributors in this book asked to respond to our questions in writing, so in the written format readers will find interviews by Sonja Arndt, Bronwyn Davies, Hillevi Lenz Taguchi, Karin Murris, Marek Tesar, and Casey Y. Myers. While the written interviews were collaborative in nature, we want to acknowledge that they were solely written by the contributors.

Traveling Ideas The interviews in this collection were carefully curated by the contributors and the two of us. We proposed a set of questions for each researcher based on their scholarship and contributions to early childhood studies and research methodologies. One guiding question that we asked of every scholar was how they engaged in methodologies that decenter the child. These interviews offer insights regarding that question. More specifically, the interviews delve into what decentering the child might look like in research, the opportunities and challenges of posthumanist and new materialist methodologies, and the ethical–political commitments behind their methodological choices. Through the interviews, scholars shared with us how they have rethought key ideas in methodology such as agency, voice, data, analysis, and writing through posthumanist and new materialist perspectives. To invite the reader to go through the 18 interviews, we organized the book into three sections. Although scholars speak to all the themes highlighted throughout the book, the sections bring together their perspectives in ways that illustrate the prominent themes that came up in our conversations. The first section of the book titled, From the Individual to the Collective, features interviews with Margaret Somerville, Bronwyn Davies, Jayne Osgood, Hillevi Lenz Taguchi, Sonja Arndt, and the collaborative interview with Mindy Blaise and Veronica Pacini-Ketchabaw. These contributors offer insights about how decentering or moving away from child-centered methodologies works as a principle to resist or interrupt ideas that focus on the individual and that situate the human as superior and exceptional. These scholars share their ethical–political concerns with the production of knowledge, emphasizing their commitments to research that is collective, transformative, and feminist. While these scholars value a move away from child-centered methodologies, they remain in conversations with the production of racialized and gendered identities through children’s relationships with the world. The second section titled, Recreating and Tracing Childhoods, features interviews with Karin Murris, Pauliina Rautio, Casey Myers, Christopher Schulte, Sylvia Kind, and Marek Tesar. Their research shows us that decentering the child can be also understood as a method to understand the underexamined multiple relationships children have with/in the world. For them, research becomes material and posthuman in that they work with animals, materials, drawings, photographs,

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storybooks in ways that are creative and embodied in their research practices. Their purpose is to move the field toward more affirmative and diverse childhoods. The third section titled, Situating Children’s Lives, feature interviews with Karen Malone, Fikile Nxumalo, Iris Duhn, Affrica Taylor, Peter Kraftl, and Riikka Hohti. While in the previous section, scholars discussed their research methodologies as a way to decenter the child, scholars in this section make us think about decentering as the result of understanding the child as one part of the world of entanglements. Their research is situated in place and time but always in an intimate relation with global issues. For them, thinking with concepts (e.g., such as Haraway’s idea of compost, water, or porosity) allows them to think about their research in pedagogical terms. Overall, the researchers in this section discuss their interest in creating pedagogies for caring about/with the world.

Our Invitation We invite readers to engage in the conversations that follow in any order, and with an openness to being challenged, much like we were and continue to be. Each interview includes a “further reading” section which is a short list of some of the contributors’ writings we have found inspiring, or recent/forthcoming work we look forward to exploring. We hope that the diverse range of perspectives offered in this book will contribute to the growing body of literature that seeks to legitimize the proliferation of alternative research methodologies and the productive possibilities they offer to the study of children’s lives. Moreover, our hope is that this book of interviews engages doctoral students and early career scholars who, like us, find themselves intrigued by posthumanist and new materialist work, and who may be wondering how to put some of the ideas into practice. While the interviews in this book do not seek to resolve the many tensions and challenges that are discussed in regards to the methodological approaches this ontological turn brings forth, they do provide the encouragement to continue to think deeply with others, to attend to things that may seem too small or insignificant, to experiment and wonder, and do “research after the child” otherwise.

References Barad, K. (2003). Posthumanist performativity: Toward an understanding of how matter comes to matter. Signs: Journal of Women in Culture and Society, 28(3), 801–831. Bennett, J. (2010). Vibrant matter: A political ecology of things. Durham, NC: Duke University Press. Blaise, M. (2014). Interfering with gendered development: A timely intervention. International Journal of Early Childhood, 46(3), 317–326. doi:10.1007/s13158-014-0122-9.

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Bloch, M. N., Swadener, B. B., & Cannella, G. S. (2018). Reconceptualizing early childhood education and care - a reader: Critical questions, new imaginaries & social activism (2nd ed.). New York: Peter Lang. Braidotti, R. (2013). The Posthuman. Malden, MA: Polity Press. Burman, E. (2007). Deconstructing developmental psychology. London: Routledge. Coole, C., & Frost, S. (2010). Introducing the new materialisms. In C. Coole, & S. Frost, (Eds.), New materialisms: Ontology, agency, and politics (pp. 1–43). Durham & London: Duke University Press. Deleuze, G., & Guattari, F. (1987). A thousand plateaus: Capitalism and schizophrenia. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press. Grieshaber, S., & Cannella, G. (Eds.). (2001). Embracing identities in early childhood education: Diversity and possibilities. New York, NY: Teachers College Press. Jackson, A. & Mazzei, L. A. (2012). Thinking with theory in qualitative research: Viewing data across multiple perspectives. Abingdon, Oxon; New York, NY: Routledge. Kessler, S., & Swadener, B. B. (Eds.). (1992). Reconceptualizing the early childhood curriculum: Beginning the dialogue. New York, NY: Teachers College Press. Koro-Ljungberg, M., Löytönen, & T., Tesar, M. (2017). Disrupting data in qualitative inquiry: Entanglements with the post-critical and post-anthropocentric. Peter Lang Publishing. Lather, P. (2013). Methodology-21: What do we do in the afterward? International Journal of Qualitative Studies in Education, 26(January), 634–645. Lubeck, S. (1998). Is Developmentally appropriate practice for everyone? Childhood Education, 74(5), 283–292. Mazzei, L. (2016). Voice without a subject. Cultural Studies$Critical Methodologies, 16(2), 151–161. Prout, A. (2005). The future of childhood. London & New York: Routledge. Spyrou, S. (2017). Time to decenter childhood? Childhood, 24(4), 433–437. St. Pierre, E. A. (2011). The critique and the coming after. In N. K. Denzin & Y. S. Lincoln (Eds.), SAGE handbook of qualitative inquiry (4th ed. pp. 611–635). Los Angeles, CA: SAGE. Thrift, N. (2008). Non-representational theory: Space, politics, affect. London & New York: Routledge.

Contents

Part I 1

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From the Individual to the Collective

Interview with Sonja Arndt . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . Sonja Arndt, Paulina Semenec and Claudia Diaz-Diaz 1.1 Attending to “Otherness” . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 1.2 Decentering the Child . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 1.3 Unsettling Concepts of Voice and Agency . . . . . . . . . 1.4 Addressing Critiques: Re-doing Ethics in a Posthuman Times . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 1.5 Areas for Future Research . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . Further Reading . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .

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Interview with Mindy Blaise and Veronica Pacini-Ketchabaw Mindy Blaise, Veronica Pacini-Ketchabaw, Claudia Diaz-Diaz and Paulina Semenec 2.1 Collaborative Engagements . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 2.2 Challenging Narratives Around ‘Early Childhood’ . . . . . . 2.3 Composing Other Worlds . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 2.4 Experimentation in Childhood Research . . . . . . . . . . . . . . Further Reading . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . Interview with Bronwyn Davies . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . Bronwyn Davies, Claudia Diaz-Diaz and Paulina Semenec 3.1 Tracing Lines of Thoughts About Gender . . . . . . . 3.2 Decentering the Child . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 3.3 Writing and Mentoring . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 3.4 The Neoliberal University . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 3.5 Ethics and Politics . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 3.6 Research Contributions and New Projects . . . . . . . Further Reading . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .

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Interview with Jayne Osgood . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . Jayne Osgood, Paulina Semenec and Claudia Diaz-Diaz 5.1 Thinking with/Alongside Poststructural and New Materialisms Work . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 5.2 Addressing Critiques of New Materialist Work . . 5.3 Thinking with Theory/Concepts . . . . . . . . . . . . . 5.4 Decentering the Child . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 5.5 Attending to Children Differently/Being with . . . Further Reading . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .

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Interview with Margaret Somerville . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . Margaret Somerville, Claudia Diaz-Diaz and Paulina Semenec 6.1 Learning About the Land Through Embodiment . . . . . . 6.2 Intra-action as a New Methodological Lens . . . . . . . . . 6.3 Decentering the Child . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 6.4 Mentoring Future Researchers . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 6.5 Embodied Writing . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . Further Reading . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .

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Interview with Hillevi Lenz Taguchi . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . Hillevi Lenz Taguchi, Paulina Semenec and Claudia Diaz-Diaz 4.1 Challenging Systems of Knowledge Production . . . . . . . 4.2 Acknowledging Multiples Ways of Knowing . . . . . . . . . Further Reading . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .

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Recreating and Tracing Childhoods

Interview with Sylvia Kind . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . Sylvia Kind, Claudia Diaz-Diaz and Paulina Semenec 7.1 Walking into the Studio . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 7.2 Doing Research as an Atelierista . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 7.3 Researching Children’s Encounters: Cinnamon Bear . 7.4 Decentering the Child in Research . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 7.5 Thinking with Others . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 7.6 Intentions in Research . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . Further Reading . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .

Interview with Karin Murris . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . Karin Murris, Paulina Semenec and Claudia Diaz-Diaz 8.1 Material Approaches to Doing Research with Children 8.2 Decentering the Child Through the Neologism “iii” . . 8.3 Addressing Critiques . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 8.4 Current Issues in Childhood Studies . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 8.5 Approaches to Writing . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . Further Reading . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .

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Interview with Casey Y. Myers . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . Casey Y. Myers, Claudia Diaz-Diaz and Paulina Semenec 9.1 Photography-as-Method and Everyday Materialities 9.2 Children, Among Other Things, and Decentering the Child in Early Childhood . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 9.3 Posthumanism, New Materialism, and (a) Political Intent in Research . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 9.4 Attending to Pressing Issues . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 9.5 Temporality and Material Worlds . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 9.6 Writing and Early Childhood Scholarship . . . . . . . . 9.7 Upcoming Research Projects . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . Further Reading . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .

10 Interview with Pauliina Rautio . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . Pauliina Rautio, Paulina Semenec and Claudia Diaz-Diaz 10.1 Entering into the Field of Childhood . . . . . . . . . . . 10.2 Child–Animal Relations . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 10.3 Thinking with/About “Decentering” the Child . . . . 10.4 “Doing” Posthuman and New Materialist Research . Further Reading . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .

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Part III

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11 Interview with Christopher Schulte . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . Christopher Schulte, Paulina Semenec and Claudia Diaz-Diaz 11.1 Engaging in the Study of Childhood . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 11.2 Researcher/Child Positionings . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 11.3 Decentering the Child . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 11.4 Conceptual Orientations . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 11.5 Teaching/Working with Children . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 11.6 On Writing and Critique . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . Further Reading . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 12 Interview with Marek Tesar . . . . . . . . . . Marek Tesar, Paulina Semenec and Claudia 12.1 Disrupting data . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 12.2 Posthumanism in childhood studies . Further Reading . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .

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Situating Children’s Lives

13 Interview with Iris Duhn . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . Iris Duhn, Claudia Diaz-Diaz and Paulina Semenec 13.1 Naming the World: Posthuman Focus and Qualitative Data . 13.2 Place and Decentering the Child . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 13.3 Addressing the Critiques of Posthuman and Materialist Perspectives . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .

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13.4 Pedagogies of Caring for the World . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 152 13.5 On Writing . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 153 Further Reading . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 155 14 Interview with Riikka Hohti . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . Riikka Hohti, Paulina Semenec and Claudia Diaz-Diaz 14.1 Entering into the Field of Childhood . . . . . . . . . 14.2 Concepts on the Move . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 14.3 Decentering the Child . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 14.4 Children’s “Voice(s)” . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 14.5 (Troubling) Child–Animal Entanglements . . . . . . Further Reading . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .

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15 Interview with Peter Kraftl . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . Peter Kraftl, Paulina Semenec and Claudia Diaz-Diaz 15.1 Entering into the Field of Childhood . . . . . . . . . . . . 15.2 Nonrepresentational Research Practices and Children 15.3 What Else? . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 15.4 Decentering the Child . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 15.5 Interdisciplinarity . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 15.6 Children’s Challenges and Childhood Studies . . . . . . Further Reading . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 16 Interview with Karen Malone . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . Karen Malone, Claudia Diaz-Diaz and Paulina Semenec 16.1 Tracing Perspectives on Children and Childhood . . 16.2 Decentering the Child . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 16.3 Shifting Lenses on Research Methodologies . . . . . . 16.4 Companion Grief and Children’s Challenges in the Anthropocene . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . Further Reading . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .

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17 Interview with Fikile Nxumalo . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . Fikile Nxumalo, Claudia Diaz-Diaz and Paulina Semenec 17.1 Challenging Colonized and Neoliberal Childhoods . . . . . . . . 17.2 Feminist and Indigenous Frameworks “for” Early Childhood . 17.3 Foregrounding Indigenous Presence Through Research Practices . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 17.4 Decentering the Child in Early Childhood Education Research . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 17.5 Working with Educators and Destabilizing Dichotomies . . . . 17.6 Collective and Collaborative Research-Creation in Early Childhood Research . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 17.7 Writing About What Troubles Us . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . Further Reading . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .

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18 Interview with Affrica Taylor . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . Affrica Taylor, Claudia Diaz-Diaz and Paulina Semenec 18.1 Challenging the Divide Between Culture and Nature . . . 18.2 More-than-Human Methods . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 18.3 Writing as Potentially Playful . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 18.4 Decentering the Child . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 18.5 Rethinking the Politics of Living Well Together . . . . . . 18.6 Research as Bringing up Difficult Conversations . . . . . . 18.7 Thinking Collectively with More-than-Human Methods 18.8 Justice and Activism . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . Further Reading . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .

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Contributors

Sonja Arndt Melbourne Graduate School of Education, University of Melbourne, Melbourne, Australia Mindy Blaise Edith Cowan University, Joondalup, Australia Bronwyn Davies Western Sydney University, Sydney, Australia Claudia Diaz-Diaz University of British Columbia, Vancouver, BC, Canada Iris Duhn Ministry of Education, Wellington, New Zealand Riikka Hohti Manchester Metropolitan University, Manchester, UK Sylvia Kind Capilano University, North Vancouver, Canada Peter Kraftl University of Birmingham, Birmingham, UK Karen Malone Swinburne University of Technology, Melbourne, Australia Karin Murris University of Cape Town, Cape Town, South Africa Casey Y. Myers Kent State University Child Development Center, Kent, OH, USA Fikile Nxumalo University of Toronto, Toronto, Canada Jayne Osgood Middlesex University, London, UK Veronica Pacini-Ketchabaw Western University, London, Canada Pauliina Rautio University of Oulu, Oulu, Finland Christopher Schulte University of Arkansas, Fayetteville, USA Paulina Semenec University of British Columbia, Vancouver, BC, Canada

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Margaret Somerville Western Sydney University, Sydney, Australia Hillevi Lenz Taguchi Stockholm University, Stockholm, Sweden Affrica Taylor University of Canberra, Canberra, Australia Marek Tesar University of Auckland, Auckland, New Zealand

Contributors

Part I

From the Individual to the Collective

The interviews featured in Part 1 draw together a focus on collectivity, collaboration, and the transformative potentials of methodologies and approaches that seek to decenter the child. When the two of us conceived of this book, one of the core questions we had in mind was how each scholar, decenters the child in their research. Throughout the interviews, however, we were continually provoked to think beyond the individual researcher who has the agency to decenter. The responses shared by many of our contributors pointed to a more collective force of decentering and one that does not necessarily come from Western epistemologies and ontologies. The interviews in this section drew our attention in particular to these ideas—to the power of collaboration with others: communities (both abroad and local), educators, children, and other researchers. This work of decentering thus, in never done individually—it takes thinking with others (through theory, engagement, collaboration, experimentation) and doing this work in ways that are always committed to ethical and transformative potentials. To compose new worlds as Mindy Blaise and Veronica Pacini-Ketchabaw discuss in this section, takes time, dedication, and even failure— moving toward collective transformation—and to produce research that encompasses more-than-human concerns, is never completed in a single research project. As the interviews with Sonja Arndt, Margaret Somerville, and Bronwyn Davies highlight, ongoing, embodied engagement with research communities—working and learning together (and from) those we work with, is essential and always situated in the spaces/places we do research. As Sonja Arndt highlights in her interview, we all still have much to learn! Other scholars included in this section drew our attention to the ethical–political concerns of knowledge production, and how we can never lose sight of the ways in which children’s gendered and racialized identities continue to inform their relations in the world. Methodologies for decentering the child, therefore, should always remain committed to the politics of identity, while also taking into account the ways in which materiality comes into play. Our interviews with Hillevi Lenz Taguchi and Jayne Osgood bring such ideas to the fore, while also once again, reminding us to be careful with how such new work is taken up. What do we want this work to do?

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Part I: From the Individual to the Collective

Why are we thinking with particular theorists and not others? These are some of the questions that these interviews really provoked us to think more about. While all the interviewees in this book spoke to these ideas, the interviews included here illustrated what collective and collaborative research could do for our thinking (and doing) as researchers. As early career scholars, we often find ourselves working individually, so any opportunity to work collectively with others—whether through joint writing projects or collaborative research is always a refreshing change of pace. The interviews in this section demonstrate that a collective research ethos means not only working together as researchers, but also working well with our research participants—be they human/children participants or more-than-human others.

Chapter 1

Interview with Sonja Arndt Sonja Arndt, Paulina Semenec and Claudia Diaz-Diaz

I love how the notion of the posthuman challenges us to decenter ourselves and the children we are researching with, to pay more attention to the wider worldly relationships that we’re all enmeshed in.

In the first interview of this section, Sonja Arndt highlights the political and ethical implications of working with others in diverse/international contexts, and about the importance of “recognizing those ‘relations of significant othernesses’ that Donna Haraway talks about, when we start to see ourselves as entangled with so much more than just the humans around us or in relationships with us.” Thinking with concepts such as otherness and interconnectedness, Sonja suggests, enables us to think beyond the human, a point that many scholars in this collection also echo. Recognizing this interconnectedness and entanglement, Sonja poignantly suggests, however, is not “new,” as it is a central to many Indigenous epistemologies and ontologies. This gave us much to think about, especially as we continue to engage in what many consider to be “new” methodologies and research practices. Sonja’s scholarship focuses on otherness (including diversity as a problem that requires a solution) and draws on posthumanist and materialist approaches to think through notions of teacher identity and subjectivity formation. She critiques the impact of globalization on teachers’ education especially the influence of the theories and pedagogies from the West that are used in developing countries giving no value to their own knowledges, experiences, and practices. Sonja’s interview was an important S. Arndt (B) Melbourne Graduate School of Education, University of Melbourne, Melbourne, Australia e-mail: [email protected] P. Semenec · C. Diaz-Diaz University of British Columbia, Vancouver, BC, Canada e-mail: [email protected] C. Diaz-Diaz e-mail: [email protected] © Springer Nature Singapore Pte Ltd. 2020 C. Diaz-Diaz and P. Semenec, Posthumanist and New Materialist Methodologies, Children: Global Posthumanist Perspectives and Materialist Theories, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-981-15-2708-1_1

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reminder for us to always keep notions of difference and otherness in mind, especially as we seek to find “better” approaches to doing research. Sonja’s interview prompted us to ask: better for whom? Who and what knowledge remains othered in the work that we do? We also appreciated Sonja’s invitation to accept the uncertainty of our times, and to become responsible in our entanglements with others (both human and more-than-human). This responsibility entails not only that we take account of morethan-human agencies, but also that we actively acknowledge Indigenous knowledge systems that hold these epistemologies and ontologies at their core.

1.1 Attending to “Otherness” Q. Your scholarship centers heavily on the concept of the “other” and “otherness.” How do these specific concepts inform the work you do in the early childhood context (either with early childhood educators or children) both locally and globally? These are central notions in all of my work. They underpin the courses I teach, the work I do in support roles in early childhood education (ECE) settings, and my local and international teacher education work. In undergraduate teacher education they influence the ways that I approach the content, the students, my teaching space. As a foreigner in many of these situations, I live multiple othernesses myself. As an example, my focus on otherness relates strongly to teacher identity and subjectivity formation (mine and that of my students). Using Julia Kristeva’s ideas, as was a seminal focus in my Ph.D., helps my students and myself to focus on the notions of the self as always evolving, never there yet, “constantly in construction,” as Kristeva says. Learning to see ourselves as, in that sense, always becoming, in some way or another, is quite a humbling way of thinking. Kristeva mentions that we should stop thinking of ourselves as “unitary and glorious,” and this way of orienting ourselves toward ourselves and our relations to others helps to bring us off our “high horse,” to make us more aware of others (people and things). We don’t always think of the ways in which we make assumptions about others, or treat others in particular ways, intentionally or unintentionally, and using Kristeva’s ideas reminds us through our own otherness, of the unfathomability of diversity and difference. In my teaching on topics related to interculturality, intercultural relationships, or belonging and contribution in society and in ECE, the topics of the other and cultural otherness are central. I try to emphasize the diverse ways that we experience otherness, feel other ourselves, and work with and across othernesses—including students’ otherness, as they work across cultures and ECE “normalities” to complete their assignments, practica, and thinking. Students say this work gives them deeper insights about not only people from other countries, or from different cultures, but it helps to see how diverse people’s lives are, that grew up just down the road, that they’ve been sitting next to throughout their studies, and that they assumed would be the same as their own. These students are strong advocates now of not making assumptions, and recognizing that we cannot really know the other.

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My work overseas is hugely informed by these concepts also. In many countries there remains an assumption that knowledge or expertise that comes from the west is the answer to their “problems.” A common process within the international aid model, is that western “experts” come and “train” the trainers, who in turn “train” somebody else and then they pass the learning on to the teachers. In the end what teachers are “taught” is likely to be something quite different to what they are expected to learn. Most importantly, though, teachers’ own knowledge and experiences— strongly grounded and informed by local realities—are given little value. In relation to otherness, this model in my view completely others local teachers and communities from their locality, culture, knowledges, and ways of being and doing. These concepts continually drive my work on the development of a sustainable teacher education model in a lower middle-income country, through peer mentoring, elevating local cultures and languages, and drawing on local knowledges and stories to strengthen the teachers’ understandings of themselves and others within their own space. Working through the concepts of the other and otherness continually challenges me to question, my role in working in other countries with these ideas. I cannot tell others what to plan, teach their children, eat with their children, or how to be with their children. Working with these teachers often reminds us that we’re concerned with very similar concepts—ethical and moral concepts about treatments of the other, kindness, children’s well-being—concepts and principles that underpin our teaching. Thinking through notions of the other reminds us of the essential element of always working within the local context, to make sense for local teachers, children and communities, and in these areas, they are the experts. The crucial point in all of these ways of working with the idea of otherness, is that that is of course an important aspect of recognizing those “relations of significant othernesses” that Donna Haraway talks about, when we start to see ourselves as entangled with so much more than just the humans around us or in relationships with us. Quite often, these are ideas that locals in some of the countries I am working with are very much aware of—I have a lot to learn! Q. In what ways do these concepts inform how you conceptualize and write your research? Like in my teaching ideas above, these concepts are at the root of most of the research and writing that I do. They underpin strongly how I conceptualize ECE teaching and working, particularly with increasing globalization, increasing resettlement programmes for refugees and migrants, and these are some of the dominant themes in my research. I’m concerned with the idea of well-being and a sense of belonging—in children and in teachers—so I am worried about the idea of viewing diversity as a “problem” that needs a “solution.” Through the notions of otherness and the other, diversity can be seen as a norm, and that helps us to realize that each of our contexts changes daily, particularly if we go with the idea that all of us are also constantly evolving—then our influence on our contexts must be too. Most of the research that I’m working on relates to communities and ECE settings, working across othernesses, conceptualizing the self-other relationship, or to such concepts that arise in this work, to equitable and just treatments of the self and other; conceptions of space

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and place, and conceptions of the purpose of ECE, in New Zealand and in other countries. Some of this work also informs my writing and theorizing about higher education, as a posthuman encounter with ourselves and the other, as academics, and with early childhood student teachers.

1.2 Decentering the Child Q. Within posthumanist research, one of the aims is to “decenter” the human child. Would you argue that your research aims to decenter the child? If so, what implications does this have for researchers engaged in social justice or critical approaches with children (where children are often the center of the research?) This is a great question! The aim thinking about posthumanism, following Rosi Braidotti, is not to lose the human. It does not do away with human knowing, being or acting—we are still there—doing the thinking, the analyzing and the engaging. We have to put in the research proposals, meet human-devised expectations and deadlines, and report to the human research funders, IRBs or ethics committees, line managers, ministries, and so on. And we need to elevate particularly how we will take care of the child participants in our research, given the most recent developments in researching with children where child participants are involved with the researcher instead of having research done to or on them. In all of this, I love how the notion of the posthuman challenges us to decenter ourselves and the children we are researching with, to pay more attention to the wider worldly relationships that we’re all enmeshed in and with. Karen Barad’s work on matter brings this to the fore for me. Like the notions of the other and otherness, elevating the importance of “the matter with matter” pushes me to rethink the reifications of the human, of human language, culture, and the discourses that surround them. As Braidotti says, it is not that we all of a sudden don’t or shouldn’t exist, but that the other forces, energies, powers, matters, by which we are surrounded matter too, perhaps equally, perhaps more. Most importantly, also from Barad, is the concept not only of our interrelatedness, but of intra-relatedness— and this point heightens our awareness of all things and beings as agentic, without us dominating, powering over them, acting in or on them. In my own research and writing I see posthuman conceptions of children and childhoods as taking the notion of the child beyond binary conceptions where children are removed, as human, and seen as separate from and powerful over their environment. When we take such notions as Barad’s intra-relationality seriously, we can see children as not essentially separate, but rather as always becoming, constructed with, by and through their relational entanglement with the energies, forces, and materialities by which they are surrounded at any particular time. Through Barad’s thinking, I feel much more able to express that the world is not one place that we can see in one way, and predict how it will be at any given time. If the energies and forces that help us each construct what is around us is so different—but connected—for humans,

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for dogs, for snakes, for example, then it refreshingly releases us from that “unitary gloriousness” that Kristeva warns against. Seeing children in such an embedded and intra-relational way with all that is in the world returns me to a strong commitment to the environment, planet earth. This is one of the areas where the cross-disciplinary views that posthuman scholarship brings together provoke more nuanced and complicated ways of thinking. Bruno Latour, brings this to the fore in his lament of the lack of preparedness in human beings for recognizing our reciprocal implicatedness in the global climate crisis, that is gripping many countries in increasingly disastrous ways. Greta Thunberg has most recently brought forth the strength of children’s agency on a global level, as they stand in protest of this lack. One of the most important points in conceptualizing othernesses is that this allows us to think beyond the human, and to open ourselves up to the kinds of wider relational connectednesses that acknowledge that we are all implicated, responsible (response-able) and part of but not elevated above the greater whole. Children, I think, already sense this—but are easily molded not to. In the New Zealand indigenous M¯aori language the term: ako represents a complex notion of reciprocity. It means, among other things, that learning is reciprocal, and that the teacher is sometimes the learner and the learner is sometimes the teacher. For me, researching and working with young children should be founded on the basis of the principle of ako—reciprocal learning, where we first decenter the adult—to learn about decentering the human. Another important consideration when we’re thinking about decentering the child, to recognize the simultaneous actions of the forces, energies and matters around them, is that from indigenous viewpoints, such as from the M¯aori viewpoint, these recognitions are not new. Working with M¯aori colleagues and ideas helps us to recognize that there is much that I—and we Non-M¯aori, or P¯akeh¯a—don’t and never will know, and that we can acknowledge this and, again, that I, and we, have a lot to learn!

1.3 Unsettling Concepts of Voice and Agency Q. What are the ethical implications of taking this approach (or not taking it)? What happens to children’s voice? Agency? It seems to me, that children’s voice and agency in a posthuman ethics can only ever be shared. In a way this brings the environmental awareness and concerns to the fore for me. If we imagine children and their voice and agency as shared, it implicates all of what is around them agentically with them. If children are engaged in a sand play activity, for example, they are not only acting on the sand, doing with the sand, digging the sand, or in other ways acting on the sand. This conception shifts seeing the children as agentic with the sand. That is, it elevates that the sand too is agentic, as is the moisture that might be in the sand, affecting the sand, the children’s skin, the digger that they’re driving in the moist sand, and so on. Over time, left in the moist

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sand, the digger might rust, the parts might stop moving smoothly, and the children’s play and relationship to the sand and to the digger might change. The digger too experiences sand, moisture, time. The moist sand becomes part of the child, as a vital, agentic material, using Jane Bennett’s thinking on vibrant matter. Recording children’s voice, power or agency in research are a strong focus of the United Nations Convention on the Rights of the Child (UNCRC), and in contemporary research with children. This is another excellent question! The ethical implications become far more complex when we recognize the vibrancy of all that is around children—in their immediate environment, and in their wider worldly relationships. All of these relations are constantly shifting, always present in some form or other, but always contingent. Or if we think with Haraway, it might be speculative—since we can never completely know the other matters, forces or energies with and by which they are acting and affected. This kind of speculative relationality is difficult to describe—but to me it makes the ethical implications even stronger. Nothing is straightforward. Nor necessarily clear—but that’s again a humbling and ethical point: that there are such complex relationships going on, that we might not even know, but need to allow for, even elevate. The ethical implications aren’t just in our treatment of children, then, but of their data. How do we transcribe and analyse, for example, the intra-actions of a loamy forest floor with human feet, animals, noise, flora? What intra-acts with what, thing, affect, energy, the recording itself? Researching through a posthuman lens helps the research to become more speculative, allowing us to “stay with the trouble,” that is, ruminating in situations, nuance, relationalities. We can’t and shouldn’t solve a research problem, then, but we should be ongoingly provoked by it…to keep thinking, keep that trouble-ing alive. Perhaps one of the most important tasks that we face is to learn to articulate contingencies. That is, I think we need to learn about accepting, learning to live, and research in, a particular kind of comfort with the discomfort of not knowing. I refer to this notion often in my writing—as a way of learning what that might mean—staying with my own trouble—being other to myself and my own knowing.

1.4 Addressing Critiques: Re-doing Ethics in a Posthuman Times Q. Some scholars have suggested that a new materialist perspective fails to attend to discourses of power or the historicity of the own researcher’s speculations or categories. What do you think of the critiques of posthumanism or new materialism (specifically the critique that new materialisms depoliticizes research)? In your opinion, what is the potential that posthumanist materialism has for re-thinking and re-doing ethics and politics?

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For me the potential of new materialist thinking and research lies in its urge towards opening up our conceptions to forces and energies that, undoubtedly, have always already been there. It is a highly political concern, for two reasons. One is the environmental concerns that are raised by scientists like Latour already mentioned, and by environmental lobby groups, and also the work of Bennett for example, is important in this area. What should be the political and actual practical priorities in species protection, for instance? Should we vote for the use of strong poisons (which we know have wider ranging effects than merely killing the plant or pest they are intended to eradicate) in or on the earth? What is “acceptable” in the extinction of rare or endangered species, for glacial melts, or in the face of other disastrous climatic changes? Such concerns raise many questions of affect and entangled intra-relationalities, of the earth with poisons, among living creatures (including humans) and the ways that human actions (borne out of seeing humans as exceptional, powerful, over other matters and things) might in the short or long term affect all of us, cause disease of many kinds, and deaths of many kinds. From an environmental perspective, then, new materialist ideas of vibrant materialities are crucial to provoke different kinds of political, ethical, and moral thinking. To me, re-thinking ethics in a posthuman way is not only possible, but crucial. In a very localized way it could mean engaging with children in more speculative ways—and other authors have written beautifully about this already—most recently in the first books to appear in this book series. It could mean from the very beginning, being with children, and with other things, beings, places, in ways that engage with the power that emanates not from us humans, but from the place, from the things, from the animals or other species. It could be in the tone we use, nuanced in a way that we orient ourselves, reflective of a much deeper ethics than a human ethics—an entangled ethics maybe, or, as I’ve written about elsewhere, an ethics of the unknown. At the same time it’s important not to hide behind a veneer of the unknown, as Bennett and I think Haraway too warn us. To act responsibly—ethically—we must learn, feel, sense, into the possibilities in order to respond to them appropriately, but first of all, to realize the depth and complexities of the human and non-human actors/actants that act in and on each other in all of the enmeshed ways that we are entangled. Q. In your paper “Vibrancy of Childhood Things,” you and Marek Tesar write that research paradigms and theoretical frameworks come into fashion and then move on again. In what ways do you think this applies to posthumanist and materialist approaches with children? The fascinating thing about posthumanism and new materialist approaches, is that they—finally, it almost seems—push us to consider the intricate interconnectednesses with local and wider worldly others (people, forces and things) that have always already been with us! I don’t mean to claim that they will be the final—good forever— theories or approaches, that they are beyond dispute, or that humanity—or some other being—won’t in the future think back and recall the days when we realized that all things and beings are connected, and that we called this posthumanism! Actually, I think some Indigenous scholars already portray this, as Indigenous philosophies

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and ways of thinking recognize a metaphysical element, a notion of the void, and of the importance of worldly connections and their intra-relationalities. We see these notions also in what Haraway calls common worlding or common worlds.

1.5 Areas for Future Research Q. What are some pressing issues facing children today, and what tools, methods, approaches, or theories do we need to address them? Since you work closely with teachers in your research projects, how do teachers need to be involved in research to address the challenges that children face today? The important points that are coming up for me as I traverse the humanist—posthumanist paradigms have to do with the need for certainty that we (humans) seem to seek in understanding what we do, whether that is working with identity/ies, in determining research methods, in understanding children and their development, growth, learning and behavior, and actually in understanding the world. It is scary to let go of the control that we’re used to—or that we think we had when it felt like we “knew” things, that we could predict, plan, write fixed-sounding ethics proposals, and so on, with any degree of certainty. For me the study of poststructural humanist theories is extremely useful, to find what feel like bridges, to, in a way, take the leap into the wider worldly thinking of posthuman and new materialist theories. I’ve been immersing myself in Kristeva’s poststructural feminist work in this way. Children would benefit enormously in my view, if teachers were to come to a more comfortable orientation to the discomfort of not necessarily knowing everything, of not being certain, of letting go of what Kristeva calls the “need to know.” Taking a step back, allowing situations to emerge, and in the sense of Bronwyn Davies’ or Reggio Emilia inspired work, really listening to a situation, might let us/teachers connect with some more of their intricacies. Allowing for unpredicted, or un-human-controlled, intra-actions, agency, speculations, to occur are areas that I’m keen to engage with. Not as new ideas, necessarily (although I worry sometimes that they may have got lost along the certainty-knowledge-desiring way), but as ideas to (re)turn to, in new, posthuman-ly unsettling ways.

Further Reading Arndt, S. (2017). (Un)becoming data through philosophical thought processes of pasts, presents and futures. In M. Koro-Ljungberg, T. Löytonen, & M. Tesar (Eds.), Disrupting data in qualitative inquiry. Entanglements with the post-critical and post-anthropocentric (pp. 91–102). Peter Lang. Arndt, S. (2018). Early childhood teacher cultural otherness and belonging. Contemporary Issues in Early Childhood, 19(4), 392–403. Arndt, S., & Tesar, M. (2016). A more-than-social movement: The post-human condition of quality in the early years. Contemporary Issues in Early Childhood, Special Issue: Re-imagining Quality in Early Childhood, 17(1), 16–25.

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Arndt, S., & Tesar, M. (2019). Posthuman encounters in New Zealand early childhood teacher education. In A. Bayley & C. A. Taylor (Eds.), Posthumanism and higher education: Reimagining pedagogy, practice and research (pp. 85–102). Cham, Switzerland: Palgrave MacMillan.

Sonja Arndt is a lecturer in early childhood education at the University of Melbourne. Her teaching and research intersect studies of childhood, education, interculturality and otherness, and philosophies of the subject. Her strong interest in bridging human and posthuman research and scholarship permeates her recent publications, building on her multiple award-winning doctoral thesis dealing with philosophies of the subject as constantly evolving.

Chapter 2

Interview with Mindy Blaise and Veronica Pacini-Ketchabaw Mindy Blaise, Veronica Pacini-Ketchabaw, Claudia Diaz-Diaz and Paulina Semenec

We need to do something different, because whatever we were doing then doesn’t work. It is not the strategy for 2018, for the neocolonial, neoliberal times in which we live. And that is exactly what we’re trying to do in the Common Worlds. We’re trying to create different stories.

This interview was conducted in the collaborative spirit in which Mindy Blaise and Veronica Pacini-Ketchabaw work. At the time, Veronica was in Australia with Mindy, doing what they call “Bush Salons” in Wee Jasper, Australia—a project that has become an integral component of the Common Worlds Collective. We were inspired by this conversation because it highlighted for us a deep commitment to the importance of feminist collaboration and collective action in research. It was also a great example for us of how collective research can be made possible within a culture of neoliberal university settings—where individual research is highly prioritized and rewarded. Both Mindy and Veronica’s work has been significant to our own scholarship (for example, Mindy’s work on gender in early childhood education and postdevelopmentalism, and Veronica’s work on waste and climate change pedagogies), so we were intrigued to speak to them about how they think and work together, and M. Blaise (B) Edith Cowan University, Joondalup, Australia e-mail: [email protected] V. Pacini-Ketchabaw Western University, London, Canada e-mail: [email protected] C. Diaz-Diaz · P. Semenec University of British Columbia, Vancouver, BC, Canada e-mail: [email protected] P. Semenec e-mail: [email protected] © Springer Nature Singapore Pte Ltd. 2020 C. Diaz-Diaz and P. Semenec, Posthumanist and New Materialist Methodologies, Children: Global Posthumanist Perspectives and Materialist Theories, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-981-15-2708-1_2

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about their commitment to opening up spaces for different stories in early childhood contexts. Central to their work is the imperative to move beyond familiar theories and approaches to research. Mindy and Veronica urge scholars to experiment with research—through the concepts we think with, to the approaches we take when working together with children (and teachers) in early childhood settings. While they acknowledge that certain theories may have served researchers well (and do not suggest abandoning them entirely), they suggest that it is time to move into different theoretical/ disciplinary terrain. Such movement, they suggest, requires risk, experimentation and collaboration, and must not rely heavily on labels such as ‘posthuman’, ‘new materialist’ or even Common Worlds. In a time when such labels are gaining in popularity, we found this invitation provocative, as it forced us to think about how work under this label is always on the move. In being open to experimentation (in ways that cannot be known beforehand), failure is bound to occur. While the idea of “failure” may not be desirable for most graduate students or early career scholars, we found this idea reassuring. We felt in being open to collaboration and experimentation, we could take risks that might produce new knowledge and research with children that makes different worlds possible.

2.1 Collaborative Engagements CD: We are very curious about the Bush Salon and the other work you have been doing together. What are these projects about and why have you chosen to work together in those projects? Specifically, those related to children or childhood. MB: The Bush Salon originates from us spending time together in Wee Jasper, with Affrica Taylor and Lesley Instone. They are inspired by the French feminist salons of the early 18th Century. The project that first brought us together is the Common Worlds research collective that we co-founded with Affrica Taylor. This has been bringing us together for a long time. It’s something that’s a connecting point for us. CD: How did it start? How did you come up with this idea of forming this Collective? And what were you aiming for when you started? VP: Well, our shared concern for social justice brought us together in different ways. The three of us had been working on similar projects but in different ways. Although Mindy and Affrica Taylor had been working together challenging dominant discourses in gender. My work on racialization and migration issues and nation state building connected me to Affrica’s work. MB: The three of us met the Reconceptualizing conference in New Zealand. From there, Affrica secured funding to bring together a group of scholars to discuss place and childhood. I organized a second event in Hong Kong that focused on posthumanism. As a result, we co-edited a special issue for Contemporary Issues in Early Childhood. This collaboration helped us to support each other. This collaboration was key for our survival as feminists in the academy.

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VP: Later, we received a series of SSHRC grants that allowed us to develop and strengthen Common Worlds Research Collective. Through the first grant, we met in Victoria for a conference and two other special issues (The Environmental Humanities and The Journal of Childhood Studies) were produced. In the two projects that we are working on, we are exploring climate pedagogies and waste using ideas developed by scholars in the Common Worlds Research Collective. We are certainly grateful for the support provided by the Canadian Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council. An important aspect of the feminist Common Worlds Research Collective is mentoring and building capacity. For instance, much of our work entails supporting the next generation of feminist scholars to do the double work of working in a neoliberal university and maintaining feminist conditions for us to have other spaces to work within. MB: In other words, it’s about playing the game but on our own terms. So, we are producing and doing all of the things that we have to do to thrive in the neoliberal university, but we’re doing it collectively and we’re able to talk back to it and push back. We are finding that our collaborative and collective work creates generative pockets that open up structures for the sorts of work that we’re doing. VP: Our hope is that we will be able to address the tensions of being feminist early childhood scholars in a neoliberal university. We were mentored by the reconceptualist movement to do exactly that. CD: Why are children important to you as scholars and researchers? MB: As scholars in early childhood education we have a responsibility to address the issues that children are inheriting. Although I never imagined myself becoming an early childhood teacher, I think that my feminist politics helped me to see the importance of childhood. As a beginning teacher, I brought a respect for children, and an interest in their views and ways of being of the world. And yet, I was always uncomfortable with the ways in which children were positioned as cute, the way that they were positioned as innocent, and how they were always patronized and colonized. From there, my interest around gender and equity grew. Feminisms was an important catalyst. Today I am feeling disappointed and dissatisfied with what some theoretical tools offer in terms of gender. Feminist post-structuralism opened up such an enormous new way of thinking about power relations, agency, and childhoods, but it seemed as though we haven’t moved very far from these ideas—we just keep producing the same sort of findings over and over and over and over again. This is why I have been interested in the ways in which some scholars in cultural and gender studies are rethinking and troubling subjectivities and paying attention to materiality and bringing together the discursive and material. I’m curious about what this offers to understanding the gendered child. VP: I’m interested in how childhood is generated within political and ethical contexts. We need to see children beyond romantic notions of innocence and developmental milestones.

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2.2 Challenging Narratives Around ‘Early Childhood’ CD: Maybe the question about how you happened to be interested in childhood has to do with something that you said regarding how the field early childhood has not really been valued. Maggie MacLure has written about the opportunities in the field due to its flexibility. And so we wonder how you make sense of children now? How does feminist ethics and politics inform the research you are doing, particularly in education or childhood? MB: Before we answer that question, I’d like to pick up on something you said about this idea of flexibility in the early years. I’m really wondering about that because I don’t think it’s like that anymore. The field of early childhood have become even more rigid and technical than it was 20 years ago. I remember the story being told when I was a teacher and it was, “It’s so much easier in early childhood you’ve got more flexibility”. There isn’t a formal curriculum you must follow, like in elementary school. Nobody really paid attention to early childhood—because it was never really seen as learning, because it was (and still is) devalued, so you could be under the radar. I think the opposite has now happened. A lot of attention and focus is on early childhood and the expectations are enormous for teachers. I think early childhood has become so narrow, so closed, so technical, so anti-intellectual, so just dreadful, that we have to give a different narrative about what is possible. Because the way that childhood and teaching has been constructed is problematic. CD: The work you have been doing moves away from developmental perspectives…this idea of a child who develops in a line. So, I guess the question, as you said, might be—at what point does this flexibility make our research visible in a place where, what is valued, is still dominated by this metrics and the number of papers or dissertations that you have as a scholar? So of course, it’s a very contested narrative in a way. VP: We were graduate students in the late 90s and the reconceptualizing group for example, was very much talking about this. So, it’s surprising to me that in 2018 we’re still talking about this. We have not yet moved from that critique. We need to do something different, because whatever we were doing then doesn’t work. It is not the strategy for 2018, for the neocolonial, neoliberal times in which we live. And that is exactly what we’re trying to do in the Common Worlds Research Collective. We’re trying to create different stories. Not to critique child development because it has been done, but to create something different, to compose a different kind of world. What are the times in which we’re living? Why is it even necessary to create something different? And what do we compose with? So, we’re trying to even step aside, if you wish—it’s inherent in that critique, that it was so important, but how much more do we need? MB: I think Veronica’s question about what we compose with is an important one, because the field of early childhood must draw from different theories, concepts, methods, and practices that can do something different. In order to compose and keep thinking alive, I must go to other disciplines. This includes, feminist environmental

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humanities, cultural and human geographies, science and technology studies, critical and gender studies, etc. VP: When we were grad students, we were reading Foucault, we were reading Butler, and so forth. But we can’t stay there forever. Fighting the same fight with the same tools is probably not a very smart idea. For me, it seems like this is a battle that is not very well played. It’s not very well fought.

2.3 Composing Other Worlds CD: You mentioned, “we aim to compose other worlds”. Can you expand on that? VP: Well, we have been trying to think differently about homecorner. In fact, we were writing speculative fiction to rethink the classroom to create home corners otherwise for the 21st century. So that piece is quite playful. But I think it’s a very good example of how we are composing other worlds. You can also take a look at what we are doing with children and animals. We are not working with the idea that children live in a society, but children live in a world. So, we are tapping into that world. We are reading about geological subjects, we’re working with this next generation so that they are doing their own thinking, with new concepts and ideas. That goes well beyond what I am even capable of doing. MB: One of the things that we’ve been doing since 2009 are our Bush Salons. It’s an idea that Affrica Taylor and Lesley Instone started at Wee Jasper. Wee Jasper is in the Australian Bush and it is beside Micalong Creek, which runs through the valley. It’s very special and we come here, and we read, and we think, and we talk, and we compose, and we create. One of the things that we’ve recently done, and it comes from our Bush Salons, is we’ve taken up the idea of the micro blogs1 if you will, and Affrica just created a microblog about the home corner based on rethinking her work about the homecorner in 2005, and then Veronica and I responded to it with speculative fiction in an attempt at composing different kinds of worlds. So again, like Veronica said, that’s kind of an example of where we’re going, of what we’re doing right now. And it is informed by a feminist politics and ethics of thinking together. VP: We have done a lot of rethinking about care, a lot of rethinking about what ethics means, the impurity of ethics and so forth. And right now, as I said before, we are trying to push through other ideas that are more geological, we’re thinking about weathering, we’re thinking about water, we’re thinking about waste, we’re thinking about what do pedagogies—what do we need to do in early childhood education to respond to the challenges and the displacements that are taking place in the 21st century. 1 For

more information about the Common Worlds Microblogs go to: http://commonworlds.net.

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CD: I’m thinking about how this, what you call speculative fiction is received by teachers. What are the opportunities that you have seen that are part of those conversations? Can you bring in a story of how you are using these concepts? VP: A lot of Common Worlding, and composing new worlds is what we are doing in child care centers. The graduate students that I work with are spending a lot of time in childcare centers working with educators. We certainly bring in new ideas that are not necessarily part of their daily conversations in these classrooms. And they are new to educators in these classrooms too. There’s a lot of relationship building that needs to take place to be able to trust and to go against the grain. There are a lot of conversations at the administration level that take place within childcare centers. Students are always involved in those conversations, and the daily work with educators, and with children and educators. The way that it looks depends on what it is that we’re looking at. And I think it very much depends on the place that we are in. Like here in Australia you have a group of teachers and children and researchers walking by a creek. In London, it looks very different…you do pedagogy in a very different way because the place guides what it is that we’re going to be doing. But always being there, in place and working with place, working with the educators, and with what comes up. There’s not really a guide about how to do this. There’s a lot of reading and engaging with ideas that we do. For example, if we are researching with the creek, we might go to an art exhibit about water, or we might read what anthropologists have been writing about squirrels. MB: I think one of the necessary aspects of this kind of work is that it simply can’t be done alone. VP: Because we’re working in a feminist way, we are building the new generation. Truly I don’t think we ever strategize about how we do it. We just start with an idea, like the speculative fiction, and we just go from there, and then things happen. So, our goal is not to develop the field. If it happens, absolutely, but it’s not the way that we work. It’s not where we start. Because we are interested in the world, to living with the world. CD: There’s this place of being uncomfortable that is needed in the work you are doing and the same logic that you just mentioned. These places of being uncomfortable are avoided for different reasons…because the understanding that children are “not ready” for such conversations or teachers might say that there’s no need. What are the opportunities that come after those difficult conversations, or what have been your own experiences in crafting or composing this new world, with dealing with the difficulty of difference? MB: It is about recognizing the importance of those uncomfortable and unpredictable encounters. It’s interesting though because our work is already moving fast- in a different way. I think it’s about making it part of our practice. And that’s maybe what hasn’t happened in early childhood teacher education—making room and space for the everyday, and how important the everyday is, and figuring how do we go about with those uncomfortable, awkward encounters, and showing we aren’t perfect with

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it, that we’re always stumbling, and that we just don’t know. I think we need more of those stories. We need to be populating more of those kinds of imperfect stories throughout the field. Maybe that’s one of the ways that we can move the field. VP: You know, they’re not recipes. I cannot give you a recipe, and I always say that to educators and to teachers… they’re not recipes. But there are things that I think that we constantly do, which is…experiment. It’s not coming in with a model that you can follow. I guess that’s absolutely hard for the educators, it’s hard. MB: It’s hard for us!

2.4 Experimentation in Childhood Research VP: I don’t think that life is predictable, nothing is predictable. So, we talk a lot about experimentation, everyone raves about experimentation. But how do you do experimentation? How do you let the world actually drive that invention, that experimentation? How do we become only one participant in the world? We’re not going to find a recipe, they’re not recipes. MB: Maybe experimentation is one way to help with the paradigm shift that is necessary in the field. One of the experimentations that we did with teachers—in this project around bark, in our bark studio. We challenged the teachers to experiment by not focusing on the child in their documentation. Instead, we invited them to focus on and pay attention to bark, bark relations, and the more-than-human world. And that was really productive and having them talk about why it was so hard, and how they failed at it over and over. But that failure was really important for becoming more comfortable with experimentation. I think experimentation will be different things for different people. But for that group of teachers that was really big. PS: Veronica, you’ve mentioned elsewhere that you don’t consider your work to be “posthumanist”. Could you both elaborate on how you position yourselves within the new materialist, posthuman ‘field’? VP: Yeah, that’s the problem when it becomes so popular, and I don’t want to be there anymore when it becomes popular. And you will find in some of my writing that I call myself a poststructuralist. And I’m not anymore. All of these labels. The problem is that these labels pin you down and define what you can and can’t do. I’m more interested in how we can keep the idea of common worlding research going? And how do we keep it going so it doesn’t get corporatized. I think that’s what I’m committed to doing. To thinking together, and continue to revise, rethink, reimagine, and reconfigure, what it actually means to do Common Worlds research. At some point, maybe in two years, we’re going to be sitting here with you and say, we don’t want to do Common Worlds. It’s very possible, who knows? MB: In my own research, I’m trying to make the feminist politics more apparent and explicit. I want the field to get a sense of what a feminist practice might look like.

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VP: We can talk a lot of different languages. I think that feminism is the one that, like you said Mindy, that continues to be there because it’s a practice. It’s not a thing. It’s not a container, but it’s practice that you live, you live with.

Further Reading Blaise, M. (2015). Fabricated childhoods: Uncanny encounters with the more-than-human. Discourse: Studies in the Cultural Politics of Education, 37(5), 617–626. Blaise, M., Hamm, C., & Iorio, J. (2016). Modest witness(ing) and lively stories: Paying attention to matters of concern in early childhood. Pedagogy, Culture, and Society, 25(1), 31–42. Pacini-Ketchabaw, V., & Taylor, A. (2016). Common world childhoods. Oxford Bibliographies in childhood studies. Pacini-Ketchabaw, V., Taylor, A., & Blaise, M. (2016). Decentering the human in multispecies ethnography. In C. Taylor & C. Hughes (Eds.), Posthuman Research Practices (pp. 149–167). Hampshire: Palgrave Macmillan.

Dr. Mindy Blaise is a Vice Chancellor’s Professorial Research Fellow at Edith Cowan University. She is a co-founder of the Common Worlds Research Collective and #FEAS: Feminist Educators Against Sexism. She has recently co-founded. The Ediths, an ECU group of feminist interdisciplinary researchers currently researching children’s waste, water, and weather relations. Their ecologically responsive, embodied, and experimental research aims to carry on the legacy of Edith Cowan, by working for better more-than-human relations in times of climate crisis and transforming how research cultures can be driven and thrive through a collective feminist ethic. Dr. Veronica Pacini-Ketchabaw is a Professor of Early Childhood Education in the Faculty of Education at Western University in Ontario, Canada. Her writings and research contribute to Common World Childhoods Research Collective (tracing children’s relations with places, materials, and other species), and the Early Childhood Pedagogies Collaboratory (experimenting with the contours, conditions, and complexities of 21st century pedagogies). She is a co-editor of the open access Journal of Childhood Studies, and the Bloomsbury book series Feminist Thought in Childhood Research.

Chapter 3

Interview with Bronwyn Davies Bronwyn Davies, Claudia Diaz-Diaz and Paulina Semenec

The challenge, in my view, is not to abandon the insights gained from poststructuralist work, but to open thought up to the liveliness of matter, and the ways in which matter matters.

We had many questions for Bronwyn Davies, as we have been followers of her work for a long time. Her influential books Frogs and Snails and Feminist Tales (1989) and Life in the classroom and playground (1982) as well as her more recent book Listening to Children (2014a) (among many other works), inspired our thinking and research practices, particularly in relation to gender. In Bronwyn’s more recent work, she explores a diffractive methodology, a concept inspired by the work of Karen Barad. In her interview, Bronwyn traces the continuities and discontinuities that posthuman and new materialist perspectives have with poststructural perspectives by looking at gender. She examines for example how these perspectives have addressed the difficult work of challenging the male/female binary. Importantly for Bronwyn, the challenge is not to “abandon the insights gained from poststructuralist work, but to open thought up to the liveliness of matter, and the ways in which matter matters.” In this way, Bronwyn’s interview provides a wonderful contextual “overview” of how we got “here”—to the place of posthuman and new materialisms, but also how poststructural theorizing enabled this “here”. Readers who may be new to these approaches will find this interview not only helpful for tracing some of this scholarship, but also engaging in the perspectives and insights that Bronwyn offers. As an independent scholar, Bronwyn also shares some insights about doing research within a neoliberal B. Davies (B) Western Sydney University, Sydney, Australia e-mail: [email protected] C. Diaz-Diaz · P. Semenec University of British Columbia, Vancouver, BC, Canada e-mail: [email protected] P. Semenec e-mail: [email protected] © Springer Nature Singapore Pte Ltd. 2020 C. Diaz-Diaz and P. Semenec, Posthumanist and New Materialist Methodologies, Children: Global Posthumanist Perspectives and Materialist Theories, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-981-15-2708-1_3

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university context, which inspire us to think about possible ways for navigating this terrain in novel ways. For us, Bronwyn Davies’ interview also spoke to the ways in which we think collectively with the theorists we engage with, as well as the collaborations we form in our own research communities. Her work with the children and teachers in Trollet, exemplifies for us the ethical dimension of caring and ethical research collaborations that do not end when research does.

3.1 Tracing Lines of Thoughts About Gender Q. As new theoretical frameworks emerge and proliferate, scholars tend to point to their differences, instead of the continuities between past and current approaches. An example of that is the radical break between poststructuralist and posthuman thought that some scholars have argued to exist. Recently, you have argued that postsructuralist and posthumanist materialist thought, rather than being radically different, have continuities as well as discontinuities. Yes, in my paper “Ethics and the new materialism” (2016a) I tried to map out the continuities and discontinuities between them. Deleuze and Barad, among others, open up new and exciting ways of thinking. It takes a great deal of time and effort to materialize those possibilities in one’s own thinking and doing, and it is perhaps inevitable that poststructuralist thought will be put to one side. It’s helpful, in thinking about the continuities and differences to go back to the way we were thinking in the late 80s and early 1990s, to see how poststructuralist theory dramatically shifted the questions that could be asked and the strategies that could be adopted in working with children. We were breaking open the psychological preconceptions in sex-role socialization theory. Poststructuralist theory had an extraordinary impact on feminist theory at the time, inviting us to move across disciplinary boundaries and to draw on concepts that changed what it was possible to think and to do. Scholars in philosophy, linguistics, human geography, musicology, physiology, literary studies, social sciences and education, among others, were opening up their own and each other’s thinking in unprecedented ways. The walls surrounding disciplines and protecting them from outside interference were at long last being breached. The work of scholars like Deleuze and Barad extended that rich cross-fertilization. In my book Frogs and Snails and Feminist Tales, which came out in 1989, in the early days of poststructuralist theory’s impact on feminist thought, I began with the question why does gender matter so much? No longer limited by standard practices of looking at children as passive objects of the adult gaze, I could engage with the children as lively, thoughtful, imaginative, and creative beings. What I encountered were emergent beings, each one fascinating in their multiple locations in linguistic and social structures. Through observing and interacting with children in an openended way in a variety of preschools I could explore the ways in which language itself, with its binary structures and its patriarchal ways of making sense of the

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world and its narrative strategies and devices, interacted with the social structures the children were born into and in which they lived out their daily lives, both at home and at school. Just to have an open-ended project, without a preconceived structure was enormously radical at the time. Listening to preschool children’s thinking and ideas at a time when even primary school children were thought to have nothing significant to say, was a radical undermining of the adult–child binary. I explored in Frogs and Snails the repeated patterns that made life survivable (that is, predictable and manageable) and the changes that feminist ways of thinking and imagining might make possible. What poststructuralist theory sought, in making the intersections of language, social structure and desire visible, and analyzable, was the deconstruction of the liberal humanist subject as the agent in control of its identity and its meanings and desires. A great deal of work went into exploring the constitutive work that language does independent of our intentions—how it subjects bodies, and constitutes agency and desire (see for example Davies, 2000a). The feminist deconstructive work on the male/female binary was difficult work. We were so used to thinking in binary terms that it took a great deal of hard theoretical work and imagination to think/write/dream/live differently, involving as it did the impossible practice of reflexivity (Davies et al., 2006) through which we strove to develop the capacity to see/hear/feel language at work. It is little wonder that language itself demanded a great deal of attention as we delved into the complexities of its powers. Not only was gender under scrutiny, but so were our liberal humanist “selves” (Davies, 2000a). What was it, we asked, to be subjected/subjectified, caught up in processes of subjectification? How were desire and the desiring body made real, and through what processes might that “making real” be changed? In a way it was a little unfair of Barad to accuse Butler of giving too much attention to language and too little attention to other-than-human matter: “…Butler’s conception of materiality is limited by its exclusive focus on human bodies and social factors, which works against her efforts to understand the relationship between materiality and discursivity in their indissociability” (Barad, 2007, p. 34). But the work Butler had done in thinking about the constitutive power of language was difficult work that had to be done if we were to resist some of its constitutive force. Butler’s thinking, and poststructuralist theory more broadly, did not preclude close attention to the physical/material world. Gender can’t be understood without including the physiology of it as I argued in Frogs and Snails, and the physiological can’t be disentangled from the social. Children interact with books, clothing, swings, climbing frames, paint, gardens, buildings, and so on. To observe them was to be immersed in the material world (see also Davies, 2000b; Davies & Kasama, 2004). Barad’s point is that Butler did not take into account the liveliness of non-human matter, and that this led to a weakness in her theorizing. The bursting onto the world of social science and feminist theorizing of Barad’s scholarship, informed as it is by quantum physics, brought matter to the fore as a lively force in ways none of us had previously imagined. It drew new scholars into the field of play, including environmentalists and those working in the STEM disciplines— science, technology, engineering, and maths. Barad’s ethico-onto-epistemology was

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experienced by many as a feminist new wave, an ontological wave that set aside the focus on language. But as Barad wrote, “Discursive practices and material phenomena do not stand in a relationship of externality to one another; rather, the material and the discursive are mutually implicated in the dynamics of intra-activity” (2003, p. 812). She was not seeking to turn us away from language as some have thought, but to find ways to give matter its due. Ontology and epistemology were not to be cast in binary terms, requiring a downgrading of the dominant term (epistemology). But binaries have a powerful grip on our capacity for thought, and the rendition of poststructuralist theory and posthumanist theory as binaries is easy enough to slip into. Though poststructuralist theorists may have dwelt primarily on the human body, they were not unaware of the power of material objects, including the materiality of texts themselves (Cixous & Calle-Gruber, 1997; Davies, 2000b; Wilcox, McWatters, Thompson, & Williams, 1990). The challenge, in my view, is not to abandon the insights gained from poststructuralist work, but to open thought up to the liveliness of matter, and the ways in which matter matters. To that end I have in some of my recent writing begun to explore the liveliness of things like ponds and sticks and obelisks, as they intra-act with children (Davies, 2019b). Inspired by Barad, and also by Bennett, I seek to stretch the present out of its linear assumptions about time, understanding the past as never finished and the future as already present (Davies, 2019a, 2019b). The emergence of posthumanist thought does not necessitate abandoning or denying poststructuralist insights. That is, in a way to oversimplify both. I think of posthumanist thought as a re-turn, not a return to an earlier scene, but as a re-turning with new conceptual tools such as the liveliness of matter, diffraction, intra-action, and the entangled enlivening of being. We can re-turn to the dominance of human-centric thought, not only deconstructing the human subject, but decentering it, and further deindividualizing it—which is not the same as denying its material specificity. Q. Has posthumanism/new materialism enabled you to theorize gender differently? If so, in what ways? In Listening to Children (Davies, 2014a), which was my own re-turn, I became aware of the way affect, independent of conscious thought and intention, moved among the children and the adults. Giving up on the idea of myself as the primary agent/researcher whose superior grasp of rational knowledge-making would be what produced “results,” I used my own body almost like a tuning fork, listening to the way it sounded when affects struck it before thought and emotion could catch up with it. I experimented with becoming no longer the authority who knows, but the one who pauses, and who allows herself to be drawn into the particular world that is emergent in the children’s play and their learning in the preschool. I switched from looking for differences (categorical differences such as gender and class) and looked for differentiation, or becoming different. As I watched children playing, and participated with them in that playing, I was no longer focusing on finding gendered patterns (categorical difference) but open to seeing what emerged in the lively intraactions. My methodology expanded beyond story reading and talk around stories,

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along with observations of play, to playing with art and to story making, to going out into the landscape of the city or the parklands, thinking about documentation differently, asking for example in what ways the camera or the tape recorder or the paint or the brushes or the dress-up clothes or the rocks and water and sand, and the pencil and paper I took my notes with, were intra-active in the emergent imagining-playing-thinking-becoming of the children and of me in relation to them. In short, a posthumanist, new materialist approach to researching with children required openness to the entanglement of matter and meaning, the creative chaos in which children, teachers, and researchers become co-experimenters, co-researchers. Opening up to the chaos and becoming within it, and giving up on moral judgment, as Deleuze enjoins us to do, has strong ethical implications. Every movement, every decision, and every agential cut impacts on others, both human and non-human. Our responsibility is intensified, not through writing ethics applications before we begin in order to protect ourselves from risk, but through asking of the others, at every turn, what is it to be this? This matter, this subjected other, this gendered being, this painting, this rock, this playing space, this child, this anger, this line of flight… I realize I am taking a long time to get around to answering your question about how the posthumanist/new materialist re-turn enables me to theorize gender differently. In the earlier work, drawing on Foucault and Butler, I understood myself to be documenting, however creatively, what was already there. In asking why gender mattered so much I was seeking to find out from the children how it was being made to matter, that is, what they thought and did that made gender real and central to their sense of who they were. I was reflexively documenting their lives; and I was representing those lives—those gendered identities—in the stories I told of them and the discursive categories I drew on to make sense of what I saw. Grosz (in Konturri & Tiainen, 2007, pp. 247–248) points out that from a poststructuralist perspective “The real is always mediated by representation. Whatever real we address, this is always already represented. This is clearly Judith Butler’s position and is linked not only to the structuralists but primarily to post-structuralism that culminates in deconstruction… [W]e have no conceptual apparatus and no access to reality without the divisions imposed upon both the mind and the real by language in particular and by representation more generally.” Deleuze and Barad open up other possibilities. In a new materialist/posthumanist framework Grosz explains (in Konturri & Tiainen, 2007, p. 248): Nature or materiality have no identity in the sense that they are continually changing, continually emerging as new. Once we have a dynamic notion of nature, then culture cannot be seen as that which animates nature. Nature is already animated, and culture borrows its energy from nature… Culture is no longer understood as uniquely human or as a thoroughly linguistic creation. Culture borrows from the animal. There could be no culture without an open-ended nature.

And as Barad points out, we can best approach that open-endedness and constant movement with the concept of diffraction, which enables us to explore the forces at work in us and on us, and in and on matter more generally, forces that may collide

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and make something new. I can perhaps best elaborate this with a story about a small girl who cut her long blonde hair off in an experimental move, not knowing where that cut would take her: When Francesca first came to Trollet she looked very much like her older sister and her mother, both with long blonde hair and elegant feminine dresses. But now she looked very different. I mistook her for a boy when I first saw her running through the forest with her short hair, blue jeans, and striped purple t-shirt. Her mother had told the teachers that Francesca had been caught mid-cut in the act of cutting off her beautiful hair, causing her mother serious distress. Her mother had taken her to the hairdresser, who created a stylish, androgynous cut that made her look like a girl from one side and a boy from the other. On the day I first saw her, she also had on pink nail polish. The action of cutting her hair was in Barad’s (2012) terms an agential cut: “differentiating is not merely about cutting apart but also cutting together as one movement: cutting together-apart… There is no fixed dividing line between ‘self’ and ‘other’, ‘past’ and ‘present’ and ‘future’, ‘here’ and ‘now’, ‘cause’ and ‘effect’” (Barad 2012, p. 46). Francesca’s cut, was a “cutting together-apart” of the gender binary—cutting herself apart from the princess-style femininity of her mother and sister, cutting male and female together on her own body. Barad explains that the agency does not lie in the individual’s intentions—in what Francesca intended when she cut her hair—but in the intra-action of all the entangled elements: a family in which princess-style femininity is valued; a school community that values strong girls; a preschool playground that provides space for girls to swing high on the swings, to scale giant rocks and find sticks to play war with in the forest; the possibility that girls can wear jeans and t-shirts similar to the boys where boys’ clothes signify masculinity, courage, and strength; an available pair of scissors; a space that is private enough for the act of cutting to go briefly undetected; a history of mother–daughter encounters with the brushing and management of hair. All of these forces were at work to produce a playful moment of haircutting, and out of that emerged, a girl who looked ultra-feminine no longer, and a very upset mother who reiterated in her upset state the power of those locks to signify a desirable femininity (Davies, 2016b, pp. 210–211).

3.2 Decentering the Child Q. Many researchers who are using posthuman and new materialist approaches in their research have claimed that there is a need to decenter the child. Do you attempt to decenter the child in your research and if you do, how do you approach it in relation to listening to children? There is an apparent paradox that lies at the heart of your question, and it is a paradox I was intensely aware of when I began my study at Trollet in Sweden for Listening to Children (Davies, 2014a). Each child at Trollet was carefully and respectfully attended to in his or her emergent specificity. Indeed, there was a tenderness and care

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in that attention that I found profoundly moving. That was accompanied by a great deal of responsibility given to children, for example, documenting their thought as it unfolded and putting it on the walls, helping themselves to their hot meals and to attend to each other as they sat around the table at lunch, including everyone in the conversation, even strangers, and making sure everyone had what they needed. Yet what they were forming was not a bunch of individual children, but a community, and more than that, an unfolding event in which everyone was present precisely because they were emergent within the relationality that came into existence around the table. What was being decentered in these observations was the liberal humanist version of the child, and of adult–child relations, and what took its place was collective life— human life and more-than-human life. The children become not what they ought to be, or what we expected them to be, but emergent beings engaged in multiple intra-active encounters. “‘Singularity’ is not the individual, it is the case, the event, the potential (potential), or rather the distribution of potentials in a given matter” (Deleuze & Parnet, 2007, p. 161, Bronwyn Davies’s emphasis). Q. You write in your book “Listening to Children” that your research methodology is a “diffractive methodology”. Can you tell us more about how this methodology/approach has informed your more current work, and how it differs from your earlier (methodological) approaches in your research with children? (for example: in relation to concepts in qualitative research including “coding,”“analysis,” “validity,” etc.). I haven’t ever used “coding” or “validity,” indeed I have argued against them (Davies, 2014b), though I do think of what I do as analysis. What I don’t do is imagine that the real world can be accessed and documented through the researcher’s reflexive gaze, as in a mirror—as if all we ever had to do was hold up a mirror to what is already lying there for us to document. A diffractive methodology is itself movement, and it is part of the movement it sets out to observe and to make sense of. A diffractive analysis might pick up on the tiniest movement, or it may pick up on large sweeps of divergent movements affecting each other. It is open to what it doesn’t yet know or even know how to imagine. In observing or working with children, it is the quality of being open to the not-yet-known that is vital in a diffractive analysis, but more than that, it requires a shift of focus from entities to events and to the potential in those events. It involves giving up on being the authoritative adult whose intentions shape what happens, and whose knowledge dictates the questions and the answers.

3.3 Writing and Mentoring Q. Part of your work has focused on writing as an embodied experience. More recently you have been involved in a project about collaborative writing through an engagement with Deleuzian concepts. What is the potential that collaborative writing has for researchers and educators? How have Deleuzian concepts helped you and your collaborative co-writers to experience writing differently? We wonder

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if collaborative writing through Deleuzian thought opens up the possibility to think about subjectivity differently, and if so, how? I love Deleuzian collaborative writing precisely because it breaks up the linear thrust of a particular thought and enables it to go elsewhere. You are no longer writing to that disembodied, collective audience out there, who is so hard to imagine, especially for new scholars, and you are no longer writing to lay claim to a particular set of ideas. In collaborative writing, your words are being lived in the bodies of your cowriters, and they respond with words that not only bring new thoughts and images, but also bring your own words to new life—to a divergent life, a diffractive life. In Deleuze and Collaborative Writing (Wyatt, Gale, Gannon & Davies, 2011) we sought to make real the flow in between, the coming to life in between, which the writing evoked. Q. As an experienced scholar, you may be working along with doctoral and emergent scholars. What is your approach to mentorship? How would you (or how have you in the past) challenge(d) your students to explore new ideas or approaches to their research? I often have to find ways to counter the stifling advice given to doctoral students and young scholars about how research should be done in neoliberal institutions, advice that is rule-bound, conformist, and stifling, and that runs directly counter to both poststructuralist and new materialist research. To break outside of the already known takes some courage and a great deal of persistence. As a mentor it’s important to do a lot of permission giving on the one hand, and on the other, to link students up with exciting ideas that enable them to imagine their research question and their mode of answering in ways they hadn’t imagined before. It’s important, too, to share the puzzlement and the excitement of discovering how to think differently, not following preconceived methods and rules, or tracing over pathways already trodden, but allowing the research to unfold itself. That has often involved writing together with my students in a collaborative search for new ways of thinking about the conceptual problems their work confronts.

3.4 The Neoliberal University Q. Throughout your work, you have offered a critique of the neoliberal university. For example, in a chapter that you co-authored with Margaret Somerville and Lise Claiborne, you have suggested that the neoliberal university, through micromanagement of ever-increasing productivity, competitiveness, and individualization, would shape both academics’ subjectivities and the nature of their work. In your own experience, how has the neoliberal university limited/shifted the production of knowledge, if at all, in the field of early childhood and childhood studies? How have you navigated through those limitations and impositions? What are the limitations that a neoliberal rationality imposes through research funding priorities to scholars undertaking more experimental research approaches?

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In the excitement of this new scholarship that began to emerge in the 1980s we failed to notice that there was a counter movement. Workers and academics had shown themselves to be “out of control” in May’68. In the subsequent decade democracy was seen by wealthy businessmen and politicians, who formed the Trilateral Commission, to be unaffordable (Davies 2018c). The strategies they developed to bring us under control, and to secure the flow of wealth toward the rich and powerful, are now grouped together under the term neoliberalism. I for one, failed to notice them, until the 90s, as a force to be reckoned with, and with passion and excitement blithely searched out new ways of thinking and researching. The forces of control did not only come from outside the academy. Academics, like anyone else, can be jealous of their own territorialized knowledge and fearful of being replaced. My first encounter with that jealous guardianship came when I was a Ph.D. student. My Head of Department was a quantitative researcher and qualitative research was not yet recognized and practiced in my department. There was no one who could supervise the work I wanted to do, so I completed my doctoral thesis, without supervision. My Head of Department said it couldn’t be submitted for examination as no one could tell whether it was rubbish or not. I asked him to send it to someone in the UK who could tell him whether it was rubbish or not. It was later published as Life in the Classroom and Playground. The Accounts of Primary School Children (1982), and I was awarded a doctorate. That is a roundabout way of saying that the constraints of the institution might cause a lot of grief, and it may require ingenuity, courage and determination to extend the boundaries of what is possible. Creative work can be (and should be) disruptive, but what at one point in time may cause enormous resistance, may later become the lifeblood of new thinking. The neoliberal machinery also erects barriers, intended to make us predictable and containable, producing whatever our managers or governing bodies think they want us to produce. Seeing that machinery as such makes it possible to develop minimal strategies for satisfying it (and thus surviving) while at the same time developing those networks and practices that open thought up, and keep it alive. There are a thousand small ways the machinery of neoliberalism captures you, so it must also be subjected to continued and incisive critique. You need to know the monster that wants to enslave you, and you need to resist it, preferably collectively. For my part, though, I decided to de-institutionalize myself so that I could get on with my work unimpeded by the monster and its monstrous practices.

3.5 Ethics and Politics Q. Some scholars have suggested that a new materialist perspective fails to attend to discourses of power or the historicity of the researcher’s own speculations or categories. What do you think of the critiques of posthumanism or new materialism (specifically the critique that new materialisms tends to depoliticize research)? In your opinion, what is the potential that posthumanist materialism has for re-thinking and re-doing ethics and politics?

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In a way this is a familiar and predictable refrain. It was leveled against poststructuralist work too (see Gannon & Davies, 2007). Liberal feminist politics generally requires the binary categories to remain intact so that discrimination can be documented, and the rights of groups who are underprivileged, according to gender, race, class, ability, sexual preference, and so on, fought for. It draws its political strength from concepts and values that are unquestioned by those in power, such as human rights. As long as subordinated groups are discriminated against this is essential political work. There are of course dangers in holding the categories intact, however. Subordinated groups can become attached to their subordinate status and can lose their power in stories of victimhood and powerlessness. There is a constant risk that the maintenance of the dominant modes of thought will function to keep the oppressive gender order intact, despite the numerous liberal feminist challenges. Other approaches to gender are necessary to offset those dangers. Radical feminism, in which femininities are celebrated and dominating masculinities brought under heavy fire, involves more playful political work, first in moving from the individualism of liberal feminism, to a collective set of strategies, and second, in doing the work of breaking open old stereotypes and assumptions that are created and maintained through the ongoing practices of subordination. Poststructuralist feminism, and more recently posthuman and new-material feminisms engage in a different kind of political work entirely. There are multiple strategies those in power can, and do, use to undermine liberal and radical feminist strategies, and so keep hold of their dominant positioning and power. They can do this quite easily because the language used by those opposing them is the very language that holds their power intact. Poststructural and posthuman feminisms are engaged in what Bergson (1998) calls creative evolution—generating lines of flight that change the ways we engage with the world and that change what it is possible to think and to be and to become. They shift from static categories to be fought over, to events, to potential, to intra-action, to movement, to ethical response-ability and to opening up the not-yet-known. Kristeva argued in “Women’s time” that each feminism has important work to do, and each can be called on in different situations, undertaking quite different, but complementary work. The capacity to move between feminist discourses, depending on the work that needs to be done, is, in my experience, one of the most liberating aspects of current feminisms. They all do vital work, and it is exhilarating to be able to choose among them in response to the work that needs to be done in specific contexts and times. Those feminists who attack each other from the standpoint of one or another of these frameworks, are doing political work. In effect, they are doing patriarchy’s work for it.

3.6 Research Contributions and New Projects Q. Do you have any upcoming research projects you’d like to share with us?

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My new book New Lives in an Old Land opens up thought about the relation between everyday lives of ordinary people and the wider sweep of exploitation and colonization that are integral to our (past/present/future) lives. I have, too, been actively continuing my critique of neoliberalism. Much more lively and life-giving, though, is my exploration, with others, of the materiality of artwork, both my own and others’, for example Davies (2018b) and Thomson, Linnell, Laws, and Davies (2018). I am also doing some exciting experimental writing on the deleuzian concept of refrains.

Further Reading Davies, B. (2014). Reading anger in early childhood intra-actions: A diffractive analysis. Qualitative Inquiry, 20(6), 734–741 Davies, B. (2018). The persistent smile of the Cheshire cat. Explorations in the agency of matter through art-making. Qualitative Inquiry 1–9 Davies, B. (2019). Pondering the pond: ethical encounters with children. In C. Schulte (Ed.), Ethics and research with young children: ‘New’ perspectives. Bloomsbury

References Barad, K. (2007). Meeting the universe halfway. Durham UK: Duke University Press. Barad, K. (2012). Nature’s queer performativity. Kvinder Køn & Forskning, 1(2), 25–53. Barad, K. (2013). Posthumanist Performativity: Toward an Understanding of How Matter Comes to Matter. Signs, 283(3):801–831 (Spring 2003). Bergson, H. (1998). Creative evolution (A. Mitchell, Trans). Mineoloa: Dover Publications Inc. Cixous, H., & Calle-Gruber, M. (1997). Rootprints. Memory and life writing (Eric Prenowitz, Trans.). London: Routledge. Davies, B. (1982). Life in the classroom and playground. The accounts of primary school children. London: Routledge and Kegan Paul. Re-issued 2017. Davies, B. (1989). Frogs and snails and feminist tales. Preschool children and gender (pp. 1–152). Sydney: Allen and Unwin (2nd ed.) (2003). NJ Cresskill: Hampton Press. Davies, B. (2000a). A body of writing 1989–1999. Walnut Creek: Alta Mira Press. Davies, B. (2000b). (In)scribing body/landscape relations. Walnut Creek: Alta Mira Press. Davies, B. (2014a). Listening to children. Being and becoming. London: Routledge Davies, B. (2014b). Legitimation in post-critical, post-realist times, or whether legitimation? In A. D. Reid, E. P. Hart & M. A. Peters (eds.) A companion to research in education. Springer (pp. 443–450). Davies, B. (2016a). Ethics and the new materialism. A brief genealogy of the ‘post’ philosophies in the social sciences. Discourse Studies in the Cultural Politics of Education, 39(1), 113–127. Davies, B. (2016b). Gendering the subject in playful encounters. In S. Lynch, D. Pike & C. Beckett (Eds), Multidisciplinary perspectives on play from birth and beyond (pp. 207–216). Singapore: Springer. Davies, B. (2018a). Seduction and desire: The power of the spectacle. Qualitative Inquiry, 1–8. Davies, B. (2018b). The persistent smile of the Cheshire cat. Explorations in the agency of matter through art-making. Qualitative Inquiry, 1–9. Davies, B. (2019a). Pondering the pond: ethical encounters with children. In C. Schulte (Ed) Ethics and research with young children: ‘New’ perspectives. Bloomsbury.

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Davies, B. (2019c). New lives in an old land. Re-turning to the colonization of New South Wales through stories of my parents and their ancestors. Sydney: Ornythorhynchus Paradoxus Books. Davies B., & Kasama, H. (2004). Gender in Japanese Preschools. Frogs and snails and feminist tales in Japan. Cresskill N.J.: Hampton Press. Davies, B., Browne, J., Gannon, S., Honan, E., Laws, C., Muller-Rockstroh, B., & Petersen, E. B. (2006). The ambivalent practices of reflexivity. In B. Davies & S. Gannon (Eds.), Doing collective biography (pp. 88–113). Maidenhead: Open University Press. Deleuze, G., & Parnet, C. (2007). Dialogue 11. New York: Columbia University Press. Gannon, S. & Davies, B. (2007). Postmodern, poststructural and critical perspectives. In S. Nagy Hesse-Biber (Ed.), Handbook of feminist research: Theory and praxis (pp. 71–106). Thousand Oaks: Sage. Konturri, K.-K., & Tiainen, M. (2007). Feminism, art, Deleuze, and Darwin: An interview with Elizabeth Grosz. NORA Nordic Journal of Women’s Studies, 15(4), 246–256. Kristeva, J. (1981). Women’s time. (A. Jardine, Trans.). Signs 7(1) Thomson, J., Linnell, S., Laws, C., & Davies, B. (2018). Entanglements between art-making and storytelling in a collective biography on the death of an intimate other. Departures in Critical Qualitative Inquiry, 7(3), 4–26. Wilcox, H., McWatters, K., Thompson, A., & Williams, L. R. (Eds.). (1990). The body and the text. New York: Harvester Wheatsheaf. Wyatt, J., Gale, K., Gannon, S., & Davies, B. (2011). Deleuze and collaborative writing: An immanent plane of composition. New York: Peter Lang.

Bronwyn Davies is an independent scholar affiliated with Melbourne and Western Sydney Universities. The distinctive features of her work are her development of experimental and collaborative ways of doing research, incorporating into her thinking and writing elements of the visual, literary and performative arts. Her writing engages with the conceptual work of poststructuralist and new materialist philosophers including Barad, Deleuze, Foucault and Nancy. She is currently exploring the de-centring of the human subject, and its emergent entanglements with human and more than human others.

Chapter 4

Interview with Hillevi Lenz Taguchi Hillevi Lenz Taguchi, Paulina Semenec and Claudia Diaz-Diaz

We need to leave the comfort of reshaping our minds with theory (as researchers) and instead reshape our minds by ways of practices in collaboration with those agents whom the research concerns. We need to involve ourselves more in the relations we talk so much about theoretically, and not make posthumanist and new materialist work be about our own theoretical revelations.

In this provocative interview, Hillevi Lenz Taguchi encourages researchers to continuously challenge the existing prevalent systems of knowledge that offer the framework for educational research. As Hillevi illustrates in her interview, taking knowledge for granted overlooks how research may indeed work against instead of for children and families who face difficult circumstances. For researchers, challenging knowledge means to be inventive with methods. Hillevi speaks to the importance of crossing disciplinary boundaries so as not to risk reproducing the same kind of research. She offers a very interesting perspective about the critique of developmentalist thinking and how scholars need to revise their critique in order to think differently about research. Regarding developmentalism, she argues that we cannot deny the fact that child development is a part of the material practices that constitute children and that it can explain some inequalities that affect them. This is not to say that we need to return to developmentalism, but that we need to engage with research that we may not feel comfortable with because it has become so much a part of our critique. She also reflects on some of her earlier work, including her well-cited paper with Karin Hultman and asks why this paper was so influential for many scholars. H. L. Taguchi (B) Stockholm University, Stockholm, Sweden e-mail: [email protected] P. Semenec · C. Diaz-Diaz University of British Columbia, Vancouver, BC, Canada e-mail: [email protected] C. Diaz-Diaz e-mail: [email protected] © Springer Nature Singapore Pte Ltd. 2020 C. Diaz-Diaz and P. Semenec, Posthumanist and New Materialist Methodologies, Children: Global Posthumanist Perspectives and Materialist Theories, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-981-15-2708-1_4

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Hillevi’s examination of some of her own assumptions about decentering the child is an important part of this interview, and one that forced us to push our thinking in regard to what decentering in fact may look like in practice.

4.1 Challenging Systems of Knowledge Production Q. Your latest work on posthumanist ontologies in educational scholarship is very rich and complex. We really enjoyed your paper titled: This is not a photograph of a fetus: A feminist reconfiguration of the concept of posthumanism as the ultrasoundfetusimage (2017). In it, you drew on [the concept of] posthumanism as a method of inquiry to answer some of your concerns regarding the use of posthumanism as a theoretical framework in/for educational research. Instead of abandoning method, you propose that we be inventive to create research practices and methods that challenge systems of knowledge production that condition our thinking as researchers. Why is that important for educational research, and particularly research with children today? The short answer of this question is that we must never cease to challenge the existing and dominant systems of knowledge production, since these can always be used to oppress those actors/agents in the world who do not have access to them. This includes posthumanist and new materialist ways of knowing the world of children and education, which in no way can be all encompassing, and can never be truer than any other system of knowledge production. All they do is produce knowledge in a different way. A way which we think can help us—collaboratively and with the agents the research concerns—do as best we possibly can in the socio-historical and material context we are in. But the day we think we know the world better by one single way of knowing something, we are already doomed to fail that challenge. The world/reality is complex and multiple, and so must all forms of knowledge production be; they need to be not singular but multiple and always open to (self-)critique and transformation. In attempting to provide the longer and more elaborated answer as straightforwardly as I can, I still need to remind us about the seemingly circular and nonprogressive ways in which time matters, and where the past, present, and future collapse into each other. That is why I would like to talk about how I came to what can be understood as postpositivist/posthumanist research, which was one of your original questions for this interview. I need to do this since, in all honesty, advocating for the challenging of existing systems of knowledge is something that has already been going on for at least 30 years in the space of academia. In the Swedish academia, critical theory, in different versions has even become somewhat of a norm in many social science disciplines. In new materialist and posthumanist approaches, however, challenges are not merely about the critical but are also about the inventive, and providing possible other ways of knowing, doing and living—the affirmative.

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Evidently, the inventive aspect of academic work seems as something necessary to argue for; that is, it is not something that researchers always see as part of their task. Innovative transformation is necessary for so many increasingly urgent reasons, both political and not the least a sheer reason of survival of the globe as we know it, and of ourselves as a species as we know us. However, most of the time we seem to fool ourselves to be challenging something, which is not even there to be challenged, or that might actually be something completely different. This, I would argue, is the case with what is often referred to as a “developmentalist thinking” about the child, which appears in so many contemporary writings of childhood research. Here, it is often argued in New Materialist and posthumanist ECER to exist a need of challenging a developmentalist thinking and the idea that children undergo a stage-delineated process of maturation that prepares them for being the adult they are supposed to become. This could be a quote taken from a number of recently published books and articles in the field of critical and/or posthumanist child studies. Yet, research in contemporary developmental sciences agree on that children embryos and bodies, brains, minds, sex, and gender are materialdiscursively and thus interactively molded: that is, developing—into each present moment in a complex co-constitutive process that we have only begun to know more about. So, in one sense, perhaps it is the lack of knowledge about the individual child-body’s materialdiscursive co-constituted development and adaption to shifting materialdiscursive conditions of living that can be understood more of a problem? And perhaps the problem is more about the lack of collaboration between researchers in different fields of research that in one sense— despite different epistemologies and methods/methodologies—basically agree on the materialdiscursive emergence of the human body and subjectivity? Another example is that some of us sometimes call for the urgency of—in line with the above revelation—challenging a discursive paradigm of social constructionism with a more serious interest in the body and matter. However, the body and matter are already performing its challenging of and on us (as bodies and our multiple subjectivities) as we speak, whether we are aware of it or not. And this is why it is especially important for research dealing with young children, to think in terms of what I have theorized as self-differentiation, drawing upon Deleuze and Guattari and Claire Colebrook, as something already ongoing. If we—as politically engaged feminist researchers—want to be engaged in urgent matters of concern, formulated in collaboration with children and their educators and families, we need to start intervening and interfering using as many different kinds of methods that can be productive of knowledge about the conditions of these self-differentiating processes. My argument for multiple or more, rather than less methods, and more and more innovative epistemologies and methodologies, rather than less, that you ask about in the second question, reflects this urgency of not just knowing more, but knowing together with the agents the questions concern, and of knowing well. This means knowing ethically and sustainably—in relation to these agents and in relation to the context and world in which they and we live together. To do this, and to be seriously challenging ways of knowledge production, and to be innovative and creative of new ways of thinking and living; we need our colleagues and their methods from other scientific disciplines, and from art and innovation practices of other kinds.

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If I may make a history of the present detour, and with a risk of sounding presumptuous, putting to work a self-differentiating process of knowledge production, is actually something that I have been arguing all throughout my career. In my early childhood education research, I have argued for the need of many different ways of both knowing and doing what is going on in a preschool learning process and the many different ways children come to articulate their relationship to and learning about their surrounding world. I came to the field of early childhood education research via my studies in first in literature and later in quantitative sociology as part of a behavioral science undergraduate. Merleau-Ponty and Derrida became, in addition to the mandatory readings of Michel Foucault in the mid 90’s, central to my Ph.D. education at Stockholm University. It basically followed the interest of my supervisors: Gunilla Dahlberg and Kenneth Hultqvist, who were closely connected to Basil Bernstein, Valerie Walkerdine, Lyn Yates and Tom Popkewitz at that time. My closer connections to Patti Lather and Bronwyn Davies, I acquired via feminist coursework led by Kajsa Ohrlander. Based on these readings, I did my feminist poststructural “action research” with educators who engaged with me in what I theorized and enacted as deconstructive talking. The aim was to self-reflect and search for knowledge—also from other disciplines—about how to understand and think otherwise about children’s learning of a specific skill or content. We did this by actively displacing dominant notions, ideas and interpretations of documented practices, to unlearn and relearn, and transform practices. A few years later, I did Ph.D. courses on my own and set to work deconstructive ways of collaboratively analyze data together in multiple and sometimes conflicting ways. Some years later, this was written up as articles in terms of a decentered researcher subjectivity and molecular becomings of research subjectivities. Ten years ago, when I tired first to get those papers published, my work was rejected repeatedly. It probably wasn’t because of my claims of the decentred human subject, which, after all, has been a familiar notion since Foucault’s metaphorical notion of the “death of the subject.” It might have been the explicit articulation of multiple realities of an event that was provoking. I don’t know, but why would that be such a difficult challenge for researchers, when it was clearly not for preschool teachers in the 90 s? Nevertheless, in retrospect, challenging taken-for-granted and dominating practices is what critical pedagogy and feminist theory and pedagogy have always been about, isn’t it, since the 1960’s? I was fortunate to be in the middle of all of that as a Ph.D. student when the many classical texts of the 1990’s had just been published to read, from scholars such as Elisabeth Ellsworth, Susan Hekman, Jane Flax, Patti Lather, Valerie Walkerdine, Bronwyn Davies, Alison Jones, Lyn Yates, Jeanette Rhedding-Jones, and many more. 25 years later, I am often trying to figure out why it is that the theorizing going on back then, by other contemporary feminists theorists who were trained as, or very knowledgeable in, the natural sciences, such as Donna Haraway, Elizabeth Grosz, Elizabeth Wilson, Anne-Fausto Sterling, was so selectively read by us at that point in history. And now, as their texts seem to appear in most all of posthumanist and new materialist research, I understand it to be selectively read once again, but in a completely different fashion.

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In the 90’s and 00’s, we read about natureculture interaction and the ongoing coconstitutiveness of bodies/matter and discourse. But what really interested us in that ongoing co-constitutive and reconstitutive process was the previously unthinkable power of language and discourse. This overshadowed the fact that these authors actually wrote on the co-constitutiveness of biological matter and discourse. It was to me completely revolutionary to understand the individual body of a woman or child, as collectively inscribed by societal ideas and notions in a way as to seemingly erase individually grounded intention and the free will of a human subject. That was huge! A child or youth, unable to become what it might desire to become; since more or less all a human subject desires is to subject herself to dominant discourse or to its movements of resistance, which confirms its existence. “There is no doer behind the deed,” as Butler said—just the power/knowledge nexus of collectively articulated discourses. Or, what Foucault described as the double-bind of an increasing individuation and a totalizing power. Honestly, the constitutive force of discourse still dawns on me almost every day as a brutal revelation of what living is all about. But we forgot about the biological body back then. Or rather, we took it for granted, and more importantly: we were not ready to think about how the body also constitutes discourse, not just the other way around. The partial deafness to that aspect of my rigorous readings of these theorists amaze me today and makes me more scientifically suspicious than ever. Because why is it that we in a certain time period seem to tune in better to some concepts and meanings than others? It is not that I didn’t hear them: I wrote about that too in the first book on feminist poststructuralism to be written in Swedish in 2004—Down to the bare bone—as it was called. But to then, in the 90 s or beginning of the 00’s, talk about the developing body of the child, or the brain, more or less equaled adhering to developmentalism; that is, the bad and ugly aspect of how knowledge of child development turns into that individuating normalization of a totalizing powerproduction, aspiring to get all children as normal as possible, and which have all of those practices of marginalization emerge as an effect. However, in a contradictory way, posthumanist and new materialists in educational research still neglect a central aspect of the biological material body, while instead sometimes over-emphasizing the constitutive force of other matter. So, while arguing for a posthumanist extreme of a post-anthropocentric decentered child and a nonrepresentational research practice, the body and matter comes to matter merely in the way we—as humans—seem to able to discursively inscribe it and thus articulate it or (re)present it. In this way anthropocentrism stares right back at us, which is one point I make in that paper you ask about. What seems to be hard to get our heads around is how bodies and matter are equally constitutive of discourses in their ongoing constitutiveness. And that the “articulations” of bodies and matter cannot merely be done, neither in a social scientist or humanities vocabulary, nor in what Christine Ericsson (2018) talks about as “high jacked practices of art” and other alternative re-representations in child studies of different kinds. And this is, again, what brings me to what you ask about in your second question, about multiple ways of knowing and not abandoning “old” ways in that process.

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4.2 Acknowledging Multiples Ways of Knowing Q. In the preface to Osgood and Robinson’s (2018) book Feminists Researching Gendered Childhoods: Generative Entanglements, you suggest that rather than abandon “old” ways of thinking about and doing research, researchers need to: …find ways to acknowledge multiple ways of knowing in a relation with each other— together. Starting in a negotiating of a, with stakeholders—whether human or morethan human—shared matter of concern for the research: then negotiating the possible ways of understanding the consequences of what can be learnt, as the results of multiple research findings and their necessarily differing epistemological narratives, and what they produce together. This is the way I imagine a possibility of more kinds of feminisms working together, and together with researchers from other disciplines. P. 17 This is an important call for researchers, because as you clearly wrote in this preface, researchers (both emerging and established) often fail to work/think with what may no longer be considered to be “new” (as we have seen with new materialisms and posthumanism more specifically). An example of how these multiple ways of knowing come together (although not always smoothly) is well illustrated in one of your recent collaborative articles (2018) entitled Bidirectional collaborations in an intervention randomized controlled trial performed in the Swedish early childhood education context. Can you speak more about some of these “shared matters of concern” and perhaps some of the challenges that arise when working across differing epistemological and ontological narratives? In what ways is such an approach needed in the (varying contexts) of childhood research? Moreover, can you speak to some of the potential challenges that working in this way may pose to emerging scholars who may not be yet well be situated to engage in this kind of transdisciplinary work? The short answer is the most pressing matter of concern is still the unequal living and educational conditions that children in all countries—even Sweden and especially now as our population has increased since 2015 with the explosive immigration from Syria, Afghanistan, and North Africa—are still experiencing, and which limit these children’s possibilities of becoming citizens with as equal as possible of conditions. In this respect I remain the critical emancipatory (poststructuralist) feminist researcher I have always been. The long answer of this very complex question I will try to answer in a way that hopefully can help scholars who have already made a choice of abandoning “old” and what Bettie St. Pierre usually call “conventional” ways of knowing, to understand how it can be that I as a critical emancipatory poststructuralist feminist researcher would even think about engaging in and lead the first randomized control trial in preschool in Sweden. I will do this in two ways. I want to plug into the— within posthumanism and new materialism—taken for granted idea of decentering the child in a flat ontology of network relations, of which the child is merely an effect of a multiplicity of relations. While doing so, I will say something more about how a critical emancipatory and New Materialist feminist stance actually needs to

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be inclusive of the natural sciences, technique and art, precisely because the child is an effect of a multiplicity of relations. The decentering of the child, as a post-anthropocentric notion, seems to be the most urgent matter of concern in Posthumanist/NM studies in ECER. It foregrounds and centers a relational ontology. The child as part of a co-dependent relationship with the planet earth and more-than-human agents/actors. But to what extent is the child really decentered and, if so, on what conditions? Or, is the child still the taken for granted main, but hidden, subject in this research? Moreover, a question I often ask myself is whether or not these studies actually manage to, in line with its postanthropocentric claims, show how the decentered child is co-constituted as an effect of a multiplicity of relations on all—or at least more than one—possible level? When asking to what extent the child is really decentered and if so, on what conditions; I ask this because I want to propose that my own work, and perhaps the work of many others actually never did decenter the child. It was my readings of Claire Colebrook that made me realize this and made me start to do some selfcritical readings of my own work. Not the least my most downloaded article, written with Karin Hultman (2010) Challenging anthropocentric analysis of visual data: a relational materialist methodological approach to educational research. Why is it that this article is so very popular? I think it is because it manages to show how other actors, such as the sand, are important in the construction of experiences and knowledge of the child, but also because the child remains the main interest of this research. The child isn’t really decentered at all. Rather, we just narrate the story about the child’s learning in a fashion that becomes inclusive of other performative agents that are not merely active from within the child’s brain and body but are also extended into the material environment of the sandpit and the preschool yard. So, just as when we were centering structures and discourses in our poststructuralist work, (instead of trying to figure out the innate developmentalist program from which the child’s body seemed to act upon the word); now we instead centered the sand and the sandpit in the equation. An equation with the overarching matter of concern which was still the child’s learning and identity/subjectivity formation. So, although the poststructuralist and posthumanist theoretical perspectives have helped me theorize on that neither learning not subjectivity construction are processes that evolves from within the child and, so to speak, exclusively “takes place” within the child; my own and other’s most urgent matter of concern has never ceased to be the learning and identity/subjectivity formation of the child. Let me clarify this shortly: During the 1990’s, Gunilla Dahlberg (my supervisor), Valerie Walkerdine, Erica Burman, Bronwyn Davies, and many other prominent scholars than myself, argued the need to get away from child-centered views and practices, since these were seen to objectify and normalize children. Critical and feminist approaches in the 90’s shifted the attention from “discovering” the laws of innate and/or universal development of children to the discursive and structural conditions of their childhoods and emerging subjectivities. Or, in other words, we decentered the child itself from our research to, instead, center the structural and/or discursive conditions that inscribe the child in a culturally, gendered, classed, ethnic, and racially constructed childhood in the family

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and in educational contexts. This absolutely necessary eye-wide-opening shift revolutionized educational and child studies research in so many ways. In too many ways, I claim today, as a senior in an academic context in Sweden, where these approaches have become not just the norm, but more or less exclusive approaches in educational research and child and youth studies. In this context, there are more than plenty of studies on how norms shape the relations and behavior of children in preschools and schools. However, this shift also meant a complete turn away from the production of other forms of knowing about how these norms might also be co-constitutive in the shaping of the biological aspects of the child’s well-being, and the brains and bodies of these children. That is, dismissing those embodied conditions that in an intra-active process of becoming are part of a materialdiscursive/natureculture coconstitution of the child. Part of the reason was that in the negative epistemology inherited from poststructuralism, the kinds of methods that would enable us to know more about this process were not seen as trustworthy, but rather dangerous, for the reasons suggested above. The way I think about it nowadays, or since I seriously started to understand more about Deleuze & Guattari’s affirmative transcendental empiricism, is that it embraces the differentiating processes going on in any kind of assemblages: assemblages that we sometimes need different and multiple methods to produce knowledge about. So, when you ask about overarching matters of concern: the most important matter of concern, at least for me, is and has always been the ethics, rights, and subjectivity formation of those actors who are not ascribed the same status and respect as adult male citizens—with an emphasis on children and women. So, to repeat: when we talk more explicitly about the materialdiscursive conditions of those ethics, rights, learning, and identity/subjectivity formations, we need to acknowledge that they encompass a mixture of structures, discourses, and various materialities in networkformations or assemblages. And these conditions are not only constitutive from the outside-in of the child, but overlap into the child’s body and embodied brain, muscles, and nervous system. These are materialdiscursive conditionings that have always and will always be taking place, whether or not we decide to take an interest in them, and whether or not we consider what we call positivist and experimental research good or bad. (Interestingly, we are always in favor of experimental research when it comes to areas such as medicine, treatments and the nursing and care of the sick.) However, if we, in line with post-anthropocentric theories, want to show how the child is co-constituted as an effect of a multiplicity of relations in multiple materialdiscursive networks and assemblages, I don’t think that we can actively exclude some of these networks just because we do not have the methodological means of researching them, or that we don’t approve all the aspects of what that research does. Any kind of research has its limitations and problems. So, why not collaborate instead to know more about the conditions of children’s ongoing and possible lives? This means that if we, in line with a classical postructuralist positioning, think that reality is a multiplicity, we need to take into account that there are multiple ontologies and epistemologies at work. If we want to know more about how the plasticity of the child’s brain work as to be actively transformed by the stress of poverty and

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threatening living conditions, and to try out ways as to transform those conditions, we probably need more rather than less methods and methodologies at work. You asked me to talk a bit about the project for which my funding just finished. We finished the randomized control trial, which means that the project in one sense just really started. It is now that we start our rigours and collaborative studies on all of the different forms of data produced with children and staff in the 29 preschools. The study began with a collaboration with educators in a municipality. It was conditioned by these collaborations with children, parents and educators, and the ongoing and continuing is equally dependent on this collaboration. What is merely stated in that article “Bidirectional…” is the background and construction of the so-called “effect study”—the randomized control trial—of this project. For 20 years the pedagogical philosophy of Gunilla Dahlberg, myself, and others have had an enormous impact on practices. It is still growing, all around the country. But as I have visited practices in different municipalities around Stockholm, I have been struck by the way that the pedagogical discourse has been taken up both by practitioners/educators and their superiors. In honesty, the investigative practices, informed by poststructural theory, Deleuze, Barad and others, have become in many preschools and schools a middle-class practice, which has abandoned too many children and deprived them of their possibilities of developing and learning the way we envisioned. There are many converging reasons to this, and this is not the place for me to discuss these reasons. But this is the background of this whole project, which made me want to take that practice and reform it together with educators once more. And now, as the effect study is done, this is what we are in a continued process of going about. Why not just do another piece of clever poststructuralist and new materialist informed collaborative “action research” in the spirit of critical and feminist theory? Because I saw the possibilities with setting up a large-scale RCT. Since the problem I saw in practices was the lack of time and tools to provide individual attention to children, I planned a project where attention enhancing practices of very different kinds could be tried out by educators and tested. What if we could learn something— within the limits of the different epistemologies with which we researched this—that was not expected, and that might help us transform practices in ways that would make more children benefit for their learning and development? We have merely started to perform multiple and very different analyzes constructed with children and educators, and by ways of testing the children, focus-interviews, ethnographic film sequences. That is, multiple “conventional” data productions but also a couple of very unconventional explorative “artistic” ones: all in the same project. One thing that I can preliminary give away, though, is that educators saw so many of the children they usually do not trust to “pay attention” or “be attentive,” “focused,” “interested,” “collaborating with others,” “talkative,” etc. suddenly be all, or some, of these. Most importantly it wasn’t just the intervention where the investigative pedagogy was tried out in a boosted version that enabled these observations. Just as many children would start to show these skills in the intervention where we tried out some playful practices of self-regulation. (Yes, I know so many of you wince at the sound of that word, I did too at first). They playfully practiced their focussed attention, but also breathing and relaxation, focus and grit, before playing

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an interactive digital early mathematics game. The analyzes of the videos show some unexpected emergences of children’s skills, subjectivities, social interactions, and learning. Maybe this tells us more about, not what pedagogy is better than the other, but how important adult focus on and attention to each child actually is? It is, I now believe, more important than a really good sandpit to play in, to allude to the article by me and Karin I just talked about. Hopefully, all preschool aged children are provided with both! But you also wanted me to talk about the challenges of this kind of work. They are bigger than I thought they would be. And actually, not because researchers from “the other” disciplines would be more problematic, but because it turned out we, as new materialist and posthumanist researchers, would be equally problematic and in similar ways. The most urgent problem in these collaborations is that researchers from different research disciplines actually do not know anything about the other’s research practices, methods, methodologies, and the conditions for different kinds of research. As for researchers from cognitive psychology and, as in our case, linguistics, they had no experience or knowledge about the kind of qualitative research that is the basis for educational research. And now I mean everything except from positivist and multi-modal and semiotic accounts. But, as it turned out, equally problematic was the complete lack of knowledge among educational researchers of any more structured accounts of research methods. Basically, it was more or less all social construction, feminist poststructuralist, and new materialist ways of thinking and doing, which prohibited imagining the conditions of other ways of thinking and doing, since these were already deemed inadequate or bad. And this is not because of who I work with, but rather, this is because this is what the Swedish ECER landscape basically looks like. Lack of knowledge and a distrustful attitude toward others disciplinary expertise constituted the biggest problem for us in this research, coming from both directions. It has been a struggle for me as project-leader. But the gains of this kind of research in the municipality among the educator is more important than internal academic problems which can, of course, be overcome—if we want to! Because, what this project has made possible is access to and collaboration with educators from 29 units, trying out some pedagogical strategies that we now are in a process of modifying and transforming. Moreover, RCT made possible an intervention in practices which put the responsibility on the researchers, but which necessarily made the educators and children much more ethically involved than what I have seen happens in action research, where the boundaries are blurred between superior staff members, educators, and researchers. The rigorous practices of information and consent, during each event, was a possibility for all involved to step aside, not be filmed, not be tested, etc., which however did not happen very often. This project also involves a larger project on the children’s experiences of being part of an RCT, the first of its kind I believe, which I do together with Linnea Bodén. It is, of course, of great importance what we will manage to show how it is possible to make multiple forms of epistemological and collaborative analyses as part of this project. It would be all too easy to make—merely—a critical analysis of the children being tested pre and post an intervention. Rather, it is when we can put that critical analysis side by side with analyzes made from other epistemologies

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that we might get some interesting knowledge about whether or not RCT studies in preschool should be done or not, and if they should, how they can and should best be performed. To me, RCT designed studies are all about the possibilities of significant and ethically performed collaborations with children, educators, and families. Most RCT studies show no effects anyway, because of the complex conditions of doing experimental research in living and transformative practices. However, when performed in an ethically sound way in intense collaborations with educators, they can enable a bidirectional intervention between researchers and practitioners, and between epistemologies of different academic disciplines. Such interventions can make us learn things we never expected about ourselves and about others. Q. In your chapter on relational materialism (revised version of the article submitted 2018- 11-03) you defined practices as the entanglement between humans and non-humans that are able to produce an educational phenomenon such as school absenteeism. You proposed that attention to educational practices can help researchers engage the necessary methodological sensibilities in relational materialist approaches to hopefully make a difference to both the actors and agents the research concerns. What opportunities do you see in attending to educational practices for developing a methodological sensitivity in relational materialist research? Why is it important to attend to these educational practices now? And what understandings of practices are more productive for educational studies today? The short answer is, and I need to emphasize that I am answering here only for myself, not my co-writers of this chapter (Linnea Bodén, Emilie Moberg and Carol Taylor.) We need to leave the comfort of reshaping our minds with theory (as researchers) and instead reshape our minds by ways of practices in collaboration with those agents whom the research concerns. We need to involve ourselves more in the relations we talk so much about theoretically, and not make posthumanist and new materialist work be about our own theoretical revelations. The longer answer is: We need to be attending to and intervene with what is actually going on if we are to both know and be able to intervene and transform. So, when writing with my colleagues on relational materialism, in a very theoretical fashion in order to get your eyes and ears to our/my cause, the key message is really to simply get involved in practices. Practices that are constituted by various networks or assemblages of multiple agents/actants/actors, or whatever term you prefer. But without putting the emphasis on the actants themselves, but rather on the relations from which they emerge. In other words, this is classical posthumanist/poststructuralist/new materialist work, right? But what is not so much in focus is—perhaps contradictory to the theoretical way we write about it—theory itself. I am weary of and troubled by the way poststructuralist, posthumanist, and new materialist work has been predominantly theoretical. It seems that theory is either to be applied on excerpts of lived/live practices, or that we think that our thinking needs to be transformed first. Then there is, or might be, a possibility for practice to change, whether it is lived educational practices or research practices. In my own experience from pedagogical practices, change in a productive direction on behalf of those it concerns, evolves in the doing and making. And if you want change, change will

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evolve given, of course, that the involved agents/actors/actants are just as engaged as you are to explore what might emerge in your interactions. Entering and intervening in practices can, as you understand from the answers of the previous question, be done in many different ways. The important message when talking about a methodological sensibility, is that it can be done in any kind of epistemology, if you ask me! Maybe not if you ask my co-writers. I cannot be sure of their answer here. I would claim that a methodological sensibility is to enact a sensibility to the relations and productions of any kind of network relations, observed or taken part of in any possible way, whether it is through a microscope, or viewing an fMRI scan, or taking part in a creative play with children in a preschool. As soon as the event becomes part of a “research-network/assemblage/apparatus of knowledge” (whichever you prefer) it becomes possible to, in different ways, discern (affectively, observingly, by listening, etc.) various relations taking place on different levels in the event of the research process. One such event is also constituted by the writing up of a research text, of course, where theory does come into the relation on another level or plane than earlier in the process. In all of this, I very much want to refer to the post-ANT work of Annemarie Mol. Although the focus should be on the relations, it is also of importance to know how powerful a certain actor/agent/actant becomes in a relation, and why it becomes so powerful in this particular relation(s), whether it is the researcher her/himself, the child, a protein, a hormone, etc. on different level network relations. A methodological sensibility also entails an awareness that anything we do in these network relations might be considered a method. This is what my slowly growing knowledge in cognitive psychology and biology as well as supervision of Christine Eriksson’s Ph.D. work has taught me. In the natural sciences, “the new” method is often developed as an effect of an experimental mistake or some unintended or side-track trial, but it needs the striations of the formal experimental set up to emerge. I am not saying this is always the case, but it is frequent enough to be made a claim. The importance, however, is that it is not just any mistake, but a mistake made in an experimental environment, which makes it possible to make use of the mistake and “repeat” it. Imagine if, within the limits of ethical boundaries of course, scientists would allow themselves to be more creative while doing their experiments. What might not happen then? Or, is this more or less already the case—this, what might be described as a methodological sensibility—although the positivistic research paradigm simply cannot/will not/ought not to prescribe it? Christine Ericsson’s work, which has been inspired by Isabelle Stengers, has mostly walked the walk with site-specific art practices in public spaces with preschool toddlers. Her writings have taught me that anything—really—can be considered a method: riding the train, walking down different streets of the city. Irrespective of what our method is, there will always be a number of ways and levels we can enter that network to describe or analyze the phenomena or matter of concern that we are interested in. This is why a methodological sensibility forces us to take an interest in more ways of being engaged in a matter of concern than one; and therefore, be productive of or engaged in more methods than one.

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To be honest. I guess I feel a bit guilty. The way I have theorized on children’s learning has had perhaps too much impact on the practices of Swedish preschool in ways for which I can be held responsible. Therefore, in this phase of my life, I feel that I need to get more engaged in what I am producing, already in the very doing of it. For me, a randomized control trial enables me to do this. By ways of the pedagogical interventions, I get to design and enact together with my co-researchers, pedagogical supervisors, and educators. This kind of research process enables me to do research in line with multiple epistemologies within that framework, including inventive ones with children, which Linnea Bodén did as part of the project described RCT designed project discussed in the previous question. Moreover, it enables me to discuss multiple ways of understanding children’s learning and development directly with educators, way ahead of the study, during the study and now afterwards, when we get to talk about our various experiences of what we did and how it affects what we do now. Some of the ways we talk about children and practices are ways that Swedish educators have not had access during the last 15 years. I am talking about the cognitive, psychological, and linguistic theories that our interventions, but also our tests with the children, were in part based on. You have to remember that Swedish children are not tested in preschool and that preschool teachers are presently not learning hardly any updated developmental scientific knowledge, due to the sociocultural and social constructionist and “linguistic turn” in teacher education in Sweden. In other words, the answers of all of what I have been saying to you should be read in a situated manner, into the academic and educational context where poststructuralist, and even posthumanist and new materialist research has not merely been taken seriously but perhaps too seriously, as to dominate and exclude other forms of knowing in some rare and specific contexts at least. It is in this respect that you need to understand why it is so very important for me to be affirmative of the multiple, and why it is so difficult for me to accept some of my own writings where I polarized against other kinds of knowledge productions. In this time and age, we need to be very cautious about polarizing and enacting that dangerous negative epistemology that (actually) came with poststructuralist theorizing in which we excelled in saying what we did not do in order to say something about what we thought we were doing. But, and more importantly, what came with poststructuralism was also the possibility of thinking the multiple and plural—an aspect that it seems to me that many of us have forgotten about.

Further Reading Aronsson, L., & Lenz Taguchi, H. (2017). Mapping a collaborative cartography of the encounters between the neurosciences and early childhood education practices. Discourse: Studies in the Cultural Politics of Education. Bodén, L., Lenz Taguchi, H., Moberg, E., & Taylor, C. (forthcoming 2019). Relational Materialism. In: G. Noblit. (Ed.) Oxford research encyclopedia of education. New York: Oxford University Press.

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Eriksson, C. (2020). A preschool that brings children into public spaces: Onto-epistemological research methods of vocal strolls, metaphors, mappings and preschool displacements. Ph.D. dissertation in Early Childhood Education, Department of Child and Youth Studies, Stockholm University, Sweden. Hultman, K., & Lenz Taguchi, H. (2010). Challenging anthropocentric analysis of visual data: A relational materialist methodological approach to educational research. International Journal of Qualitative Studies in Education, 23(5), 525–542. Lenz Taguchi, H. (2010). Going beyond theory/practice divide in early childhood education: Introducing an intra-active pedagogy. New York, NY: Routledge. Lenz Taguchi, H. (2017). “This is not a photograph of a fetus”: A feminist reconfiguration of the concept of posthumanism as the ultrasoundfetusimage. Qualitative Inquiry, 23(9), 699–710. Osgood, J., & Robinson, K. (2019). Feminists researching gendered childhoods: Generative entanglements. Bloomsbury. Stengers, I. (2018). Another science is possible: A manifesto for slow science. Cambridge, UK: Polity Press.

Dr. Hillevi Lenz Taguchi is a professor at Stockholm University, Sweden. She has experience of trans- and interdisciplinary research specifically focusing feminist theories and continental philosophy in her studies of higher education, teacher education and early childhood practices. She is much involved with the theoretical development and transgressive methodologies as part of the Posthumanist, New Materialist and Post Qualitative turns.

Chapter 5

Interview with Jayne Osgood Jayne Osgood, Paulina Semenec and Claudia Diaz-Diaz

…the process of writing is diffractive, entangled, immersed, and it’s all about the sticky knots.

In this interview, Jayne Osgood discussed with us the impact of certain theories not only on her thinking and approaches to research, but also how they have transformed the way she lives her life. This observation really resonated with us. The more we engage with posthuman and new materialisms literature, the better attuned we have become to the “everyday” and the things we encounter. These things are often small, like the glitter that Jayne investigates in her research. Such matter is not diminished by its size—in fact, as Jayne shows in this interview, small things come to matter in significant ways—politically, environmentally, etc.—and need to be taken seriously because they have ethical implications for human and more-than-human others. We also really appreciated Jayne’s discussion of writing within posthuman and new materialist approaches, and how, despite calls for experimentation, we must keep in mind what experimentation does in our work, and for those we do research with. We discuss some of her recent writing in Feminists researching gendered childhoods: Generative entanglements (Osgood and Robinson 2019) in which she experiments with different forms of writing, and the opportunities this has opened up for her. As Jayne suggests, research and writing is not about having answers, but is rather about becoming open to questioning and making connections that we may not have considered or noticed before. J. Osgood (B) Middlesex University, London, UK e-mail: [email protected] P. Semenec · C. Diaz-Diaz University of British Columbia, Vancouver, BC, Canada e-mail: [email protected] C. Diaz-Diaz e-mail: [email protected] © Springer Nature Singapore Pte Ltd. 2020 C. Diaz-Diaz and P. Semenec, Posthumanist and New Materialist Methodologies, Children: Global Posthumanist Perspectives and Materialist Theories, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-981-15-2708-1_5

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5.1 Thinking with/Alongside Poststructural and New Materialisms Work PS: The first question I’d like to ask you is about your new book you co-wrote with Kerry Robinson and in particular about the connection between feminist poststructuralist work and how it has informed, and still informs the work being done in new materialisms. This argument touches on some of the critiques of new materialisms which suggest that it fails to acknowledge some of this work, as well as concerns around its “newness”. We were wondering if you could speak a little bit to this and about your impetus for writing this book? JO: I think it was born from a kind of personal frustration because I was really intrigued—I think it was around the time that Hillevi Lenz Taguchi published her massively shapeshifting book, it changed the way that early childhood research has been done since. But I think when it first came onto the scene people were quite afraid of it because it was so much to take on board and we had all become so entrenched in particular ways of doing critical research. I think that there was both curiosity as well as a kind of fear around what’s this new thing and how on earth would we do that? And how is it useful, and how does it speak to what we’ve done before? I came to feminist new materialisms quite hesitantly in the initial stages but the possibilities made available by this mode of thinking, doing and theorizing coincided with having my own children. I was struck by how lively, unpredictable, bodily, sensory and affective really small children are, particularly babies as they go into toddlerdom, and of course you see that in early childhood research, but it’s not until you have this small creature that is with you around the clock every day that it hits you. All of a sudden, it’s like oh my gosh! Previous attempts, through a discursive approach to trying to understand childhood falls short of all this other stuff that we can’t quite pin down. I guess it was very much a kind of personal, political, professional, and academic moment. I became ever more curious I suppose, about what these “new” in inverted commas, philosophies, theories, approaches might offer, and how I might take them up. So initially, I was quite hesitant, and I was also—I think we do make this quite plain in the book and as you say particularly in the introductory chapter, is that there was—for me anyway, a kind of healthy skepticism and for Kerry Robinson—we’d had these conversations over many years. She’s a kind of staunch Butlerian, she uses Foucault, she uses Butler to really great effect and her work has been so important and made such significant political inroads into how we understand children as gendered beings. So for her giving up on—or the possibility of giving up on—a way of doing research that has served her so well was you know: “Why would we do that?…Why are we giving up on something that’s been really productive and useful?” We had lots of interesting discussions and then the other thing that troubled me was within the field of gender studies, childhood studies—I could see this division growing between the old ways of doing things (i.e., feminist poststructuralism where you gather your data and you analyze in order to identify discourses), it’s all about the discursive and textual representations, and then the emergence of this new growing body of research

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that looked quite unfamiliar and that people were afraid of. But it was almost as if the two could not connect and that was really troubling because through conversations with Kerry and other feminist scholars, it’s like we’ve made so much progress over such a long period of time, so are we really just going to give up on all of that and step into this new trend? And that was the thing that was troubling me. Is this just a fashionable academic trend or is there something in there that’s deeply political and that can be as productive and useful as feminist poststructuralism has been? The other thing that we stress in the book is the “F” word—it’s about feminism. I’ve seen new materialism and new materialist work, and if it doesn’t have a political backbone—and that is true of feminist poststructuralism as well, I’ve seen poststructuralist work that is quite indulgent from a theoretical point of view. Unless it’s underpinned by a political or social justice, or feminist agenda, then I think any paradigm can fall short of its political ambitions. For us writing the book was very much about “what’s especially feminist in feminist new materialism?” And the second question we really go on to address is “what’s new here?” And that was our concern, to make the connections and working with Barad’s concept of dis/continuities, to stress that these approaches are in generative and generational conversation with each other; it’s not a clean break, but also to challenge the idea that it is new. We need to acknowledge, we need to embrace, and we need to engage without colonizing indigenous thought because this way of engaging with the cosmic and the affective and the material, the worldly and weather and all of those things—that’s been going on for millennia. And we simply can’t, as white Eurocentric academics lay claim to be making this new discovery when we aren’t. I think there’s a really important need to recognize those ongoing connections and what they make possible in our research. Those were the two foundations that really drove the book project. They really made for quite a lively set of engagements because the scholars that we invited to participate in the project were on a kind of continuum of skepticism [laughs]. And it’s not until you have those deep and difficult conversations with other feminist scholars that push you to say “well actually why are you doing this and what gets lost and how is it useful?” that then it becomes possible to really dwell on the weaknesses or the problematics and try to find a way to be respectful of what’s come before, what’s currently here and where we’re going—not in a linear sense but the fact that all of this is working together to produce a richer way of undertaking research in early childhood that still hangs onto its political motivations or is framed by those political motivations.

5.2 Addressing Critiques of New Materialist Work PS: In regards to what you’re saying about the deeply political, can you speak a little bit about your take on some of the critiques of new materialisms that suggest that it is a-political?

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JO: I get quite frustrated with the critiques not because they are critiques. I agree with healthy critique—and that’s what we were trying to do in the book so hence, Debbie Epstein was very critical and pushed us considerably to think really deeply about the kind of affordances but also the losses. I think that that kind of healthy critique is really valuable because it ensures that the rigor and the integrity of what you’re doing is strengthened, so I’m all for critique. But what I find really frustrating and really insulting actually, are academics who will critique this, but without having engaged with it at any depth. They are critiquing what they think it is, or what they imagine it to be. And that’s really disrespectful, and it gets us nowhere. I think particularly the point that you make that this is an emergent field and there are lots of Ph.D. scholars who are contributing to creating a massive academic wave. They’re the ones—and this is what for me becomes problematic from a feminist ethics of care—that it’s the Ph.D. students who are being subjected to this really unfounded and unethical critique, and that’s not okay. It doesn’t achieve anything and it doesn’t move the field forward and there’s plenty of space for all of us. There’s enough space for sociocultural theories, there’s enough space for poststructuralist for posthumanist and all of the other approaches, and I think it is this academic kind of aggressive defensiveness, and I think where posthumanism really gets people—riles them, is because it’s about challenging egocentrism. It undoes the very humanist idea that phallocentric man is central to everything and so it’s our human place in the world, and the sense that we make of the world that reigns supreme, and therefore places us beyond reproach. I’ve had countless run-ins with academics who really find this stuff almost personally offensive because for them, they cannot cope with not being central to inquiry. Where are they as human researchers, or as pedagogues, as the all-seeing I that is directing the whole show? The thing that I constantly stress to students and other academics is—decentering the human doesn’t mean removing the human. And I think that’s where a lot of the criticism comes from, so the idea that posthumanism—”Oh we’re no longer interested in the human”—is a really naive and ill-informed critique of posthumanism. Often the critiques of posthumanism don’t engage with even introductory texts to posthumanism to get a sense of “what is this?” and “why are people doing it?”. It’s just dismissed as frivolous. You can get caught up in those critiques and you could spend your whole life defending what you’re doing, or you can just get on and do it and make sure that it’s rigorous, and make sure that it’s ethical and response-able in a posthumanist sense. I think the thing that’s really striking about this mode of doing research is that it becomes life changing. The way you live your life is not the same, you can’t look at anything—a piece of glitter, a Lego brick, noodles, anything—your whole world becomes diffractive… you know it’s the “and and and…”. The world of which you are part then becomes so complex but you also realize—and it’s Barad’s stuff about the smallest cuts matter—that every single tiny thing that you do is deeply ethical and deeply political and therefore you have a response-ability to recognize the gravity of it—I guess it’s Haraway’s concepts of worlding, world-making—and so then when you start to live life in that mode then research becomes so much more important, significant, affecting and affective. Effective and affective, because as a researcher your whole life

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is transformed and the reason you undertake research becomes a way of life—Haraway’s more liveable worlds start to materialize through the everyday. That sounds almost evangelical but it’s not. Until you spend some time with these philosophies and theories; putting them to work, putting them into practice and writing about them, articulating, embodying and enacting them—through workshops and doing pedagogies—that it ceases to be abstract theory and instead comes to life, and becomes a way of life. It’s difficult, really demanding work, but also immensely generative.

5.3 Thinking with Theory/Concepts PS: What were some of the key concerns for you in relation to childhood, and how did you come to this field? Can you also speak to some of the conceptual and methodological thinking you brought with you, and perhaps how you’re rethinking them as well? JO: I’m a sociologist by trade, that was where things began. My feminism comes about from my personal life experiences. I grew up in a working-class family, and there were no expectations for me to go on to higher education or do particularly well educationally. I was acutely aware of my classed subjectivity from a very young age, and then increasingly my gendered subjectivity. As a working-class girl there really weren’t expectations for me to do anything very much at all. And I just remember thinking that this was really, really unjust. And then of course I discovered sociology when I was 16, and then I started to find the theories that made sense to the life that I was living, and that there were broader explanations and ways in which to philosophize and theorize these things, and also make change. Then the feminist politics start to become part of my everyday living, and with it the dawning realization that actually a different life is possible. And the personal is political. So that’s kind of how it all came about. I didn’t have any formal early childhood education or a preschool education at all. I just went to school early so when I was four, they made a special case for me because I was desperate to go to school. I had a sister who was in school. I practically begged, and special dispensation was made, and I was the only four-year-old child in this school at that time (late 1970s). For me it was the affordances and the possibilities that education made possible—so I guess it became a kind of project in social mobility. But then social mobility is not straightforward; fraught with affect, and class inequality as materialized figuration, so it was not straightforward in any sense. But that provided an underpinning, I increasingly came to recognize the possibilities that education can create, and a feminist politics is core to who I am and has assisted me in making a difference in the world. And then my classed and gendered subjectivity or identities were so forcefully felt throughout my formative years. For those reasons, I suppose that is how I became an education researcher. That coupled with an ongoing sense of just how amazing the early years are, how formative they are, and how much adults can learn, relearn, and unlearn from attending to the queerness of early

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childhood. I guess actually in the late 1970s which is when I should have been at preschool, had I gone to preschool—it was a very different picture. It was very casualized as an employment sector. It was principally about getting women into employment rather than a kind of educational program to foster citizens of tomorrow, which we hear in policy discourses now. All those things piqued my curiosity about early childhood, and then almost by chance I started my research career at the National Foundation for Educational Research, an independent research organization. I found myself doing research about the early year’s workforce, but it was completely devoid of politics and completely devoid of philosophy and theory. It was very much like “here’s a government policy, put into practice, how effective is it”. I just thought “gosh this is so frustrating” because I’m hearing these stories, these feminist tales from women on the frontline of the early years workforce, and it’s not going to find expression in this report that has been commissioned by the government, because the government has a narrow preoccupation with measuring the effectiveness of what they’re doing. It was at that point that I thought there must be another way to undertake research than this, and hence that’s when I started a Ph.D. into the early years’ workforce, with the express intention of applying feminist poststructuralist theory and method. I recognized that there were more exciting, complicated ways of undertaking research that can produce a far more nuanced picture. That’s where it all comes from—a kind of a personal, professional, political, feminist project of the self over many years now. PS: In your more recent scholarship you think a lot with the work of Karen Barad, Kathleen Stewart and Donna Haraway. Are there any particular concepts that you find yourself returning to, or that you find the most productive for the work that you do? JO: I think they work really well together. I think that’s the thing, that to limit oneself to just one of those theorists shuts down the possibilities but when you start to bring their different concepts and approaches together then something else gets produced and that’s really exciting. But I have to say I think Haraway for me—I was saying this to a student just the other day—I feel like I’ve been nourished when I read a Haraway chapter, I feel like I’ve had a really good meal. The ideas, the stories, the residues are buzzing for days afterwards. I can go back to the same chapter again in a week’s time and I get something else. It’s so generous and generative it’s just giving the whole time. I really find her work—It’s not easy, it’s very, very nuanced and complex but crucially for me, it’s funny. She is very, very funny and I think for me being able to express humor through academic, really technical, deeply philosophical, and very critical political work, is an incredible skill and I think she does it so well. But what I’m finding really helpful is a clearer sense of how we might put this into practice in our research and in our writing. I find her string figuring and cat’s cradle methods—and the SF philosophy writ large—brings all of it together for me. Speculative fabulation, science fiction, science fact, so far, and string figuring all together, offer such a rich onto-ethico- epistemology. And what a fun way to bring together all of those kinds of really, really tricky concepts and then they really do come alive. They’re not easy to write about necessarily but then I think because she

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gives you the license to work with those concepts, then your writing becomes more playful, more creative and more poetic, so I find myself writing differently to how I did previously which feels quite liberatory. It’s quite freeing. But actually, I never imagined in my wildest dreams I would be writing chapters about Lego, glitter, and noodles. And then when I sort of mentioned this to people like the glitter workshop with Becky Coleman and I declared: “this feels like the pinnacle of my career”, and when I say to my children what my latest project is they’re astonished: “Is this what you do? And you get paid for this?!” They can’t quite believe I’m going to a Lego workshop or I’m going to play with glitter for the afternoon. But then when I start to talk to them about the string figures and the sticky knots that that presents, then we have some really deeply political discussions about world-making practices and their place in the world and they’re both very kind of ecologically minded, and they’re concerned about gender inequality, but we talk about it from materiality and their place in the world. So yes, I’m finding her SF philosophy really, really productive, generative and useful. And I’m also finding it really useful with my Ph.D. students. Coming to these theories and ideas presents a whole new way of thinking, a whole new way of undertaking research—there needs to be something—it can be abstract but something concrete to hang on to, and I think her SF philosophy offers that. It’s not “how to” by any means, but it is a kind of a slightly more digestible way into this mode of inquiry. But what it also does is to keep all of those bits in place. You can’t do one part her SF philosophy. You need all of them to work together. When I first started (re)reading and coming to Haraway’s later work it followed quite an extensive period of reading Deleuze and Guattari, and I found myself transposing their concepts onto my reading of her work, and now I consciously resist doing that. They’re in conversation with each other anyway but they do different sorts of work. These kind of theories and philosophies offer us so much in this paradigm. But to the point that you were asking… about how theories and concepts work together, I find that Bennett’s concepts of enchantment and thing power …while they’re not the same concepts they work in harmony with Haraway’s theorisations. So, it is recognizing that they are offering something different. Barad and Haraway obviously, they’re entangled, they know each other, they cite each other, they comment on each other’s work. It’s not that they’re doing something completely separate, but there are subtle and significant differences between their work, and I think that there is a danger that in attempts to get a handle on what the newness of this is, and how we might put it to work, some concepts and ideas are used interchangeably and so the nuance and specific work that given concepts do runs the risk of getting lost, or being reduced. Often there’s a conflation and a kind of a resistance to staying with the trouble if you like, of what the different concepts offer and how they can work together or not. I think that is the ultimate challenge for anybody coming to this, but particularly Ph.D. students who are new to the newness of it and want to find a way to enter into the dialogue and make it work. And I guess this is Stengers’ slow scholarship. We need to take this slowly. We need to immerse ourselves in it—and it is about deeply immersing yourself in it. Staying with it, and then trying it out. It’s not until you try it out—and it feels so uncertain sometimes and that’s the point. There is

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no certainty—and that’s where the experimentation comes in, and that’s where it’s generative. But it’s not a case of anything goes…putting these theories, concepts and philosophies to work in a seriously playful way, is deeply political and cannot be done lightly, it needs to be taken very seriously. But it is a process. I’ve seen some journal papers through my editorial work, where it’s very clear that people are new to this and they want to get up to speed really quickly and they throw in every concept and all the language—and it’s something you can’t rush. You have to work with it, become with it, and craft it. The other thing I notice is that everybody works with it slightly differently. I’m seeing an increasing number of papers where string figuring is used as a core methodology, and they’re very, very different. The take up of the concepts, working with the methodological practices and then what gets produced is ultimately very, very different. And that’s exciting, I think. You rarely read two pieces that will look similar, and that keeps the field moving, lively which requires openness to diverse ways of working in this way, putting it to work (differently) and seeing what gets produced through the processes. And I guess that’s it, it’s about processes rather than the end product. PS: Is there a “wrong” way to do this kind of work? Because if there are five or six different ways of using string figuring and you talked about rigor a little bit earlier— I wonder if there is a “good” way and a bad way—or a good approach and a not so good approach. Or is it more about what the work produces that becomes the measure of whether it’s done well or not? JO: That’s a really difficult question and I think it’s a really important question. I have had this conversation with many of my Ph.D. students that I think there is a wrong way to do it but there isn’t one right way to do it. I think the point that you make is really significant, that it’s about questioning as you’re writing, as you’re crafting, and I now see writing more as a craft that is so multilayered and it’s so nuanced that with every line that you write and every paragraph or every stanza or whatever it is, that you are kind of sculpting. It requires asking questions as the writing is materialized, what work is language doing, organization of text, image and so on, or is it just there for triviality sake? If you put an image into your chapter or your paper, is it doing work? What work is it doing or is it just there because you feel pressure to ‘be creative’ and break free from conventional text-based outputs? It’s the questioning underpinning why you’re doing it the way that you’re doing where the creativity has a chance to find expression, because it’s not just a case of chucking it down. I hadn’t anticipated that in the final chapter of the book with Kerry that there would be a poem. I’m not a poet, but it emerged from the whole process of writing the book…all of these things that don’t need to be written in long paragraphs. That poem was very much in conversation with what had come before. And then setting up questions for “what else?” And “what if?” It wasn’t like “oh right here would be a good spot for a poem” because we need something else, something creative. And I think that’s the point, it’s just deeply questioning what we’re doing and why we’re doing it. That’s where I think the rigor comes in … crafting a piece these days involves a depth of engagement, a willingness to follow diffractive lines, and to invest time in gathering and foraging. To write the Lego chapter I found myself delving into journals I would

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previously have never have gone near, pure science journals, environmental studies journals, business reports, artists portfolios and all sorts of lines that insist that you develop some sort of working knowledge—not necessarily expertise—but a working knowledge of these different fields and that’s truly transdisciplinary. We can talk about interdisciplinarity, but it’s not until you’re forced to engage seriously with what else is out there, and how that informs our thinking (and doing) about early childhood, and gender, that you then have this sense of worldliness and entanglement; that you are actively engaged in world-making practices. The process of writing becomes emergent, diffractive, entangled, immersed, and becomes all about the sticky knots. When I think of all of the stuff that I engaged with, gathered and grappled with, and then what ultimately found expression in the chapter was but a mere fraction— but it lives on, and reverberates long after the paper is published. There is always more left out than goes in. But the sense of the importance of Lego specifically, and the importance of materiality more generally, in early childhood has just grown exponentially. And you take that with you to your next piece of writing. I think it becomes then a way—and this goes back to the point we were discussing at the beginning about how life changing this mode of inquiry is because you can’t live life the same because you can’t see things the same and encounter and sense things in the same ways. PS: It’s very interesting what you’re saying about doing research in other disciplines. I think this is very exciting but might also be unsettling for some people because they don’t know where to go or how deep to go so that it doesn’t sound superficial. But I like how in your chapter on Lego for example, you make your writing very clear as to how you’re putting concepts to work. Sometimes we read very complex accounts of children’s lives through these different theoretical lenses, and I really appreciated how you write about these things in a very profound way that is complex, yet simple. JO: I think that’s it—the point you raised previously about the efforts expended on every sentence. If it doesn’t make sense to me, and I read it back and I get lost, then I cannot hope to speak to the people who are interested in reading what I have to say. I think I’m at great pains to not do that thing of falling into kind of overly academic—that’s not to say my work is not academic and doesn’t use academic language, but it’s also checking myself, “what is the point I’m trying to make?” And how does it connect to the literature? I think that’s really important. Because if you can’t articulate clearly what it is… which I think is ever more important when the theory is really complex. That it’s as clear as it possibly can be without diluting the theory or the philosophy. The important thing is not to over simplify to the point that ideas have been wrung out through brutal processes of reductionism, so much so that it’s unintelligible or meaningless. And then it loses its integrity and it loses its capacity to do what Haraway might have hoped for it to do. If it then becomes “oh I’m doing string figuring that means that I do one, two, three, four, there we go”. That’s not helpful I don’t think. It’s kind of striking that balance. And I think it’s tricky. I think a lot of people are doing it really well actually. I’ve seen some really great stuff. I mean Carol Taylor—she’s in higher education but she writes very clearly, but making sophisticated use of very difficult theory. But she does it in such a

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way that you’re engaged and hooked—she’s conveying the messages that she wants to through the way that she writes, and that’s a really important skill.

5.4 Decentering the Child PS: I’d like to ask you specifically about this notion of “decentering” the child. What is your line of thinking when you’re trying to move beyond the child? Are you thinking with a particular material first, or an emotion or a curiosity? Because it’s no longer so much about what the child is doing or saying. Or maybe you’re not even thinking about decentering intentionally, it’s just that your work takes that form? JO: The two guiding questions—the “what if” and the “what else” from Erin Manning are really helpful because if we don’t decenter the child, if we don’t decenter the human in our investigations then we go looking for what we know we’re going to find, and then we tell the same stories. And however important those critical stories are about race or gender or able-bodiedness, or the problematics of developmentalism or whatever, we can find those stories, we know those stories and we go looking for them. But being open to “what if” and “what else” is really generative, but in order to get to that we need to not go looking for things we know we’re going to find. And that can make doing research a very peculiar undertaking. I’ve just written a chapter about the mutated modest witness, a Haraway figure that I have found really helpful… thinking myself into a research situation looking for the peculiar or that which just grabs my attention for no particular reason, but that haunts and provokes something in me. I don’t think it can be isolated to one… because it’s about those entanglements and about the processes. But by starting by looking at playdough or sequins or shaving foam or whatever it is, the children are still there, they’re entangled, but those material actors are doing important work. If we could make that our entry point and stay with what that offers us, then we can get at other accounts of childhood that open up our investigations, that are generative, and push us in places we otherwise wouldn’t go. But they’re also really ethical in a kind of Baradian sense that this mode of being, and this mode of inquiry insists that we appraise each micro moment to ask what’s going on? What’s being produced and what’s unfolding? And so, this idea that you can “fix” a child or you know, Mindy Blaise’s idea about the developmental child and knowing and fixing them. We can’t ever know them because they’re constantly in process, and therefore they don’t need fixing. There’s this kind of very liberatory agenda underpinning childhood studies that view the child as a kind of process ontology rather than a product or a linear project of developmentalism. It’s all of those things—it’s the materiality, the affects, the moments that slap you around the face and just arrest your attention and you don’t know why. And I think also giving yourself license because what would that have been previously? It might be in your field notes but would never find expression in your thesis or your papers. But the in-between stuff, the marginalia, the things when you say “that’s so interesting but I

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can’t do anything with it” that are privileged and take research in new and exciting directions. And so, the study becomes about those moments that don’t fit, the inbetween, the arresting, the troubling. They’re actually really generative—you know this is Maggie MacLure’s ideas about moments in your data that glow, that induce wonder. That’s exactly what it is, you know, it’s like “I don’t know what to do with that but it’s doing something to me, so I need to act upon it.” And hence the Lego, standing on the Lego brick—how many times have I done that and how painful is it? and it’s just so embedded in my everyday life. And yet when you take Lego seriously, the places it can take you and the things that it can tell you about childhood…and it was only a small part of research about Lego that actually went into the chapter, I could probably write another couple of chapters about Lego at least [laughs]. PS: You should, I would love to read more! It’s so interesting also what you say about thinking about your research as a sort of unraveling of certain moments that you didn’t know would come up beforehand. And yet, prior to even doing fieldwork, we still have to write a research proposal where we have to include questions about what we want to know, and then we have to go into the field and search for those things. JO: I think this is where the academy needs to catch up. And that can only catch up where you know, you’re doing the doctorate, I’m doing the examining, or I’m doing the supervising, or peer reviewing, and these things then come to count as what Patti Lather terms “valid knowledge”. The more studies, and the more established this field or mode of doing research becomes then that that can only be a good thing. But it takes all of us to collectively support each other in that endeavor and work really hard and again, the point we were discussing previously about the critique and the critics of this—it’s not about persuading. Some critics will never be persuaded. They don’t want to be persuaded and it’s not our job to expend all our energy trying to persuade people who are always going to be deeply skeptical and critical of this. But it is about being certain that as a community we’re working together to nurture each other and to find ways to support each other to be experimental and to make sure that what we’re doing is underpinned by the kind of philosophy and politics that we’ve spoken about. And I think for me that’s where the PhEmaterialisms network is really, really important. You’ve got early career researchers, established professors, artists and academics coming together doing their methodology, sharing in a feminist space of collegiality and collaboration. And for me, whatever I do, it will always be feminist because that’s what’s important to me about doing research.

5.5 Attending to Children Differently/Being with PS: Are there any pressing issues that children face today, and what kinds of questions or concepts might be helpful to address them? Is there anything particular you’d like to focus on in your future research in relation to these issues?

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JO: I think the biggest service we can do to children is to learn with them and from them, rather than imposing our worldviews and ideas about how to make the world a better place, upon them. We have so much to learn from them—watching a two-year-old explore the world and be in the world is so illuminating. I learnt so much, not just about childhood, but about myself, the world, the environment, politics, social class, race and gender, from my two-year-old child, than I have from anything else. Spending that intense time with them, being with them and watching them engage with the world around them is just so important. For me it’s about being with, not imagining that we have solutions because the world is so complex and modern day childhoods in the Anthropocene are fraught with challenges and difficulties and we have a response-ability to do what we can, but recognize that our human exceptionalism is fairly limited so we have to embrace and work with a child’s worldly connections—and actually be more childlike in the way in which we approach the study of childhood and the way in which we live life. I could be very specific and say it’s about climate change, but I think it’s I think it’s bigger than that. Focusing on childhood from a decentered, posthumanist sensibility; bringing the materiality and affective in—gets you to all these places. The pollution that Lego bricks do, but also how they re-emerge, and you know glitter as well. It really forces you to think deeply and to really contemplate and grapple with our ethical responseability, not just to the human child, but the whole world and all its inhabitants and how we’re entangled with it. I think there are endless burning issues, but I think that it’s about our sensibility and our way of being in the world. That’s what needs to change. I guess once you let go of the human exceptionalism and stay with the trouble as Haraway urges, then you realize there are no quick fixes. There are no solutions. It’s so entangled and complex and difficult, and we just we need to keep working at it every second of every day. PS: Yes, I get that sense in your work—that through encounters with children questions come up and then they lead to more and more questions—as opposed to starting with one specific question or three “research questions.” The more entangled you become, the more that these questions come up and then you have to look to other areas of scholarship to find out more. There’s this constant questioning that never ends. JO: Absolutely! It’s the on-going-ness and the in-betweenness—that’s where we are and that’s where children are. I really like the work that Veronica, Mindy and Affrica are doing—the Common Worlds stuff, I think that’s really important. Thinking about environmental education and making a difference in the world, but my concern is also that lives lived are complex and contradictory. So, we do stick our children in the car and drive them around. We do take flights to conferences. I’m constantly troubled by this…we all congregate, we fly across the globe and our air miles and pollution is catastrophic. To sit and then talk about the Anthropocene you know, we live within these constant contradictions. Like every time I feed my cat, I don’t feed him vegan cat food. So, then I think, “how do staunch vegans have companion species cats and dogs? So, you’re thinking about response-ability every moment of every day, but this is how I live my life [laughs]. How much electricity am I wasting?

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Should I fly? Should I drive? The turmoil I go through buying new things that I feel are almost impossible to justify. It’s those kind of life choices that we make are really significant, far reaching and mundane and every day, and habitual. That’s where we can make the difference… in the small stuff.

Further Reading Osgood, J. (2019). You can’t separate it from anything!: Glitter’s doings as materialised figurations of childhood (and) art. In M. Sakr, & J. Osgood (Eds.), Post-developmental approaches to childhood art, (pp. 111–136). London: Bloomsbury. Osgood, J. (In press). Becoming a ‘Mutated modest witness’ in early childhood research. In C. Schulte (Ed.) Ethics and research with young children: ‘New’ perspectives. London: Bloomsbury. Osgood, J., & Giugni, M. (2015). Putting posthumanist theory to work to reconfigure gender in early childhood: When theory becomes method becomes art. Global Studies of Childhood, 5(3), 346–360. Osgood, J., & Robinson, K. (2019). Feminists researching gendered childhoods: Generative entanglements. London: Bloomsbury.

Dr. Jayne Osgood is Professor of Education (Early Years & Gender) based at the Centre for Education Research & Scholarship, Middlesex University. Her present methodologies and research practices are framed by feminist new materialism. Through her work she seeks to maintain a concern with issues of social justice and to critically engage with early childhood policy, curricular frameworks and pedagogical approaches. Through her work she seeks to extend understandings of the workforce, families, ‘the child’ and ‘childhood’ in early years contexts. She has published extensively within the postmodernist paradigm including Special Issues of the journalContemporary Issues in Early Childhood (2006, 2016 and 2017) andNarratives from the Nursery: negotiating professional identities in Early Childhood (Routledge, 2012) and currentlyFeminist Thought in Childhood Research (Bloomsbury Series). She is a member of several editorial boards includingContemporary Issues in Early Childhood, British Education Research Journal, and is Co-Editor ofGender & Education Journal and Co-Editor of Reconceptualising Education Research Methodology.

Chapter 6

Interview with Margaret Somerville Margaret Somerville, Claudia Diaz-Diaz and Paulina Semenec

What I’m interested in at the moment is working with more Deleuzian ideas about becoming and about losing the sense of the human body. Becoming with other bodies, with bodies of water, with rocks with stones, with the blue of the sky, and so on.

We came across Margaret Somerville’s book Water in a Dry Land in our reading group about posthumanist and new materialist methodologies. Her water ethnography was important for us because it offered a clear and rich example of research done differently. In her interview, we talked about her water ethnography and all the relationships that made that 5 year collaborative project possible. She described her research and writing as a form of embodiment that connects her with her own body, the relationships with other places, and life experiences. She shared with us one of her projects in which she accompanied two young girls in walks from their homes to the river over one year. In these walks, Margaret was fascinated with the richness that the act of walking offered to her understanding of children’s relationships with place and their learning, not about, but rather from the sand, the river, and the sounds of birds. If readers are looking for ways to understand Barad’s notion of intra-action, Margaret’s interview will be of help. For example, through short videos, she has recently been documenting what she refers to as “embodied observations.” In turn, these videos have helped her to develop a method to communicate these important ideas with teachers. She reminds us that for “people of the Western society” decentering the human is an important imperative as a way to abandon oppressive forms of M. Somerville (B) Western Sydney University, Sydney, Australia e-mail: [email protected] C. Diaz-Diaz · P. Semenec University of British Columbia, Vancouver, BC, Canada e-mail: [email protected] P. Semenec e-mail: [email protected] © Springer Nature Singapore Pte Ltd. 2020 C. Diaz-Diaz and P. Semenec, Posthumanist and New Materialist Methodologies, Children: Global Posthumanist Perspectives and Materialist Theories, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-981-15-2708-1_6

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relations with the land. She shows us how embodiment can be a form of decentering the child and the researcher.

6.1 Learning About the Land Through Embodiment CD: I’d like to start with your ethnography on water: “Water in a dry land.” Could you tell me a little bit more about how the project was born? How did you and the group you worked with started to think about the land, the water, and in that dry land? MS: I really have to go back to a very long way to when I was a young woman and I lived in the desert in Central Australia with my husband and I did dancing and ceremony with Pintubi women. I did not have an academic framework, I learned it in my body and learned about the land through dancing and being painted and singing, and that influenced my own Ph.D. which was called Body Landscape Journals and then I attracted students who wanted to do something different. So, a student came to me, Chrissie Joy Marshall, a U’Alayi researcher from Western New South Wales, and she grew up on the Narran Lake, about a thousand kilometers west of the university where I was working, the University of New England. And she struggled with academic language and wanted me to help her find a different way. And what we realized in our conversations was that in order to make any knowledge claims at all, she was doing her Ph.D. about conflict resolution in Aboriginal communities. She was working for the police force. And in order to make any knowledge claims at all, she had to “think through country.” It was the specific country of the Narran Lake where she grew up. So, we developed the idea of thinking through country and I’ve written a lot about that. We developed that together, and we developed a project in collaboration, and applied for funding, and on the second time we were successful, and we had a quite a big grant to do the project that generated Water in a Dry Land. But Chrissie Joy had a car accident and the impact on her spine gradually caused brain damage. So she got terrible headaches and became very sick. She remained in the project, traveling to the Narran Lake with us, we become very, very close but she was unable to be actively involved. Chrissiejoy’s ‘thinking through country’ was developed in a series of paintings, stories, and language translations, so the core of it was creating artworks about Country. So, I approached another artist who was living in Armidale and I asked her whether she wanted to join the project and she was very happy, very excited to join. She was a Gomaroi woman from out west in New South Wales. So she joined the project and we decided we would have an exhibition of the work and she invited another colleague Badger Bates who lives further down the river. So, the project began its journey down the waterways in the Murray Darling Basin, moving from Narran Lake to the Darling River. Our first exhibition was called Bubbles on the Surface, in Armidale in 2006, and then when I moved to Victoria I became linked in then to Victorian Aboriginal people. The whole Murray Darling system is connected

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to Victoria through the Murray River. Then I worked with Treahna Hamm, a Yorta artist who lives on the Murray River and we started to do work together as a group, recording collective conversations about Country in the different places we visited. Each place generated its own conversations and artwork, and in each place we developed different exhibitions. And I suppose the important thing for my participation in it was that I was going through quite a traumatic difficult period in my own life. And because I shared my trauma and they shared their trauma they regarded us as equals so I wasn’t someone who was all together and white and privileged and everything was easy, and I had authority and they didn’t. They were more than me because they had the knowledge I didn’t, and I joined them. But I think what was important, what they said was really significant to them, was that I shared my own life experiences with them, and they then regarded me as family. So, in the introduction to the book Chrissiejoy wanted to write that I had become a sista. So that was how Water in a Dry Land came about. I had always worked differently, my first book was called Ingelba and The Five Black Matriarchs with Patsy Cohen, an Aboriginal woman, and she was first author on that one, and that was again about land and country. I have always worked in that way, collaboratively, with knowledge holders, and it is as much coming from the place, the land, as it is from the people. So, it was just an evolution over time, I guess… water in a dry land. It was a fabulous project to do, hard work, but fabulous. CD: It’s very interesting to hear that the project came from relationships between people and the relationship that those people had with their land. This is very different to our traditional approach to research that starts by identifying a problem and then identifying certain theoretical ideas that help us to narrow our perspective of a particular reality or place. I know that this water ethnography was not about children, but I wonder if you can trace for me different ideas about children and childhood through your research. MS: It relates to my own childhood really. So, when I was a child, I spent lots and lots of time outside in the bush, so I was in the bush and there was a creek a drainway. I used to collect tadpoles and I would pick wildflowers for my mother and I knew where everything grew so that’s always been part of my life. And when I moved to Victoria it was really the first time that I actually started to work with children. It was a very poor school in a disadvantaged community where the main teacher had introduced the children to an artificial wetland, integrated throughout the school curriculum in every single grade of the school. He was an amazing person. He was a beekeeper and I think he had that different kind of headspace and he loved the children and all the children would go to this artificial wetlands that was actually created by the power company that buried the river in a site where a wetlands would have been. The children documented the lifefullness, everything coming to life in the wetlands, the trees changing, the frogs coming, the birds coming, when it was dry, when it was flooding, and they incorporated that into all of their lessons and I thought that was just totally amazing. A colleague Monica Green, and I did years and years’ of research alongside Mark Sargent, this particular teacher, and we published a book about it, Children, place,

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and sustainability. One story that best illustrates the wonder of this work is one afternoon’s chance event. I went to the school that afternoon and the classroom was very crowded, full of desks, classroom things, and kind of smelly like primary school classrooms can be. And there was a young girl with down’s syndrome, and she had her integration aide with her, and she was moving so awkwardly through the space. The space was really obstructive for her and she was obstructive of this space and it just wasn’t working. And then they showed me a performance of a frog dance (I wrote about that in that paper Becoming Frog). They did a frog dance and it was entirely to frog music that they made from frog calls and movements that they had learned from frogs. And this child with Down’s Syndrome became so beautiful and so amazingly integrated into this dance in her movement and a smile on her face just totally transformed, part of the collective of children, the frogs the fact that they were becoming, the fact that all children are becoming integrated into that kind of activity, and not this sort of child or that sort of child with a diagnosis. You’re actually being-becoming frog. So, that was really wonderful and I wrote a lot about that but I didn’t actually embrace posthumanism and early childhood until later in a separate activity which was with two young girls after I had read a lovely paper by Hillevi Lenz Taguchi and Karen Hultman, it is an analysis of a child in the sandpit and a child in a climbing frame. So, I read that paper and I think that’s a really, really good paper, because it uses a bit of Deleuze as well and it’s very, very clear about the child and the sand and the child becoming in intra-action. It is really beautiful. But what I thought when I read that was well, I would like to do some kind of thing with children that is about intra-action, not just this analysis, but what if you begin the whole project with the assumption of intra-action, what would happen and what would you do? So, I proposed to two young girls, Lulu and Charmaine who were three and four at the time. Let’s do an experiment. What places would you like to go and I’ll record what you’re doing. So, we did that for 12 months, over a period of 12 months, about once a month we would do something but I was really, really interested in the fact that for a start, the walking with them would take us hours to get somewhere because it was about the actual walk and they would pick up stones all the way. Their favorite place was the river and on the way to the river, they would try and get stones that were embedded in this sort of track. They’d be digging them out, they’d be holding stones, carrying stones, I’d have pockets full of stones. And that’s when I came across Pauliina Rautio’s paper about children who carry stones in their pocket. So, we went down to the river and the first thing they did at the river was pick up stones and throw them into the water. And then on the way back they would make patterns with stones in the sand of the road and so on. So, I documented a lot of things, not only that, but one thing was one of the children made a birthday cake with dirt and Jacaranda petals. So, there were lots of intra-active things that they did, and I wrote a chapter about that because I was just so charmed, so my mind was blown I hadn’t thought like this before ever. And it was so beautiful. So, this went on for 12 months and then I decided to write the proposal for the project that I’m currently doing, the big project that got funded which is based in posthuman and new materialism called Naming the World.

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So, I use that little experiment as a pilot study because. So, then I had researchers in NSW, Queensland, Victoria, and Pauliina in Finland, two or three early childhood centers, long day care, and preschools in each of those states and one in Finland. And that project is still going. So that was funded successfully and is very much based on Karen Barad’s new materialism posthuman concepts from other early childhood researchers and may be influenced a bit by Deleuze.

6.2 Intra-action as a New Methodological Lens CD: Since you started to use this concept of intra-action, you started to see certain things that you were not able to see before, right? What are those things more precisely and why are those things important? MS: I started to use small videos to record sound and movement and everything that was going on around. One thing I recorded was Charmaine, the youngest child, 3year old and she was very, very active, very chatty, very sort of noisy. But I recorded her sitting in the water for 20 min with a tin that we had taken with our lunch, and the sand, and the water, and just drizzling the sand into the tin flicking the tin on the water for a whole 20 min completely and utterly absorbed, just becoming in that moment. It was so clearly a moment of intra-action when child and sand and water are becoming with each other. And then another one was, there was a little island and they walked out to the little island on the river stones and I went out there with them and I recorded both of them and Charmaine the youngest one was walking out on the rocks and coming back and saying lots of things, just making up stories, but she was making up stories about the rocks about that the rocks were becoming her family and all those sorts of things that children do. But what was really interesting was the challenge and I’m still finding this the challenge of transcribing a video afterward to really get the feeling of what’s happening because it’s so complex there’s so much going on in the moment and our human ears tend not to hear it all or not to… in intra-action you really need to be able to encompass the whole thing, so that’s why we only ever take very small videos sometimes, they are only 10 s long. When I made myself transcribe everything that was going on in this video, I realized one really interesting thing, that the child’s developing language, she was singing and making up a song, but it was a song that was echoed or going parallel with a bird. So, a bird singing, the child was singing, the child was making sounds, not necessarily words, sounds, the bird was making sounds. There were stories happening. So, I started to think about language as emergent in this space and how we might think about language as co-emergent with the world and that would be a new way of thinking about literacy and understanding literacy which is at the heart of this new project. How does language emerge with the world and what does that mean? And getting to your question of why it’s important, we linked it in the project proposal to sustainability, which is probably a pretty much clichéd and overused word, but it’s in the Australian curriculum and it’s a word that has sort of purchase.

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But what I meant was how do children learn with the world and how can we learn with them? Because as adults we aren’t going to live in that world that it’s going to be different. It’s children’s world so we have to learn with them. And I did an interesting little interview with two teenage girls and they were very, very concerned beautifully active girls, very concerned about the state of the environment and so on. But what I realized from their conversation was that, for them as well as for me, the world is going to be pretty much the same, it’s their children, and their children’s children, who are going to experience a very changed world and we don’t know what it will be like. And so, what we hope is that they will come into being in a world that they love and that they can care for and that they feel part of, they don’t feel separate from. So that’s where the important thing comes in. And all that learning comes from the world. There’s no other place for learning to come, comes from and with the world. Literacy, numeracy… everything.

6.3 Decentering the Child CD: The idea of learning a language from the world is very beautiful, but also very important. This idea about language reminds me one question we ask every contributor. In most posthuman and new materialist research, a common claim is about the need to decenter the human and the child. I wonder if decentering the child is important for you, and if it is, how do you put it in practice? MS: Well, I think how we put it in practice in this current project is with 0–5 fiveyear old’s and they decenter themselves anyway. So, it’s really a matter of becoming with the children. So, the other thing is I guess with the educators that we worked with, they find it really hard. Even though they love the children and they know the children, they found it really hard to then understand the world as the children might see and understand the world. Because for the children it might be the mud or the sticks or the water or the mushroom or the bug or whatever has become them. They’ve got much more soluble, much more porous boundaries than we have. Or sand or whatever and it’s all happening together and especially with very young children. So, the problem for us has been first of all explaining it to the educators so that they could think about how to enact that pedagogically. And the only way we could do it was actually to do coding. So, we had presented several times all of the videos and talked to them and trying to find a language to communicate about it is really hard. So, we asked what does bringing literacy and the world together mean in terms of this research? We started to think about things like vitality and libido and energy and how do you tell that a moment of child world becoming is happening? When we did our coding, we developed seven quite discrete categories out of a huge, huge body of data. They said oh yeah, we get it. And so there were things like becoming animal, becoming plant, drumming, playing, dancing, singing, movement gesture, and performance. So, those sort of things, and then we got the educators to develop their own projects

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and they developed the most amazing beautiful projects in response to that. So, it’s a really hard thing to do and I don’t even know whether they will sustain it. The director certainly can and does, but because schools and institutions are so regulated, they do always slip back into the same old. You just have to hope that if you keep on reiterating it that it will keep going. I’m still in conversation with the director of the preschool and the project has spread its links now, the kids are linked to Finland and the kids are linked to Scotland. And I guess the thing that is good to my heart is that children will keep on doing that anyway. The children won’t lose it so there’s always a starting point. But the challenge is in writing about it so what we find is whenever we start to write about it we start to focus on the children and our papers get rejected. So, it’s really hard to get stuff published, so we had a paper, we’ve just written a paper about mud. And it finally got accepted by the Journal of Education Philosophy and Theory and it’s called thinking with mud and children of the Anthropocene. But that was a really hard paper to write and we started off by saying we’re writing based on our own failures to decenter the child or to decentre the human and what we want to do is begin with mud. We want to think with mud. So, we challenge ourselves and try and write differently every time. And we always have difficulty getting published. CD: While Indigenous people have a very close relationships with their land and country, they are also closely connected with their elders, community leaders, and ancestors who are considered as referents. They never overlooked their own peoples and communities. If we pay attention to the relationships within Indigenous communities, why do we really need to decenter the child in order to engage with different relationships with the world? What are your thoughts about that? MS: Well, I think that’s a very profound ontological question and the problem is that for Indigenous communities they have a very deep ontologically different understanding of what it means to be a human subject. And to actually change Western ideas and practices and our sense of ourselves what it means to be a human subject you have to do something very radical. I don’t think you have to exclude the child or the human. I believe in the idea of entanglement that we are entangled in the world. But to actually learn that as a Western person who’s been brought up in an Enlightenment tradition of the autonomous self you have to do something really different. Whereas Australian Aboriginal people that’s in their genetics, it’s part of their tradition, it’s part of the way they are, they don’t have to make any effort to think about what to do about the human, but we do and we are responsible to do that because it’s the western world that is actually changing the world in such a dramatic way really.

6.4 Mentoring Future Researchers CD: Let me continue asking you about your role as a mentor with graduate students and emergent scholars. What is your approach to working with students, doctoral

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students, and emerging scholars? And what are the things you are enthusiastic about in teaching? MS: I love teaching doctoral students and always have. And it’s partly because I did a very different Ph.D. myself and I had a supervisor who was profoundly permission giving and just let me do what I wanted to do and that was the reason why I seem to attract people who want to do something different so it wasn’t that I go out looking for them. They seem to come to me and so I’ve often had very large groups of them and so I always supervised in cohorts. I never do individual supervision. So already that creates a collective that is quite different than individual supervision. I always work from their emergent ideas; I don’t teach them. I don’t think that there is a way to do a doctorate. I think it’s quite a struggle to actually work between the formality of say, a research proposal, or an academic publication, or the way doctoral thesis is organized, and being creative and emergent in research practice. I think that that is a really difficult place. I don’t think there’s anything easy about it. So, I guess what we do, we work as a group. We support each other. I’m very interested in creative ideas. Ideas that might be different. I often say to my students, well if you started off and you already knew the answer, the research doesn’t need to be done and that’s something I think that is very much missed in the way that we normally think about doctoral research. We tend to be fairly positivist, that we think you sort of know the answer before you start and then you prove it. So, I think they don’t know the answer before they start. And we need to see what’s emergent and we need lots of conversations around that so I provide a very strong structure. I give my students meeting times once a month that we schedule a year in advance and we have two residential schools where they come on campus because most of them don’t live near, and in those schools they live together and we’re very much engaged in a conversation and we often have a visiting scholar. So, we’ve had people like Affrica Taylor and Linda Knight and we recently had Karin Murris. The visiting scholar helps them to open up their ideas, they talk to them about opening out possibilities rather than closing down. And I also work with them to structure their thesis according to its own needs, what the thesis demands, what the research demands rather than the conventional model. But I always also tell them what the conventional model looks like, if they want to use that. There’s usually an introduction, there’s a literature review, there’s a methodology, there’s data chapters, and so on so there’s a lot of conversation around that and how to negotiate that and also how to choose examiners and what examiners will be sympathetic. There’s all different sorts of students, so it depends on the student and the project how I relate. But the key thing is that cohort and the fact that they belong to a group and we call it the space place and body group and it’s been going on for years and years and years. It has a tradition that they can follow. So that’s how it goes yeah. And I love that work. CD: How do you navigate and how do you help others navigate with the demands of government agencies or international agencies who are the ones who fund most research? Is there some practical way of writing a research proposal? Are there certain questions that the team needs to address?

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MS: Well, how I help others to navigate is generally by bringing them on to projects and doing projects with others and they’re not necessarily government funding, so I’ve done a lot of projects that have been funded by other ways. I did a project called Love your lagoons that was funded by a gas company and they failed to monitor their coal seam gas sites and so they were fined and had to do reparative action, and we were invited, a lot of people submitted proposals and we were successful and I had a team on that of people who were learning to do research. So that is how people learn by doing things with me. I guess how I navigate it is, particularly with government funding, I’m absolutely adamant about following the instructions and using the headings and following the guidelines, and I read it over and over and over again. But the way to make sure that you can do what you want to do and also be funded is to be absolutely clear about what you want to do but to also totally follow the guidelines. It doesn’t help to be creative and experimental in a research proposal, you just won’t get funding. You write it in a very conventional way, but you use all of the ideas that are unconventional. So, you can still use Barad or Haraway or whoever you want in your ideas and you have to be very super clear about them, not jargonistic, and totally follow the guidelines. Once a project gets funded there’s very little monitoring about what actually happens, and we wrote Naming the world as an emergent methodology, so we said that things will happen as it goes and that’s how it is. It’s really just taken off with its own directions. Once you get funded but getting funded is to actually absolutely perfectly follow the guidelines and read them over and over and over again to make sure it does and have perfect editing and that sort of thing. So, yeah that’s how I do it I guess, and I’m just developing a new project and it’s interesting to see how that’s working because it is a project it’s called a linkage grant scheme here with an industry partner, and it is working with the Department of Education. But I want to walk with children to their nearby creeks and so it’s that out-of-school learning again. So, it’s a matter of finding someone in the funding body that will be sympathetic to your ideas and then working out how to navigate that through the system, which is challenging. So that’s how I do it. Yeah, I give them what they want but I also get what I want.

6.5 Embodied Writing CD: Your writing is very clear, but at the same time very profound. So, I would love to finish the interview with some of your thoughts about writing. How do you address writing and why you have mentioned that writing is an embodied practice, instead of expository writing? MS: Embodiment is central to developing my ideas, and my ideas come from embodiment. When I was doing my own Ph.D., I was reading and reading and reading and reading and it was making me feel sick and I was becoming very sort of weak and exhausted and tired from all this reading and I decided to do some bodywork with another Ph.D. student who was writing a Ph.D. about massage called Tissue Talk. As

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I did that the areas of discomfort in my body were coming into words and I would gradually start to say the words, it’s like being under a ledge and trying to move a mountain or things like that. I would say the words and then I started to write the words and then I started doing the same process when I was not in the massage; I can remember one day I went with my children and they were young. I went out to a local waterway and I was lying on a rock and I could hear the sounds of children and the sounds of birds and the sounds of water. But when I did I experienced my body as like a lizard spread out on a rock in the sun and I wrote about that. It also came from the realization that for Aboriginal people, when I was transcribing their words, they had a totally different way of being in the world and that I wanted to learn a different way of writing that would enable me to be in the world in that way. That is how I write and my big project at the moment that I love and I never get a chance to get to is writing a book called Riverlands of the Anthropocene that Routledge is going to publish and it’s about my walking at the river lands every day and my writing is dependent on little videos or photos or very, very brief notes that I make on my iPhone and then later I might write it up. So, I’m a kind of funny writer in that I don’t write from the beginning and write logically but I write with pieces that I insert into text then I call it chunking. So, I teach some of my students who have trouble writing about chunking because the basis of my writing is really body landscape journals but they’re body landscape journals that vary in their ways of being recorded and in the experiences that they’re recording. What I’m interested in at the moment is working with more Deleuzian ideas about becoming and about losing the sense of the human body. Becoming with other bodies, with bodies of water, with rocks with stones, with the blue of the sky, and so on. I’m also interested in opening up our writing to other modes so there’s a fabulous exhibition in Sydney at the moment by a Chinese artist called Xun Jun who does amazing videos, makes videos out of his drawings. I’m very, very interested in the influence of music at the moment. So, I’m listening to a Canadian singer called Kate Wolfe in her song The Rising Moon. So, I bring lots of things into writing from other modalities and that is really how I write, it’s very playful. It’s very pleasurable, but it also has some very deep ontological and epistemological underpinnings about how I think about the world, and how I think about being in the world, and how I want to be with the world, and how I want to move with those ideas. One last example. At the moment I’m writing a literature review because one of the reviewers for my book proposal wanted a literature review and I thought I don’t want to write a literature review, how will I do it? So, I’m writing what I call a blue literature review and I’ve taken a photo of the bower birds blue objects in their bowers so I’ve got some beautiful bower birds in the river lands with hundreds of blue plastic pegs and so on. So, I’m writing a blue literature review that involves collecting things that appeal to display to the reader, that have some sort of ontological depth or meaning for me and it doesn’t function like a literature review but like a collection that I want to invite the reader into. So, I guess I’m exploring different kinds of structures or styles as you call them, in the way that we can destabilize or open those up. Doing something different that involves presencing the world, I guess.

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CD: That is very interesting! Two very short questions before we finish. One is about children. Do you feel like children are facing particular challenges? And if you do, what are those challenges and how would your research speak to those challenges? MS: I’ve been thinking for a long time about the idea of children of the Anthropocene and that’s the idea that we talked about earlier that, these children are growing up into a world that we will never know. So, it’s the stage of the world and the environment and climate change and the loss of biodiversity; but we can’t actually assume that children have to take that on and inherit it and save the world. I don’t want to go with that. So, the idea of children of the Anthropocene is that they’re fully entangled in their worlds and that they will become with those worlds. And we need to work with them and learn from them. To be able to help them continue to develop their capacities to name the world in the way that they do. So, whenever I go to the preschool it is like I become a child again and I’m on the ground level with the children listening to the children and really trying to understand how to move with that, how to be with that. I think that’s the best that we can do in terms of helping children to deal with the fact that they are inheriting a world that is really in crisis. But that’s our adult terminology and of course that’s why we have to look at the world with children rather than solving it for them. We can’t. I think the idea of the Anthropocene, the new era of the Anthropocene is a very contested term, but I think it is a very interesting term, to explain what’s happening in relation to humans’ entanglement in the fate of the planet. So that’s what I think about in relation to challenges children. They always give me such great joy, when I’m with children, especially very young children, I don’t feel any sense of gloom and doom. I just feel a sense of the world opening up. And I love it. I just love it.

Further Reading Somerville, M. (2013). Water in a dry land: Place-learning through art and story. New York: Routledge. Somerville, M. (2018). Education research for the Anthropocene: The (micro) politics of researcher becoming (2017 Radford lecture). The Australian Educational Researcher, 45(5), 553–567. Somerville, M., & Hickey, S. (2017). Between indigenous and non-indigenous: Urban/nature/child pedagogies. Environmental Education Research, 23(10), 1427–1439. Somerville, M., & Powell, S. (2019). Thinking posthuman with mud: And children of the Anthropocene. Educational Philosophy and Theory, 51(8), 829–840.

Dr. Margaret Somerville is a Professor of Education, Western Sydney University. She is interested in alternative and creative approaches to research and writing, with a focus on relationship to place and planetary wellbeing. Her research has been carried out in collaboration with Aboriginal communities, schools and school children, and her doctoral students in the Space, Place, Body cohort. Her most recent research, Naming the world, draws on posthuman and new materialist theories, in collaboration with very young children and their extraordinary capacities in world naming. Her new book, Rivers of the Anthropocene will be published in Routledge’s Environmental Humanities series (2020).

Part II

Recreating and Tracing Childhoods

As early career researchers, we have taken many graduate courses on methodology, including those that seek to address so-called child-friendly methodologies and approaches. Working with art, photography, as well as materials/artifacts, we know how powerful these modalities can be when working with young children. At the same time, we have encountered the persistent child-centeredness with many such approaches. For example, the desire to attend to the human in photographs and understand why certain photographs, or drawings were created by children. The interviews in Part 2 draw together methodological perspectives that seek to interrupt child-centeredness and open up the space for more diverse childhoods. The scholars in this section do research with children in different ways, but they show us that methodologies for intervening in child-centeredness are possible. Many do this by thinking through philosophy and creatively about methodology, which disrupt notions about data and analysis. As Marek Tesar illustrates, thinking about data has the potential to imagine “childhoods as being a part of a larger global conceptual and ontological movement in research.” The contributors in this section attend to some of these concerns not by decentering children completely in their work, but by drawing attention to the ways in which space, materiality, movement, and affect enable particular encounters with children. As Christopher Schulte reminded us, for him, decentering the child is about decentering the “traditional humanist forms of understanding that too often speak for and about the child.” In doing so, how we come to “know” children, becomes much more nuanced and complex. By attending to children’s art-making practices, or their engagement with “tinythings”, as Casey Y. Myers, highlights, what matters to children (beyond purely human concerns) is brought to the fore. This section also prompted us to think about how decentering approaches make room for difficult conversations, as well as encounters with more-than-human others, not just children. The work of Pauliina Rautio for instance, highlighted for us how approaches to studying child–animal relations can draw our attention to deeply ethical and political issues that often go unexamined in research with young children. Questions about living and dying well for example, and the decisions we make everyday about the food we consume are often not considered appropriate to discuss

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with young children. Karin Murris’ work on philosophy with children and picturebooks also speaks to the ways in which having difficult conversations with children has the potential to challenge notions of the humanist, and agentic child. We were also lucky to witness how Sylvia Kind attends to materials in her studio at Capilano University in Vancouver, and how the force of some of these materials (including a life-size Cinnamon Bear), invited the children to ask questions about life and death, the “real” and the “unreal.” Children were always central in Kind’s engagements, but the materials moved the encounters and conversations in unpredictable and often provocative directions.

Chapter 7

Interview with Sylvia Kind Sylvia Kind, Claudia Diaz-Diaz and Paulina Semenec

I think it always has to be trying to multiply the languages, multiply these ways of being and knowing so that there is more space for children to really authentically be part of what’s going on.

What might a decentered approach to doing research with children look like in “practice”? Our interview with Sylvia Kind took place in her studio at Capilano University in Vancouver, BC. We had both read Encounters with Materials in Early Childhood Education (Pacini-Ketchabaw, Kind, & Kocher, 2017) and were curious about the role that materials play in enacting other childhoods. We walked into Sylvia’s studio and were inspired by how certain materials could prompt different lines of inquiry with children. However, it was not until we observed Sylvia with the children in the studio that we both experienced an “a-ha!” moment. As an alterierista and early childhood educator, we took note as Sylvia carefully attended to children’s engagements with the materiality of their surroundings—the fabrics that hung from the ceiling, the knitted accessories that served as “cooking” instruments for the children. Sylvia’s slow, attentive pedagogy centered on children’s engagements in a way that did not diminish their own agency but took into account how they were coming into being through the studio. As Sylvia discussed with us, however, this is more than a child-centered approach, as she often comes with particular interests and questions in mind. This is detailed through our conversation about Cinnamon Bear— a life-sized bear that was slowly introduced to the children, until it made an entry S. Kind (B) Capilano University, North Vancouver, Canada e-mail: [email protected] C. Diaz-Diaz · P. Semenec University of British Columbia, Vancouver, BC, Canada e-mail: [email protected] P. Semenec e-mail: [email protected] © Springer Nature Singapore Pte Ltd. 2020 C. Diaz-Diaz and P. Semenec, Posthumanist and New Materialist Methodologies, Children: Global Posthumanist Perspectives and Materialist Theories, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-981-15-2708-1_7

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into the classroom. From beginning to end we came to understand what she meant by saying that the studio was not only a place or a container where children gather to make art work, but most importantly, the studio emerged from the encounters between children and the arrangement of materials available to them.

7.1 Walking into the Studio CD: Can we start by asking you how the studio came about? SK: I’ve been working at Capilano for 12 years. I came into the faculty, as an instructor, but then very soon took on the role of alterierista. We have been working really closely with some of the ideas and provocations from Reggio Emilia for over 15 years which has been one of the key inspirations in early childhood. We’re not trying to implement their approach but have been really inspired from it. We have a pedagogista which is a role in Reggio Emilia and throughout Italy as well. A pedagogista is very much like a provocateur around pedagogy. We are trying to think about the arts as central to learning, not as an addition to curriculum and not as a separate area in the room. The work of the Atelierista involves thinking about the artistic processes as processes of making sense, of figuring things out, and as ways of knowing. My goal was to think about how do we then create a studio space. We’ve tried different configurations over the years, as fairly soon after beginning as an alterierista felt like we needed a defined studio space. We claimed one part of a storage room and over the years we took over the whole space and it became the children’s studio. In the summer when there are less classes scheduled, the large early childhood classroom is usually free and so that room gets turned into a big studio space as well. Some of that work in the book Encounters with Materials took place in a small studio but much of that was in the summer months in here because it was a bigger, much more experimental space. This fall we’re experimenting with keeping it as a studio space, so it becomes a large studio space for early childhood education students as well as children. It has been a work that has been evolving and intensifying and moving for 12 years. I’ve never thought of the studio as a container where you just have a room to do artwork in. I’ve always seen it as its own emergent space. It becomes a studio in its use. The studio is an idea, not just a place. It’s a way of being, a way of working together. My initial vision and desire for the studio was that it’s not just a space for children, but a space together with children and a place where adults nurture their own sense of artistry as well. The studio is always trying to nurture collaborations between adults and children and materials. It’s a core essence of the studio here.

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7.2 Doing Research as an Atelierista CD: You introduced yourself as an atelierista. Could you tell us a little bit more how you understand being and becoming an alterierista? SK: In every Reggio Emilia center there is an atelierista who is a someone who has studied in the arts, not necessarily in an educational context, who’d identify themselves as an artist. The atelierista works together with the pedagogista, who has a strong orientation in pedagogy, so over time tends to develop a pedagogical bent to their work. But still the main orientation is an artistic one. As an atelierista here my main interest is in the arts as ways of knowing. I saw my role initially as mostly helping teachers develop attunement to children’s artistic processes, to see beyond the conventional, and to think about materials and processes in other ways, to what the materials make possible rather than just using them for instrumental purposes. Much of my work is about paying attention to these artistic ways of being. I’m much more interested in seeing the arts as ways of being and ways of knowing rather than the arts as a process of creating something even though lots of things do get made. For me being an atelierista is really rooted in a/r/tography. That was my context doing my Ph.D. at UBC so I see art practice as research, as a way of knowing, as a way of thinking. That is essential to me in being an atelierista. I wanted to explore using the arts not just for myself as a way of knowing and a way of researching but seeing children’s processes in that way as well. Working with the children is so vibrant. I couldn’t imagine teaching without also working directly with children. CD: How do you see children, and more particularly, in relation to materials? SK: I didn’t start with a set idea of children, rather it’s evolved through the years of working in the studio with them. My early background in education is in Montessori, and I found the heart of Montessori fits beautifully with the essence of Reggio Emilia. It reflects a way of listening to children and taking children seriously. It also has taken shape over the years through working with Cristina Delgado, the pedagogista in the center and her pedagogical promptings and provokings. I would say I see children as relational, not as individuals who are developing, but already in the world in relational ways, already in relation to materials, and to ideas, and already full of potential. I see much of my artistic and studio work as expanding the possibilities for children and educators not because they are incomplete but because rich, vibrant, and intelligent spaces enliven possibilities for them (Fig. 7.1).

7.3 Researching Children’s Encounters: Cinnamon Bear CD: I’m curious to know a little bit more about cinnamon bear. How did this project come alive? and how have you worked with your student and with the teacher and with the children through this project? I understand it has been a while.

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Fig. 7.1 Encounters with cinnamon bear. Photos courtesy of Sylvia Kind

SK: Yes, it’s been a while. We’ve been engaging in a project around birds, eggs, and hatching for about 3 years. Last year children were speculating and thinking about eggs that were hatching. For example, they had ideas that if an egg hatches it’s an alive egg and if an egg doesn’t hatch it’s not alive and you can eat it. They were working with propositions of being alive and not alive. Children were inventing symbols for alive and symbols for not alive and were playing with those ideas in enactments, drawing, fabric, and clay. We wanted to settle into the questions they were posing, but not in direct or literal ways. I don’t think you ever get anything in an interesting way by just going directly at it. We wondered how do we settle into this space between alive and not alive? We did all kinds of things to try to engage with the ideas. As we were trying to figure this out, one of the teachers in the center had a friend who had a taxidermy cinnamon bear. She asked us if we would we like

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to have the bear at the center. And so rather than just bringing this taxidermy bear right into the Centre, we thought it would be much more interesting to actually try to encounter the bear who looks alive, but it is not alive. We wanted the children to encounter the bear but not touch it, because if you touch the bear you will know he was not alive. One day when the children were outside we placed the bear on the other side of the fence of the children’s play area. When the children noticed the bear they were puzzling and speculating about whether it was alive or not alive, is it real? is it not real? Why is it not moving? Then one of the children was convinced that it was alive but it wasn’t moving because it was daydreaming. That was a highly generative proposition as it articulated a state between alive and not alive, it offered a plausible explanation to the children, and became an invitation to explore further. We started thinking with them about daydreaming, dream states, and alternate states of being. For quite a while we would encounter the bear at different times, without touching the bear. They were still convinced that it was real and daydreaming, but they couldn’t figure out why the rock it was standing on (the bear was mounted on a plaster rock) was moving along with the bear. We became attuned as well to their desire for life, liveliness, and animacy in their speculations and tried to engage with them in this. We wondered if there is this desire for animacy, how would they try to animate the bear? They talked about giving the bear food to try to make it move, they thought about throwing things at the bear to see if they could make it jump and react. They yelled at the bear, called out “I love you bear” and whispered to the bear words of love. For quite a while we settled with them into this place between alive and not alive, but it was never disappointing to them that the bear wasn’t doing anything. PS: Did conversations about death ever come up? SK: Oh yes, in the studio it comes up in different ways. One boy, for instance, told us that he had a cat who was a black cat and then it died and turned white because it was cremated and now it is in a box on their shelf. I figure that any story that comes into the studio is a story worth thinking about, no matter how dramatic or upsetting it is. When the story is told we think about it and engage with it. So, yes there are stories of death.

7.4 Decentering the Child in Research CD: Some scholars argue that we are in a moment when decentering humans, and particularly the child is much needed. You have written that you see children as relational. Would you agree that seeing children in permanent relation with materials or space is a form of decentering the child? Or would you claim that your work aims to de-center the child? If you do, how do you do so? SK: I think that the work the children and I have been doing with the bear may help me to give an example of children as relational. One way to see children and their relationships with the bear is that children are full of ideas about the bear before they

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encounter the bear, as if their ideas just come from inside of them, and it’s coming out and being expressed toward the bear as if the meaning is in children and just needs the avenue or the language or the materials to express it. That perspective keeps an idea of a very strong child full of ideas but is human centered. I think more about the idea that things are made in the moment and in the exchanges between. It’s the touch of the bear, the aliveness of his eyes, the dissonance between looking alive and being still, that proposes something. It’s the connection between the wool that has been winding around the studio in lots of different ways over the weeks that then comes and wraps around the bear and begins to create something that comes from the entanglements of materials and child and ideas. It’s not coming from the child, although certainly children have incredible ideas, but it’s in the meeting of things, in the touch, in the intersection of materials, in the what the materials propose that generates something. Whatever children’s ideas are I see them as speculations or propositions of the way things might be. To me decentering the child is certainly not taking the child out of the picture and just looking at materials. It’s looking at what happens between. You cannot take the human out, partly because it is a human making sense of everything anyways. But in a world where children are still so undervalued and there’s still so much othering, how can you not keep the human as an essential element by seeing the human in relation with all these other things that are composed in the making? That’s what interests me - how ideas, how experiences, how events, how materials, how things intersect and are composed together. The human is part of it, but not necessarily central. I’m interested in how a material, for example, fabric, become a vibrant presence so when we come into the studio it does something to you. After months and years of playing with the fabric, getting to know its qualities, movements, and propositions, we respond by composing the room in such a way that you can be in the midst of a living and dynamic material. It’s really about bringing the qualities, the characteristics of the material into presence so it acts on you. CD: When we read your book, we understood you propose that materials are a central actor. You take care of the materials, you touch them in a particular way, you look at them, and you allow yourself to be affected by the relationships with them… SK: Yes, and materials have a relationship with other materials, not a human kind of relationship. For example, light has such a dynamic and engagement with this particular fabric (she shows us a colorful sheer fabric). Light enlivens it. Then it’s arranging things in a way that the light catches it. CD: When I walked into your studio, it gave me another feeling of your ideas in the book. While I read your book, I felt I understood the ideas throughout, but when I walked in your studio my body felt what all these ideas were about. SK: Yes, it’s a different kind of knowing that it’s not cognitive, easily articulated knowing. It’s an experiential lived kind of feeling knowing. To me that’s also really essential in working with materials. It’s about becoming attuned to lived ways of being with materials. Materials do different things. The fabric is very different than clay because clay has a different life and it’s got a different tempo and way of moving.

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It’s a much slower denser material and fabric has a lightness and instability in it so that if you wrap it around yourself you might feel like you could fly, and it proposes possibilities of who you could become. It’s becoming attuned to what to the materials propose and set in motion. PS: I’d like to ask you about the role of your documentation as you are walking, filming, and taking photos. I’m wondering what do you do with that? What are you looking for when you watch those videos? Is there something that you are trying to figure out when you are re-watching? SK: Yes. I’m always trying to figure something out. It is never just taking photos. At the beginning of some kind of exploration, part of documenting is trying to figure out what am I seeing? What is happening and what’s going on? I may be trying to notice the movements and rhythms of a material, the way the fabric hides and conceals, or the moments of encounter between fabric and child. It’s always a decision of what to look at and what to look for. It’s never a general view or a record of what happens; it’s always a view to something in particular. For instance, I’ve been engaged in a long curiosity with wool and its interweaving strands along with metaphors of knitting and being knit together. Metaphorically, wool knits us together and it entangles us, so this was one thing I was attentive to today. This brought my attention to a little boy who had the ball of wool and was rolling it around children “who were in the oven.” The children, who were being strawberry and apple pies in the oven, were saying: “Oh I think he’s making a trap for us.” It was attending to what the wool is doing, and the various ways wool entangles children and narratives together. While I usually hold multiple things at one time it is always a deliberate decision of what is it that I’m going to be attending to because there are too many things happening and you just get lost, if you don’t have a guiding view and intention.

7.5 Thinking with Others CD: We have talked about what inspires your thinking. I wonder if there is any author or scholar you find particularly inspiring for your work. SK: An author I currently really like is Tim Ingold and the way he writes about improvisation as a way of making your way through the world. I love his way of working in concert with and correspondence with materials. I’m also currently reading Erin Manning. I really find her work dense and nearly impossible, but fascinating, and also Brian Massumi, and their idea of thinking-doing, that thought is being formed in the moment, in the making, in the doing. This is where I differ from many North American Reggio inspired practices which tends to think quite representationally as if children’s ideas can be easily made visible. I am much more interested in the moments of making, in these processes of being in the making of ideas, and how they are taking shape… I’m reading Erin Manning and Brian Massumi and their book

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Thought in the Act,1 and two others by Erin Manning, I tend to take little bits and work with them in the studio and in practice. I particularly like Manning’s writing about choreography. Choreography not as something that is planned ahead of time and directed but is in the moment relational responding and moving together with children, ideas, materials, which to me is such a foundational part of working with young children, and I think adults as well. It gives space for things that can’t be easily articulated, and emphasizes felt, lived, in the moment doings CD: When you work with the other teacher you both are together in the making, and in that making, there is always a path that is taken and other than is not…. SK: Exactly. We are always in the moment of trying to figure out what is being proposed and what is taking shape. There are decisions ahead of time in terms of a particular orientation, particular broad ideas. For example, the teacher and I know we’re playing with ideas of alive, and not alive; existing, not existing; real not real when cinnamon bear appears. Those are the big questions that guide our engagements. But there are many in-the-moment discussions with [the teacher] when together in this studio I might say: “look I think this is taking shape,” “I see this happening.” Or she notices things. We are continuously trying to figure out what directions we want to follow, amplify, or settle into. It’s a process of making curriculum together.

7.6 Intentions in Research CD: You said that you and the teacher do not know all things beforehand, but you have discussed some guiding ideas, desires, or intentions… Can you tell us a little bit more about your intentions about doing this work? What is the kind of possibilities you want to open? SK: This is a really good question. I’m always in process of figuring out what is going on. If we really are taking seriously this idea of research with children, and I don’t see research as something separate from daily practice, we’re always trying to figure out where we’re going and what we’re doing and what things are about. Then there is always a responsibility to do something, to respond, to take what is being offered as a companion to children, side by side with them. It is not as if it’s child-centered and I’m just following their ideas. I may conceptualize things in a particular way, have particular interests and orientations that I really think is worthwhile exploring. What children propose needs to be taken seriously if we’re really in the space with children, although we might articulate it differently. It is not just documenting in order to make sense of children’s processes but acts of returning it back to children in some way. It’s trying to give shape to things to actually settle somewhere with the children. It may not always be exactly what they’re following, because most of the time there’s many things going on, but it’s always proposing, saying “here what 1 Manning,

E. & Massumi, B. (2014). Thought in the act: Passages in the ecology of experience. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press. https://doi.org/10.5749/j.ctt6wr79f.

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about this,” “what if we settle here, “what if we try that.” It’s always trying to give shape to something in a way that really tries to honor what they’re proposing and is in resonance with their desires, their orientations, and also expanding on ways of being and ways of knowing. I think it always has to be trying to multiply the languages, multiply these ways of being, and knowing so that there is more space for children to really authentically be part of what’s going on. CD: For me working around cinnamon bear was really about shaping relationships in a very different way of how we typically think about relationships in the early childhood classroom. All of you, I would say children and adults, were in this space, encountering each other with the ideas, materials, and their projects. SK: And the questions that we were asking we are genuinely curious about. It is not the kind of question that teachers ask, that you actually know the answers or you’re leading towards something. I think that what you said to me is the essence of the studio here. It is ways of being, and inventing ways of being together that is genuinely being with children and with each other where it’s not a hierarchy. Yes, adults have more life experience, but children have perspectives that I don’t have or ideas and ways of putting things together and ways of knowing and thinking about things that are really vibrant. We need each other. I see my intention as really trying to create these spaces of collaboration and collective improvisation. CD: What do you think are the challenges that children are facing today and how does the work you do address these challenges? SK: I think children will inherit a world that is full of difficulties that we don’t know how to address. I think it’s essential in early childhood and all of education, to open and create spaces where children really are vibrant thinkers and doers and makers, nurturing a sense of thinking in movement. You can respond, make things up as you go, and get somewhere because those are things that are needed in the world. Rather than figuring out how they’re going to address the things they will inherit or leaving them with the problems, is really important to nurture a space of learning together, where children have a sense of agency and their ideas are taken seriously so they can think about their own thinking, they can encounter others’ ideas and work with them. I see it in a sense in the studio. My role is not in terms of teaching children anything in particular, but taking what’s happening, giving it some kind of form, so children can see their ideas taking shape in other ways. Honoring their ideas and reflecting them back, so that they can continue to work with them, engaging in improvisational and creative processes. It’s not just making for the sake of making, but finding your way, settling into big questions and realizing you can think about these things and people will take you seriously and listen to you. It’s not just children doing this, but we can do this together and create a space of really thinking with others and being with others. CD: What I’m hearing is that your work in the studio is a form of keeping bodies alive. SK: Yes, and not just talking or verbal forms of thinking, but thinking with your hands, thinking with your body, thinking in movement, in correspondence with others, and

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with materials. In early childhood can be so vibrant, because children are so alive in this and haven’t been conditioned by schooling to particular ways of being and thinking. PS: I did my research in grade three classroom where it was already so teacher centered. When the teacher said it’s time to draw, everybody drew. When I was sitting here in your studio a couple of the children were drawing something. There were two children who were not drawing and nobody said “now, we’re going to draw.” I was kind of waiting for it, a little bit… it is so much more restricted already in primary school. And so I feel kind of sad in a way because seeing the space and knowing that in a few years the children will be in a very different kind of environment. But maybe they will learn to embody that space differently because of their experience here. SK: My best story I heard was about two children who had been very involved in the studio when they were at the Children’s Centre. They had known each other in the center, but they were a year or so apart, and they ended up in the same elementary school. When one was in kindergarten the other one was in grade one, they saw each other during lunchtime and decided to build a studio at the school. To me it was like they said: “Okay this is missing in the school experience, so let’s make one.” They got together frequently at recess and would carve out the clay and the mud from the ground and went about building a studio. I don’t think they ever actually made a studio. It was more about the act of being in the making of it together and the agency to do something about a perceived lack. And I still think what happens in early childhood even if children go through a really restrictive schooling still stays with you. What has been nurtured and lived remains. And maybe it becomes quiet for a while, but I don’t think you just have an experience and then you leave it behind. That is why I think the experience of the studio is so important. It’s something that is a feeling, an experience and event. It’s a way of thinking, being, and co-creating that I trust stays with children.

Further Reading Kind, S. (2013). Lively entanglements: The doings, movements and enactments of photography. Global Studies of Childhood, 3(4), 427–441. Kind, S. (2018). Collective Improvisations: The emergence of the early childhood studio as an event-full place. In C. Schulte, C. Thompson (Eds.), Communities of Practice: Art, Play, and Aesthetics in Early Childhood. Landscapes: The Arts, Aesthetics, and Education (pp. 5–21). Singapore: Springer. Kind, S., & Lee, C. (2017). Moon bear and the night butterfly. In M. J. Binder, S. Kind (Eds.), Drawing as Language: Celebrating the Work of Bob Steele. (pp. 101–116). Transdisciplinary Studies. Rotterdam: Sense Publishers. Pacini-Ketchabaw, V., Kind, S., & Kocher, L. (2017). Encounters with materials in early childhood education. New York: Routledge.

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Dr. Sylvia Kind is an instructor in Early Childhood Education at Capilano University and an atelierista at the Capilano University Children’s Centre. Her work is motivated by an interest in young children’s studio practices, their lively material improvisations and collective experimentations, and in developing understandings of studio research in early childhood contexts. She has co-authored the book Encounters with Materials in Early Childhood Education, co-edited Drawing as Language, and has written several journal articles and book chapters on studio practices in early childhood.

Chapter 8

Interview with Karin Murris Karin Murris, Paulina Semenec and Claudia Diaz-Diaz

‘Child as iii ’ is the reconfiguration of child as posthuman child, the child who is always in a process of becoming with others and with the world. Decentering the child unsettles voice and identity as something humans ‘have’ with agency as something inside and outside the acting, human body at the same time.

Karin Murris’ interview elaborates on the “posthuman” child, as well as decolonizing teacher education. Inspired by the work of Karen Barad, Karin speaks profoundly about reading and writing diffractively. For Karin, diffraction in research means that instead of finding an “answer,” diffraction opens up different possibilities to think through and create new realities, which is often experiential and intuitive. She reminds us that the boundaries between culture and nature, the micro and macro, are also human-made (following Barad) which has important implications for research and how we understand the child. We found her discussion of “Laika” (introduced in her book The Posthuman Child) extremely moving in this interview, as it prompted discussions for us about child–animal relations, ethics, and difference. Her neologism “iii” instead of the human “I,” which she discusses in this interview, also challenged us to think about how the “I” is often so present in posthuman work. Karin’s “iii” forces us to read differently, something we often talk and write a lot about, but often struggle to put into practice.

K. Murris (B) University of Cape Town, Cape Town, South Africa e-mail: [email protected] P. Semenec · C. Diaz-Diaz University of British Columbia, Vancouver, BC, Canada e-mail: [email protected] C. Diaz-Diaz e-mail: [email protected] © Springer Nature Singapore Pte Ltd. 2020 C. Diaz-Diaz and P. Semenec, Posthumanist and New Materialist Methodologies, Children: Global Posthumanist Perspectives and Materialist Theories, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-981-15-2708-1_8

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8.1 Material Approaches to Doing Research with Children Q. In your book, “The Posthuman Child,” you write in your Acknowledgements section that some of the chapters in the book were “re-analyzed using a posthuman orientation.” Can you tell us a little bit about your decision to reanalyze some of your work and data through a posthumanist orientation? In other words, what prompted this shift in perspective? Were there any challenges in reanalyzing this work, especially in relation to writing differently, etc.? Yes, I had published some of the material in The Posthuman Child (2016b) before and my introduction to critical posthumanism didn’t so much shift my teaching practices but changed more the way I theorized those practices. I diffracted through my earlier writings, and it was such a liberating, exciting, and productive process. I wrote the book quite quickly and it wasn’t a clear decision as such, it sort of emerged. What very much inspired me was the weekly posthumanism reading group I coordinate at the university, our open-ended conversations and close reading of primary texts. We started with Lenz Taguchi (2010) and had so many questions that we then read Karen Barad’s Meeting the Universe Halfway (2007) chapter by chapter. Although she doesn’t talk about education, it was as if I had finally found the words for what I believed about education for a long time. Not that my ideas are stagnant or stable of course, they are always on the move, but I have always been interested in relational and philosophical approaches to teaching and learning. You asked about the challenges in reanalyzing some of my earlier writing, but I didn’t experience it as a challenge at the time. I spent a South African Summer working more or less next to our salt water pool (which takes up most of our back garden)—my desk was then in a room quite close to it. I looked out onto the pool and I could dive into it whenever I felt like it, letting some of these earlier ideas about education wash off my body. It really helped me to re-turn to “old” data and engage with them from a fresh material-discursive perspective. I tried to pay attention to the materiality of the world I am a part of and not just focus on words and language in my research. I got up early (as I always do), and the words just rolled out, perhaps because I wasn’t too focused on them. Now and again, I also took the car to a nearby beach and bodyboarded in the waves. It was so much the right time and place to engage with Karen Barad’s diffractive reading of social justice theories and quantum field theory. The idea of a diffractive reading for posthumanists is to treat texts (in the broad sense) like waves, and therefore as disturbances, not bounded entities. When waves overlap or diffract, for example, when they encounter an obstruction (e.g., me on my bodyboard), they create an interference pattern or “superposition”—something new. Waves can occupy the same place at the same time, they are unbounded. Quite some time ago, quantum physicists documented that electrons can behave like waves or particles depending on the apparatus that measures their movement (for example, whether being observed or not). This is counter-intuitive, because humans experience the world differently at “macro level.” But Barad reminds us that the distinction between micro and macro, and nature and culture, is also human-made. For example,

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the devastating (macro) influence of the tiny (micro) atom evidences that assigning a certain ontology to bodies at micro-level and not to bodies at macro level is problematic. The reason for this is that the very act of dichotimizing (breaking apart) the way the micro and the macro exists means that as your ontological starting point you already assume individual existence and binary logic (something can’t be A and -A at the same time), and not mutual relationality. In a sense this is not surprising because the way we have come to understand the world, through human vision in particular, is that objects (e.g., my own body and the bodyboard) can’t be at the same place at the same time. However, quantum physics has shown that there are no absolute boundaries between here-now and there-then. Diffraction patterns are evidence of superpositions and the new patterns created are the effect of difference and mark where learning has occurred. Now reading texts diffractively is not a unilinear activity (e.g., causal), but multilinear, experiential, experimental, and intuitive. Unlike methods that researchers apply to the data they have collected (a “doing to”), it is a kind of mutual performativity in between the human and more than human that troubles cognition/emotion and inner/outer binaries. Putting the methodology to work is far from straightforward, because it is so different from the reflective methodologies we have become so used to. But reflection is an inner mental activity, whereby a researcher supposedly takes a step back (as in a literature review), distancing herself from the data or whatever is being contemplated. In reflection, the researcher is seen as separate from the world, whereas in diffraction, there is no researcher who is an independent subject but rather an intra-action between human and non-human phenomena (Murris & Bozalek, 2019). So, what does this mean for educational research you may wonder and what is different? I have to say that further immersion in critical posthumanism and especially a seminar with Karen Barad for my Decolonising Early Childhood Discourses (DECD) project (www.decolonizingchildhood.org) here in Cape Town helped significantly in creating new understandings about posthumanism. During the seminar, Karen returned (diffracted through) two papers she had written—a very moving and powerful experience. At first, I was disappointed that she was just reading the papers I had read so often myself, but soon I realized that this was deliberate. Re-reading texts is diffracted through your own work and sediments the world in its iterative becoming— a world-making process. The seminar was a year after The Posthuman Child had been published and it helped me to develop a much better feel for what is central to the methodology and what it means in practice. I learnt to focus much more on the activity of tracing the human and non-human entanglements and to try and describe or visualize relations, not individuals or units in space and time. And many of these entanglements are not visible; they change with each intra-action. Deleuze would probably have said that many of these entanglements are virtual, but not actual. However, they are real. For example, we tend to conceptualize memory as an activity in the mind or brain of a knowing subject. But remembering (diffraction through) “my” childhood is not a kind of time travel into my past that is there for the taking as it were, left behind and waiting to be reflected on, but it is a creative process of paying attention to

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what is still present in the here and now. Barad (2017) talks about “times bleeding through one another” and temporal diffraction is the methodology that traces different temporalities in the “now.” In The Posthuman Child, I diffract through earlier writings, but also much of its energy and passion comes from memories of earlier experiences with schooling. Laika, for example, is a narrative device I start the book with, but it wasn’t a tool in an instrumental sense, something I used out of convenience or with a particular objective in mind. Laika is in fact George in my Ph.D. thesis, a boy judged as being a “slow thinker.” I chose Laika as a name, because I am (still today) haunted by what happened to this dog, specially how she was carefully selected as a stray dog (so who would care?) and female, because there was no space for a male dog to urinate by lifting his leg. Only a female dog would fit. You can just imagine how little space there must have been when she was sent into space in Sputnik-2 by the Russians in 1957. It doesn’t take much imagination to visualize how traumatic it must have been for Laika. Long after the event, the authorities admitted that she probably died within a few hours. She died all on her own from overheating and panic—a one-way ticket bought by humans to satisfy their colonizing impulses. Ironically, Laika, like other dogs after her with a similar fate, was declared a “hero.” But I see Laika as a tragic victim of the cruel actions of human subjects who have learned to regard themselves as autonomous, intentional, and rational human actors. It is an ontology that positions humans above the “natural” environment and animals and has led (and still does) to unspeakable cruelty. Images of Laika’s face on the Internet haunt me. Laika in my thesis—George—also suffered from a lack of space for his legs in the school where I was teaching for 1 day a week and carried out my Ph.D. research. The way he was talked about by staff in a primary school affected me deeply at the time (as in fact many staff room conversations do); he and many other children still haunt me and the injustices done to them. It inspired the direction of my Ph.D. thesis Metaphors of the Child’s Mind: Teaching Philosophy to Children (1997), which focused on how children’s thinking is evaluated by adults. Teachers are not deliberately unethical or unjust. I wasn’t blaming them or being critical in the moral sense, but their actions or statements helped me to find a philosophical response. It helped me to put words to the injustices I felt deeply. When I now read The Posthuman Child, I see how the diffractive methodology was still very new for me then. I now and then fall back on humanist ways of thinking and writing, which is not surprising of course as it is so engrained in the languages I think through. In a 2017 paper, I return to (diffract through) Chap. 7 and read Philosophy with Children and Reggio Emilia diffractively through one another, again (Murris, 2017a)! A kind of slow scholarship I suppose. I can now see that what I did in the book sometimes reads more like a literature review. I also had another “hat” on as it were. Student teachers had to be familiarized with different theories of child and childhood and pedagogies in order to also use it as a textbook in the future that was also part of writing in the present. What has been really helpful for me is to think about writing as always in progress, never the last word and also that it is perfectly alright to disagree with or be unhappy with what you have published before.

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Although my main inspiration for The Posthuman Child was Karen Barad’s relational agential ontology, I also draw on Rosi Braidotti’s work and her inspirations, Gilles Deleuze and Felix Guattari. But I only do so when they affirm and reinforce a Baradian analysis. For example, Baradian quantum entanglements are not “assemblages” when the latter are understood as pulling independent entities or events together in new linkages or intertwinings (as is the case in “interaction”). This is often misunderstood, I think. For Barad, entities, space, and time exist only through their entangled existence (“intra-action”). Even nothingness or the void is entangled with bodies, space, and time. For me, this is the biggest challenge to enact in educational theories, practices, research, and to teach students. Relational ontologies can still assume that human and non-human bodies move around in space and time as containers à la Newton. But for Barad, we are entangled at micro and macro level. My body is entangled with more bacterial cells than human ones. So, what does it mean to be human? The bodies of young children consist of 75-78% water. However, how this watery substance affects how they feel and think, and how that is affected in turn by, for example, the moon (see the affect it has on the tides!) is disregarded in educational theory and practices. Only what happens in the mind (mental states) matters for measuring academic achievement, which is mainly understood as cognitive. It is a very dualistic way of thinking about learning.

8.2 Decentering the Child Through the Neologism “iii” Q. In “The Posthuman Child,” you also propose the neologism “iii” instead of the human “I” (capital “i”). This is an interesting approach to decentering the child, which is one of the questions we have for all contributors in this book. As you write, this neologism serves as a “continuous materialdiscursive challenge to binary discourses we inhabit, and aims to open up alternative non-dichotomous understandings of child” (Murris, 2016a, p. 91). You then provide some really interesting and concrete examples of how these different iterations of “i” work in your analysis of Liam’s photos. Can you tell us a little bit more about how this different conceptualizing of the child came about, and how you have found it useful for your own thinking about the child, especially in thinking about how to decenter the child? I am really glad to hear that the analysis of Liam’s photos worked for you. He is our youngest son. Our children and grandchildren are completely entangled with my educational philosophies and practices. They also tend to feature in most of my writing and many of my presentations—I “take them with me” as it were in professional settings. Often my experiences of living with children have helped me to illustrate a theoretical point, or even a paradigm shift as in Liam’s case. For me, theory and practice are like two pedals on the same bike. When I read theory, I “test” what I read at the same time by consulting my own experiences as a mother teacher lecturer researcher, checking my own understanding. We don’t do that enough in philosophy, or at least show that to the reader. I always hope that if an example works

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for me, it might work for the reader. I continually move in my thinking between what we used to call the “abstract” and the “concrete.” I see this as a fluid movement, because concepts express changing and dynamic relations, not static things in the world. Concepts are performances, boundary-making practices, and not accurate, objective descriptions of a world “out there,” because nothing in the world sits still. It is a kind of “reality check,” but not in the sense this phrase tends to be used. In a significant way, my family is always in the present, even when they are not physically there. They are completely entangled with my own be(come)ing. Of course, I do think of them often, but that is not what I mean. They are part of me. Not in the sense that they are part of my consciousness, something psychological or mental, but ontologically. I suppose that also made me excited about my reconfiguration of the teacher as pregnant stingray. I write about this in Chap. 8 of The Posthuman Child, and return to it again in a later publication in the context of the polarized notions of child-centered versus teacher-centered education (Murris, 2017b). The intra-active pedagogies I am interested in tend to be labeled as “child-centered,” which misses the point, at least in the way I enact them. The teacher as pregnant stingray is a diffractive reading of three familiar figurations through one another: the midwife, the stingray, and the pregnant body. The new educational theory and practice that is produced is the “superposition” of the pregnant stingray—a reconfiguration of the educator that disrupts power producing binaries, such as teacher/learner, adult/child, individual/society. The reconfiguration of the teacher pregnant stingray has made me think differently about difference, the knowing subject (as in/determinate and unbounded). It also creates a more egalitarian intra-relationality “between” learner and educator. My writing is always a response to what I see as injustices. Anyway, to come back to your question about Liam and the neologism “ iii ”. It is deliberately written in gray ink to express a posthuman shift. To be honest I don’t quite remember how it emerged. I had been reading Andrew Stables’ insightful book on an Anti-Aristotelian perspective on childhood, but I struggled with his categories (Stables, 2008). When I was in the process of writing a genealogy (a political reading of the present) about “child,” I soon realized that posthuman child is a shift from thinking about children as smaller and younger bodies in space and time (the Newtonian container) to “child” as phenomenon: an entanglement of subject and object, but without discarding the human subject. Many years ago, one of my much older philosopher of education friends, John Colbeck, suggested “ii” as a playful way of expressing the relationality of the human subject when engaged in philosophical dialogue. The neologism stuck and many years later provoked further experimentation with language in the context of childhood. My starting point was “Child as i,” the scientific, cognitive child which has been (and still is) so influential—the Piagetian child. I then thought of the capital “I” and how language puts the human in the center of everything, even in sentences. So, I constructed “Child as I”: the child with a voice and bearer of human rights. John’s “ii” deconstructs the human-centeredness of Man (as Sylvia Wynter would say). The neologism emphasizes the relational, but it is still very much like “interaction.” The bodies exist prior to their engagement with one another. Child as “ii” is the child in context, who is seen through a socio-constructivist or poststructural lens. Humanist

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relationality is still its ontology and I have found this difference with posthumanism the hardest to teach students or to explain to colleagues who hold on to a sociological or psychological notion of relationality. When child as “ii” is our theoretical lens, we observe bodies as bounded individuals (the child or children), whom we follow in our research practices. And I agree that these “ii”s are never pure, but normative. They are always part of sociocultural and geopolitical networks of relations (childhoods rather than childhood). Child as ii is another way of describing the vast literature in the sociology of childhood as a kind of “shortcut.” And posthumanism doesn’t throw away these insights as that would assume holding onto a linear notion of progress. But posthuman child makes a radical, ontological shift that has profound implications for research practices. It decenters the child and theorizes child without individualized bodily boundaries (like Liam who became a road sign in my book). “Child as iii ” is the reconfiguration of child as posthuman child, the child who is always in a process of becoming with others and with the world. Decentering the child unsettles voice and identity as something humans “have” with agency as something inside and outside the acting, human body at the same time. “ iii ” “is” also you and me, not just child. So, what I am trying to do in The Posthuman Child is to reconfigure the human of any age through the child, and my analysis of Liam provokes this shift from i to iii . It expresses the subject as unbounded sympoietic system, as Donna Haraway would describe it. It is not a denial that there are individual children who exist but reconfigures child as always already in human and more-than-human company (is “inhuman” in fact). Liam is already entangled with what, for example, happens on the moon, and his desire to play football, and his attraction to tractors, and his dressing up in smart clothes, and his piece of paper directing the traffic, and his ideas about a wedding, and discourses about what it means to be a child, and the road he is standing on, and the way he has mapped the geography of the place, and the ants crawling on the road, and the barking of our dogs… ad infinitum. It is simply impossible to trace all entanglements that are part of what makes Liam act the way he does, so all efforts to fully describe him are in vain. iii involves seeing children as dynamic events, processes, rather than individual subjects or objects. Posthuman child does not exist as a distinct entity prior to her intra-actions but emerges through material and discursive intra-actions: cells, atoms, wind, fibers, dust, metal, skin, ant legs, soil, paper, government, concepts, policies, language, touch, atmosphere, and so forth. I explain this in my Posthuman Child Manifesto (2018) (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ikN-LGhBawQ). The figuration of posthuman child resists erasures between past and futures. Childhood is not something we leave behind, iii am also still child. Understanding child-adult as an entanglement helps to move away from deficit discourses about child and childhood as it decenters the child as a being (with a stable personality, characteristics, and essence) whose age determines her abilities. Instead posthumanists regard child as a dis/embodied and dis/embedded becoming. The “dis/” expresses the entanglement between past, present, and future as the past and the future are always already threaded through the present. iii renders child capable as part of these entanglements. So as teachers and researchers, we focus on the relations child is part of and not on the child itself.

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In a recent research project, we exemplify a posthuman analysis of a 1-hour Philosophy with Children session. We write about this in the book Literacies, Literature and Learning: Reading Classrooms Differently (Murris & Haynes, 2018). We created video data of a literacy lesson using three different angles when a visiting teacher and philosophical play consultant was reading the picturebook How to Find Gold by Viviane Schwarz with a Grade 2 class in Cape Town. In the first part of the book, we theorize our analysis and in the second part the chapters diffract through one another. They are written by postgraduate students and colleagues from three different continents and diverse disciplinary backgrounds and they are all members of the DECD project. It was a fascinating and very challenging project for various reasons, but it worked I think in showing what happens when you decenter the child in research, ontologically, epistemologically, and ethically. For example, in one chapter we analyze one observer’s comment that the children had been “fidgeting.” In another, we show how video as apparatus created the data. What really caught our attention is how the furniture (the circle and the chairs) was part of the learning that emerged. What the book tries to enact is how we as researchers tried to pay attention to minute material and discursive details of what happened in the classroom where nothing ever sits still, and not just the children, also the more-than-human bodies. We also adopt temporal diffraction in one chapter and show how colonizing histories are threaded through the present. We visualize that with a diffractive image of a Cape zebra and an old map of the land on which the school was built.

8.3 Addressing Critiques Q. Some scholars have suggested that a new materialist perspective fails to attend to discourses of power or the historicity of the own researcher’s speculations or categories. What do you think of the critiques of posthumanism or new materialism specifically the critique that new materialisms depoliticize research? In your opinion, what is the potential that posthumanist materialism has for re-thinking and re-doing ethics and politics? I agree with some critics that certain strands of posthumanism are apolitical and that is what confuses some people. They can sometimes be even more human-centered in the sense of putting the technologically enhanced human in the center and they don’t question the power issues involved in what it means to be human (as rational, intelligent, etc.) and its self-assigned power over animals and the material world. The problem with that is that Man will continue to use nature and the environment as a resource. Other posthumanists (e.g., Object Orientated Ontology) assign agency to objects in a mirror image of assigning agency to humans, thereby repeating the dualist ontology of humanism. Relationality is still understood as between subjects and objects that exist prior to their relationality. In other words, much depends on what people mean by “posthumanism” or “new materialism.”

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The strand of posthumanism I work with reconfigures who and what counts as (fully) human. As I have hopefully shown by my answers to your questions so far, the idea of diffraction as a posthuman methodology is to do justice to the always already existing entanglements we find ourselves in. They make life possible and at the same time we are responsible for them: a kinship with other animals (including humans) and also things. A relational agential ontology disrupts past/present/future linearity. There is no radical break with the past, there never can be as the subject is always situated, dis/embedded, and dis/embodied, meaning not fixed but always entangled with the political, the cultural, and so forth. Critical posthumanists are not only materialists, but also committed to the insights of poststructuralists and postmodernists (hence the notion of “material-discursive”). In that sense, the boundaries between i, I, ii, and iii are not fixed, but also diffracted through one another. The inclusion of the apparatus that measures as part of the diffraction patterns, means that I (as researcher) am also part of the diffraction pattern. Importantly, these interference patterns disrupt identity producing binaries (e.g., mind/body, cognition/emotion, researcher/researched, man/woman, White/Black, adult/child, normal/abnormal, micro/macro). So, diffractive readings are always ethical and political—ethics, ontology, and epistemology are always entangled. However, there is a radical difference in the way in which critical posthumanists and poststructuralists theorises and enact difference. For the former, differences do not start from individual identity ontologically (e.g., White males), but differences emerge relationally. In other words, an ontological decentering of the human is required to expose who counts as a person, a “fully” human and who and what is excluded in these accounts. For critical posthumanists, relationality is ontologically prior to individuality and also includes the more than human. In that sense, posthuman ontology is more akin to some Indigenous peoples’ ontologies, Eastern religions, and children’s form of life. So, in a certain way, I do agree with the critics who argue that posthumanism or new materialism isn’t “new” in a sense. However, even those critics “forget” that age is also a category of exclusion, not only race, gender, ability, and class. Children are not listened to because of their ontology—their very being a child and therefore unable to make claims to knowledge, because it is assumed that they are (still) developing, (still) innocent, (still) fragile, (still) immature, (still) irrational, and so forth. Even Braidotti (2018) does not include children among the “missing people” of humanism. I suppose that is what my scholarship brings to the current posthuman literature—summarized in my Posthuman Child Manifesto I mentioned earlier. My DECD research project investigates how child as concept can do anti-colonial work in education with the potential of carrying non-dualist modes of be(come)ing, thereby actualizing missing peoples, including children. But also, the material, including the land, space, and place makes it possible to enquire into the concept of decolonization beyond its metaphorical and symbolic usage by paying attention to the more than human beyond identity and individualized agency. What it means to be human is always already entangled with the more than human. As a mother, teacher, and teacher educator, I have always been fascinated by children’s imaginative, anthropomorphic, and animistic thinking. Their kinship with the

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more than human tends to be dismissed as immature and in developmental psychology regarded as evidence of an unevolved mind that needs culture (read: education) to progress into a rational mind. But ethics is not an add-on or afterthought. We just need to pay attention to the details that matter and then our relational existence becomes obvious, even for those educated in the West. Although human exceptionalism is indeed of major concern in relationships between humans and animals, humans and the material world, humans and nature, how child is positioned as knower in pedagogical relations often tends to be forgotten in liberatory humanist and even some posthumanist education. In Chap. 10 of The Posthuman Child, I argue that decolonizing educationalists can perpetuate colonizing child: adult relationships in their desire to teach the truths in which they are installed, thereby reducing children to knowledge consumers, rather than knowledge producers—a social, ontological, and epistemic injustice. The way I see decolonization is that it is not about truths about a just future as perceived by the educator to be taught (transmitted) to the learner, but to continue to ask the awkward questions (including what it means to decolonize). Importantly, it also means to allow children to ask the questions that matter in class. This decolonizing pedagogical move reconfigures children as knowledge co-creators and as such includes them in the becoming of their own futures (both immediate and long term).

8.4 Current Issues in Childhood Studies Q. What are some of the pressing issues facing children today, and what tools/methods/approaches/theories/questions do we need to address them? How does your current context (geographical location for example) inform what issues get addressed? What questions should we be asking as childhood researchers in this current climate in the context of the “Anthropocene” for example? The aim of most of my recent publications is to show how against the odds, a teacher education program I convene can prepare student teachers for the implementation of posthuman pedagogies in their future classrooms. This is a real challenge for South African education that still works with a colonial two-tier system: one for the mainly Black children living in poverty and the other for the more affluent White children. Although illegal, corporal punishment is still routinely administered in many schools, much teaching in South Africa is teacher-centered with a national curriculum that is content-heavy. The new Birth to Four curriculum tries to be child-centered by using language from the perspective of a child but is very human-centered and does not take account of caring for animals or the environment at all (Murris, 2019a). So, my challenge is to make sure that students are able to adopt intra-active pedagogies within the bounds of national government’s prescriptions, but also go beyond it. One way of describing my in-service and pre-service practice is that I enact post-age and post-developmental pedagogies (inspired by my diffractive reading of Reggio Emilia and Philosophy with Children). This way of teaching disrupts the

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anthropocentric gaze—a gaze that not only puts certain humans in terms of race, gender, and class, but also of a particular age, above other bodies (including the material world) and deterritorializes the metaphorical and psychological language that has become so naturalized in early childhood, primary and teacher education worldwide. As an intricate part of my practice, I use picturebook art as a methodology. I include images, not with a purpose to clarify, illustrate, or somehow support the words, but to affect and to provoke transdisciplinary projects. I do this so (student) teachers learn in an experiential way how they could enact rhizomatic pedagogies in their own classrooms. I now also work closely with colleagues in the same department and postgraduate students. For example, last year we published an article about our work with Julia Donaldson’s The Stickman (2008). We show how we took the concept “family” for a walk, also literally into a nearby park. Collaboratively and in a dis/embodied way, we stretched the concept of family to also include the more than human: the animals we saw in an aquarium, the trees, plants and ants in the park, and the planets (Murris, Reynolds, Peers, 2018). I had selected this picturebook, because I had an inarticulated hunch, an inkling, that the concepts that flew out of this book might be able to help us think with concepts like “family” and “belonging.” And indeed, despite the fact that the story takes place in a snowy landscape foreign to South African readers, and the human characters are all White, I noticed that many student teachers identified with the story. It made me wonder whether the philosophical concepts at play in the story, rather than identification with the characters and the landscape, had engaged and affected the students. It reminded me of Braidotti’s method of dis-identification, we write about in Literacies, Literature and Learning (Murris & Haynes, 2018). This is significant in the South African context as the current trend is to work ideally with literature that depicts the local as a move to decolonize the curriculum. I explore this in a Chap. 1 wrote last year (Murris, 2019b).

8.5 Approaches to Writing Q. Can you share with us your approach(es) to writing? For example, are there any specific concepts/approaches/techniques that you find valuable in writing posthumanist/new materialist research? The diffractive methodology as part of my response-able approach to writing means trying to do justice by paying care-full attention to the details of other people’s writing. This way of writing is also inspired by our weekly reading group we started some 5 years ago where we also work diffractively. It is about cultivating a sense of collective knowing, desiring, being, and making-with so that we render each other capable. Our group comprises professors, postgraduate students, and anyone really who is interested, but we work from the egalitarian principle that there are no experts in the room. We always include times for reading out aloud sections of the text we have identified first as interesting or possibly unclear in small groups first—a kind

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of being in touch with the text. We always try to formulate these into questions we can work with first. A response-able reading of texts is not a once off reading, but an ongoing and ever-changing entanglement of experimentation with the ideas of re-reading and re-turning to one’s own and others’ texts.

Further Reading Murris, K. (2015). Posthumanism, philosophy with children and Anthony browne’s little beauty. Bookbird: A Journal of International Children’s Literature, 53(2), 59–65. Murris, K. (2016a). The posthuman child: Educational transformation through philosophy with picturebooks. London: Routledge. Murris, K. (2017). Reconfiguring educational relationality in education: The educator as pregnant stingray. Journal of Education. 69, 117–138.

References Barad, K. (2007). Meeting the universe halfway: Quantum physics and the entanglement of matter and meaning. Durham, NC: Duke University Press. Barad, K. (2014). Diffracting diffraction: Cutting together apart. Parallax, 20(3), 168–187. Barad, K. (2017). Troubling time/s and ecologies of nothingness: Re-turning, re-membering, and facing the incalculable. New Formations, 92(92), 56–86. Braidotti, R. (2018). A theoretical framework for the critical humanities. Special Issue: Transversal Posthumanities. Theory, Culture & Society, 0(0), 1–31. Haynes, J., & Murris, K. (2017). Intra-generational education: Imagining a post-age pedagogy. Educational Philosophy and Theory., 49(10), 971–983. Lenz Taguchi, H. (2010). Going beyond the theory/practice divide in early childhood education. In G. Dahlberg and P. Moss (Eds.), Contesting early childhood series London: Routledge. Murris, K. (2016b). The posthuman child: Educational transformation through philosophy with picturebooks. London: Routledge. Murris, K. (2017a). Reading two rhizomatic pedagogies diffractively through one another: A reggio inspired philosophy with children for the postdevelopmental child. Pedagogy, Culture & Society, 25(4), 531–550. Murris, K. (2017b). Reconfiguring educational relationality in education: The educator as pregnant stingray. Journal of Education. 69, 117–138. Murris, K. (2019a). Children’s development, capability approaches and postdevelopmental child: The birth to four curriculum in South Africa. Global Studies of Childhood. Murris, K. (2019b). Choosing a picturebook as provocation in teacher education: The ‘posthuman family. In C. R. Kuby, K. Spector, & J. J. Thiel (Eds.), Posthumanism and literacy education: knowing/becoming/doing literacies (pp. 156–170). New York: Routledge. Murris, K., & Haynes, J. (Eds.). (2018). Literacies, literature and learning: reading classrooms differently. London and New York: Routledge Research Monographs Series. Murris, K., & Bozalek, V. (2019). Diffracting diffractive readings of texts as methodology: some propositions. Educational Philosophy and Theory. Murris, K., Reynolds, R., & Peers, J. (2018). Reggio Emilia inspired philosophical teacher education in the Anthropocene: Posthuman child and the family (tree). Journal of Childhood Studies: Interdisciplinary Dialogues in Early Childhood Environmental Education Special Issue, 43(1), 15–29.

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Dr. Karin Murris is Emeritus Professor of Pedagogy and Philosophy at the School of Education, University of Cape Town and Professor of Early Childhood Education, University of Oulu (Finland) from April 2020. She is a teacher educator and grounded in philosophy as an academic discipline, her main research interests are in child studies, school ethics and postqualitative research methods. She is PI of various projects, including the Decolonising Early Childhood Discourses: Critical Posthumanism in Higher Education research project: www.decolonizingchildhood.org and the Learning through Digital Play project (sponsored by Lego Foundation). Her books include: The Posthuman Child (2016), and (with Joanna Haynes) Literacies, Literature and Learning: Reading Classrooms Differently (2018), Picturebooks, Pedagogy and Philosophy (2012). She is co-editor of the Routledge International Handbook of Philosophy for Children (2017) and Chief editor of a new series on Postqualitative research (Routledge).

Chapter 9

Interview with Casey Y. Myers Casey Y. Myers, Claudia Diaz-Diaz and Paulina Semenec

Perhaps a better way of framing this is not “decentering” but rather “making room” methodologically to acknowledge the agential capacity of children and situate that agency as one force among many interrelated and interdependent forces, including the intervening forces of inquiry.

We really enjoyed Casey Y. Myer’s doctoral dissertation: “Children, among other things: Entangled cartographies of the more-than-human kindergarten classroom”, one of the first pieces of her work we came across. We were fascinated by how Casey theorized child/hoods as interconnected everyday kind of forces. In this interview, Casey delves into her work on the power of tinythings as delightful and disruptive agents whose effects are disproportionate to their size. Her idea about tinythings helps us to understand children as one part of complex entanglements in the world. Casey also talks about her methodological approach of becoming (with) cameras which we find innovative in that it makes palpable what it means to do research through a new materialist lens. Acknowledging the fact that cameras usually intervene in what it is produced, she invites us to attend equally to children as well as those artifacts that are present with them. Her work is also a demonstration of the entanglements among the scholars featured in this collection. For Casey, Hillevi Lenz Taguchi and Sylvia Kind have had an important influence in her use of visual methods as a relational onto-epistemological approach. In other words, she is indebted to these scholars because she has learned to attend to what is being produced between herself, the camera, the children, and the images that emerge from those encounters as valuable C. Y. Myers (B) Kent State University Child Development Center, Kent, OH, USA e-mail: [email protected] C. Diaz-Diaz · P. Semenec University of British Columbia, Vancouver, BC, Canada e-mail: [email protected] P. Semenec e-mail: [email protected] © Springer Nature Singapore Pte Ltd. 2020 C. Diaz-Diaz and P. Semenec, Posthumanist and New Materialist Methodologies, Children: Global Posthumanist Perspectives and Materialist Theories, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-981-15-2708-1_9

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pieces of children’s lives. She reminds us: “If childhood matters we need to consider what matters to them.” Her interview closes on an important note about posthumanist ethics as reimagining ethics that embraces more-than-human concerns. Q. Can you tell us a little bit about how you became interested in studying/working with children? I started my career as a preschool teacher. About 12 years ago, I had stepped away from working with young children in classrooms and I was working as a pediatric therapist in a major city. My biggest struggle during that time was operating within a supposedly neutral medical model—working with children and families at the intersections of “health” and “ability” brought to the foreground so many sociopolitical and material complexities that weren’t being acknowledged in the procedures and processes of my job. The ways in which child/hoods emerged through interconnected, everyday kinds of forces—for example, food, weather, pollution, standardized assessments, transportation, etc. —was something I wanted to turn my attention toward. At this same time, the first iPhone was released alongside other affordable digital tools and this allowed me to begin experimenting with photography and video in my life away from work. When I decided to begin doctoral studies full time, these two interests came with me and eventually emerged within my current work in posthumanisms and post-qualitative inquiry.

9.1 Photography-as-Method and Everyday Materialities Q. Photography has been an important part of your research in documenting the everyday lives of children. How has photography helped you understand children’s lives? Working with/in photographic or visual modes has helped me understand that child/hoods, and children’s school lives in particular, are more complex than I am capable of representing. As a graduate student, I first studied visual ethnography while doing fieldwork with young children and my orientation was very much aligned with a traditional documentary mode. I believed then that I “captured” representational artifacts. The more long-term engagements I had in the field with children, however, the more I came to understand how my modes of researching intervened in, rather than simply recorded, their school lives. Although there were many others, two of the more formative, “a-ha!” pieces of scholarship from that time period were Hultman and Lenz Taguchi’s (2010) Challenging anthropocentric analysis of visual data: a relational materialist methodological approach to educational research and Sylvia Kind’s (2013) Lively entanglements: The doings, movements and enactments of photography. These were some of the first pieces I had read that grappled with visual methods, research with young children, and a relational onto-epistemological framing. (I mention this because I owe a great deal to scholars who helped me to attend to what was being produced between myself, the camera, the children, and the images we constructed, and afforded me my first set of conceptual-practical tools that helped me move toward post-qualitative orientation to inquiry.)

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Click-click-click, Your Face is a CameraFace Now. Collaborative imaging with Nia, Paige, and Elizabeth

Click-click-click, Your Face is a CameraFace Now. Collaborative imaging with Nia, Paige, and Elizabeth

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So, more so than leading me to any particular understandings of children or childhoods, photography has played a major role in the way I engage in research processes with children and how I’ve come to understand the various workings of inquiry. For example, one of the methods that emerged from my photographic work with children was something we would come to call “becoming (with) cameras.” Becoming (with) cameras entails the various social and material dimensions of what is produced by introducing cameras into classroom life—not simply constructed cuts of events via digital images, but hurt feelings, new ideas, very careful or even uncontrollable patterns of movement, etc. When attending to our research processes, children often drew themselves as kinds of human–camera hybrids and discussed how cameras were used to intervene, garner attention, or disrupt events, and many of their photos were attempts to document not what preexisted our inquiries, but what seemed to be occurring because of the cameras. In this way, I not only understand the photograph to be a dynamic material-discursive agent, a machine that “is what it does,” but I also understand cameras to work in this way, too. Q. Why is it important for you to address the materiality of children’s lives? What can we learn by studying the mundane and the everyday? Within the more mundane aspects of school lives, I’ve been alerted to, what Barad (2007) calls “the patterns of differences that make a difference” (p. 72). Everyday kinds of materialities—how children move down the hallways, the ways in which friendships are mediated by material “things,” the drawings and notes and secret messages, the insects that find their way into the classroom from the outdoor patio— comprise a whole world that adults may disregard. In my work with children, they often articulate these seemingly small or mundane encounters as figuring prominently within their school experience. Perhaps more than anything else I’ve written about, the emergence of what the children I researched with called “tinythings” illustrates this quite well. Tinythings—like grains of chemical salt that had been tracked on the floor, tiny milkweed seeds, the spaces left when your baby teeth fall out, or a small plastic “crystal” from the classroom LEGO set—came to be these delightful and disruptive agents which had effects disproportionate to their physical size. Tinythings were described as being “everywhere,” both desirable and desirous. Although adults disregarded the impact tinythings had on children’s abilities to make “good choices” or to “sit still,” the children were eager to point out how they and tinythings were bound up together. If childhood matters, we need to consider what matters to children, the matterings of childhood, etc. To recognize the complexities of children’s everyday might enable us to be more mindful adults, to refrain from judgement and assumption, to pull away from what we’ve considered given or common sense about the lives of children in school so that we might make better, more considered choices, whether those choices entail the ways we speak to the children we work alongside each day or the ways in which we speak for children in the policies we promote at less-local levels. Considering the marginal rights that children already have in society, I think this is the minimum to which they are entitled.

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9.2 Children, Among Other Things, and Decentering the Child in Early Childhood Q. The title of your dissertation “Children Among Other Things” suggests that your scholarship attempts to decenter the child. Would you claim that your research decenters the child? If you do, what methodologies have helped you to do so, and how they are useful? Why do you think it is important to decenter the child in early childhood research? Decentering, in an easy or a pure sense, is not a claim I’m comfortable making. I think that post-qualitative inquiry and posthuman onto-epistemology entail a certain breadth and depth of commitment—commitment to illuminating the limitations of humanism and resisting practices that rest on a foundation of anthropocentrism. So, this means (at best) I’m working to understand children as emerging through intricate and dependent sets of material-discursive circumstances, and to map that fuller web of relations through methods that push back against what Patti Lather calls the “settled places” of qualitative inquiry (e.g., representation, voice, reflexivity, etc.). Perhaps a better way of framing this is not “decentering” but rather “making room” methodologically to acknowledge the agential capacity of children and situate that agency as one force among many interrelated and interdependent forces, including the intervening forces of inquiry. I’d rather understand the center as expanding. Q. What implications does decentering the child have for researchers engaged in social justice or critical approaches with children (where children are often the center of the research?). What are the ethical implications of taking this approach (or not taking it)? What happens to children’s voice? Agency? How do you think about these concepts in your own work? There is a (seeming) contradiction in focusing your work on both children and things or in contending that your work is both child-centered and about decentering the human. As I stated earlier, I don’t believe that attending to the workings of “things” precludes me from attending to the concerns of children; to me they are inextricable. I believe that if I care about children I have to care about these “things” and vice versa. However, I’ve tried to engage productively with these contradictions in my work and not ignore them. For example, I’ve been asked these questions before in real-life conversations: Do you really care about children or about things? And my answer to these are always, “yes.” And for that “yes” to be a real yes and not just a smart retort, I have to work to take both the ethical participation of children in the research process and the radical agency of the material equally seriously. I contend that the same reconceptualist ethos that understands children as competent researchers of their own social relationships can make room for the possibility of a more-thanhuman child. This child can be materially-aware and capable of articulating many relational complexities. Why not? This way of thinking-doing might afford a fuller account of who and what are driving the collective practices of children’s classroom lives. To me, this is a kind of practical-ethical inquiry; attending to the specificities of children’s lives in this way is the opposite of ignoring their voice or refuting their agency.

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9.3 Posthumanism, New Materialism, and (a) Political Intent in Research Q. What do you think of the critiques of posthumanism and/or new materialisms, specifically the critiques that new materialisms depoliticizes research? In your opinion, what are the potentials of posthumanism and new materialism for re-thinking/re-making ethics and politics? I don’t believe that there is any room within posthumanisms for sidestepping ethics, although there are, within various veins of posthumanisms, calls for reordering or reimagining ethics in particular ways so as to take up various more-than-human concerns. At their most basic, relational onto-epistemologies call on us to reconfigure and reimagine collectivity, democracy, co-construction, and all other practices of careful togetherness. On the other hand, I do think that there is much work to be done in early childhood studies in terms of the ways in which posthuman ontoepistemologies are used to define and enact particular political ecologies. “Power” is still an inequitable force even when it’s situated among and entangled with other forces. (Brigitte Bargetz’s Longing for Agency: New Materialisms Wrestling with Despair (2018) grapples with this assertion in a more articulate fashion than I am able to.) Similarly, I don’t think many in early childhood (including myself) are contending as powerfully as we should be with the underlying assumption of Western Man and eurocentrism within the posthuman and the ways in which this ignores and even serves to erase other genealogies of knowing-being. But that being said, biopolitics, queer politics, racial mattering, colonialist materialities, Indigenous materialities are alive in posthuman scholarship if one seeks them out and I am hopeful that those who are doing posthumanisms in early childhood expand into those realms in greater numbers. I think that perhaps the most useful thing for me to do is refer whomever might be reading this to work by Mel Y. Chen (2012) and Zakiyyah Iman Jackson (2013), just to name two, who are eloquently and expertly examining these things within the posthumanities and have yet to receive attention from many early childhood scholars.

9.4 Attending to Pressing Issues Q. A number of scholars in early childhood studies have pointed to the need to attend to the current environmental, economic, and social crisis we are facing. What are some of the pressing issues facing children today, and what tools/methods/approaches/theories/questions do you think are useful for addressing them? How does your current context (geographical location for example) inform what issues get addressed? What questions should we be asking as childhood researchers in this current climate?

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Post-qualitative inquiry involves making moves toward questioning, disrupting, or displacing “humanist optics”—and this has often resulted in taking up a diffractive analytics to push against conceptions and enactments of reflection or reflexivity. Abandoning allegiance to the all-seeing eye/all-knowing I (or the “I/eye”) as a methodological imperative has provoked me to turn my attention toward the material-but-literally-invisible. In my particular geopolitical landscape within the Midwestern United States, this urgency is emerging in the form of the entanglement of lead and child/hoods. The lead-contaminated water in Flint, Michigan, for example, has received national attention as a crisis—in part because of the horrific impact of a neurotoxin-polluted water supply has had on the residents and partly because of the newsworthy convergences of race, class, and political corruption. The news cycle has moved on, but ongoing crises of contamination, specifically lead-contaminated water, are an everyday reality for communities in my region. The ways in which childhood emerges within these toxic networks are most often examined through discourses of human capital—thousands of lead-poisoned children are constructed through the financial consequences they bring to bear upon educational, medical, and correctional systems in the future. But, of course, the everyday reality of the force of microscopic, yet highly destructive, particles in the lives of actual children is not just about the future economy. And the more-than-human reality of lead is that we can move lead around, but we cannot make it disappear. So, it seems to me that an urgency within activist scholarship around toxic childhoods is to work harder at comprehending what relationships both preexist and outlast us and how might we be humbled into the recognition that justice with/for children encompasses the multi-temporal, the multi-scalar, the superhuman, the infinite. The fact is, long after neoliberal discourses “win” or “lose” in their efforts to clean up whatever messes we’ve made, more-than-human forces will still be doing work.

9.5 Temporality and Material Worlds Q. Part of your research has attended to time and temporality as a way to challenge developmental perspectives on young children. Time and temporality can be such ephemeral concepts but very present in our understandings of children. How do posthumanist and/or new materialist theorizing and approaches help you to offer new understanding of children through concepts of temporality/time? Child/hood is enmeshed in so many temporal constructs (e.g., aging, development, growth, youth, etc.). I think that many of us for whom social constructivist or otherwise sociocultural viewpoints were formative in our education rely (perhaps unquestioningly) on the notion that child/hood is situated within in a particular “place and time.” So, it seems to me, that any theorizing that unfixes those two concepts from specific locality and chronology can be provocative. For me, the theorizing most useful to my interests in the multi-scalar and multi-temporal aspects of child/hoods is currently Timothy Morton’s (2013) work on hyperobjects. Although this isn’t theorizing that is specific to childhood per se, it does provide a conceptual grammar for

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space-time mattering in such a way that the scope of any given childhood becomes unfixed. Q. What advice would you give to scholars (or students) who are interested in exploring/experimenting with posthuman and materialist approaches/methodologies? What are some of the challenges/limitations/ as well as openings that these approaches offer to the study of children/childhood? In what ways do these approaches transgress traditional notions of the child/childhood? My advice for those pursuing posthumanism or new materialisms would be not to wait until you understand every aspect of every theory (this will never happen) or feel yourself to be an expert (whatever that means). Put theory to work and attend to what is produced as you are learning. Because knowing is necessarily tied-up in doing, it seems to me that it is an onto-epistemological imperative to attempt to work in this way. Many years ago, when I was in first engaging with Deleuze, Todd May’s (2005) introduction to Deleuze helped me understand philosophy differently. He said that philosophy should not beg the question, “what should one do?” but “how might one live?”. For those who are Deleuzian scholars (I am not), this is likely a trivial thought. But to me, at the time, it was everything. The idea that philosophy and theory were less about “getting it right” and knowing the answers than about how they afforded possibilities for doing differently…that still guides me. Of course, I don’t mean that anyone should be reckless in terms of the practical relations of their research; quite the opposite. Possibility and responsibility (or response-ability) go hand-in-hand. If an entangled relationality is your point of departure, then all research practices, whether explicitly taking an activist stance or not, are enactments of relations with real consequences. So, my advice is: Do, be careful/ Do be careful.

9.6 Writing and Early Childhood Scholarship Q. Can you share with us your approach(es) to writing? For example, are there any specific concepts/approaches/techniques that you find valuable in writing posthumanist/new materialist research? I think it is necessary to acknowledge how anthropocentrism might be operating in writing processes and products, but I don’t feel comfortable asserting that writing is ever post-representational (in the easy sense, at least). I know that I’ve come nowhere close to dismantling everything humanist within myself and my work. That’s not possible (and if it were, how do you know when you’ve effectively achieved this?). Again, I think this is about commitments—commitments to both imagine and attempt writing otherwise, to trouble the received notions of representation from qualitative inquiry, and to give shape to the contours of data events that trouble us. Early in my education in qualitative research, Laurel Richardson’s work was formative in my understanding of writing as an event that is folded into the processes of inquiry, not something apart from it. Writing is a productive phenomenon, not simply transcription of what has preceded it. Because of this, the transition to a posthuman orientation (and, thus, a more post-qualitative approach) made a great

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deal of sense. I currently engage with writing with what Rosi Bradotti (2006) calls an “enlarged sense of inter-connection” (p. 35)—writing about relationality with the simultaneous recognition that I am literally writing relationality. I am always writing-in-relation to/with a host of others that are exerting their forces of various intensities upon and with me. And I can’t possibly represent that experience fully, but I can grapple with the complexity of that experience. As I am arriving at a place in my career where I am now mentoring graduate students (reading their writing, writing in collaboration with them, learning with/from them), I am feeling a renewed sense of responsibility/response-ability and possibility with regard to doing writing otherwise. Some of this entails “reading” differently— including engaging with memoirs and essays and poems and picture books and audio-visual works as scholarly informants in ways that I wasn’t necessarily taught to do—and some of this entails writing differently—including troubling neoliberal academic discourses of productivity through a slow(er) and more careful kind of scholarship.

9.7 Upcoming Research Projects With the publication of my monograph (in this series), I’m finally feeling as though I did the necessary justice to the “Children, Among Other Things” project. My hope is that this work keeps giving to others even as I am incited to work through new and different lines of inquiry. Recently, my laboratory school colleague Rochelle Hostler and I have been exploring various dimensions of children’s school lives which deviate from adult expectations of predictability, planning, and prevention— events that might be characterized as improvisational, messy, or disengaged. We’re hoping to continue with that project into 2020 with a book. I’m also continuing to explore photography-as-method by reengaging with a series of photos I’ve unwittingly (unwillingly?) taken part in generating over the past several years. One thing that has been a constant in my work with young children is that, as the researcher who brings cameras into the classroom, I am now in possession of many, many photos of myself that I didn’t specifically “consent” to or do not actually remember anyone taking. These photos are continuing to be a productive that they’re forcing me to reckon with ideals around not only consent and power in research relationships, but also “self” construction in visual modalities. These are “unflattering angles” in both the figurative and literal sense. I’m not sure yet what these will produce.

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Further Reading Myers, C. Y. (2014). A “terribly inefficient” production: Unsettling methodologies with children through Deleuzian notions of time. Reconceptualizing Educational Research Methodologies, 5, 34–45. Myers, C. Y. (2019). Children and materialities: The force of the more-than-human in children’s classroom lives. Singapore: Springer. Kroeger, J., Myers, C. Y. (2019). Nurturing nature and the environment with young children: Children, elders, earth. New York, NY; Abingdon, Oxon: Routledge.

References Barad, K. (2007). Meeting the universe halfway: Quantum physics and the entanglement of matter and meaning. Durham, NC: Duke University Press. Bargetz, B. (2018). Longing for agency: New materialisms wrestling with Despair. European Journal of Women’s Studies, 26(2), 181–194. Braidotti, R. (2006). Transpositions: On nomadic ethics. Cambridge: Polity Press. Chen, M. (2012). Animacies: Biopolitics, racial mattering, and queer affect. Duke University Press. Hultman, K. & Lenz Taguchi, H. (2010). Challenging anthropocentric analysis of visual data: A relational materialist methodological approach to educational research. International Journal of Qualitative Studies in Education, 23(5), 525–542. Jackson, Z. I. (2013). Animal: New directions in the theorization of race and posthumanism. Feminist Studies, 39(3), 669–685. Kind, S. (2013). Lively entanglements: The doings, movements and enactments of photography. Global Studies of Childhood, 3(4), 427–441. May, T. (2005). Gilles Deleuze: An introduction. New York: Cambridge University Press. Morton, T. (2013). Hyperobjects: Philosophy and ecology after the end of the world. Minneapolis, MN: Minnesota University Press.

Dr. Casey Y. Myers is Assistant Professor of Early Childhood Education and Coordinator of Studio and Research Arts at the Kent State University Child Development Center, an internationally recognized early years campus laboratory school. In her work teaching preservice and graduate teachers, she specializes in theories of child/hood, (post)humanities, integrated arts and social studies, and preschool education. Her research focuses on the everyday materialities of young children’s school experiences. She was the inaugural recipient of the Jeanette Rhedding-Jones Outstanding Dissertation Award from the International Reconceptualizing Early Childhood Education organization. She resides in Kent, Ohio with her partner and son.

Chapter 10

Interview with Pauliina Rautio Pauliina Rautio, Paulina Semenec and Claudia Diaz-Diaz

This is one of the things where what I understand decentering the child means that you kind of get rid of the notion of the child as a category. What do we need it for? What do I need it for? Could I do research without the child and just do research with certain kinds of persons?

Our interview with Pauliina Rautio was the very first one we did for this book. We met Pauliina in New York City, at the American Educational Research Association (AERA) in 2018. We were each familiar with her work, and were, like many other contributors in this book, drawn to how she takes into account children’s everyday moments (like carrying stones in their pockets). We were especially eager to speak to Pauliina about how she put posthuman theories into practice, including her more recent scholarship on child–animal relations. She shared with us how “post-post” readings enabled her to undo child-centered approaches, which take the perspective that everything comes from “within” the child. At the same time, she shared how the very practical (and often humorous) demands of attending to children in the moment of doing research was also a challenge, and Pauliina describes how she navigates centering and decentering in some of her research projects. For us, this was an important discussion because it addressed the “real world” contexts in which we do this work. Children want to be included, they want our attention, so how can we decenter them at the same time? Our conversation with Pauliina also prompted us to consider the category of the “child,” and whether such a category was necessary for doing research with children. Her question: “Could I do research without the child P. Rautio (B) University of Oulu, Oulu, Finland e-mail: [email protected] P. Semenec · C. Diaz-Diaz University of British Columbia, Vancouver, BC, Canada e-mail: [email protected] C. Diaz-Diaz e-mail: [email protected] © Springer Nature Singapore Pte Ltd. 2020 C. Diaz-Diaz and P. Semenec, Posthumanist and New Materialist Methodologies, Children: Global Posthumanist Perspectives and Materialist Theories, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-981-15-2708-1_10

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and just do research with certain kinds of persons?” has interesting implications for “childhood researchers” because it unsettles the taken-for-granted category of “child.” What might our inquiries look like if we do not assume a separation between children, adults, and animals?

10.1 Entering into the Field of Childhood PS: How did you become interested in studying childhood? Were there any questions or issues regarding children’s lives you were particularly interested in? PR: It’s quite boring how it happened really. There was a funding call for a project and it had to be focused on children and children’s relations to their urban everyday environments. And then I’m in education, and the person applying was in geography, and so she suggested we write up the application together and make it focus on children and young people, and I’m like: “Yeah okay. I haven’t done anything with children but I’ll go for it”…because the thing is that until then… I really wasn’t interested in childhoods and children’s everyday lives and going into that project I still wasn’t. It was purely because that’s how we got the funding but then… It went kind of the wrong way round, but then beginning to do it, I became more interested and started to really kind of feel like okay, okay this is what I want to do. PS: Did that inform your study of materiality and children’s places? PR: I think I had that approach sort of brewing. So, there was the everyday mundane materialities and aesthetics and sort of the non-representational feel of things and affects all of those elements were in place, but just not the child or childhood part or perspective. And in that project in which I did my Ph.D., we had geographers on board as well so we were thinking about place-based education as the frame. I went into the postdoc project thinking about place and everyday environments and materialities. We just substituted the adult participants with children. And I thought that it was just like a mechanical substitution but then it began to be so much more. I had to rethink the whole notion because children quite concretely would participate in a very different way. When I was actually doing fieldwork with children, I had to keep changing my thinking and approaches completely because they wouldn’t of course function like adult participants. But what happened again was that first I thought this is just a mechanical switch. I will interview in a different way… I needed to rethink who these people are and who am I, and what is “participation” and what does it mean when I do research with children? So I kind of changed my grounding understanding of what it is to do research, or qualitative research anyway. If I think way back to my BA that I did in photography and even before that, I studied art history and all of the things that I was thinking then, everyday life and the ordinary has been at the core of what I wanna do. What has changed are the concepts and theories with which I work with the “ordinary,” so at the stage of my PhD, I was a part of a project that was very conventionally qualitative. There was actually

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a group who were very intensely engaged in narrative research, narrative inquiry. That’s where I grew up, so it was all about narrative inquiry sort of as creative way to story and recreate your worlds differently. I somehow didn’t buy into that, so I started to bring in theories and concepts and ways of thinking from aesthetics and everyday aesthetics—that’s what was lacking from narrative was the context and the situationalities and the materialities—and then, everyday aesthetics… I don’t know how I got into that, but I stumbled into that, and it seemed to kind of give me tools to think about the feel of the mundane ordinary everydayness. And then, in the PhD I found sort of new materialist writings and again I think by accident just stumbled upon Karin Hultman and Hillevi Lenz Taguchi’s article. I remember the moment when I read about the photograph of the child playing with the sand and I’m like “that’s it!” That’s it exactly. And then I landed on to New Materialism and quite soon after that it sort of widened what I know…I don’t know if widened is the right word, but kind of began to be more about posthuman or non-human in general not just about materiality, but about life and other kinds of life forms, and the sort of challenging of the humanist individual thinking around children and child. PS: Can you say a bit more about how you were thinking conceptually and methodologically? PR: Methodologically, if I trace back to the PhD it was quite conventional beginnings, so I tried to interview these participants, these adult women but it didn’t work out because I was asking them questions like “So what do you feel what is beautiful in your everyday life?”. And they’re sitting there and going like, “Oh I don’t know maybe the rainbows and the northern lights.” And then I realized if someone asked me that question I couldn’t answer either, that needs time for that response to take place. So, what we ended up doing was the letter correspondence for over a year. There were these five participants and myself, and we wrote letters to each other for a year. We exchanged them once a month. And so everyone on the 15th of every month— everyone got a letter from each other and the topic was “beauty in my everyday life.” And so that stack of letters was my data for the PhD. After that, because I really kind of felt that I had understood something about methodology because I went in thinking really conventionally. You just go and you ask people stuff, and when it didn’t work out and when I really had to think about why it didn’t work out—what was the phenomenon? And what did I want, and how to sort of design the methods and approaches for that was when I got really interested in the like—okay this is cool, so depending on what you study, you can actually create and design the sort of approaches. I mean this is simple now, it sounds simple, but it was really sort of an “aha” moment. And then especially after beginning to work with children, I was again faced with situations where what I was trying to do just did not work. The kids would run away and not listen to me and not want to engage, and I’m thinking “Okay, this is not a problem, I just need to design this differently.” So, I always thought that methodology was really a positive challenge and a really interesting one for me. PS: When you speak of how children were running away, was that from your paper “Mingling and Imitating,” where you asked them to bring the boxes?

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PR: Yup, that was actually really frustrating. I think I wrote a conference paper about it. We got together with about ten kids and they each had a box. They brought different stuff in the boxes, and I had imagined that this would engage them enough… But no, they came in with the boxes, they put the boxes down, and this was a huge space that we met in, and they would start running, and then I would look at them run around being all sweaty and red and panting and I’m thinking “Okay, I can’t do anything with this What’s happening?”, and “maybe they’ll cool down in a minute maybe this is something that they just do to begin with.” And we have an hour. And so I just sat down and thought, well it’s going to end soon, I’m going to start something soon, I’m going to start my research when their running ends. And it didn’t end. And then, trying to do something with the sort of participants who come and who just begin to move away from you and move faster than you, and I was thinking whether that was an indication of them not wanting to be part of the research. So I kept going back to them and saying “look, you know you don’t need to be here, and I would love to have you here but you know…” But they would always say, “Yea I’m going to be here, I want to be in your research, I’m a research companion,” and kept on running. What do I do with this? CD: How do you read that scenario today, if a student comes to you with the same story? PR: Actually, what helped me at the time was my colleague Maija Lanas who was struggling with similar kinds of issues in her research and she was saying that what helped her was that she was focusing on not what she wanted out of the children or what she wanted the children to do or wished for them to do, but rather she was trying to focus on what the children wanted from her. What were the children using her for? So how I proceeded, and what I now kind of understand more is… I would try and think—Okay, rather than why are they doing that, I think—what does it make me into? What do they want from me? trying to get past the “why” question. And then so with the same kids what we would do is we would meet up inside, but also, we had these outdoors explorations wherever they wanted to go. And it was actually clearer when we went somewhere else. They really did use me for their purposes in different ways. And then I kind of just let go of the ideas that I had for them, and was there to be used. It didn’t happen explicitly. Again, I couldn’t have gone to the children and said “I’m here for you” you know, “use me for anything.” They wouldn’t have done that. That’s just something that would happen anyway and I would just need to be sensitive to see it in that way. Depending on the places that we went to, they would use me for different things. Sometimes I would have a “passport” for things that they wanted to do but they couldn’t on their own. They couldn’t get into a building on their own, or they were doing something semi-dangerous or dangerous like climbing on a statue that you’re not quite allowed to, but then the statues are really inviting, and you can do that. I was made to stand next to them—they told me “you stand here and we climb on top.” And then I’m like “okay.” But then I realized afterward why all of the adults passing by were frowning at me. You know, you’re the adult here, why do they do that? And they could. The kids were climbing over the statue like being really happy they could do it.

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10.2 Child–Animal Relations PS: How did you become interested in child–animal relations? PR: I think that grew from the postdoc project with children and the materialities of their lives and their everyday environments. I began to somehow understand children’s ways of attaching—or I don’t know if that’s the right word again—but the way that children make friends sort of indiscriminately so that it could be a toy or a stone in the case where I wrote about stones. They weren’t explicitly individual friends, but it was more of the sort of the very close physical relationship that kids have when they pick up something and they carry it, and then they might just throw it away and not care about it, but it’s the sort of easiness, the simultaneous ease with how they get attached to something. But then, also the emotional or somehow some sort of investment… so that it really does matter to them. The teddy bears and the special toys and then the stones and rocks. But at the next minute they can completely forget about it. And I became really interested in that because from an average adult point of view when something is special it’s special forever and it’s super, super special. All kids don’t do that. In some cases, they can get attached for a short period of time, and for that moment it really does matter, but then the next moment, well who cares anymore? Now it can be discarded. So it was more momentary, I guess the process was really interesting for me. And then I began to sort of expand that to—and I can’t remember exactly how it happened… why I began to think about animals and children but it was a continuation of children’s lives as somehow differently social than ours. I don’t want to keep upholding this binary children/adults, but let’s say that we don’t view our lives in the same way. My social circle has many other things than humans in it, things and beings but I don’t think about it that way, so I kind of dismiss it, but with some children it’s more open: maybe they have not yet learnt to exclude other than humans. So I began to think so what is there? How are children social beings, with whom and how does it happen and who initiates what and why do different things and beings matter? And how do they matter in children’s lives? I guess that’s how I sort of ended up with animals. After my postdoc, I began planning something new. I needed to. And this is again a mechanical decision. I needed to start a new project. I didn’t want to keep on continuing material everyday lives. So I’m thinking, “so what do I want to do?” If I could choose something if I wanted to, and that was the point I was kind of like slowly getting fed up with research that in my view… I wasn’t being political enough, I wasn’t making a difference enough, I wasn’t doing anything in the world. I was just fiddling with like “ooh kids and snow piles, isn’t this fun and cute?” And then at that point I wanted to engage with a topic that would be somehow more political. I’m not an activist in any sense, but I just wanted to push myself a little bit toward that direction. And so I’m thinking, okay kids and animals. The whole animal issue is really close to my heart personally, and in my everyday life I take care of so many animals and injured animals and all that. I think that it kind of grew there. PS: In terms of thinking with posthuman theories and methodologies have there been any concepts or approaches within that broad field that you have found really helpful

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in your own research, but also challenging? For example, challenging your thinking about children’s “voice” or “agency”? PR: In the beginning it was really about child-centered research where the focus was on children’s agency as if lodged within the children: children doing stuff intentionally and out of their own desires. And then the post-post readings just undid all of that, and I began to think about agencies as shared and taking place in between and relationally and collaboratively and in connection with non-human beings and things all that. Of course there was the notion of intra-action. I think it’s been to every other person or every person doing stuff like this, it’s been a revelation at some point. It’s like “oh okay, that’s it versus interaction.” So when I was writing the children who carry stones in their pockets that’s when I was reading and thinking a lot about what is intra-action.

10.3 Thinking with/About “Decentering” the Child CD: For us, posthumanist ideas, new materialist ideas, have to do with this idea of decentering the child. What does decentering the child mean to you? Or how do you respond to these claims that are part of these perspectives? PR: Yeah that’s a good one. My students sometimes ask me that, and I try and explain that…it’s the same way as like when you’re doing post-anthropocentric research, you’re trying to decenter the human. It doesn’t mean that you need to forget the human because you can’t. It just somehow means that you need to flatten your way of looking. So I would say that in decentering the child it doesn’t mean that the importance of the child, the human child is diminished. It means that other things around and in the context of the child are brought up to the level of the child for the purpose of just leveling the scene if you will, for the purpose of seeing how children are in their specific situations and contexts. How do they become to be who they are? So I would say that to me it means decentering the child as a human individual. It doesn’t mean decentering any importance or sort of your motivation for doing research with children and to better their lives or whatever. That’s not what you need to decenter. For example, I’m writing with Abigail Hackett about children’s running. You would normally think that you would see a child run or you’re thinking about the running child and you would see the child first. This is a bit like the sand and the girl playing with each other. You would see the child first and think about the running as his or her intentional choice and act. What we’re thinking with Abi is that what if we take everything else as seriously as the child and his or her intentions, so we’re thinking about the surfaces, the weather, the context in as much detail as we can and all of the things and beings that are included. We’re trying to think that the running sort of preexists the child, it’s sort of that the running is what makes the child exist in a way, rather than the child being in existence before the running takes place. So that’s sort of decentering. The child is still there and in the very middle, but it’s just that it’s not peaking up… things are being lifted up to be able to see

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the entanglements and the conditions for the child to be the kind they are and those conditions can be political, material whatever, but it’s just taking seriously other than human individuals. PS: In the writing up of your own research, is that where you’re thinking mostly with the idea of decentering, or also when you’re there with children “doing” the research? PR: That’s a really good observation. You can’t help it. You’re a human being. You’re the kind of human being you are, and when you do stuff with young children that’s what happens, and you can’t in that situation be like “I’m not gonna look at you, I’m gonna decenter you now,” you know? You kind of need to do what you need to do with them and step back and when you think about it and write about it. That’s when you need to go back and take the time, that’s how I do it. But it’s also what I do when I’m actually with children. And this is something that dates back to the postdoc project with the running children and the boxes because I was really annoyed with them, and I wanted to work with this feeling of like being annoyed with these kids. And I was thinking, “how do they make me feel?” And “what are they? Where does this 3-D kind of nasty feeling that I have… where does it come from?” And so I went home and I started to flip through all kinds of books on animals and insects and fish and whatever, trying to find the sort of the feel from some different kind of creature that the kids were making me feel, and then I found a book on insects and I just flipped through it, and I found a certain insect that I don’t know the name in English now, it’s sort of a lice or a bug. And the way I read about its behavior it seemed just like the kids that I was working with. After that, I went in and I was trying to relate to the kids as if they were those kinds of bugs. Not only was it really funny, but it kind of made me decenter the kids as kids and as human beings in the moment, and I was kind of constantly trying to think, “oh these are the bugs” and “now they’re running and what they’re doing and what do I want to do to them and why can’t I connect with them?” as if they’re some faraway species. Something came to my mind now, about decentering the child. One of the ways in which I understand it and I end up doing it—it’s not a choice, but it just is. I don’t really like children. I’ll just flat out say it, you know, I’m not one of those researchers who’s like “oh it’s lovely,” “ohhhh I get hugs from them,” “I get attached and I cry when I go away,” I’m not like that. I don’t particularly like children as a lump category. I like some children because of the persons they are. You know, it’s as absurd as if you would say “I love animals.” Of course, you don’t. There are millions. It’s a much bigger thing than to lump, “I love human beings.” It’s even bigger to say, “I love animals.” This is one of the things where what I understand decentering the child means that you kind of get rid of the notion of the child as a category. What do we need it for? What do I need it for? Could I do research without the child and just do research with certain kinds of persons? And at this moment in my child animal project, to do research with human and non-human persons regardless of their age because sometimes the animals and the children we spend time with are much older than them. So, if I don’t care about—if I don’t do research with animal children and

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human children why would I—in that relation, why would I categorize the human part as a “child,” like really age relevantly? But then the non-human part could be like well, any age. I don’t know. Dies tomorrow. It just is. So, I’m thinking the decentering of the child is also the questioning of the whole category...what does it mean? How has it been used? It’s been used for much good. I mean, the whole children’s rights, and childhood research and all—but currently, in my research do I need the notion of a child to be able to say what I want to say? PS: How might educators respond to something like that? When for many of them, their training was in developmental psychology where the child is central to everything that they do? PR: You’re right there. When you talk to teachers they are immersed in the developmental thinking where age is everything and the developmental phase. And then, even if you get them past that, then there’s this kind of like, “I’m responsible for the minors,” you know, “I’m the adult.” There needs to be some ground rules and all that. And that’s the hard part…to take them even beyond that. So, there’s two hurdles to cross. But then I would think that because teachers and people in education are human beings, they learn to repeat the “I love children” mantra. They don’t. There are absolutely kids in their classes that they don’t really like and there are kids that they’re really, really crazy about. And to be able to work with that would be I think liberating, it could be good for everyone, even the kids that they don’t like. And also trying to make them see that decentering the notion of the child would be a really ethical, educational pedagogical move because they would then allow children to reinvent and to explore the kinds of things that being a human being, a person would mean, sort of even outside and beyond the box of what is a proper child. For teachers, I would think that maybe that would be the best way to sell it, is that this is your educational responsibility. We all want to educate children who are free and independent and can think outside of the box. If we just sort of let go of the idea of the child as a lump category notion and relate to the people around us as different kinds of persons in different stages in their life or what would then happen? What would become possible? I would love to work with teachers who would be motivated and engaged enough to be able to want to try this. CD: You said that one of the reasons you moved to your last project was because you wanted to engage in a more political project. What is the political aspect of your current project? PR: Yeah, I think they’re very basic ecological “save the world” kind of motives. It’s sort of making children and us people in general aware of our dependencies and ethical responsibilities toward other life on Earth. I think it’s just as simple as that. Because I’m constantly amazed at working with children in schools and teachers— how completely human-centered the whole school environment is. You know, there’s a kid eating pizza in school, and there’s salami on the pizza, and I’m pointing out that they’re eating meat just like casually, and the kid stops me and says, “I’m not!”. And I say well there’s salami on your pizza, and he goes and points out the red round things and says, “that’s not meat.” And like, yes, it is, and this kid is 10, not 5 or 3

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he’s 10 years old, and things like this surprise me on a daily basis. And this is not just about whether to eat meat or not, but whether the kids are aware and realize the context and the implications of their lives and that they are actually making choices all the time. And adults are making choices for them. “No, kids rebel, stand up! Don’t let anyone make your choices for you!”. That sort of political thinking.

10.4 “Doing” Posthuman and New Materialist Research CD: How do you teach your students to read posthuman and new materialist perspectives? PR: What I would say, and I do say, is that—and I keep asking them, “why do you do this”? “What is it doing to the thing that you want to say?” “What do you want to say?” I don’t mind if they engage in all kinds of crazy reading and practices as long as they check back to what is it that I want to say? Which should be very simple. And whenever they can’t answer me—I’m not expecting them to give me a clear answer that will stay the same throughout their studies. Of course, it changes. But I want them to be able to at any time explain why they’re doing what they’re doing, so as not to get carried away with the—“cause it’s fun and easy and seductive” … No, easy was the wrong word, but when you start reading, and you get into the kind of concepts and new things and it just makes you feel like there’s new and new and new all the time, and you can get lost in that sort of like, everything’s floating. Everything’s possible. Yes. But you still need a direction. It can change. It can be a multidirectional thing, yes. But you still need to be able to kind of fall back on something so that the only thing that I do is I always just quite simply keep asking them “Okay, what is it that you want to say with that?” “What do you want to do with that?” PS: Do you feel like a lot of your students are thinking with these theories because they’ve become so popular and perhaps less so because they’re actually useful to their own research? PR: I think both. And I also tell them that you don’t need to know which one it is now but keep that in mind whenever these things stop working for you just jump off. Because it is something that is really trendy at the moment or what their supervisor is engaged in. That’s what they kind of get sucked into doing. And I’m trying to remind my students that it’s not the only possibility in the world. You know, you’re there now. If you’re happy, if it works for you, good. But keep in mind that it might not. And whenever it does not, come back and let’s talk about it. I am aware that this whole “post-post” thing is such a big ontological, epistemological commitment that you can’t just jump away to something completely other—you can, but it’s a big thing. I’m not talking about that. Because you can do post stuff with quite conventional methods for example, you can do interviews, but you can apply post theories and think about it and talk about it in a different way or you can do some very crazy

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designs and you go all the way. So, it’s rather the scale of what they’re wanting to do and how far and how creative they want to go and where to leap. I want to go back a bit about to where I’m saying that it’s not political [laughs]. For me there’s many kinds of ways of being political and some of the “post-post” work that seems to be very far out there. Two things—it might be political in ways that are not accessible yet. It might become political in what it does. And the second, is that it could be political on its own right within sort of the field of how research is done, and the politics of knowledge production. At that time, when I was trying to design a new project and went to the whole animal issue, it was my personal desire to engage in the very explicit political questions and the social realities. PS: You have an edited book coming out about Arctic childhoods. What is unique about Arctic childhoods, and how does living in Finland inform the work that you do? PR: Well, I’m always aware that the children that I work with as well as all of the people in Finland—most are very, very privileged in global terms. I’m working with children who are already very well-off… their lives are good in global comparison. At the same time, or maybe because of that, I’m also interested in, and I think children in Finland face a lot of pressure to perform—whereas traditionally Finland, because of its particular history and just a very short time of like less than 100 years, we were a poor, peasant small community under Russia…and now this kind of thriving nation where everyone is really well-off. The expectations that children face have changed in just a few generations and the pressures that children face now in Finland are increasing. You can see that in the public discourses and the policy discourses—the age where you go to school, it’s traditionally been 7, but it’s now made into being six, and now there’s a law that will pass soon that will go probably down to five. And kids’ freedom that they used to traditionally have…you have these short school days, very little homework lots and lots of freedom, very few hobbies. It’s all constantly changing toward there being more and more, and a pressure to perform, to produce, and to be more efficient. And smaller and smaller children are getting like—even in kindergarten, there’s like these career days and advice of like so, “have you thought about what will you be when you grow up?” And you know that sort of ethos and atmosphere, is I think what our kids in Finland—maybe because of the privileged position—that’s the sort of pressure and stress that I’m sensing that they need to live with.

Further Reading Rautio, P. (2013). Children who carry stones in their pockets: On autotelic material practices in everyday life. Children’s Geographies, 11(4), 394–408. Rautio, P. (2014). Mingling and imitating in producing spaces for knowing and being: Insights from a Finnish study of child–matter intra-action. Childhood, 21(4), 461–474. Rautio, P. (2017). “A Super Wild Story” Shared human–pigeon lives and the questions they beg. Qualitative Inquiry, 23(9), 722–731.

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Rautio, P. & Stenvall, E. (Eds.) (2018). Social, material and political constructs of Arctic childhoods—An everyday life perspective. Springer.

Dr. Pauliina Rautio is an Adjunct Professor at the University of Helsinki and a Senior Research Fellow at the Faculty of Education, University of Oulu, in Finland. She uses posthumanist theoretical and methodological approaches in studying education and childhoods as more and other than human development. Of special interest to her are child–animal relations. And especially close to her heart you’ll find human–bird cohabituation. Pauliina is the leader of AniMate (2017-2021), a research team exploring multispecies childhoods: becoming and being human with other animals.

Chapter 11

Interview with Christopher Schulte Christopher Schulte, Paulina Semenec and Claudia Diaz-Diaz

…by attending carefully to the matter of how and why children make art, I must also attend to those things that traditional humanist forms of knowledge leave out, that don’t get valued as art, or as essential to the artistic practices and lives of children.

In our interview with Christopher Schulte, which took place at the Reconceptualizing Early Childhood Conference (RECE) in Copenhagen in 2018, we discussed many ideas related to the practice of posthumanist and new materialist work. In particular, we found Christopher’s discussion of writing of particular interest, as this is something graduate students and early career scholars often struggle with. Christopher warns us not to get too wrapped up in the seductiveness of language, a point that other contributors have made also. He encourages researchers to find their own voice through writing, which is a practice that comes with many challenges. For us, Christopher’s point about always taking an account of oneself was intriguing, especially as we continue to/think/and write research within a posthumanist framework. The choices we make in our everyday encounters with children, as well as what we document (photos, what data comes to matter), and how we represent this work in our writing (and other forms of representation), need to be accounted for. There is a risk, Christopher suggests, in privileging language/theory over children’s realities and this was a point that we took very seriously. As early career scholars who too, often find ourselves seduced by particular theories and language, we were brought back to questions of why we do the work we do, and for whom? Our conversation C. Schulte (B) University of Arkansas, Fayetteville, USA e-mail: [email protected] P. Semenec · C. Diaz-Diaz University of British Columbia, Vancouver, BC, Canada e-mail: [email protected] C. Diaz-Diaz e-mail: [email protected] © Springer Nature Singapore Pte Ltd. 2020 C. Diaz-Diaz and P. Semenec, Posthumanist and New Materialist Methodologies, Children: Global Posthumanist Perspectives and Materialist Theories, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-981-15-2708-1_11

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with Christopher reminded us that these ethical and political questions should always remain at the forefront of our research.

11.1 Engaging in the Study of Childhood PS: Can you trace for us what first interested you in the study of childhood? CS: When I was a doctoral student at Penn State University, I was asked to assist with the Art Education program’s advanced practicum experience, known by most as Saturday Art School. Specifically, as part of this experience, I was asked to mentor the undergraduate students who as part of the course requirements were responsible for teaching. My advisor, Christine (Tina) Thompson, had requested that I mentor the preschool class. Admittedly, I couldn’t figure out why. While I had experience as an elementary teacher, I did not have experience teaching preschool. “Why on earth,” I wondered, “would Tina have me mentor the preschool teachers?” I think Tina could sense that I was nervous about this assignment, but I think she also knew that this experience had the potential to reshape my thinking about children and childhood art. So, to return to your question, what really convinced me to study children and childhood was a particular experience that I had while mentoring the teachers in this preschool space. One Saturday morning, after assisting the kindergarten teachers, I entered the preschool classroom to find the children drawing in tandems. They were making large-scale creatures. The children’s bodies—in pairs—were sprawled out across the classroom floor. As I moved through the classroom, I noticed one tandem in particular. The two boys, Carter and Scott, were drawing together in the far corner of the room. What really struck me about this tandem was that one of the boys, Carter, was describing in great detail what he—or rather, his partner Scott—was drawing. As I lingered, the more I began to sense that drawing, for Carter, wasn’t only about making marks on the paper. For Carter, drawing was also (and primarily) a verbal endeavor. This isn’t to suggest that he didn’t also draw in ways that we might traditionally recognize as “drawing,” but that it was not the only way that he engaged in this work. For Carter, whose practice I have written about a number of times (e.g., Schulte, 2011, 2013, 2015a, 2015b, 2016, 2018), drawing was a “public performance” that utilized multiple languages at once, of which there were many that did not show up in the final product (Thompson, 2009). The point being, most of what I understood (or thought I understood) about children’s art, drawing in particular, was unraveled as a result of this experience, and continued to be unsettled by my encounters with children in this space over the next 3 years. What I observed and experienced in this space seemed to conflict with what I had been taught to expect from children. Of course, much of what I was taught to expect was based on a developmental frame of reference. This is not to suggest that developmental frameworks are not also productive in ways that help young people, and that help teachers and researchers to arrive at certain types of understandings about what young people do. Rather, my point is that what I had assembled as common and good sense was not aligning with what I was encountering in the

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preschool classroom. The children were doing things that were not only different from what I was expecting, that varied from what I had been taught, but that often exceeded these expectations. And this is really what initially motivated me to commit to research as a reconceptualist endeavor.

11.2 Researcher/Child Positionings CD: Can you expand on that? We are interested in how your research practices or focus have changed the way you are thinking about children. CS: For me, the process of taking a reconceptualist approach to researching childhood art, or rather the process of entering into and beginning to contribute to this reconceptualist stance, began with the recognition that children’s drawing, for example, emerges in ways that are not often considered, through means of production and negotiation that may not be visible at all in the “drawing” itself, in what Phil Pearson refers to as the artifactual residue. This isn’t to suggest that drawing is not graphic, but rather that it is not only graphic. In other words, drawing is a complex materiality, with components that are rarely, if ever, considered to be relevant to the practice of drawing. The real issue, though, proceeds from this narrow conception of drawing and that gets produced by it. It is one thing to miss something that might be of importance to the child when making art—i.e., to overlook the child’s specific ways of drawing or sculpting, or perhaps playing with blocks. It is another matter, however, to exclusively use and rely on this limited sense of attentiveness and the conception of the child and childhood art that it presents. The idea that children’s art is a material-discursive practice that does not always register in the final work, is a critical recognition, not only because it is a recognition that should continually reorient us (as teachers and researchers) to children’s artistic, play-based, and aesthetic practices, but because it should also reorient us in our relations to the child, children, and childhood, as well as the professional work of teaching, of thinking and doing research, and learning with others. For me, the silver lining is that children and childhood art, “like life,” as Jane Bennett says, will “always exceed our knowledge and control.” That I even had the impression that I could “get control” is a matter worth addressing. Also of importance is the idea that childhood art is something that I could potentially “know,” that I could have power over, or that I could make intelligible. This isn’t to suggest that I am unable to learn or know something about the child, about children, and about childhood art. But that this process of learning and knowing is a given, is a stance that is problematic, which is to say that we don’t do enough to think critically about how these assumptive tendencies goad and guide us in our work, even if it is in ways that are subtle and perhaps difficult to discern. The point being, that childhood art is always more than what it has been expressed to be. Also, as a researcher, I am far less savvy and sensitive than how I sometimes articulate myself to be. This isn’t an intentional act of deception on my part, nor is this admission meant to suggest that I am not someone who is thoughtful and respectful in my attentiveness to children. Rather, I say this because I am also clumsy

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and selfish at times, even unfair. As I have written before, I can sometimes desire too much as a researcher (see, e.g., Schulte, 2013). Of course, I try not to. But… I do. And this is a very real part of doing and thinking research with children. Researchers of childhood often talk about how entangled they are with children, and how research itself is an entanglement. But I don’t think we do enough to address how the complexities of such entanglements are also complexities that are problematic, and that work against the interests and expertise of children. They are complexities that we as researchers want to see, and that at times we desire “too much” to be part of, typically at the expense of the complexities that children are showing us—i.e., those dimensions of entanglement that we are not immediately open or receptive to. Fortunately, the children that I have worked with have been patient and generous hosts. But I also understand that children, like me, have a threshold, a point at which resistance becomes the appropriate and necessary option. And rightly so. CD: How has your notion of the child changed now that you are attending to drawing? CS: Because I was able to see the child’s work differently, as a practice and set of processes that are situated and contingent, I was able to see the child differently. Similar to other disciplines that study the child, children, and childhood, the field of art education (and in particular the history of the study of children’s art) has a long and complicated history of positioning the child as a particular kind of subject. This isn’t to suggest that the child has not been nuanced over time, but rather that our approaches to studying childhood art figure the child in specific ways, as a particular kind of artful subject. For me, each and every time that I encounter a child drawing, it is not only an opportunity to rethink the child but also who I am as an adult. It is an opportunity to take an account of myself.

11.3 Decentering the Child PS: One of our questions is about decentering the child, and I’m wondering how that happens. How do we do that? I think you’re trying to really trace how you go about doing that in these really everyday, mundane moments with children. CS: So, the first thing worth noting is that early in my graduate program, especially when I was doing pilot studies, I recognized the importance of taking an account of myself, of actively cultivating the readiness to turn against my own interests and inclinations, or at the very least to be aware of the fact that I am never neutral, that I am always partial to something in some way. At the time, I was thinking a lot about the idea of “being there” with children in research. For me, this line of thinking was informed by scholars like Corrine Glesne, Christine Thompson, and William Corsaro, for example. At any rate, I spent a lot of time thinking about the anatomy of the idea of being there, of what that process entails and how it gets negotiated in context with children. At the time, I did in fact recognize that being there was a negotiation, that it was reciprocal, but not in ways that tend to be romanticized in

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research with children (e.g., reciprocity as equality). However, in many ways, being there had become something that I would say, a matter that I would speak to, but that I was not particularly good at doing. I have always been concerned about this, of saying one thing but doing another. As a graduate student, I sensed the fraudulence that was at play in research (and in teaching and parenting). In 2013, I published a short article in the International Journal of Education & The Arts that explores this sense of fraudulence. Drawing on an experience I had as a doctoral student doing research, I discussed the importance of “being there” and “becoming unfaithful,” the idea that we have to be willing to work against our own tendencies and desirings. So, that’s the first thing. The second thing worth noting is the idea that just because you turn your back to something, or you say it isn’t there, or you ignore it entirely, doesn’t mean that it isn’t always present, that it isn’t constantly working on you and through you. For me, this continues to be a driving force in the work that I do. I spend a lot of time writing about these moments in research. I do this because I think it matters and because I don’t think adults should be given free rein to ignore the indignities of our inquiries with children. Certainly, we can, and we often do. But that doesn’t mean that we should. In doing so, I believe that we cede a great deal of possibility. In other words, indignities can be productive too. My feeling is that I have an ethical obligation to demand more of myself, and to demand more of those moments where it is clear that my interests have begun to undermine the lives and experiences of those I am working with. CD: What have been the ideas informing your research in the last couple of years? CS: Broadly speaking, my work has been informed by a childhood studies approach. This approach, however, has also been influenced by a number of theoretical and philosophical orientations. In particular, by the writings of Gilles Deleuze and Félix Guattari (D&G). In fact, D&G’s work on concepts, or rather on philosophy as a practice of concept formation, has been highly effective in terms of reshaping how I approach my work as a researcher. I share this in order to indicate that my research is foregrounded by an interest in thinking with concepts. So, to answer your question: my research is informed foremost by concepts.

11.4 Conceptual Orientations CD: Are there any concept in particular that you use frequently? CS: I don’t know if there is any one particular concept or set of concepts that have been more (or perhaps most) influential to me. Concepts are always contingent. That said, as a graduate student, D&G’s concept of re- and de-territorialization was significant in that it helped me to address the doing and undoing of language in children’s drawing. It was also an effective way for me to challenge the stability of certain structures and frameworks that the field of art education has continued to prop

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up, especially regarding children’s art. Another concept, however, which is perhaps less exciting but nonetheless important to the study of children’s art, is agency. In many ways, this is an obvious concept to choose. Admittedly, I am not someone who says, “This essay is about agency.” Rather, the work that I do often addresses the issue of agency but in ways that are often indirect or not outwardly stated. That said, in many ways my work is about broadening how agency is understood and how it functions within the context of children’s art making. Childhood Studies, for example, has always been concerned with agency, and rightly so. A Childhood Studies approach sees the child as a social actor as opposed to being figured as a social object. This is an important shift. The field of art education understands this shift. However, not entirely. Or rather, the field of art education is not entirely ready to negotiate the implications of this shift in terms of what it does to conventional wisdom. As Paul Duncum has noted: “Children never were what they were.” Our conceptualization of agency has a lot to do with this deception, which we have experienced, and that we have also created for ourselves. But it is more than simply conceptualizing childhood as a sociocultural space and the child as a social actor. It is also, now, a matter of recognizing that agency is distributed, and that it includes too non-human and not-quite human actors, or rather more-than-human actors. My hope is that by decentering the idea that humanist agency is the only form of agency that matters, we can begin to think about agency in other ways, that value what’s “more” in children’s drawing. In other words, that we can see children’s drawing, for example, as a dynamic space in which human and non-human actors are always co-mingling. Because of this, agency is not only distributed but also and always a distributing force. In the field of art education, where the underlying tendency has been to make sense of children’s drawing through the views and values of adults, the issue of what gets to matter has largely been defined by a reliance on normative conceptions of the human and human agency, a viewpoint that routinely positions children as subjects who are less agentive and dependent on adult interventions, and whose consumption of the world around them is viewed largely as being passive. In this view, as Peter Moss has written, “there is a strong developmental element, which confines full humanity and exclusive capacity for agency to adults, the child being not fully human but rather an immature and incomplete person, unequal to the developed and knowing adult” (Moss, 2018, p. 142). This reliance has proven to be especially problematic for children, for whom the practice of drawing, even today, continues to be read foremost as the origin story of adults. Even more recent accounts, which break from this tradition, working against the tendency to see children as inadequate and incomplete, do so through a concept of agency that is unable to break free from traditional humanist thinking. Though these accounts have been taken up with good intentions, with the underlying aim to recognize children as social actors with the agentive power to effect change within a relationship or in the context of a particular set of social circumstances, they nonetheless exclude various networks of possibility, and thus disregard whole complexes of non-human matter and agency that operate in concert with children. The purpose of this critique is not to undercut the need to honor children’s capacities to make their own decisions and express their own ideas, but to elaborate instead a conceptuality

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for children’s drawing that is more ontologically generous. In this conceptuality, the child is always part of a broader network of human and non-human agents. As art educators, conceptualizing children’s drawing as more-than-human calls upon us to reorient ourselves in relation to the materiality of children’s drawing, to the social worlds of children more broadly, and to ourselves. As a perspective which aims to decenter the human, a posthumanist new materialist approach to thinking children’s drawing is not without its challenges. After all, the enactment of a human-decentering conceptuality raises important questions, especially given that historically children have not been regarded as fully human, but instead as subjects in the process of becoming human. Moreover, the limiting pressures associated with this ontological positioning become increasingly difficult to negotiate for children whose cultural and linguistic backgrounds and experiential frames of reference continued to be diminished, distorted, or ignored all together. Since the 1990s, for example, many critical race scholars have expressed concern about the loudening call to become ‘post’ human, citing the privilege of the dominant group to give up humanism, because their own. I think this distinction is important, especially for those of us whose intellectual commitments orbit around the lives and experiences of young children. To circle back to your initial question, though, about the big ideas or concepts that influence me, agency is an obvious one. But again, agency is a concept that is always contingent on the circumstances in which it is being made to be thinkable.

11.5 Teaching/Working with Children PS: Can you tell us how the teachers you work with might be thinking about agency, in particular in ways that you are trying to challenge? CS: As a teacher, I mostly teach courses that focus on art making with children and youth. These might be theory-oriented courses which provide an overview of different perspectives and practices, but also courses that center on field experience, where the onus is on students gaining practical teaching experience. I also teach graduate level courses that focus on research approaches in art education, and more specialized course offerings related to the study of children’s art, play, and cultural production. Most everything that I do, however, even courses that are decidedly theoretical in orientation, are intentionally structured for students to think in relation to the contexts they inhabit with others, particularly children. In other words, fieldwork is always a significant part of the class. It isn’t merely about constructing fieldwork experiences, though. Most important is the matter of how and why these fieldwork experiences get constructed—i.e., the curriculum of fieldwork—and the ways in which these experiences foreground teaching and professional development as a lifelong practice of inquiry. This is also the case for graduate students. It isn’t only about gaining experience, which is important, it is also about constructing sustainable and collaborative

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occasions for faculty, students, young people, and others to come together and share their interests and expertise. Pedagogically speaking, an approach that I take, especially with undergraduate students, centers on the use of what I call research pedagogies—i.e., pedagogies that, for students, generate research encounters with young people and their art making, and with the broader educational environments of art and its education. My belief has always been that students benefit from encountering first-hand the lived reality of the ideas we attend to in class. For students to begin to grasp the nuances of how certain ideas get used to shape or make intelligible a child’s learning or experience in school, and in non-school settings, the opportunity to witness the presence and work of these ideas in context, with children, is critical. In doing so, students learn the importance of demanding more of the received wisdom that gathers and accumulates in education, and that often dictates what constitutes “good” and “appropriate” practice. This is not to suggest that establishing practices that are acknowledged as being “good” and “appropriate” is unimportant. Rather, the point is to signal the significances of working against the tendency to just accept what has already been fashioned as common and good sense. After all, who is it really “good” for? And, is it indeed “common” for all? I should also say that I am unable to simply go into these spaces and, from the start, take this approach. This approach to doing fieldwork requires ongoing dialogue and collaboration. The idea is that students begin to cultivate a project of inquiry that is based on their experience and that prompts them to not only pursue questions that emerge in class, but also questions that they are generating in context, with young people, or that young people are generating for them. I do understand the frustration that you are expressing, that this approach, for example, is not “reproducible,” or rather that it does not easily translate in ways that can, on a daily basis, benefit “all” of the children in the class. But the purpose of this approach, importantly, is not to establish a practice that does this. The underlying purpose of this approach to fieldwork is to move students to establish an “attitude” that will (or at least can— that has the capacity to) reorient their pedagogical practice—i.e., an attitude that can fundamentally alter their relationship to the child, to children’s art, to their understanding of how and why a child thinks and learns as they do, to their sense of schools and classrooms, and to their own beliefs and values. The real benefit of this experience then, and, of this approach, is not that it provides a “recipe” or “code” to follow and use, an approach that will help the student to develop an orientation to teaching that allows learning to become a process of “as usual” thinking (Davies, 2014). Rather, the value of this experience (and of this approach) is that it works against the “recipe” or “code,” against those approaches that desire for teachers to accept what has already been constituted as common sense, as good and appropriate practice. It is certainly true that you can’t be this version of attentive to all children, at all times. That is a certainty. But this certainty should not be an excuse that gets used to make this orientation to teaching the overarching reality of the teacher. Rather, it is a certainty that should, I think, remind students of the importance of doing big things in small ways, understanding that this intimate, slow approach to thinking with and supporting others will have a real material impact over time.

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PS: I wanted to ask about the current challenges in regard to decentering and how you have navigated that, or whether you even see that as a challenge in your work? CS: Again, what I am decentering (more than anything) are traditional humanist forms of understanding that too often speak for and about the child. So, for me, by attending carefully to the matter of how and why children make art, I must also attend to those things that traditional humanist forms of knowledge leave out, that don’t get valued as art, or as essential to the artistic practices and lives of children. Importantly, I am not only speaking to the qualities of children’s work that get left out. Children too get left out. Children get left out on the basis of these qualities, yes, but children also get left out because they are children and because they are children with particular qualities (e.g., non-White, linguistically diverse), from particular places (e.g., a specific country, community, or neighborhood), with particular backgrounds and frames of reference (e.g., poor, immigrant, lgbtqui +). For all of these reasons the critique matters. But for all of these reasons, too, the work of decentering traditional humanist frameworks is essential. For me, it isn’t really about decentering the child. If anything, it is about re-centering the child, but within a broader and more complex set of material relationalities. CD: I really appreciate your distinction about decentering the ideas in how we are thinking about the child. CS: I think it can be a hard distinction to make. You know, going back to the concern that you raised Paulina, I am reminded of something that Gerald Raunig has written: to flee you must have something to flee from. Part of this process, of fleeing, includes naming the thing that you are fleeing from (e.g., the human, representation, traditional humanist approaches to doing qualitative inquiry, etc.). In the process of fleeing, though, and in naming that process, we sometimes (even without meaning to) give the impression that this thing must never ever be done again. Or, that if this thing IS done again, it must only be done in THIS way. It is for this reason that distinctions matter, at least in the way I am approaching it. I hope that by making this distinction, within the context of my work, that it might also be useful for someone else. I want to be clear, though, that this distinction is not intended as an escape route, a strategy to work around the critique. Rather, it is an attempt to face the ways in which this critique is aligned with the work that I do. CD: I would like to link this question with a broader critique of new materialisms or posthumanist perspectives in the last couple of years. It has to do with this idea that these perspectives depoliticize research because they decenter the human in a way, they neglect histories and power relationships. If you disagree how does your work address questions of politics or power or ethics? CS: I’ve never thought about the work that I do as somehow being divorced from history or from politics. History and politics are absolutely part of the work that I do, because power is embedded in every possible relation, layer, and dimension of this work. But again, it’s the researcher’s responsibility. In other words, the researcher has an ethical obligation to honor the ways in which power is part of the child’s social,

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cultural, and material reality, and the extent to which it is also part of their own relation to these spaces and to the children who inhabit them. To decenter traditional humanisms in relation to the study of children’s art is, fundamentally, a political and power-oriented engagement. Taking this perspective, for example, is itself a political act, a decision that is both informed by politics and that produces politics. To take this position is to advocate for a politics of knowledge, and a politics of knowledge is always invested in processes of “unsettling,” as you say. It is a tough question to answer. But as it was noted with the other critique that you brought up, in doing posthumanist work you do in fact run the risk of doing violence in this way, of ignoring history and the structures of power that are at play, which we know have been ignored before. But this is true of any perspective that you take up. Research and writing are always risk-laden projects.

11.6 On Writing and Critique PS: Your writing is very rich and detailed regarding how you do research with children. Is there anything that you try to keep in mind when writing the research that you do? CS: Thank you! I love to write. That said, I don’t see myself as a “good” writer. In fact, I have always felt that I am terrible writer, but that is also why I continue to do it. I see writing as art practice. I always have. Writing is a lot like painting. It’s hard. It’s a genuine struggle, especially for me. I mean, writing doesn’t just happen. I have to constantly goad it and guide it in different ways, shape it and pull at it. And you know, sometimes the writing pulls back at me in ways that I don’t like, but I think that’s part of the reason why I continue to write, because I recognize in writing the things that I recognized and loved in painting. So that’s the first thing that I need to say about writing. The second thing that I need to say is this: the challenge of thinking with poststructuralist/posthumanist theories, for example, is that the language is so seductive. The trick is to find a balance, or to find a way to not let the theorist write for you. Admittedly, I continue to struggle with this. I’m getting better at it, at returning to my own voice. The reality, though, is that sometimes it feels like Deleuze is writing for me. Or rather, that Deleuze is affecting my words too much. This, to me, is a really important issue. A third thing to mention is that I love to write narratives. The most enjoyable aspect of writing and research for me is to story my engagements with children. Writing in this way is an intensive engagement, a critical attunement to what children are doing, how they are doing it, and why. Moreover, it is an opportunity to take an account of myself, to write into presence my own movements as a researcher, no matter how unflattering they might be. Doing this, I think, is really important. In the end, though, the biggest risk in writing, from my perspective, is when you get seduced by the language of the theorist or philosopher, to the point that your writing isn’t really doing anything at all. In other words, that your writing fails to put anything to work. I am always asking

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myself: What is this particular concept doing? How is it moving the reader to see, think and feel the child’s work differently? This isn’t to suggest that I manage to be successful at this. I know for a fact that I am not always successful in my attempts to reconcile these matters. But like I said previously, research and writing are risk-laden projects. PS: That’s also a great piece of advice for grad students or anyone whose thinking with theory. And yes, it can be very seductive to the point where you almost get lost in the language and you don’t really know what you’re saying anymore. CS: Yes. That’s exactly right. PS: Yes, which is part of that critique. CS: It’s absolutely part of the critique because you’ve created a conceptual or theoretical world that is divorced from the reality you’re trying to address, where there’s real material issues and problems and inequities that need attention. And you’re suggesting that you’re attending to them, but you’re not. And that’s the risk, that’s the risk of decentering the human. That you might actually “decenter” the human, or that you might “further decenter” a human. It’s a way of working that risks neglecting the process of addressing power relations that have a real material effect on children’s lives. In neglecting this, we also risk exploiting or ignoring histories that are part of that scene and that weigh heavily on the skin of the individuals who inhabit it. This is a really dangerous form of politics to be playing: to write in a way that you not only ignore the very real human issues that you are attempting to address, but that you write into presence a world that no one else can occupy.

Further Reading Schulte, C. M. (2013). Being there and becoming-unfaithful. International Journal of Education & the Arts, 14. Schulte, C. M. (2016). Possible worlds: Deleuzian ontology and the project of listening in children’s drawing. Cultural Studies < –>Critical Methodologies, 16(2), 141–150. Schulte, C. M. (2018). Deleuze, concept formation, and the habit of short hand inquiry. Qualitative Inquiry, 24(3), 194–202. Schulte, C. M. (2019). Wild encounters: A more-than-human approach to children’s drawing. Studies in Art Education, 60(2), 92–102.

Dr. Christopher M. Schulte is an Endowed Associate Professor of Art Education in the School of Art at the University of Arkansas. His research on children’s art, specifically drawing in early childhood, has appeared in handbooks and other edited volumes as well as national and international journals in art education, early childhood education, and qualitative studies. Christopher is co-editor with Christine Marmé Thompson of Communities of Practice: Art, Play, and Aesthetics in Early Childhood (2018, Springer) and editor of Ethics and Research with Young Children: New Perspectives (2019, Bloomsbury). He also serves as senior editor of the International Journal of Education & the Arts.

Chapter 12

Interview with Marek Tesar Marek Tesar, Paulina Semenec and Claudia Diaz-Diaz

…data have a place in childhood studies, in research projects and systems, in research discourses and conversations, and in various practices. I like to think that data in some ways materialize research, and thus generate inter and intra-actions. Data are not only mined, but data produce. Data make childhood studies happen.

In this interview, Marek Tesar turns our attention to the concept of data in childhood studies. As childhood researchers, we know that “data”—in whatever shape or form, is a necessary part of empirical research. Marek engages this topic by bringing his philosophical and methodological insights to ideas not only about what data is but what data can do for our understanding of children in our research. As Marek suggests, “thinking about ‘data’ means thinking about children and their childhoods being part of a larger global conceptual and ontological movement in research.” Marek also poses important questions about researchers’ desires for data, and how this mining of data may actually not always be beneficial to the children in our research. Marek’s interview, like many others in this collection, also offers important perspectives on the eager uptake of posthuman and new materialist theories and approaches, something that Marek is optimistic, but also cautionary, about. He attends to some of the areas that need more attention—one of them being the deep immersion in reading the theories and philosophies that inform such work, as well as always keeping questions of history and politics in mind. We were once again reminded of the call by many of the contributors of this book to always consider why we are drawing on particular theories and approaches, and what we want this work to do in our research. M. Tesar (B) University of Auckland, Auckland, New Zealand e-mail: [email protected] P. Semenec · C. Diaz-Diaz University of British Columbia, Vancouver, BC, Canada e-mail: [email protected] C. Diaz-Diaz e-mail: [email protected] © Springer Nature Singapore Pte Ltd. 2020 C. Diaz-Diaz and P. Semenec, Posthumanist and New Materialist Methodologies, Children: Global Posthumanist Perspectives and Materialist Theories, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-981-15-2708-1_12

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12.1 Disrupting data Q. Some of your recent work focuses on disrupting data. Why is it important to rethink or disrupt data in the field of (early) childhood education research? How does disrupting data inform how you think about and write your research? As childhood studies scholars we always work with data, no matter how we conceptualize this notion. For a substantial period of time, I have pondered what “data” may mean for researchers concerned with children and childhoods. Why data? And what can count as data? These are some pertinent questions that have been haunting me for a number of years. As a childhood studies scholar and philosopher of education I always found the notion of data very disturbing. They are so close— yet also quite far away! Within them, it’s “all” there: all the bits and pieces, the remains of developmentalism and theories and ideas that have shaped children and childhoods for generations; gathered, ready to be used and excavated. All that we know about the child is present: as it relates to the current environment and our being on the planet is there. I’ve been also always curious about how philosophical scholarship and methodological thinking can help us to understand what childhood is and who children are. As a complex entanglement of so many ways of seeing, doing, and understanding different research. As such, thinking about “data” means thinking about children and their childhoods being part of a larger global conceptual and ontological movement in research. All disciplines and fields of study that look at and consider children and childhoods are very much focused on gathering, excavating, and utilizing evidence that is coming from data. And as such, as a researcher being intrigued with data has become to me both a real need and a necessity. For example, some scholarship has established in now “classic” texts on childhood studies, particularly I am referring to the sociology of childhoods, the importance of children’s participation and agency, and the structure and generational ordering of society. The ideas around children’s rights. Child first language. Child-friendly. It took some time for the post-theoretical scholarship to challenge their positioning and stoic definitions, and there is still some work to be done with recognizing the importance of research with and by children; and the implementation of these theories into practice. In other words, what has been established theoretically is still lagging behind in practice and requires further attention not only in the professional settings but also in everyday, mundane environments. And I do believe that the notion of data has a lot to do with it—hindering us to get that support going. Childhood studies are generally positioned within traditions of both qualitative and quantitative inquiries (depending on the paradigm and discipline); but overall for me the trend to “think” or “problematise” data relates to the irresistible move away from persisting post-positivist epistemological ruins, and humanistic, humancentered, and neo-positivist practices of research and scholarship. I often think, what would childhood studies scholarship look like if researchers were more attentive to both theoretical and practical understandings of what may be perceived as data. What encounters and interactions may happen?

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This thinking stems from the notion that from my perspective far too much time is spent on producing or collecting data. I still recall Alison Jones, a famous New Zealand scholar and back then a supervisor of my Ph.D., how she was calming down my hunger and drive to collect data. At that stage, I perhaps was not ready for that advice and it is only sometime afterward that I have embraced the notion—how data in childhood studies can come together, interact, and indeed: intra-act. Encounters with data. They can be endless and everywhere, and we do not need to necessarily become enslaved within our data collection—data are endless and run forever; data are here, there and everywhere, data can be bent and exploited, and particularly used for a variety of ontological and epistemological purposes. Being with data is perhaps the most liberating and at the same time most difficult task one can ask of an ambitious researcher. Data in childhood studies bring us, in some ways, both possibilities and impossibilities. For example, data in childhood research—as many of researchers and students find very quickly, are needed, required, funders glorify them, research ethics committee govern them …. And researchers destroy them after 7 or so years of securely storing them. In other words, in my work I reached the point of being fully open up to possibilities for data being everything and everywhere. I do not mean to make it sound esoteric, data are important and have a time and place in each researcher’s study, and there is indeed good and poor scholarship associated with data. But far too often I’ve seen mediocre forced data being tweaked to tell the story of macro dimensions, and the local being stretched as global, and vice versa. I am really glad that you have asked this question. Because data have a place in childhood studies, in research projects and systems, in research discourses and conversations, and in various practices. I like to think that data in some ways materialize research, and thus generate inter- and intra-actions. Data are not only mined, but data produce. Data make childhood studies happen. Joe Tobin has been for example looking for years at the same set of data and analyzing it from diverse perspectives. However, I do have some not so-good news. At the same, data seems to bring dichotomies: impossible and full of possibilities; innocence and strength; advocating and disturbing.

12.2 Posthumanism in childhood studies Q. Within posthumanist research, one of the aims is to “decenter” the human child. Would you argue that your research aims to decenter the child? If so, what implications does this have for researchers engaged in social justice or critical approaches with children (where children are often the center of the research?) What are the ethical implications of taking this approach (or not taking it)? What happens to children’s voice? Agency? I think that posthumanism (and some other relevant approaches) are simply so refreshing and landscape changing in childhood studies. This scholarship has reinvigorated the field and scholarship—and it is visible within both major and minor

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discourses. It has even had traction in the Global South and with Indigenous thinkers. However, at the very same time, I do agree with Hillevi Lenz-Taguchi about the lack of critique of this approach, and it seems that it is taking a very long time for researchers to get a handle on this work. My explanation for the rationale for this is twofold. Firstly, the scholarship of—let’s refer to it as “posthumanism” but being aware of all the possibilities and tentacles of these “new” paradigms—is very interesting and important, and also very enticing and seductive. At the same time, it creates a critical point in the history of childhood studies scholarship where it seems to allow researchers to sit comfortably with the trouble. Secondly, this approach to thinking, doing, being is very complex. However, it seems to have been reduced to some generic thoughts in childhood studies. However, this approach requires so much reading, reading, and reading. Bettie St. Pierre said to me once that she can always tell who has been reading, and who has not!! That sentence frightened me to death, but I do agree that reading and thinking with posthumanism is a more complex process then some scholars or research students actually realize. As the “newness” of this scholarship lies in the understanding of the ontology of the current scholarship; the philosophy is old (as Indigenous scholars have thought us) and traces the thoughts of both those who reached philosophical stardom in the past and those who remain to be often overlooked or forgotten. The other problem of newness can be a repetition without a difference. I remember how Michael Peters once said “do not send me another doctoral work on Foucault”! I know that it was supposed to be a tongue-in-cheek comment, but it brought up a lot of thoughts about the state of the scholarship back in the days. I think my research is not necessarily set to perform in one agenda. I try to think with the masters, and with children, on the one hand, and critique and theorize established notions on the other. I think to decenter the child is not the task that necessarily should belong to me as a researcher; children are doing it so well themselves. However, I do believe that we do want to make sure that “relationality” is brought back to academic and childhood studies discourses. My concerns are that all of these are not the new concepts—as Foucault reminds us, always historicize! And most importantly, how do we define “new”; how do we tell the “origin” narrative? I would like to also reflect on the point that you’ve raised of children’s voice and agency. They are already becoming and decentered as children are doing so themselves. My concerns are what do we, as adult, do to young children once we turn on a camera, once the thrill of collecting data kicks in! Children’s voice and agency are not ethically neutral, but can have diverse function, either supportive or dangerous. I still do believe that the right point is sometimes not to get involved. I’ve conducted an elaborative study a couple of years back where young children were working and navigating objects in secrecy, outside of adults’ view. I refer to this space as “childhood underground.” However, what happens when an adult enters this space? It’s gone! Theorizing can be thus sometimes as effective as the actual data production. But not to avoid your question, yes, this is a problem. I think that there is a lot to think with and work with in this space. Shall we be placing cameras on infants’ heads? What is this obsession with data, and also, with knowledge generation and dissemination? Will evidence make our practices better—and if so—what evidence,

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and at what cost? But as a thinker, researcher, and also as a father—taking a lead from children is equally important as all the other activities. Q. Some scholars have suggested that a new materialist perspective fails to attend to discourses of power or the historicity of the own researcher’s speculations or categories. What do you think of the critiques of posthumanism or new materialism (specifically the critique that new materialisms depoliticizes research)? In your opinion, what is the potential that posthumanist materialism has for re-thinking and re-doing ethics and politics? I am not sure that I entirely agree with this point. I think all these “new” approaches have not done their own genealogical research and tracing, as other fields and approaches have done. And that has been, perhaps, for now, okay. I think that a lot of work of variable quality has been produced. As a colleague of mine mentioned to me recently: “it seems that, as long as the word ‘entangled’ is used, things become part of post or new approaches and paradigms, and it seems enough.” But the time may have come for childhood studies to do this tracing and this critique; if not the critique of a critique. And as such, I would argue that any high-quality scholarship is both political and historical; that all high-quality scholarship has to consider power, in one form or another. What I do see as a problem is a lot of approaches and scholarship that has been published under this banner of post/new, is the lack of engagement with the reading of texts; while talking about collective and relationality, and too much is focused on the idea of the “human I,” which sometimes seems to be self-indulging scholarship. Recently I listened to an autoethnography paper that was “entangled” and fully locked in a posthuman paradigm. The idea intrigued me, while the mixing of these incompatible paradigms made me a bit concerned. I am not a theoretical purist, but I do believe in tracing the genealogy of a thought, and in not becoming a scholar whose work should be in “fashion.” I return back to data to further argue this point (seems to be the main motif for me of this conversation!). The term “data” has been considered very clinical. Mirka Koro-Ljungberg once beautifully told me, that data “carry an odour of scientificity.” Gorgeous statement! Data have been used (and I would say even abused) to serve particular political claims, about children and their childhoods. Governments get elected on them, and in our field, grants are allocated! And as such, they bring in a neoliberal discourse of accountability, as input to the assurances of “evidencebased” policy and practice. And thus, data have brought us the ethics and politics to the very cradle of the child, to every early childhood center and school, and to every playground. So, what changes if we are able to look at data through a posthuman or new materialist lens? First of all, for me post/new approaches help us to work against existing and incoming machinations of data and encourage thinking and diverse variations and manifestations that the data project brings. As such, post and new theories and approaches—and methodologies in childhood studies—create a new platform and liberate forces which are focused on creating, generating, and reproducing knowing, affect, and potentially other sensory experiences. They also allow us to place data in

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the relational ecosystems of childhoods—and that is something that is so needed and fundamentally critical and important. I am a little bit unclear about how—I think we do need to think more about what this would look like and what it does, and how it performs ethics and politics. And also, how it can be both rigorous and able to speak to, for example, policymakers. While a posthuman reading of children’s poverty is fascinating, will policymakers be able to approach it in the same way and use it as they do with the developmental scholarship? So, there is a problem of accessibility and knowledge translation so that the “outsiders” can become “insiders.” I do believe in scholarship for the sake of scholarship; but I also believe in the tremendous capacity and potentiality of childhood studies and what they can achieve under and with this new theoretical umbrella. Q. In your paper “Vibrancy of childhood things,” you and Sonja Arndt write that research paradigms and theoretical frameworks come into fashion and then move on again. In what ways do you think this applies to posthumanist and materialist approaches with children? It is interesting that you have picked up on this paper. Vibrancy of Childhood Things was a paper a long time in the making. I think I had presented it for about 3 years around conferences, in different shapes and forms and versions, but I was not really happy with it till I had teamed-up with Sonja (Arndt). And one of the key openings was indeed the idea of how theories become and move in and out of “fashion.” That notion of “fashion” was meant in a number of ways. Firstly, I was purely fascinated by the notion of concentration of scholarship, whether it is a position of a theoretical lens, or just affinity toward particular thinking. Piaget, Vygotsky, Bourdieu, Deleuze, Foucault, Barad … the list goes on. At any given moment, there is a critical mass that attests and works with the scholarship, collaborates, and sometimes argues a bit. It is fascinating to watch it both from the collective historical perspective, but also from the perspective of a once researcher’s individual career. I myself have, as others, moved through different philosophical and conceptual paradigms, and I do believe that I do still fluidly move within the philosophy of thought, trying to stay out of ideology. Ideology of scholarship can often blind us and make us too comfortable. I think Stephen Ball in one of his lectures said “I am not a Foucauldian and I do not do Foucault.” Fascinating comment. I think that new materialism scholarship and posthumanism are definitely in fashion. In some circles, I should add. Fashion in our relatively small group of scholars is zero-sum-game. Scholars move from one area to the other, and perhaps more than in other fields. Perhaps it demonstrates the constant fluidity of childhood studies, a non-ability of just one way for framing our thinking and doing or our understanding. Perhaps in 10 years’ time we will all be concerned with radical empiricism. I guess the point of being in fashion does not have—as it may have seemed—any negative connotation. What it means is that there is more and more scholarship, and obviously, we need to be careful about its quality and political and axiological potential.

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Q. What are some pressing issues facing children today, and what tools, methods, approaches, or theories do we need to address them? In what ways are these questions/concerns context specific (for example, particular to the place where you live and conduct research)? In Aotearoa New Zealand I have spent over 6 years with the human geographer, Christina Ergler, working on and growing the Childhood Studies in Aotearoa New Zealand organization. We have founded it and carefully crafted it, and I am amazed every year at our annual colloquium. It is so exciting, cutting edge, interesting, and diverse, to see all of these scholars and activists come together. You see so many fields and disciplines, and so much of what childhood studies really are to me—the merging of scholarship and activism. I remember when Affrica Taylor was a keynote and there was shock with some audience members—they had not made yet, as Affrica said, the first “post turn.” The late Anne Smith was a fantastic mentor to us and a keynote the first year we have started, and always reminded us to go back to the “rights scholarship.” Christina and I care deeply about this organization, but we are also concerned about how “care is a form of control”—Foucault said so! I myself am currently working on the book that will allow genealogical and historical tracing of the philosophy as a method and childhood studies methodologies. Hopefully it will uncover some of those original traits, and contribute to the pondering about the method, the thought, the paradigm, the child, and childhoods. And as a final note, I think that childhood studies will grow stronger, and the new paradigms will enrich it and keep it alive … albeit, in the meantime, the field may be vulnerable to some critiques, but I have a cautious optimism for the future.

Further Reading Arndt, S., & Tesar, M. (2016). A more-than-social movement: The post-human condition of quality in the early years. Contemporary Issues in Early Childhood, Special Issue: Re-imagining Quality in Early Childhood, 17(1), 16–25. Koro-Ljungberg, M., Löytonen, T., & Tesar, M. (Eds.). (2017). Disrupting data in qualitative inquiry. Entanglements with the post-critical and post-anthropocentric. Peter Lang. Tesar, M., & Jukes, B. (2018). Childhoods in the Anthropocene: Re-thinking young children’s agency and activism. In N. Yelland & D. F. Bentley (Eds.), Found in translation: Connecting reconceptualist thinking with early childhood education practices (pp. 76–90). New York: Routledge.

Dr. Marek Tesar is an Associate Professor at the Faculty of Education and Social Work, University of Auckland, New Zealand. His research focuses on the philosophy and sociology of childhood, and the history of education/childhood, the construction of childhoods, notions of place/space of childhoods, and newly qualified teachers. Marek was the recipient of the Emerging Scholar Award in 2016 at the AERA Critical Perspectives on Early Childhood Education SIG.

Part III

Situating Children’s Lives

A question that we often pondered together when thinking about this book was about where the field of childhood studies is headed—what are the questions that we need to explore in this age of growing social and political uncertainty as well as environmental devastation? We asked this question of our contributors too, because we wanted to locate some of the pressing areas currently being studied in the field. But this was not an easy question to answer. The contributors in this book all work in different contexts, each with its own pressing issues, political climate, not to mention institutional support for the kind of research that gets funded. We felt that the scholars included in Part 3 attended to some of these complexities and discussed ways to move the field of childhood studies in more affirmative and diverse directions. One of the things that was most striking across these interviews was the need to diversify the theories, concepts, and approaches we think and do research with. We must move away from thinking in silos and move toward approaches that are more interdisciplinary. As the contributors in this section urge, attending to the complexity in children’s lives demands that we engage with developments in science, nano-technology, geology, and others, because children do not live their lives in isolation. The work of Peter Kraftl and Karen Malone for example, highlighted for us the need to engage seriously with the materiality of the chemicals and pollutants that children in various parts of the world are exposed to in their physical and natural environments. As Malone explains, thinking about the porosity of these chemicals, and the impact on both human and more-than-human bodies enables us to see ourselves as not separate from “the ecology of the planet. I am part of everything and my body is not just mine, not just human, the story of being a human porous body is the same story of all objects human and non-human on the planet in which we are all implicated.” Being implicated in worldly matters is something that Riikka Hohti, Affrica Taylor, Iris Duhn, and Fikile Nxumalo also address in their research and in their interviews. In particular, their work attends to how we might create pedagogies for caring about/with the world. This caring, they show us, extends beyond the human. Duhn for example, shares how we can care for soil and dirt, which is heavily depleted in many areas of the world. Taylor highlights the importance of caring about child–kangaroo

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relations, even though that they are often viewed as a nuisance in various parts of Australia, and Nxumalo highlights the importance of caring for spaces and places that we occupy, while attending to their colonial legacies. Hohti highlights how she “stays with the trouble” through her exploration of child–animal relations. While we are still pondering the question of where the field of childhood studies may be headed, the interviews included in this section point to matters of concern that we can no longer avoid. How we can address them in our own research and encounters with educators is something these contributors speak to in this final section of this book.

Chapter 13

Interview with Iris Duhn Iris Duhn, Claudia Diaz-Diaz and Paulina Semenec

We need to think about what children need to learn now and maybe the relationship between teacher and learner is part of what has to be rethought.

We had the privilege to meet Iris Duhn in person during the Reconceptualizing Early Childhood Conference (RECE) held in Copenhagen in 2018. Inspired by engaging discussions and presentations during the conference, our conversation with Iris detailed some of the tensions inherent in doing “posthuman” and new materialist research in particular educational settings, which, as Iris discusses can be quite conservative and very child-centered. Our discussion provoked us to think carefully about how such challenges inform how we might design and carry out research, and how the work we do with children may reinforce rather than challenge harmful binaries (i.e., “child”/“adult”). Iris prompted us to consider how we might begin to re-think, re-imagine and put to practice ways of being with children that broadens the scope of what matters—beyond a humanist concern. Imagining data differently or placing an emphasis on place rather than the child is for Iris, one way of decentering, but she also articulates an approach to decentering that requires a particular way of being on part of the researcher. Waiting, and being patient when doing research with children she describes, is also central to decentering, because in doing so, we become better attuned to what else is happening around us, and to what matters to children. In other words, children let us into their worlds, but only if we take the time to listen and be with them. This gave us pause as we began to think about how our own encounters and ways of being with children in our different research sites were enabling (or perhaps limiting) what we were making room for. We were also pushed to think about how writing as a form of representing and communicating our research to others I. Duhn (B) Ministry of Education, Wellington, New Zealand e-mail: [email protected] C. Diaz-Diaz · P. Semenec University of British Columbia, Vancouver, BC, Canada © Springer Nature Singapore Pte Ltd. 2020 C. Diaz-Diaz and P. Semenec, Posthumanist and New Materialist Methodologies, Children: Global Posthumanist Perspectives and Materialist Theories, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-981-15-2708-1_13

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needs to do something in the world. Reflecting on the number of trees that need to be planted in order to offset her flight from Australia to Copenhagen for example, we were reminded of the very material consequences that doing research has, not only on children, but on the world that children and more-than-human others will inherit.

13.1 Naming the World: Posthuman Focus and Qualitative Data CD: We would like to start this interview by asking you about what we understand is one of your latest projects Naming the World: Early Learning Literacy and Sustainable Learning. We would like to know what this project is about and what are the main perspectives that you have been using in this project. ID: The idea for this project was to do something with sustainability in early childhood education and the literacy. I’m just going to focus on sustainability because that’s really my area of expertise in the project. We really wanted to be quite explicit about a posthuman approach in the project. It was written into the proposal which I thought was taking a bit of a risk because in Australia we have quite a conservative atmosphere around research. I wasn’t sure that you can be successful at the moment in gaining this kind of funding. It’s very difficult to get the Australian Research Council. I think we were all surprised when we got it. It’s also really encouraging because the process for getting those proposals is peer reviewed. It’s actually your peers who kind of make a call on it and then it goes up the levels of decision-making. It must have been convincing enough because many people in Australia, I think, at that point weren’t sure at all about what posthumanism might mean. I think that’s a really important message for scholars as well, because quite often when it comes to funding I think people tend to play it safe but that also means you never push boundaries, right? I’m really proud of this project because I think it does push boundaries. We have a place focus in there as well. Originally the idea was really focussed on place as a concept and develop some new thinking about how children learn and how sustainability happens. I do some intensive work with different sites. We had three kindergartens in Victoria. But the project is much bigger than that. We also have sites in New South Wales and Queensland and also in Finland. It’s actually quite a big project in many ways and I’m finding that even the three sites in Victoria are really hard to manage because it’s a lot of data that you’re generating and it’s a lot of data to work with. That’s always a bit of a conundrum for qualitative researchers. How do you deal with the data? One of the things for this posthuman focus for me also has to do with data and how to manage this kind of data in a different way. The commitment to the data is really interesting for me in this project, and I haven’t found a good way yet. What I do not want to do is this “cherry-picking approach” where I’m going to pick only that bit that is interesting to me and I will forget about all the other things that happened. I mean it’s always a problem for every researcher who does qualitative work. I like to find a way of creating maybe a more relational

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approach. But I’m still working on it so I haven’t figured that out. For me, that’s a challenge in this project. CD: Perhaps I can jump in and ask about the paper you wrote titled disrupting data. So, I wonder what does disrupting data mean for the work you are doing? Why is it important to disrupt data? PS: And how are you thinking about data in this particular project? What constitutes data? ID: Well, I think data is really just the moment where you pay attention, right? And then for one reason or another we try to capture it, however we capture it by writing it down, by taking a picture, by having a video. But it’s really only this frozen moment in time of the attention that was paid to this particular thing that happened or not happened. Data is really just a framing. It’s almost like a frozen moment in time I think. If I think about data that way, it’s not about evidence as such. It’s not about demonstrating that something happened that cannot happen in other conditions. We’ve moved away from that particularly in this project. But then what is it, right? And what can it say that is of significance? How can I create something that speaks to other people that makes sense to them, that makes them see things differently? That’s what data is for me. It is a little window of opportunity that I can share with others and hopefully something happens because of this moment that I’m creating with the data for others. I was really trying to think about intra-action and the frozen moments the way I described the data before. The task then is to unfreeze that, to find a way of allowing whoever reads, whoever works with it, whoever has a conversation with it, to do something else with it. CD: I was thinking to come back to your project Naming the World. What makes this project posthuman? ID: I don’t think it’s as straightforward as saying this is posthuman and this is not posthuman. The whole idea of posthuman is again frame, right? It’s an intention. In a way you can never really be posthuman. For me posthuman just means trying to push awareness of when I think there is a window for data or you know—so who is in it? Why do I think that’s a moment and that one is not? How do I make those decisions? What kind of perceptions am I focusing on? For me it’s a call to attention all the time. That’s how I would understand posthuman. It’s so easy as a researcher to fall back on being very human, right? Focusing on children, what are the children doing? How are they doing? Because it’s also interesting. The posthuman for me is a reminder of attending to what else is going on there that I might not see unless I call myself back to there’s more going on than just children. Even when I worked as a teacher I found the idea of children always somewhat mystifying because it’s such a developmental discourse that we are all so deeply aligned with whether we want to or not. Even this idea of children as this other, somehow different to adults it has always bothered me. I’ve always found it difficult. I find adults childish, sometimes. I find children adult-like sometimes. I find children childish and adults adult-like. Then there’s all this in between and it’s the same

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for myself. There are probably moments where I would say “Oh God, I really don’t understand a word of what’s going on,” so I fall into this whole—we think of children quite often not knowing or not understanding or not being quite with it or not quite developed enough to understand the concepts, right? If I listen to Karen Barad about quantum physics I’m kind of in that space again. This is how we think of children. Traditionally, right? Especially when it comes to learning. That’s the whole task of learning to get from here to there. I don’t know if I can find it that useful. On the other hand, of course children also need protection, and children need something that a robust adult doesn’t need, right? There is always that relationship as well which has to do with care. But I can look at a colleague who’s really exhausted because she’s been on a plane for 24 h and just arrived and then she needs that care that I as a robust adult can give her because I’m rested. Again, it kind of undoes this weird thing of what kind of care does a child need? What kind of care does an adult need? It becomes this kind of more fluid thing. I’ve had children who’ve been so amazing in their thinking and in their ability to be deeply philosophical about ideas about the world that I say “wow!”, I have nothing to say to you. These are moments of wonder and that shake me up a bit and my assumed understandings of what childhood is, what adulthood is, who I am as a teacher, who children are. I’ve had that when I was a teacher as well. And I’m still having it. PS: How does your thinking about children inform how you engage with them? ID: I’m fairly introverted anyway, so I’m not this kind of “oh yeah let’s-be-friends” person. A lot of people who work with children have a preference for this kind of outgoing, let’s have fun with children, let’s be really extroverted because that’s really what children like. So, for me, I like to be invited or I’d like to make sure there is an understanding before I engage with children. But that’s the same I would have with adults. So, I find it really interesting to come back as a researcher. I haven’t actually done any fieldwork for a while, so this project has brought me right back into contact with children and I just really noticed it this time. I really noticed—and this maybe is the posthuman as well. That I was very…I just waited, I just was very patient, I think. And I didn’t expect lots of things to happen, or lots of connections to just come up. I just was there. And then I waited for things to happen. So, I would be sitting with children, and children are very… those children were very tuned into the fact that I hadn’t been there before. And they kind of noticed straight away that “ooh there’s a stranger, why is she in here, this is really weird, this is really odd.” But they didn’t say anything because they were very polite children, I have to say. This is also a socio-economic issue with those children. And I would just sit with them by the sandpit and then after a while they would start to put sand on my knee, for instance. And so, it was the sand that started to bring us together and build connections. And I would just let them. I wouldn’t say anything. I would just wait what was going to happen. And I found that interesting. I found it intriguing. So, the sand as a data encounter became really interesting to me and really important because that’s how we started to build relationships and connections.

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13.2 Place and Decentering the Child CD: One thing that stands out in your research is how you theorize place. We would like to connect that focus on place with the idea of decentering the child that is part of most posthumanist and materialist perspectives. Would you claim that your research aims to decenter the child? Does place have a role in that? ID: It’s really complicated. If I want to decenter them I first have to assume that they are centered, that they are already somewhere in the middle. And of course, they are. If you go into a childcare center, the whole childcare center is about that. I mean it’s called “a childcare centre.” It’s a very artificial, very odd place. I never feel comfortable in those places. To me, they are highly artificial and constructed and really weird. I don’t quite know how I would go about decentering childhood in one of those settings. I don’t know if that’s possible, but in saying that we had—I had one kindergarten that was a Bush kindergarten and the other one was a city Bush kindergarten. One was out in Australian bush, and the other one was out in the city in Melbourne—an urban Bush kindergarten. That’s different then because all of a sudden, you’re not in this child-centric environment as such, especially in the city you are out and among and with. That creates different possibilities. The teachers especially in the city, the Melbourne one, were great. They had just started to be out in the city with quite a small group of children, maybe eight children and they would go 1 day a week for the entire day out into Melbourne. The children were four to five I think. The teachers would take a big backpack. It was a lot of work for the teachers as well. If you have 8 children, you need to take a lot of stuff, right? Even the physicality of it, materiality… carrying all that stuff and then going out with the children. If it rained, they would be out all day. If someone would be tired, they would still be out all day. It is very demanding. It broke down some barriers for the children, but also for the teachers. They had to build up resilience over time. The first few times they went out, everyone was just so exhausted, but they got used to it which is really interesting. With this becoming more robust, there was a lot of confidence that was gained for the children but also for the teachers and they had really quite amazing and quite beautiful experiences being out there together. This whole thing of “I’m the adult,” “I’m the child,” broke down naturally because they had such interesting conversations about what was happening, what one person saw, but not the other, and so they would tell each other and they made discoveries together. I found that really quite lovely and quite beautiful to watch and very, very different. CD: What does a focus on place bring into the sustainability piece of your research? ID: Sustainability also is a concept that I’m not particularly happy with. I think it’s just a label that we use at the moment to say, okay, well this has something to do with rethinking human relationships to the world. But in many ways, we are post sustainability. I will have to think very hard about how I talk about sustainability as well. CD: Is there a term that you would prefer to use instead?

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ID: The posthuman helps me to talk about some of the things that would be important to raise under the sustainability flag. As I said before I think we are post sustainability anyway. I’d probably focus on the posthuman to frame those kinds of ideas. Posthuman for me again, as I said before, is about shifting attention away from humans to all the other things that happen with, and sustainability for me would have to do with something similar. It’s certainly not about teaching children how to be careful when they are out in nature or even when they go on a bushwalk “be careful that you don’t step on the little tiny trees.” All of that comes under care. For me the posthuman would be much more interesting than sustainability. My colleague had a look at some of the data that she just archived for me because I want to have a systematic approach to the data. With all the post-qualitative stuff, as I said before, there’s something that calls me to do something with the body of data, and she noticed that there’s a lot of data of me talking to children about insects. That’s one of the creatures that if you’re out in the Australian bush there are just lots of insects, all kinds of insects. I did not realize this but I would constantly try to create a space for those insects to be cared for with the children ‘cause they would pick up a beetle and then they would go from one hand to the next hand to the next. I must have said: “what about the beetle, you know, don’t you think that’s enough now for this creature?” Don’t you think we should put the beetle back, which is fascinating. I wasn’t aware of it, but she noticed that I did that a lot. For me that would come through the posthuman focus. It’s really interesting that I started off by saying it’s all about perception. Obviously, there’s a lot of self-awareness that is lacking and I didn’t even realize that I was doing that but it talks to me about shifting the focus. Obviously, I was not focused on the children. I was also focused on the other creatures that were part of this encounter and for me then that’s a power relation. That’s how I would possibly also look at it. For me that’s also part of this posthuman lens. It’s about power relations. This creature needed a lot more care and protection than some of the children in those encounters, right? Then as an adult maybe my job would be to look the ones that are particularly vulnerable. My attention would go to whoever is the most vulnerable in this encounter.

13.3 Addressing the Critiques of Posthuman and Materialist Perspectives CD: One of the things we have been thinking about is about the critique of the posthuman or materialist perspectives, particularly the one that says that these ideas do not consider power relationships or they don’t attend to the history behind these relationships. What do you think about that critique and how do you approach those critiques in your work? ID: The critiques are really important. I have to say I’ve seen quite a bit of work coming out under the label of posthumanism and new materialism. I’m a little bit concerned about the lack of politics and about the lack of history. I think that’s a very weak spot. I loved Foucault from way back. I still really enjoy Foucault. I think it’s

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really important to pay attention to politics and power. I also come with a really strong feminist background. Feminist theory has always been important to me and that’s certainly about politics. That’s certainly about power. And I think there is scope for a lot of really interesting work still to come that develops that much more explicitly than, maybe, we have at the moment. CD: Maybe self-reflection is a good thing to think about the question of power and politics? It is about the question of what does your research do to the world, right? ID: For me that’s the question about sustainability. It is really starting to think about how the world would look like if we take all the challenges and disruptions that we all experience really quite deeply now. A lot of children really experience them quite deeply now as well. How do we work with that? How do we create, you know, a bushwalk that goes down to the Yarra River and sees that there is a dead fish and a dead bird without it? Also, it doesn’t get desperate and depressed about it and yet picks it up as a power relation. Something happened. We don’t know what the story is. Can we find out what the story is, and then, can we do something to make it a little bit better, maybe for the next bird and the next fish? It is about being alive really with the world as much as we can. I love Donna Haraway because for me that’s the kind of work she does and she asks us to do. She’s probably my favorite theorist at the moment because I find her very political. CD: Do you want to extend a little bit on some of her ideas that have influenced the work you are doing? ID: I love the composting idea. To me that is just a fabulous, fabulous idea because compost requires quite a lot of understanding and knowledge. You can’t just throw everything together. This goes back to Deleuze and Guattari and assemblage. It is an assemblage because it does something. Compost is even better than that because a really good compost generates heat. If you find really good technologies to work with compost, you get a really speedy creation of compost as well. If you put the wrong things together you get a messy slimy, goopy thing, that maybe also does something but it might take much longer. There’s an art to it all. I find it very, very inspiring to think with compost. One of the big things for me again about sustainability is that all our soils are so depleted. We have this very thin crust actually on the planet right now. We just had this big tsunami in Indonesia where the crust just disappears and becomes quicksand and everything gets sucked in. The idea of soil and caring for soil is maybe the main task of sustainability now. I find it really inspiring because it’s something that can be done. We can do that with children we can learn through soil with children…you can do everything, you can look at it through art you can look at it through science, you can look at it through gardening. At the same time, you are contributing to making your place better and you have to take care of all those insects and all those beings that live in the soil. What I also love is that it’s so small, it’s micro life. It’s not just the big things, and for working with children I find that really empowering to use that old-fashioned word because it also means children can do something themselves. They can see, “oh there are more worms now in the soil than there were three weeks ago,” or “there’s something growing.” Let’s see what

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it is and what is growing with it and what doesn’t want to grow with it. So, you really start to cultivate an idea of how ecologies work, how communities are created, how more than human communities are created and how we as humans can actually do something good because we consume all the time, right? For me this is a very practical way of stopping consumption and creating something that is nourishing for the planet as well as for people, as well as for this micro community that’s created there. I really like composting. I think it’s very powerful.

13.4 Pedagogies of Caring for the World CD: How can the kind of research you are doing help you or others create new pedagogies for caring for the world or for facing the challenges of current times? ID: I’m always interested in pedagogies. I’ve written about pedagogy. I’m always trying for my work to be useful, to be helpful to teachers in particular. Going back to the data, I probably will look at teachers in the bush childcare in particular to see how the relationship changed when they left the childcare setting to try to get a better sense of the kind of change that happened. I’d give examples of pedagogical practices and explain why I think the teachers might look at it and think, “wow, you know, I could try that” or that might be really interesting. To get teachers, to actually find it interesting, you always need an outcome right. You need something, otherwise why would they want to do it. So, what do I get out of it, if I relate to children differently? A lot of teachers also love this idea that they are the adult and the child is the learner. So, why would we want to disrupt the relationship that works really well for the teacher? You need the big arguments to respond to that question that for me probably would be the fact that the world is changing. We need to think about what children need to learn now and maybe the relationship between teacher and learner is part of what has to be rethought. Maybe that’s one way in which we could help children as well to be better prepared for this changing world. There’s a lot of insecurity I think at the moment in terms of what is it that children need to learn. Nobody quite knows, and I don’t know about your institutions, but in my institution we kind of pretend the world is not changing. You know, there’s a focus on learning outcomes. There’s focus on literacy, numeracy. PS: Do you share the writings that you have from your research with practitioners or educators that you’re working with at the center? Iris: We gave them some readings because they don’t have access to databases but quite often they are so busy. That’s another problem. We might come up with those great pedagogies but teachers don’t necessarily read them. It doesn’t necessarily reach them. The challenge is to think about dissemination of research. How do we create other ways of communicating some of those ideas, right? CD: What sort of dissemination are you thinking in your current project?

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ID: We might do an exhibition, an art exhibition with the data. We contacted a gallery in Melbourne. We wrote an application for them and we’ve got some really amazing data. We’ve got beautiful moments that we talk to teachers. They’re almost like little narratives, like a little girl that walks really slowly, slowly, slowly, and the teachers wouldn’t have noticed, because as a teacher if someone in dawdling you say come on, hurry up. They were outside and the researcher was walking behind and so she noticed that the girl was walking so slowly and then she, I think, she had a conversation with the girl afterward and the girl said, oh “that’s because I knew that there were bats sleeping in the trees above and this was daytime of course and I didn’t want to wake them up. So that’s why I walked so slowly.” How can you not love that story as a teacher, right? Because those are moments that in the business of life you probably miss. This is an example of children being incredibly thoughtful. Those moments get normally lost. If we can create opportunities for teachers to pay attention to the unexpected in daily practice and look more closely what’s happening, then that changes the whole idea of teaching and what’s going on. That story can be presented in the art exhibition and then get whoever comes the audience again to re-engage with the data to create data on top of the data, and see what then follows from that, right? Then we thought, since we like the compost so much, we thought maybe we could have soil there as well. We could have a dark space because this is about a bat encounter. Maybe we can make it a dark space and then somehow have this video running and then the next step would be to maybe have soil. Soil in the gallery and then see what—how people work with the soil.

13.5 On Writing PS: Are there any concepts or guiding principles you think with when you’re writing about your data? ID: Writing is really interesting because I would love to say I love it but I actually don’t. I find it such hard work. It’s really, really hard work. That’s partly because for me a good text is a text that affects me. It has to have an effect, right? If it’s just in my head it’s not doing anything for me. So, the writing is similar. It has to touch me. I need to be touched somehow by the idea, by something and then I can write about it but it’s very difficult to write about something if you feel touched by it as well. It’s this interesting back and forth. I don’t find writing particularly pleasurable. I find it really strenuous and maybe it has to be. For me that’s kind of expect it to be hard work. Then the pleasure comes through feeling that I am doing something, I am becoming with my own text with my own writing. I’m changing myself as well as maybe some ideas. It’s working on myself and at the same time trying to communicate to others why this is interesting, why this is important. I don’t like self-indulgent writings. For me it always has to contribute something to the world.

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That’s just an expectation I have of myself and whether I meet that or not is another question. PS: Is that advice that you provide to your students as well? ID: I like to remind them what is this actually doing in the world? Why are you doing this work? Why are you investing 4 years of your life, what is it apart from wanting to get a Ph.D.? Is there something bigger that you want to do with this work? Which brings me back to the politics right to me. I think, this world is just so amazingly beautiful. It just breaks my heart how we are as humans on this planet. I just cannot understand that. Why is it so difficult for so many humans to see the beauty and the incredible preciousness and mystery of the world? I don’t understand that. And that sometimes makes me wonder if all these attempts to communicate is actually useful? I don’t know who’s interested in what I’m saying, because I’m talking to myself [laughs]. For me that’s also the politics of how we think about communication and how there’s such a backlash at the moment. People just don’t want to think. You know, there’s a resentment. We were talking about all the trees that need to be planted just because of all the people who flew to come to Copenhagen, right? My flight from Australia to here, that’s 43 trees that need to be planted. If you look at all of us that’s forests that we need—and we don’t have them at our disposal. I’m also aware of this incredible privilege that we have as academics. There are many people who just have really tough lives now. More and more people. I’m also wondering if all of this is very elitist in many ways and that’s why things are not really changing the way I would like them to change. That’s another big question that can’t be answered just like that. I don’t know really what to say about it but… It’s nice to talk about an art gallery and put data in there and do exciting things with it. But again, it’s very privileged. Maybe there are better ways of achieving something with the data and I just haven’t thought of it yet. CD: Can you expand a little bit about your ethics when you attend to everyday places or mundane places or attend to bats and the trees? What are the ethics implicit in paying attention to those things? ID: The ethics is always complicated because in theory I would now like to give something back to the teachers, give something back to the children, give something back to the bats. But I don’t have the time and the space to really attend to it. So, my ethical commitment is what we talked about, right? But in practical terms, I’m quite aware that it would be great to have something tangible to give back to the teachers and the communities where we work. I probably don’t have scope to do that in a really hands-on way. Like, making a beautiful book for them with the data. We did newsletters for them so we did give something back, a little summary for each of them. But even that is quite difficult to do because the funding is always limited. You need to do it carefully, and to just find that time to do this kind of labor. I have done it though. I have done three of those newsletters. We’ve given them back to the teachers so it’s something. From another project, I’m still in contact with that teacher. It’s also an opportunity to build long-term relationships and just touch base from time to time and keep the conversation going. I’m very happy to do the same

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thing with the teachers if they are interested. It always needs a bit of give and take from both, right? It can’t just be me constantly contacting them, but if they want to keep up the contact, then I certainly will make sure that we keep it going. But teachers as I said before, they are so busy as well that they sometimes don’t want to know anymore and they might even resist. If I knock on the door now and say “let’s have another conversation about the project” they might say “Oh, god, really? We’ve done it, it’s done. Just move on.”

Further Reading Duhn, I. (2016). Making ‘place’ for ecological sustainability in early childhood. In A. Reid & J. Dillon (Eds.), Environmental education: Critical concepts in the environment (pp. 514–527). London: Routledge. Duhn, I. (2018a). After the ‘post’: Anthropocenes. Educational Philosophy and Theory, 50(14), 1609–1610. Duhn, I. (2018b). Performing data. In M. Koro-Ljungerbg, T. Löytönen, & M. Tesar (Eds.), Disrupting data in qualitative inquiry: Entanglements with the post-critical and post-anthropocentric (pp. 11–22). New York, NY: Peter Lang Publishing.

Iris Duhn is Associate Professor in Monash University with extensive experience in early childhood education research, teaching and professional development. She has led research projects for the Ministry of Education in New Zealand, and for the Victorian Government in Australia and she is currently a chief investigator on two prestigious Australian Research Council funded projects in early childhood education. One of the projects focuses on children’s sustainability learning and innovative pedagogies, the other on teachers’ collaboration and their ability for professional agency. Her research focuses on post qualitative research methodologies, policy and practice in early childhood education. She is interested in globalisation and sustainability, and in ‘place’ as a concept.

Chapter 14

Interview with Riikka Hohti Riikka Hohti, Paulina Semenec and Claudia Diaz-Diaz

I wouldn’t say that I want to center children nor decenter them. I’m interested in children’s assemblages. Children plus. I will say it like this: children are never alone. So, they cannot be interesting as such. They’re not in isolation. They’re always connected.

In this interview, Riikka Hohti traces how thinking with concepts informed by Deleuze and Barad have taken her work into different directions, enabled her to ask different questions and make new inquiries possible with children. We discussed her more recent shift to child–animal relations through her postdoctoral research, which has unveiled new kinds of questions and approaches to doing research with children. For example, Riikka discusses how the notion of voice and agency have become troublesome for her, and what a focus on the concept of assemblage and entanglement allows for her thinking instead. In this way, our conversation with Riikka also invited us to think about the importance of always re-evaluating our practices and the concepts that can limit or open up for new ways of thinking and being with children. Riikka’s interview also highlighted the ongoingness of learning with new theories, and how many of the concepts and approaches that many think with under the umbrella of “posthuman” and “new materialist” can be elusive and always on the move. For early career scholars, or those new to these theories and approaches, we found this discussion reassuring and also motivating to keep reading and experimenting with new concepts. This work is demanding, and as Riikka shows us, takes time and care to truly put it to work in creative ways that make a difference to children’s lives. R. Hohti (B) Manchester Metropolitan University, Manchester, UK e-mail: [email protected] P. Semenec · C. Diaz-Diaz University of British Columbia, Vancouver, BC, Canada e-mail: [email protected] C. Diaz-Diaz e-mail: [email protected] © Springer Nature Singapore Pte Ltd. 2020 C. Diaz-Diaz and P. Semenec, Posthumanist and New Materialist Methodologies, Children: Global Posthumanist Perspectives and Materialist Theories, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-981-15-2708-1_14

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14.1 Entering into the Field of Childhood PS: How did you become interested in the study of childhood? Can you also talk a little bit about your earlier approaches to studying children? RH: Originally, I worked as a musician and I wanted to change because I wanted to do something that had an impact in society. So I thought there’s nothing that has more impact on society than to be a teacher. And I still think that that profession is perhaps the most important. By the shift of the Millennium I started my studies to become a class teacher. And I left my profession as a musician. I eventually worked as a teacher for 4 years. When studying, I became familiar with this approach called “storycrafting.” It was developed by Liisa Karlsson who is a Finnish professor, and her idea in this approach is that children are simply asked to tell a story. The approach is totally open-ended—well, you can never say “totally” because power relations are always there, but the idea is that children are not presented with any specific questions. Their attention is not focused. They are not required to produce anything if they don’t want, and the length and the format of their stories are completely free. And I speak about that in my thesis quite extensively. I recognized the power of that approach and I put it to work in my classroom, which became, you could say, a narrative classroom. I think the children never thought of anything as exciting as telling stories and writing them together with a friend. And it was a lot of fun. So I started to do these classroom writing things, where I asked the children to write down their observations and stories and work as classroom diary writers and as ethnographers. It was based on the same open-endedness… it showed me how it is possible to join children’s worlds on their own terms. I was really excited to find that there are theories that resonate with this. I started to do my thesis and actually found people talking about the same things— about this open-ended relationality that had become so important to me during my work as a class teacher. So this was kind of how I swam into children’s world in an open-ended way. PS: Was storycrafting something that interested you once the children became interested in writing their own stories or is that something that you already came into the classroom with? RH: I used storycrafting as a research approach in my master’s thesis when I studied to become a teacher. Later, storycrafting was accompanying my practice as a teacher. I found it just so energizing and so joyful to let children speak because as a teacher you end up speaking too much usually yourself. I had a big class… 30 children almost. And so I was quite stressed and I would have loved to listen to my pupils more than I could. Through letting them write about what they saw happening in the classroom I could listen to their thoughts without actually physically listening. I soon realized that the less I gave guidance to their writing activity, the more I learned about their thoughts, because their motivation would not be killed by assumptions of a “good” or “right” way to write. PS: Can you tell us about the concepts that inform your research with children or when you’re working with children?

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RH: Once I became familiarized with new materialist and feminist thinkers, and Deleuze and Guattari and Barad and their theories, I was ready to leave the cultural frame—it was very cultural, this storycrafting idea. And I was ready to take the challenge and to see how storytelling was much more than only words or culture. It was entanglement of matter and meaning and I was really excited to start to explore how materialities actually came to stories, how bodies entangled with words, and so on. So this opened even more. I mean, before I was interested in children’s thinking through their stories, but now I was able to kind of broaden the scope into finding these entanglements and also joining these entanglements myself, so I think Barad’s entanglement is a very central concept for me. Another concept is “nomadic” although I don’t claim to know the idea of nomad very well. Through the concept of nomad I might be just looking for some idea of movement which is kind of what I always look for. Movement is perhaps the first thing in research for me. I’ve been using the concept of nomad but I also talk about zooming and navigating and about exploring these in-between spaces, these middle spaces and fluidity inspired by Braidotti…and this possibility of employing methodologies that are non-reductive—you’re kind of able to zoom in and out… I think with children, movement is important. PS: Was there a moment when you were reading the children’s stories when you realized “oh there’s more going on here” than just children telling me “stories”? RH: Sure yeah. It happened as a very big learning experience together with little by little learning something about those theories. And yeah it was really eye-opening. And I can remember specific papers that I wrote at that time—drafts of research plans and so on—where I, in a very shy way, take some new materialist and posthumanist concepts and try to use them in connection with the writings of the children that I had as “data.” I remember reading Nick Lee’s writings on childhood, I think it was the paper “Awake, asleep, adult, child,” which was really inspiring and I couldn’t really grasp, I think anything, but on another level, an intuitive level, I was very much drawn to his way of writing. And then I participated in the summer school in Manchester Metropolitan University—I think it was 2013. I understood almost nothing, but still I was really kind of—I felt specific energy there. And those moments are really important… On the other hand, it was a very realistic problem for me, how to enlarge or broaden the idea of data because as a teacher I’d be so busy that I could not write anything. But now I was there with an overwhelming amount of memories which in a conventional sense would not have counted as data because there were no written accounts. Having the permission from these giants like Betty St. Pierre, to be able to use your memory. You’re able to move in time, you’re able to think with your data, you’re able to do different kinds of things, you’re able to write and think with theory, you’re able to see writing as inquiry. The piece “Writing as inquiry” written by Laurel Richardson was really eye-opening as well.

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14.2 Concepts on the Move PS: Have there been any concepts that you’ve been trying to grapple with and maybe you’re struggling to figure out? RH: Oh yeah. Basically, you’re haunted all the time with the feeling that you have not read even the basic things, and still you need to have the courage to join others to do this work. And on the other hand I think the idea of doing scholarly work is beautiful in that sense that you can always lean on these giants and you can just join the best people when you are writing with their ideas. I’ve been telling this story about a specific concept which was difficult for me in a concrete way and it was exactly this MMU summer school where I was really a newcomer. I listened to many people talking about “sandwiches” and I was like, “this is getting really concrete and material here.” So many people talking about sandwiches! And in the end I realized it was not the “sandwich,” it was “assemblage.” This is also me not being a native English speaker, so we have later been laughing so much at it. CD: But the sandwich is kind of an assemblage, in a way. It’s a very material assemblage…I would say. RH: Exactly. So I’ve been talking with people like we would maybe write a paper about sandwiches. Yeah, but this is just a joke, although a serious joke, as it relates to Anglocentrism in the academy, how much non-native English speakers have to do extra work in order to keep up. Of course assemblage is just one of the central concepts… in a serious sense of course something that I’ve really learned and tried to understand more and more all the time. But as I told you, there is the feeling that you should all the time read, so much more. PS: In your work, you often evoke this notion of the everyday as being really important. Can you speak to why these “small stories” and the everyday moments you write about in your work matter when you’re working with children? RH: When you work within the frame of education you are working under really normative constraints. So it is a kind of delicious place to be when you want to be a rebel a little bit. Because then there’s lots to destabilize, a lot to disrupt… I ended up kind of challenging myself, my past self as a teacher. As a researcher I was able to say things I would not have said as a teacher because of the practical and material conditions that regulate teachers’ work. …This is something that I’ve always been interested, everyday life, I find it’s the most interesting thing. As a feminist you see the political in those tiny little moments. I’ve always been a reader and I have loved for instance how short stories or poems can open the depths and layers that there are in mundane moments. Somehow, the writings that the children made, in my research, they do the same thing. So there’s something that I’ve been growing with, this interest and again, I was so, so excited to find that there are theorists who talk about the same things. But for children the everyday is all there is, and it’s also a lot of intellectual fun to take the children’s side and to

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go with them and see what’s important and what matters to them. You can always expect surprises. PS: One of the big contributions of your work has been to develop this approach you call classroom diaries. Can you tell us more about this approach, and how it might compare to other participatory kind of approaches with children? Do you see it as being of the same more or different in what it’s trying to achieve? RH: It was part pedagogical and part research in the beginning, and there was this new laptop that was given for me, and I brought it in the classroom. There was this interest, there was my exhaustion. There was the children’s motivation. And we also had grammar things to learn such as how to use dots and commas and so on. So, these things collided and came together and I came with this idea that they could start writing a classroom diary. When I noticed how much fun there was involved, and how much—I mean it seemed to be something that did not exhaust itself. We always started the day by choosing two volunteers who wanted to be the diary writers. Sometimes they were good friends, sometimes not. I was the one who appointed them. So, they took the laptop and sat with it in the corner of the classroom writing what was happening around them. They did not have any other work to do during the entire school day. And this was the open-endedness at work: there was a point when I already knew that I wanted to do research on these diaries. And I started to worry if the children had written about interesting things and I provided a list of questions and that seemed interesting to me. And so there were questions like how does the classroom look like and what are the children doing? How are they learning? And so on. In the end of the day, the children came to me with a list of good-looking answers to those questions and I immediately realized that this was not what I wanted. And I removed the questions and from that day on it was an open-ended practice. It was open in that way too that in the end of the day we usually printed those diaries out by the permission of the writers, so that others could read, and they were very interested. Most of them just visited all the time the writers and asked, “are you writing about me?” “Are you putting my name here?” (laughs). And yeah it just evolved into a really rich interplay between audience and writers because the writers knew that their text would be read either aloud or sometimes just put in a file or on the wall sometimes. But yeah, clearly audience was one part of that, and there was so much fun when the writers planned the effects that their texts would have on the listeners. But later on I realized that the interplay was not only between humans but it was a more than human interplay. PS: Do you see this as a research method that other scholars could utilize, or do you see it was very unique to your situation as a participatory approach? RH: I think it was both unique and yes, scholars and teachers could utilize it, again in their own unique settings. It was situated storytelling in the sense Haraway talks about it. But it was always somehow… also generic because you could easily apply the ideas of open-endedness in so many other contexts. And it’s actually not so usual at all that children are given spaces to tell about what matters to them. And yes, the same approach has just been applied by some researchers and it has been applied

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in teacher training at the University of Helsinki and right at the moment there’s a project between Nordic countries where I’m involved, and we are planning to use this approach once again maybe with photographs or smartphones. When you think about smartphones, how easy it is to tell rhizomatic stories using them, they are good to experiment with. So yeah, I don’t see the need of fixing that approach into any specific method, I’d rather speak about an approach. I think the basic ideas can be taken further and differentiated in many ways. It could be named otherwise, it could be taken further. Developed into something else.

14.3 Decentering the Child CD: One thing that we see crosses many scholars who are doing posthumanist and materialist research with children is the intention of decentering the child. So, we were wondering if you would claim that your work aims to decenter the child, and if it does, how do you do it? RH: Maybe what I again would emphasize is movement, decentering, and centering again. I mean—and I find that movement and between-spaces are again the most interesting here. I have talked about zooming out and in into the assemblages. Like when I was talking about adults and children during my dissertation and moving between teacher and pupil and adult and child and trying to figure how they were always emerging differently in different assemblages. The more stable cultural and embodied characteristics of childhood and adulthood are parts of it, but just parts, and not fixed. I wouldn’t say that I want to center children nor decenter them. I’m interested in children’s assemblages. Children plus. I will say it like this: children are never alone. So, they cannot be interesting as such. They’re not in isolation. They’re always connected. And I think these relationalities are where to work from, which is what I am trying to do at the moment as I’m researching child–animal relations. Relationality defines children in my work. Like Anna Tsing says, “human nature is an interspecies relationship.” So, there is a decentering movement, which is perhaps needed to begin, but at the same time there is this interest in those assemblages in a detailed way. And also, agency can be defined in that way, although I’m not a fan of the concept of agency at all, but if someone wants to talk about agency. The usual question: is it then so that there is no human agency anymore? So, OK there can be agency, but it’s not situated in individuals. It is in assemblages that are shifting.

14.4 Children’s “Voice(s)” PS: Another concept that we often hear when doing research with children is “voice” and the need to highlight children’s voices and to “give them voice.” Can you tell us a little bit about how you’re thinking about voice maybe how you would explain

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voice to teachers who are trying to highlight children’s voices in the classroom or to researchers? RH: I think I might have a little problem with voices at the moment especially because I am interested in animals now. So, this is a yeah, it’s a really big shift that I’m going through, this “animal turn,” you could say, and it has once again kind of put many things in a different light, also what I have been thinking about voice. Maybe voice is one of the most human-centered concepts you can find. But it’s also interesting, it’s very material. Thinking how voices are regulated, how problematic voices are. And it is supposed to be political imperative to raise someone’s voices. If you go into educational institutions, you realize that to include everyone’s voices is actually very much a material problem. Like agency… I believe that they’re shifting, they emerge in assemblages. I think practitioners are aware of how context specific children’s voices are. You only have to take one step from there to acknowledge that voices are not situated in individuals as much as we think. To understand voices as emergent and materially situated can work as another kind of political approach, and actually free children’s voices from normative assumptions pre-set by adults. PS: Is there an alternative to voice? If we’re not thinking about voices anymore. What could be the next thing or for you as you’re thinking through animal relations? RH: There’s this philosopher Vinciane Despret who talks about attuning instead of listening. So, an attuning is something that you do with maybe a broader scope of senses than only your hearing. And it does not have to involve rationality or explanations. When you let human-centeredness go, many things begin to speak, they stop being mute. So, I don’t know. I’m kind of on the move with this concept.

14.5 (Troubling) Child–Animal Entanglements CD: Could you tell us a little bit more about your role as a postdoc researcher in the project “Animate”? RH: Well I’m in my dream job now. I’m being challenged really a lot… to leave intellectual comfort zones. I’ve been spending this year (2017–2018) doing research together with Tuure Tammi who is my co-researcher here in the Helsinki area. Pauliina Rautio is leading the project from Oulu, which is the Northern part of Finland, and Tuure and I are working in the Southern part. And we have been spending a most interesting year in a greenhouse, which is built inside a normal school in a disadvantaged suburban area. The kids come to the greenhouse to become responsible carers for animals. There is something like 40 different animals—rabbits, iguana, birds and hen, rooster, snakes, beetles, mice—you name it. Some of the animals are in terrariums, like the snake obviously, but sometimes the kids take the snake out and play with it. Yes, the gerbils are in the terrariums, but their carers come and take them and play with them. But the rabbits are left to

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run freely. The turtles are walking around the floors. The iguana goes around and the birds, most of them are flying freely. Now we come to why this place is so—such an evocative thinking place because it is in constant trouble with all these species. It’s a constant negotiation about freedom and capture… gender and hormones, for example are part of it. I mean, the stories about male animals not coping with each other because they want to have their own kind of hierarchy and say… Yeah, it’s a very, very troubled place and very, very problematic and very affective, very beautiful, and it’s everything. And then all the assumptions about animals being beneficial for the well-being of humans, which is the dominant trope, and so anthropocentric when you start to think. We spent the whole winter there together with Tuure doing the multispecies ethnography. We are right now writing about it using the notion of care by Maria Puig de la Bellacasa to analyze it. PS: How did you become interested in this area of research? RH: Yeah it was not so much my own idea, but Pauliina Rautio invited me to join, and, I’m ready to go wherever she wants. I’ve learned so much through her writing and with her and she has this passion for animals. I’m actually not the animal type, like she, at all. I can truly say I don’t understand animals. I try to turn this into an advantage. I’ve hardly touched a horse, I think, so I’m really a newcomer to this world, very, very much challenged all the time facing new things, but yeah, it’s also a very energetic position to be. It is also theoretically inspiring at the moment… As I talked about this concept of voice. CD: You said that this space is affective, troubled, problematic. I wonder if you can share a particular event or experience that you’ve had in that greenhouse, in terms of your observations, something that was really intriguing for you, that has remained in your memories that you are thinking about. Could you tell us a story to have a sense of how that place is? RH: Yeah, it’s a place of stories once again, and it’s really a place where, I think Haraway has this about how stories produce bodies that produce stories. This materialsemiotic interplay is very, very visible there. Yeah about this problem, and to quote Haraway’s ‘staying with the trouble’—the trouble of that greenhouse. There’s the story about the rabbits. Tuure and I got this idea that we have to have proper data now. So, we took a wide-angle video camera and Tuure climbed up to a terrace near the ceiling and put this camera there. And so, we got this videotaped material about—all over the greenhouse. We were kind of having a little shock looking at that video because all we could see was ceilings of cages. Actually, we could not see animals on this video. We started to have a different perspective. Like it was not only homes for animals, it was also a jailhouse. And this issue of freedom and capture became very alive. And we had a talk with Maria Saari who is a Ph.D. student in our project and an animal rights advocate. And she’s very much questioning those practices where animals are there only for human’s learning and amusement and to be company. And so we started to talk about these things with the children, also. And this went on, and then one morning when we came into the greenhouse the children came to us and they said: “The rabbits have been set free!”. The rabbits had

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been free running before, but never the four of them at the same time. But now they had decided they deserved all to be free running around. But this day became really messy, and hurting, in the end there was fur all over, and the flower pots were fallen, and it was a big mess and violent… And so, in the end of the day, the kids decided this won’t work. So, they came back to the earlier practice that only two of the rabbits at a time were running freely in the greenhouse for some time of the day. So yeah, this was kind of like staying with the trouble and such big questions. And there was also another story about… I mean deaths and births are very present there because of the short lifespan of those small animals. There was a dead gerbil one morning in the terrarium. There was a boy who took this gerbil and he was going to deep freeze it because they put the dead animals in deep freeze in order to bury them later when the ground was not covered in ice. And then we asked, are you going to feed the snake with this gerbil because the snake was eating mice. Those mice fed to the snake are transported by mail deep-frozen somewhere from Germany. So, we thought, why not give this gerbil to the snake. And then this child was completely shocked. “No! That would be totally unethical.” And this made us think. What is ethical? What is at stake in the processes of eating one another? You know, behind the glass walls of the greenhouse there’s a school dining room where usually meat dishes are eaten for lunch. And so, it’s really different child–animal relations materializing there. So yeah, it’s hard to give you an impression of this richness of that place, but we’re going to write about it. CD: These are really important stories. And when Paulina and I started to think about these conversations, we wanted to give some stories for people who are interested in knowing more about this. We’re in a culture in which solutions are so important. And so, when we don’t have solutions we better not talk about things, and so we miss all the difficult conversations just because we don’t have a solution. And so, staying with the trouble and the stories you just told us, is about that, like having difficult conversation regardless if we have a solution or not. RH: Yeah, yeah, you’re putting it just right. Yeah, exactly. Education is all the time, more and more neoliberal, becoming more and more clear-cut, linear, efficacy, results, measurable—whatever. And these spaces—spaces for anything, even slightly difficult and open-ended are really hard to find. Yeah, you’re absolutely right about that. PS: Do you think one of the pressing issues currently in childhood studies is this thinking through child–animal relations? Children’s relations with the more than human world? RH: Animal relations is a mattering and pressing issue for children— and humananimal relations are at the core of the present environmental crisis, so they are a pressing issue for us all. So again, the animals and children are not alone, isolated. But yeah, at large, and animal relations also not in vacuum but connected to climate, pollution, waste, environmental damage, and the politics that follow. There is no limit to how harsh and hard dimensions there are inextricably connected to childhoods and child–animal relations. So, as I have been talking a lot about joy and fun in

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connection with work, it is important to acknowledge the dark and unequal and unjust assemblages of childhoods as well. This is something we want to emphasize in AniMate, that the most difficult and complex issues belong to children as well. Animals is one of them and we are responsible and invited to use our capability for theoretical thinking and attuning. The environment is not only environment, it’s—it’s our knowing, it’s how we know, it’s how we relate to others. I have talked about feminist new materialisms but in the future I want to begin to learn from Indigenous philosophies such as Sàmi knowledges. They never centered the human in the catastrophic ways the Western colonialist and capitalist projects did. So, I feel like it’s a responsibility toward children to allow them to ponder these questions, as difficult and unsolvable they may be. I don’t know... when I was a child, what scared me was nuclear war and the Soviet Union. And what now scares children? Climate change apparently is high on the list… maybe we should just ask them.

Further Reading Hohti, R. (2016). Children writing ethnography: Children’s perspectives and nomadic thinking in researching school classrooms. Ethnography and Education, 11(1), 74–90. Hohti, R., & Tammi, T. (2019). The greenhouse effect: Multispecies childhood and non-innocent relations of care. Childhood, 26(2), 169–185. Hohti, R., & Truman, S. (forthcoming). Dear language and practices of hoito/care: On Anglocentrism of the academy. Hohti, R., Paakkari, A., & Stenberg, K. (2019). Leaping and dancing with digitality: Exploring human-smartphone-entanglements in classrooms. In P. Rautio & E. Stenvall (Eds.), Children and the everyday: Arctic childhoods matter (pp. 85–102). Singapore: Springer.

Dr. Riikka Hohti Ph.D., MA (music), works at the intersections of childhood studies, humananimal studies and education. Inspired by theorists of the more-than-human, and by feminist new materialisms, she has employed ethnographic and participatory narrative methodologies when researching topics such as school classrooms, digitality, time, and participation. Riikka’s current research interests include child-animal relations, multispecies inquiry, and care. She has worked as a postdoctoral researcher in the AniMate research group, University of Oulu, and in Manchester Metropolitan University’s Education and Social Research Institute (2018–2019). Currently, she is based in the University of Helsinki leading her own postdoctoral project titled “Growing up in more than human world: Child-animal relations and non-innocent care”.

Chapter 15

Interview with Peter Kraftl Peter Kraftl, Paulina Semenec and Claudia Diaz-Diaz

In my work I quite firmly advocate a decentering of childhood studies that’s done in order to think and to explain more clearly how children are entangled within those processes, not to exclude them entirely.

Our interview with Peter Kraftl encouraged us to think about the ways posthuman and new materialist theories and approaches cut across different disciplinary boundaries, and the opportunities (and challenges) that this movement allows for reconceptualizing the child. Peter’s recent engagement with nanotechnology research, for example, offers a “decentered” approach to the child because it takes seriously the various ways that children and plastics are deeply entangled with one another; to decenter the child means that we take into account other agencies that are at work—not simply human ones. This can include dangerous microplastics found in soil and water, as well as more “everyday” materials like Lego pieces (see Jayne Osgood’s interview), and other “Tinythings” (see Casey Myers’ interview) that matter deeply to children. Such work prompted us to consider how we might come to understand the ontology of the “child” differently if we see the child as a human–animal–plastic–social–cultural–political assemblage, and not simply a biological/cultural being that develops according to prescribed milestones. We also thought about how this reconceptualization informs how we engage with children in research, and how it might necessitate different forms of inquiry, theories, and practices we may not have considered before. Peter’s interview also prompted us to consider how disciplinary P. Kraftl (B) University of Birmingham, Birmingham, UK e-mail: [email protected] P. Semenec · C. Diaz-Diaz University of British Columbia, Vancouver, BC, Canada e-mail: [email protected] C. Diaz-Diaz e-mail: [email protected] © Springer Nature Singapore Pte Ltd. 2020 C. Diaz-Diaz and P. Semenec, Posthumanist and New Materialist Methodologies, Children: Global Posthumanist Perspectives and Materialist Theories, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-981-15-2708-1_15

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boundaries may limit how we come to “know” children and challenged us to think deeply about where the diverse field of childhood studies may be headed.

15.1 Entering into the Field of Childhood PS: Can you tell us how you became interested in studying children and childhood? PK: I’ll take you back to my Ph.D. which I completed in 2004. My Ph.D. was actually about architecture. It wasn’t about childhood. I was interested in sustainable or ecological architecture. And my Ph.D. took me to two specific buildings both of which were designed with, if you like, kind of utopian principles in mind. One was the Hundertwasser House in Vienna—Hundertwasser was an Austrian artist and architect who had a really kind of colorful, quite childlike style. And if you like, his buildings were not truly ecological in the kind of sustainable technological sense, but I was interested in the symbolism of the buildings and in how people inhabited them. And in the kinds of feelings, emotions and materialities that were created there. So that was one building. The other building was a Steiner school in Pembrokeshire, in Wales, in the United Kingdom. And what interested me was that the building was built along very similar principles with similar kinds of utopian ideals in mind; it also had a grass roof and quite wavy walls. And I’ve published quite extensively on this particular building. But what interested me there was that initially I’d gone to observe the place to look at the building to think about the symbolism and the architecture but the building I spent time in was a kindergarten and I was actually quite quickly drawn in by the children themselves. They wanted to play with me, wanted to engage with me, and I ended up spending six months there as a classroom assistant and that kind of completely shifted both my perspective and to an extent my Ph.D. I hadn’t intended to look at children, but children and education became a component of the project. And from there really my attention shifted away from architecture although I’ve retained that interest as I moved toward exploring children’s everyday lives. And it was that experience where I became fundamentally interested in how the teachers, the children, and the building, and the materialities of the building created particular kinds of atmospheres, and what we term affects in geography. That’s how I became interested in nonrepresentational and posthuman modes of theorizing childhoods.

15.2 Nonrepresentational Research Practices and Children PS: How has thinking with nonrepresentational approaches altered your research practices, including the writing up of your research? PK: I was working doing my Ph.D. at a time that nonrepresentational approaches became increasingly popular in geography initially and then beyond and as you’ll know there’s considerable overlap between nonrepresentational approaches and these

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kind of bio-social, non-dualistic posthuman, and new materialist approaches to childhood. I guess the core difference is that nonrepresentational theories go beyond an interest in non-human materialities. Nonrepresentational theories are also interested in, I think, more feminist modes of theorizing around embodiment, around emotion, and affect, as much as they are around materialities, and actually draw these together. Hence, why they’re called nonrepresentational theories, they draw together a range of theories rather than being focused around the new materialist approach to material objects. So to answer your question, what that has meant has been a whole range of approaches which are quite methodologically diffuse… so underpinned by ethnography as a lot of work has been on the new materialist work has been in childhood studies and some of that I think actually is not necessarily a radical departure from traditional ethnographic approaches or traditional ways of working with children but rather a shifting of attention to the different constituents of children’s lives. A shifting of attention to material objects. A shifting of attention to the agency of those material objects, and a shifting of attention not just from the ways in which children express emotions but to the senses the atmospheres that are created in a particular place. And so, ethnography’s one key element of that. But over the years, on my own, but also especially in collaboration with John Horton with whom I’ve written really extensively about experiments with a whole range of approaches. I hesitate to call it creative—you invariably find someone who’s used the approach before. But ranging from a couple of papers we wrote really early on, where we essentially used auto-ethnography to visit places that were important to us in our childhoods and to think about the importance of a series of material objects and embodied actions and memories. The glasses that we wore and how we brought them into our adult lives, our first days at school, the playgrounds that we spent time at as children. So, we called them thinking-writing-doing projects, they were a mixture of kind of memory work, a mixture of playing with material objects, a mixture of telling stories, and sharing stories, and actually visiting places and going back to those places as adults. So that’s another approach. And then more recently it’s gone to kind of quite participatory approaches. I think we’ll talk later perhaps about where my future work and current work are going and we could maybe capture that then. But also, in collaboration with Sophie Hadfield Hill, who is one of my collaborators at Birmingham, using mobile phone apps to try and get at some of the kinds of everyday routine things that we can’t always capture at interviews. Not necessarily using those apps as a way of capturing usable data in themselves, but of prompting discussion and ways of mapping out children’s everyday lives in a different way. CD: Affect is salient in your scholarship, and I would like to ask you how spatiality has helped you to think about affect in a way that is not centered on children but centered on the materiality that you look at. PK: Yeah sure, I think that’s a very good question and I think the starting point is always to kind of outline how geographers have thought about affect compared with scholars in other disciplines. So, in psychology, affect would usually be seen as some kind of drive which is within an individual, actually, it’s on a continuum with emotion. Whereas in geography rightly or wrongly, affect was interpreted slightly differently

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to be what Nigel Thrift called a sense of push in the world, a kind of energy, or for some people an atmosphere which is intersubjective. Now that also gets us into problems because for some feminist scholars of emotion, emotions can be relational, and emotions can be felt between two or more people. But I think probably what just about distinguishes affect is that it can also admit the non-human in particular ways. So, affects are those, if you like, atmospheres or feelings that are produced between humans and non-humans and which come to characterize a situation or a space. And it’s for that reason that I think they are, to answer your question, inherently spatial because they are about the kind of coproduction of those feelings between different agents, usually on a microscale, if you like, within bounded spaces, so within a building, or within a kind of an outdoor space. But there’s been some really great work which has looked at the production of affects at a much wider scale. For instance, senses of nationhood that are produced when there’s a national scale event like a World Cup, for instance, or when a particularly important member of society dies and there’s a kind of national period of mourning. Well, there’s a sense in which yes there’s an outpouring of emotion, but there’s that kind of shared, that shared sensibility exceeds that and it’s extensive, it travels, and it’s a sense again, a sense of push which provokes people to respond in particular ways. For me, affects are profoundly spatial but there’s always this question which I think is a productive question and conversation about the relationship between affects and emotions. CD: You just mentioned larger scale, but you have also talked about a smaller scale, and particularly I am thinking about your work on geographies of alternative education in which you talk explicitly about love, care, and responsibility. Is there any difference when you look at these different scales in terms of affect and feelings, and how those differences make a difference in the work you propose for education? PK: Yeah, I mean that’s good question. I’m not sure I’ve thought too much about the differences between scales. What I tried to do in my work on alternative education, especially writing about love was to think about how love was spatialized and how it was upscaled. So, I began thinking about expressions of intimacy, expressions of different forms of love at a micro scale as you say. But then to think about how they might be spatially extensive. So how they are either manifested as dispositions to the world more broadly, and in some alternative education spaces that manifested as, for instance, ways in which schools would send charitable donations to other countries in instances of disaster. In others, it was a sense of how teachers wanted their pupils to act when they went out into the world the kind of care and love that they would demonstrate. I think less about the difference between those different scales and more about how they connect to one another or how scales are collapsed. I think that sense of upscaling and downscaling represents what Nicola Ansell talks about her work when she talks about trying to descale children’s geographies. She talks about the ways in which there’s been too much attention on the microscale and actually what we need to do is think about how childhood actually transcends scales in different ways.

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15.3 What Else? PS: I’d like to ask you about your earlier work with John Horton and your article on what else can we do with children’s geography? In that paper you encourage scholars to do more with certain ideas like materiality, body, spaces, affect, practices. Can you speak a little bit about why you saw the need for such an engagement in relation to children’s geographies and whether or not you think the scholarship has shifted to include some of these concepts? PK: Yeah. So that’s a really interesting question. The paper is I think quite historically situated at a time when there were several critiques, not just our own, of the direction of children’s geography scholarship which I think could also be relatively fairly leveled at work in childhood studies more broadly, which was that there was a certain doxa around children’s voice, around children’s agency, and around the idea of the social construction of childhood. And what we were saying then, and what we’d still say now, is that we don’t disagree with any of those assertions although there are problematic elements within them. Rather, we were concerned that there was a sense in which children’s geographies, like childhood studies, was becoming too ‘cozy’, as we characterized it. Stuart Aitken called it a kind of ‘bloc politics’ where there was just an assumption that the theoretical underpinnings, and the political underpinnings for childhood studies were voice, agency, participation, social construction, and what we wanted to do was to, in our own way, set out using nonrepresentational theory to afford a sense of how else we might study children’s lives, how else we felt children’s lives mattered and what mattered to their lives. So again, that was a key element. And those areas of especially children’s everyday lives that had gone overlooked, and it was our sense that nonrepresentational theory was inherently interested in the playful, the ludic, the material, and without trying to romanticize or think nostalgically about children and childhoods, those are elements that matter to children. Children are very often caught up in the details of everyday life. Children are very often the experts on their local communities because they spend time in them and see stuff that adults just overlook. Without wishing to romanticize, or to overgeneralize, we wanted to just open our whole series of areas of human experience and non-human experience that we felt children’s geographers had not engaged with fully in the past. And I say that carefully because there is some evidence where they had, so there were the beginnings of work on emotion certainly in children’s geographies and childhood studies and especially in terms of embodiment. If we think of the work of people like Alan Prout and Pia Christensen and especially Nick Lee, they were also looking embodiment and the child’s body especially in legal situations, at the turn of the 1990s into the 2000s. For us, it was an opportunity to gather some of that work, but also to try and push it into some new directions. I mean since then, I mean our work and other work, like Chris Harker’s work on affect has been, widely taken up in a whole range of directions. And also since then, there’s been both within children’s geography’s and childhood studies, not an explosion, but a real kind of increase in conceptual diversity. I mean, I think now childhood studies broadly is really exciting in terms of the manifold theoretical engagements from Critical Realism through to

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New Materialism and so on. That’s not down to us, that’s just down to a whole series of authors beginning to critique those orthodoxies that were emerging in the late 1990s. PS: Do you see any particular area of children’s geographies that still needs more attention right now or that you would like to see more attention on? PK: That’s tricky, I mean one area is the historical side. There are some excellent historical geographers of childhood, but there aren’t many, and the people I think of are people like Elizabeth Gagen and Sarah Mills who do fantastic work especially on citizenship and Sarah de Leeuw who works on Indigenous Canadian childhoods and who is a fantastic historical geographer, but that work tends to remain sort of much smaller in scale than the work on contemporary childhoods. It also tends to remain divorced from the work on contemporary childhoods in a kind of empirical sense. You find relatively few comparative studies or kind of longitudinal studies and I think that generally goes for childhood studies too, when I think back there’s people like Julia Brannen who looked at different generational childhoods but there’s not that much work that is kind of historically inflected to the same degree. And so one of the things that I’m interested in especially in terms of questions about decentering childhoods, which I will come to, and in terms of thinking about children after childhood, is thinking about how children are positioned generationally and how those generations work in relation to non-human generations, whether that’s notions of the Anthropocene, whether that’s generations of kind of economic cycles, whether it’s other non-human generations, on a much shorter or longer timescale. One of the things that I think childhood studies scholars could do if they’re interested in decentering childhoods is push at these notions of the historical, the generational, and so on. CD: I’m curious about what you mean by non-human generations. Can you give us more examples? PK: Yeah, I think I probably should have called them more-than-human generations because I’m interested in other processes which extend across time, which sometimes includes and perhaps sometimes exclude humans. If we think about scholarship on the Anthropocene that could be geological epochs. And the discussion at the moment is about, of course, how humans have effectively created a new geological epoch because of the mark that we’ve left on the earth. But there are different discussions about those timescales. There’s 4000 years’ worth of agricultural production, then there’s more recent histories of industrial production. Now all of those, of course, are human induced but they also involve a whole range of non-human processes and timescales, from the time it takes for concrete and plastics and metals to break down and seep into the earth; from the time it takes for crops to grow on a seasonal basis and the effect that has on how we treat our landscapes; we visited a really interesting, it doesn’t seem very interesting, but it was, it was a really interesting rubbish sort of garbage site in Brazil for some of our work. And there, what they’d done to educate children was they’d done a cut through the site and you could see how over time human and non-human materials were kind of accreting. So, there is like this kind

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of cut through the Anthropocene so you could, again, see those different epochs as you looked through the garbage site. And then we might also want to think about timescales in terms of climates, and in terms of vegetation, in terms of animals there’s a whole series of, if you like, they’re not generations in the traditional sense, but if we think of them as generations, then we can think of the ways in which humans are entangled in those processes but don’t always have control over them. I think it’s looking historically that enables us to do some of that decentering without necessarily forgetting that humans and especially children are entangled with them. And I would quite firmly, advocate a decentering of childhood studies—or as I call it in my book After Childhood a ‘moving in and out of focus—that’s done in order to think and to explain more clearly how children are entangled within those processes, not to excavate or exclude them entirely.

15.4 Decentering the Child PS: Can you tell us about your new book project about decentering the child? PK: Yeah, in a sense it’s got two starting points. One is this idea of decentering the child (or moving them in and out of focus) and the other is kind of essentially trying to move on from new materialist and nonrepresentational scholarship in children’s geographies and childhood studies. And the idea is hopefully, to generate some further new directions in how we think about childhoods and to encourage scholars to think carefully about how that decentering might take place and what the book does is bring together a variety of perspectives on doing that. One is that I’m quite heavily interested in speculative realist and object-oriented ontologies which come from a slightly different place from new materialisms and in particular come from this idea of there being earthly processes, especially geological processes, but also biological processes, which we know happened anterior to humans existing on earth and we know there are many processes that happen on Earth without any human intervention. If we just for a moment suspend our disbelief about the social-constructedness of natures and human knowledge of natures, we still know that those processes take place. And one philosopher, the French philosopher Quentin Meillassoux calls this “after finitude” so his sense of the term after is after the human condition . And that’s where I take inspiration for the term after childhood. It’s not in temporal terms and it’s not strictly in terms of humans or children not existing or being completely decentered, it’s in the sense that there are some processes that exceed human cognition and exceed human control. And what I want to do that is kind of play with that set of terms basically in a whole range of different ways. So, one way I do it is by reflecting on a current projects that we’re working on in Brazil which is about young people in the food water energy nexus, and in that there are various different nexuses going on. There are huge scale nexuses of food, water, and energy that involve non-human processes, the flows of water, food, and energy through cities, through landscapes, and so on over which we have little control. There are agricultural and industrial

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processes which children are quite frankly largely not involved in. There are others that children are involved in or are affected by but actually have little control over. But then at the same time we were interested in much smaller scale nexuses of children themselves. So how do they see how food, water, and energy are entangled in their everyday lives. I look at these different scales to kind of say, well yes, there are all these processes happening and children are completely decentered in many of them and actually in ways in which the nexus is represented, humans are often put in a kind of center position, but at the same time if we keep looking at them and if we still remain committed to some of the ideals around children’s voice and their experiences we can also re-center them, but by doing that we can actually see that, you know, there’s a whole series of problems of kinds of social injustice which we draw attention to which we can’t do if we just simply went and asked children about their views. So, it’s by placing these different conceptions of the nexus alongside one another that we can do this decentering and re-centering (or moving in and out of focus) and draw attention to issues that perhaps we didn’t research as childhood scholars in the past. That is one of the examples. There’s a whole range of other examples that I’ll look at. One is kind of this idea of generations and thinking about different kinds of generations and how children are positioned within them. Another is thinking about different kinds of energies. I’m doing a current project in collaboration with scholars in Canada and Australia, and with Arooj Khan, who is a Ph.D. student working with me, which is about climate change pedagogies and thinking about how different kinds of bodies and creative energies flow through different spaces. Yes, so the book draws on a whole range of examples to kind of build on this argument about childhoods after childhood. CD: You’ve said that you are interested in these processes that exceed the human condition. So, the question for many people is if those process exceed human condition why are they important for childhood studies or children’s geographies? PK: Yes. So, it’s a good question and actually I think it’s a twofold question because the other question is how do we witness them, if they exceed human cognition. And here my answer which is not a completely satisfactory one, is that is twofold. One, maybe we need to draw a line, to think a lot more about the moral and political imperatives of looking outside of the human condition. And I think that’s a conversation that childhood studies scholars need to have not just if we’re interested in object-oriented ontologies but same with new materialism as well. I remember Tara Woodyer, who is a children’s geographer, asking if we keep tracing all of these energies and flows which appear to be unbounded, where does that leave us in terms of a moral and political position? And I think that’s really important. The other answer I have is that what this requires, and another thing that I look at in the book is, I think more radical forms of interdisciplinarity than we’ve engaged in before. Childhood studies scholars have been excellent at interdisciplinary work. But generally speaking, that’s tended to be between geographers, sociologists, education scholars, anthropologists, people who on the whole are relatively like-minded. But it hasn’t to as much a greater degree involved a collaboration with psychologists, although there

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are some recent examples and even less so with people like environmental scientists, geologists, physicists, people working in completely remote fields. That’s why at the moment one of the bits of research that we’re doing and another project that I have funded is to look at nano particles in children’s lives. I’m doing some work with some nano scientists in our School (of Geography, Earth and Environmental Sciences) who can identify micro and nano plastics, metals, and other objects in the environment, but also in human bodies. And I think this in many ways exemplifies this argument about research after the child because we’re taking multiple cuts through how nanomaterials appear in the environment. One of the things that we do, which is really quite child-centered, is to get children to use an app and to basically record the plastics that they come across in their lives. And the foods that they’re eating. We’re then going to analyze those materials to see what kinds of nano plastics and nano metals they have within them. We’re also going to look at the presence of nano materials in their environments in drinking water, in air, and so on. So, we can think about how they circulate locally and globally but we’re also going to test children themselves to look at how nano particles actually circulate through their bodies. Now those nano particles are completely indifferent to children, they couldn’t care less. They are after the child, they’re after humans. Some of them have been produced by humans, others haven’t. Some occur naturally in the environment. And without wishing to kind of overplay the importance of the sciences and ideas of ‘objectivity’, because this is an interdisciplinary project and we need to remain critical. What we are therefore interested in is how these nano particles circulate but without again losing sight of what children are doing and saying. And all of this matters for two reasons. One, as we know from certainly in the UK there has been massive attention on micro plastics and the presence of micro plastics in watercourses, in fish, in vegetation, and these kind of macro plastics in the oceans. So, it matters in an environmental sense. It also matters because we don’t know to what extent—there’s just no research, we don’t know to what extent these plastics and other nanomaterials and pollutants actually are held in our bodies and passed through our bodies and what effects they have. But we do know that increasingly we’re putting nano metals in sun cream, in tomato ketchup, in clothing, actually in a lot of things that children are exposed to and these could have profound health impacts, but we just don’t know what they are. So actually, I think they matter profoundly and they matter in very different ways from wearing glasses. But I think they matter profoundly. CD: You have said this is an interdisciplinary project that has several stages, several focuses, that it’s going to answer several recent questions. What is the research question that you are most interested in this project? PK: It’s difficult to pick one actually because I think the nature of it being an interdisciplinary project is that the questions are multiple. I mean in some ways for this project it’s almost a kind of proof of concept piece of work. As far as I know there just aren’t any projects especially in terms of childhood that have tried this sort of thing before. So, in one sense the question is methodological: can we bring together experimental nanoscience with childhood studies? And from that, what are the ethical, moral, political, conceptual implications of doing so? But for me, it’s also, not

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another way, to answer, to ask, and answer this question about what research after the child might look like. But what it might look like in a sense that isn’t purely just about, and I don’t have a problem with this, but isn’t purely about tracing materiality or purely about tracing relationships, it’s still guided by some really significant political, and in this case, medical and environmental questions. So it’s also in response to one of the ways in which the early work that John and I did was misinterpreted it was accused of being apolitical. And perhaps it seems so. But we never meant it to be apolitical. We meant it to open up a series of different political questions and moral questions. That’s not to say that people read our work wrongly, but I think they misinterpreted the sense that we were just interested in being playful and messing around. To an extent, we were, but to an extent we weren’t, we were interested in posing different political and moral questions. I think what I want to do is do that more forcefully in this project. It’s those three things, the methodological, the conceptual, and the political that are really driving the project. It’s hard for me to pull out one as being the most significant.

15.5 Interdisciplinarity PS: I’m wondering if there is a challenge for students who may be thinking about these ideas but who are somewhat limited in their programs in terms of working in these interdisciplinary ways? PK: Yeah, I mean that’s a really good point. I think actually there are two challenges and one is actually your disciplinary positioning. So, the challenge for geography students is that they will come to university not having studied childhood generally. And they probably won’t encounter children to any great degree until they get to that final year of their undergraduate degree if they choose to take the module that Sophie Hadfield-Hill and I teach. And what we have to do initially is actually to talk about, you know, why childhoods matter, why do children’s geographies matter. We actually have to go through questions of voice and agency and politics and so on in order to then get to nonrepresentational theory. There’s a set of questions there about whether that’s strictly necessary or whether we could actually just jump straight to the questions about everydayness and nonrepresentational theory and so on. But what that does mean is that what we see in terms of the projects that students are able to do because of the framing we give them, they tend to be the more traditional mapping of children’s mobilities, children’s participation, decision making about planning, children’s voice in the home, those kinds of things they don’t tend to engage with the other kinds of questions that Sophie, I and others are working with at the moment. I don’t tend to work with students who come from a different arguably more advanced start point. I don’t feel like I’m particularly well qualified to answer that beyond that. Again, though, it’s reaffirming that some of these forms of interdisciplinary collaboration do require resources. They require financial resources which I’m lucky enough to have, the project I have, they require you to

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have collaborators. We’re lucky enough to have world leading nano scientists in our school just upstairs from where I sit. Which makes all the difference. But I guess that needn’t stop us from engaging in productive conversations because actually this work around nanoscience has come from two years’ worth of conversations with no funding and a series of kind of what ifs and a series of questions that we felt are really important to pose and actually asking those questions at conferences and elsewhere as a result of those conversations has been just as important. But I guess it does though, it does pose a whole series of problems. One issue we’ve had is that this nano plastic project is being seen by quite a few funders as so radical that they won’t touch it. They won’t fund it. But it does also pose problems for funding Ph.D. students because you have to go through some kind of ‘stream’. I mean Ph.D. students can’t be funded through an environmental science department and humanities, usually. In a humanities department you most likely won’t have access to lab facilities or anything like that. It does pose a whole series of problems and also for training as well in terms of the expertise that we bring to these studies; they do require collaboration. You also have to find people who are willing to be open about their approach, willing to talk about their approach. And I’ll give an example of that. One of the best examples of someone talking about their positionality that I’ve ever heard actually came from the engineers that we work with at UNESP in Brazil. So social scientists like to think they’re great at talking about positionality, but our engineering colleagues did this fantastic piece on how engineers think, what it means to be an engineer, how it affects their personalities; it was absolutely brilliant. But you need to find the right people who are open to those kinds of conversations.

15.6 Children’s Challenges and Childhood Studies CD: What challenges do you see children facing today as a children’s geographer? PK: So, I think my perspective as a geographer…there’s two responses. One is just to sort of come back to the question you were asking earlier about the sort of gaps in research. I think one was around the historical element, another which has been particularly acute within geography is that there are relatively few geographers looking at really difficult issues. Children who experience violence. Children who are in situations of war. Those kinds of issues. And there are authors who work on that. But I think there are others elsewhere in childhood studies who perhaps engage more. But what I’m not so certain about is how the focus on those kinds of issues tallies with the new materialist approach. I wonder whether sometimes new materialist approaches might be seen as too frivolous to deal with those kinds of issues. On the other hand, I wonder whether those kinds of issues seem to be so human-centered because they’re about the violence that humans do to other humans that a new materialist approach might not seem appropriate in some way. But perhaps there is a need for more thinking on that. The other issue that detains me more directly is about the complexity and intractability of a number of challenges that are

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facing children and childhoods today and how we develop ways of understanding and broaching those. We’ve been very slowly at my university putting together a kind of program of work that rather than looking at all the different issues that affect children’s lives separately, brings together strands of work around psychology and mental health, which are particularly pressing issues, not just in the global north, but also in the global south. Issues around air pollution which can in turn affect mental health, but are becoming increasingly pressing especially in Africa and the East African countries. Issues around natural disasters and the occurrence of natural disasters and how they intersect with social inequalities and marginalization, etc. And in turn linking those into education, infrastructure, engineering. Now this is a massive thing to try and do, and it involves much bigger forms of collaboration than just the nano science childhood studies collaboration I’ve just been talking about. And in a sense, there’s a question of saying, well okay you’re just trying to look at everything at once and trying to get an objective view of the world. But there’s also a sense in which you’re trying to do something which looks at the intractability of these challenges because you can’t disentangle these things when you look at them. They’re all so entwined and I think our thinking on the food, water, energy nexus has helped but that’s just food, water, and energy. You know you’ve also got disasters, soil, violence, war, engineering, a whole series of things. For me it’s the kind of intractability of those challenges combined with this position that we now see globally that the current generation of young people are likely to be the first that grow up poorer than their parents’ generation, environmentally, socially, economically, politically. Certainly, in the minority global north. So how do we broach that injustice in a way that doesn’t just focus on the social and economic, but focuses on the intractability of those challenges. I think a big question to end with. I certainly don’t have an answer. But for me that’s something that I think childhood studies scholars should be central in attempting to broach.

Further Reading Horton, J., & Kraftl, P. (2006). What else? Some more ways of thinking and doing ‘children’s geographies’. Children’s Geographies, 4(1), 69–95. Kraftl, P. (2013). Geographies of alternative education: Diverse learning spaces for children and young people. Bristol: Policy Press. Kraftl, P. (2018). A double-bind? Taking new materialisms elsewhere in studies of education and childhood. Research in Education, 10(1), 30–38. Kraftl, P. (2020). After childhood: Re-thinking environment, materiality and media in children’s lives. London: Routledge.

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Dr. Peter Kraftl is Professor of Human Geography at the University of Birmingham, UK. He is also Honorary Professor in the School of Education, RMIT, Melbourne. He is the author of 7 books and over 50 journal articles. His work focuses mainly on children’s everyday lives and spaces. He has been an Editor of the journals Children’s Geographies and Area, and is currently leading a project about children and plastics. His latest book, After Childhood, will be published by Routledge in 2020.

Chapter 16

Interview with Karen Malone Karen Malone, Claudia Diaz-Diaz and Paulina Semenec

Before I looked to understand what was going on for the child, now I look beyond the child, and I look at all the relations that that child is having in terms of what’s happening in that environment.

We were excited to speak with Karen Malone at the American Educational Research Association (AERA) conference in New York, 2018. Her book Children in the Anthropocene: Rethinking Sustainability and Child Friendliness in Cities (2018) had recently been published, and we were keen to discuss the many ideas and methodological approaches she takes up in it. During our conversation, we realized that like many other contributors in this book, Karen’s path to working with children, and to thinking and doing “posthumanist” research took many unexpected twists and turns. We were especially intrigued by her story of the blue wren—a bird she used to come across in her walks—and how often small, seemingly insignificant and unexpected encounters can unfold in meaningful connections. We also appreciated the many ways she elucidated shifts in her thinking and how this informs her research approaches—from more conventional approaches to thinking about data and analysis, to thinking more through concepts, such as diffraction and porosity. Karen provides many thought-provoking examples of how putting these concepts to work in her own research with children in different parts of the world has enabled her to take account of the multiple relations we are entangled in—from pollution and toxicity, to our always open-ended relationships with animals. K. Malone (B) Swinburne University of Technology, Melbourne, Australia e-mail: [email protected] C. Diaz-Diaz · P. Semenec University of British Columbia, Vancouver, BC, Canada e-mail: [email protected] P. Semenec e-mail: [email protected] © Springer Nature Singapore Pte Ltd. 2020 C. Diaz-Diaz and P. Semenec, Posthumanist and New Materialist Methodologies, Children: Global Posthumanist Perspectives and Materialist Theories, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-981-15-2708-1_16

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16.1 Tracing Perspectives on Children and Childhood CD: Could you describe how different theoretical perspectives have influenced your research? KM: When I did my Ph.D. in environmental philosophy in 1993–1996, the convention on the rights of the child was being signed off and the new sociology of childhood was starting to get traction. Therefore, the influential ways to theorize children’s environment experiences were very much embedded in children’s rights mostly around participation, and children’s activism and agency. I was using a lot of ecofeminist activist work at that time and therefore my research focused on exposing children’s invisibility and writing them into the everyday stories of neighborhoods and communities. Mostly the ecological architecture of neighborhoods, and in particular looking at children in challenging or degraded environments. My doctoral specifically looked at children living in public housing on the boundaries of an offensive industries zone where they were exposed to significant toxic pollution events. I used a lot of participatory research style methodologies and I always saw myself as a researcher who was working with children to support them to be co-researchers. I was at Deakin university when I was doing my doctoral so I was influenced by the significant traditional of critical theory and was influenced by visiting scholars such as feminist activist researchers such as Patti Lather, Laurel Richardson, and theorists such as Freire and Gramsci’s. I especially worked with the critical view that children could be organic intellectuals. A lot of the arguments that I made very early on in my work were about how knowing and being in the world were central to children’s agency and voice. To know and understand hegemony, for example, didn’t come from being educated but evolved from experiencing oppression, disempowerment, marginalization, loss. I wanted to do research that valued children as “knowledge-able” of their own lives. Children having these rights and having “knowledge” and “experiences” worth knowing was still very new and I spent a lot of my early research convincing university ethics committee’s, government officials, funding bodies, and even educators and parents as to why research with children, and not asking adults about children was important for my research. I argued that children could offer a very different perspective about their experience of being in the world and that children around the world had very diverse experiences connected to the specific context of their lives and we needed to acknowledge that diversity. As an environmental philosopher I often felt there were limitations with critical theory, and this led me engage with the theoretical work being done at the time by the human geographers. Geographers such as Doreen Massey, David Sibley who I felt were doing really interesting and innovative work around children and young people, place, politics, and exclusion. The research was always focused on urban environments, mainly with disadvantaged children. Early on and after working with Louise Chawla and the UNESCO funded Growing Up In Cities research team I developed a tool kit of research methods that I used. Children when they participated in the research therefore had the opportunity to

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choose from a set of possibilities of how they would like to go about doing their research in the neighborhood. Some kids might do one drawing of their neighborhood and that was it. Other kids do the drawing of the neighborhood and do a dream drawing. They also had choices doing photography so we’d give them disposable cameras and they’d take a camera out for a week of their life and take photographs. We also had walking methods, so we did walking maps, and children took us out into the neighborhood spaces. Children could also interview each other, work in groups, with their family it was always about being open to any possibilities. I started doing this work with children over 20 years ago now and during that time I have worked in over 15 countries. All of them different projects, different funding, different ideas that I was exploring at the time, but I always had the same research methods that children had the choice of. And mostly I kept it very open ended, never putting constraints on what I was expecting the children to do or what the data should be. The data was always analyzed and theorize from a range of perspectives and approaches depending on the research questions and the focus of the project. But what did eventuate was a significant database of raw data from every place I went. Twenty years later I now have this enormous database of research data focusing on children’s encounters of being in urban environments. Mostly very damaged challenging environments. And because when I asked children to document their encounters in these environments I was very open—I didn’t give them descriptive accounts of what I wanted, the data is very, very rich and very diverse. And mostly over the years I have hardly even scraped the surface of its entirety. Children’s drawings, photographs, maps, interviews from 15 countries. Mostly the data had been analyzed from a socio-cultural-ecological perspective, very human- or child-focused and very embedded in the landscapes of children’s lives and when I was invited by Palgrave to write a book for their children and development series entitled Children in the Anthropocene based on my UNICEF child friendly cities data. I felt I wanted to do more and extend my theoretical engagement with the data, but I was confident with these new theoretical approaches being espoused in the literature. I had started to explore posthumanism, and agential realism. I was wading through Rosi Braidotti’s “The Posthuman” and Barads “Meeting the Universe Halfway’ along with the work of Affrica Taylor’s book on reconfiguring childhood nature (she was at the time mentoring and supporting me) and I was also interested in Pauliina Rautio’s theorizing where she was applying intra-action in her thinking with children’s everyday lives. At the time I was living in a little apartment in Coogee right on the beach in Sydney, and I was going for a walk every day before I would sit all day writing the book. As I was walking along, I came to notice this little blue wren talking to me. I know it sounds weird, but it would follow me along the track persistently coming close and drawing my attention. It reminded me that bluebirds had been very significant in my life. When I was a child, but I hadn’t seen them much in my adult life. When I was a child not far from my house there was a stormwater drain overgrown with blackberry prickles and weeds where I use to sit quietly to hide and feel safe. It was refuge and I came to know it like it was my imaginary world where I was one of the animals, the birds the insects, the trees. There used to be a blue wren there that always came

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visit me. So, I thought this is weird that this blue wren just like when I was a child wants to speak to me. After a while, as I walked in Coogee, I started to look for the little blue wren, it made me smile and think back to my childhood. One day after the blue wren became really persistent about something, I just really did not understand I went back into my house and I was sitting on the couch and looking over and there was a bookcase and in the bookcase was my Ph.D. And it just sprung out at me and so I picked it up and thought god I haven’t read my Ph.D. since I did it over 20 years ago. I opened it up and on the first page of my Ph.D. there was a poem. I wrote the poem when I was 15 years old and it was the poem that I’d written as I was leaving that place, the refuge of my childhood, and in the poem is the story of the blue wren, and I read the poem and thought the blue wren wants me to read my Ph.D. Sitting on the rock I can hear the breeze playing on the leaves in the trees The sound of water trickles through my thoughts and dreams Is that a blue wren in the distance I can hear? Wren will you be singing here again tomorrow? or is your life so filled with sorrow since they choked the sky with smoke and took away your home? The silence is so easy Hiding in the shadows of history time stands still when I am here It is my special place Nobody knows I am here Nobody knows where I go But special place will you always be here? Do you quietly fear…… as I do? That in years to come the shadows will be gone and only memories will stand in this place. Karen Malone, March 1978, age 15

I sat there and read my Ph.D. for the first time in 20 years from beginning to end. And what stood out to me was the work I had included at that time about the importance of engaging in a new paradigm of environmentalism. Drawing on the work of Val Plumwood and Carolyn Merchant I had written that to change our way of being on the planet humans needed to recognize they were not exceptional creatures. That environmental ethics was the link between theory and practice, and we needed to translate thought into action, world views into movements. The dominant world view I had written was as entrenched in a structure of hegemonic values and processes based on “human exceptionalism.” Contemporary industrial societies reinforced the separation between ethics and morality and that a new ecological paradigm should include an expansion of human sympathies to include the non-human. Environmental

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ethics could be the shift to a valuing of, and compassion for, all forms of nature— nature has valid rights which need to be considered. When I read this, 20 years after I had written it, I thought “Oh my, that’s why posthumanism resonates with me”. That’s why it feels so right. When I first picked up Rosi Braidotti’s book on the Posthuman, there was something in me that just went—this is me. This is my journey now. Everything I’ve done before has led me to this. Then I realized that it wasn’t new; that it was there all the time. Then I thought to myself how am I going to do this? Write the book? Am I going to use my old theoretical frames, or shall I attempt to retrospectively analyze my past data using posthumanist and new materialist approaches, actually go back to those old past tracings of theory and create something totally new? I decided I would write a few papers for journals, trying out this new/old theoretical lens and see if I could do it. Would it work with this data? I wrote the two articles one in Children’s Geographies (Malone, 2016a) and the other in the Australian Journal for Environmental Education (Malone, 2016b), I gave a few presentations in conferences, started off with the multispecies ethnographies of childdogs of La Paz (Bolivia) as the sort of entry point, and then just allowed my theoretical and conceptual work to flow on from there. I explored data on radiation sites in Kazakhstan, Japan, climate change, and ecological disasters in Bolivia and Kazakhstan. Someone when I started doing this writing said to me you can’t use posthumanist approaches retrospectively on data and I went “oh why not?” No, no you have to do posthumanist research with a posthumanist perspective from the beginning was what they said. Well, I’m just kept doing it anyway and I found that what it allowed me to do is consider what had I missed? What was there in the rich data children provided for me that I hadn’t noticed that I had overlooked, hadn’t recognized? What posthumanism and now diffractive theorizing has done to me is that makes me work with data differently. When I look a photograph, for example, whereas before I looked to understand what was going on for the child, from their perspective, now I look beyond the child as only a human, I looked to see a child with and through the complexity of possibilities, the intra-actions that make up the past, present, and future relations of all that make up the ecology of these landscapes the child inhabits with other entities.

16.2 Decentering the Child CD: What does it mean for you to you decenter the child? KM: Children don’t see themselves as the center. They were telling me that all along in all of my research data, but my humanist lens and the cultural knowledges led me on a specific journey to categorize data that positioned the children as the center, the only acting agent. The background, the landscape, country the ecological relations were the context of their lives instead of understanding that they were in complex relations with all those things, objects, entities, that they the child existed among and

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with them. It wasn’t that I ignored that, that those things weren’t there. It’s just that I didn’t see the importance of acknowledging that children had these deeply integral relations with all of those elements in their lives. With the childdog relation in La Paz it started with looking at the children’s photographs. We had 120 children in the study, and they all had about 25 photographs. Which means I had close to three thousand photographs. When I interviewed children individually they would show me their packet of photographs and dogs often came into the conversation but I didn’t notice it as a big thing, yet when I spread out all the photographs in front to of me all I could see dogs and dogs and dogs all in the photographs. I knew the dogs were there in the streets during our walks in the community, I had tripped over the dogs myself they were always there, always hanging around and children told me that. I’d heard the story of the dogs often the familial relations they had but to me it was always that I was so focused on the child that the dog existed but the dog existed outside of the child, was with, but lived alongside of the child. Then I wondered what if I look at the dogs and I bring the dogs forward and I say what’s going on with the dogs? What’s the dog’s relationship with the child as well as the child’s relationship with the dog? And then I went to the point of going, can I read the life of a child through this dog relation? Because what I started to realize was the amount of time they spent with together childdogs not adult and dogs their relationships were very different. It was unique. This concept of childdog bodies was my starting point, a realization that being a child and being a dog meant something new came into existence. Then I started to consider how does this disrupt the human as exceptional mantra if child and dog have these mutual encounters of being and knowing the world outside of adult humans? And if I can say that, what else is there I can say about relational beings not just non-human animals but other entities? What other relations are there that are going on that I have not recognized or considered worthwhile writing about? I find with my posthumanist work I am now trying to unpack these deeper entanglements those that are going on in children’s lives wherever they are in the world. I was worried and concerned though when I started writing in this way the communities might feel this wasn’t a true way to write about children and landscapes, what did it mean using a posthumanist approach, that they think, how is this going to be useful to our community? Doing a posthumanist reading of a child’s life was tricky for me I had built up strong relationships with government and community figures who relied on my research to inform policy to consider the child’s wellbeing. I was anxious about their response when the book was published. But I am very grateful that I have had very supportive feedback on the stories, and I think it’s probably because in these worlds outside of capitalist dominated Western landscapes there is a desire to consider alternative ways of thinking about relationships with the planet. That a new ecological paradigm that acknowledges the complexity of our relations with the earth is seen as normal not a radical idea! When I went back last year to La Paz and spoke to the children about the stories we were having really interesting conversations how I as a Westerner…was capturing what it was a natural thing for them to see which is the idea that dogs have a reverence guided by the Pachamama this spiritual friendship is part of their everyday lives. It wasn’t hard for them to see that why I had valued this relationship so deeply in the stories I wrote about them. As

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a Westerner I believe I am seeing something new, my posthumanist lens is opening my eyes. But actually, they already recognize they are connected to the mountain, to the dogs, to earth, plants and the rivers, so to them it didn’t feel that unusual.

16.3 Shifting Lenses on Research Methodologies CD: You have extensive experience as a researcher. How have you changed the way you think about your research methods, your interviews, even the notion of children’s voices now that you are using posthumanist perspectives in your research? KM: I’ve started quite a different project. I’ve been working with pre-language children. Currently I’m researching children who are 2 years old. I am exploring child–earth relations as pre-language. Language brings human culture into being— we’re asking children through language to name, to represent through abstract thought a world a certain type of world humans have created through language. And in fact, by doing that we start the process of separating ourselves from nature, so the nature/culture binary emerges as the means through which we identify I as human and it as in the world outside of me. But when you are with 2-year olds—before they start speaking and engage in the language—they’re learning to be and know the world through their senses. I’ve documented a child for a year—I have made over 4000 videos following the child from 8 months till she was almost 3 years old. She also has a dog companion, and she spends a lot of her time with the dog. And I’m looking at how the dog is teaching her how to be animal, and how to grow and how to be in spaces, and how she teaches the dog about her encounters of the world, not through language just through their bodies. I’m trying to filter out the direct human impact— therefore there is no interaction between myself as the documenter and the child and dog. In my earlier research work I used to say children had an innate connection to nature, and I never really understood what I meant by that. I sort of knew they have a desire to know, that very young children especially have a natural desire to want to be in nature and understand that nature is as a restorative, engaging, learning place, and often they’ll used nature as a place to touch, smell, hold, play, explore, wonder be curious. But I didn’t want to romanticize this, I was very critical of the type of Richard Louv’s romanticization of nature as this special place for children. This idea it is an object of our pleasure, joy, that it is always a beautiful lovely encounter. I wanted to consider what does it mean if a child is nature from the time they’re born and actually they unlearn how to be in nature through human enculturation? That this enculturation if the beginning of the development of human exceptionalism; of humans positioning themselves as exempt from the ecology of the planet. Do young children feel that? Or do they use their senses to be in the world as nature? What I’ve learnt through this work is to look for these residues (i.e., different ways of being in the world) in data that I have missed. I’d be coming to it knowing that it exists, and I’d be looking for it through my body I am being affected by a knowing now that allows me to feel and know this data differently.

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PS: I like how you talk about data as “residue.” What other forms of data have you found and looking back and thought… Oh I never would have thought of this to be “data”? KM: I’ve talked a lot about the photographs, but I also engaged in mobile or walking methodologies some with the children and I in groups and also children in their own walking methodologies alone or with friends (including non-human bodies). Early in my career I was involved in the children’s independent mobility (CIM) movement where based on Meyer Hillmans research from the 70s we did “big data” longitudinal research projects around the world. Most of that research was very statistical work, surveys, and mapping with children about where they went and what they did in their neighborhoods. We also surveyed parents about their childhoods and choices their made around their children’s movements. Additional to the toolkit of surveys provided through the CIM program I also at each site developed qualitative data, mapping, drawings, photographs on children’s freedom and mobility. These global research programs, although useful for providing some broad brush or patterns/trends of childhood freedoms for country comparisons the focus was very much on universalizing childhoods looking for global trends seldom looking to fine grain city or neighborhood differences. The research and the analysis seldom sought to deeper connections between the environment as an influential element shaping children’s movements it was focused on parenting practices, cultural and social media trends, and government policies. I am now revisiting this data using Baradian diffractive theorizing as a way of thinking about flow, fluidity, and movement, what it means to be walking with and through non-human entities as a child. Noticing new data in the old research often means coming to it with fresh eyes with a new sense of how I could be with the data, allowing it to work through me being open to letting go to the normalizing impacts of my own experiences, my past research processes. Not wanting to say the first thing that comes to mind. Letting data sit with me, sit in me. Being playful, curious, getting lost, and being free to follow tangents, lines of flight if I was going to think from a Deleuze and Guatarri perspective. PS: Are there any concepts or approaches that you find challenging in your own work? KM: I have to say the biggest shift as I alluded to in the last questions is to move away from the old ways of analyzing data, the way I was taught or trained to do research as a young researcher. Setting up categories, using pre-determined themes, grouping things together, reducing data in order to understand how things were, what was there or was not, what was missing but also what was most prevalent, focusing on similarities and differences. Telling the story of your data was often around identifying and/or setting binaries and the fleshing out the tensions between those binaries. I don’t use themes or binaries anymore. Or let’s say I try not to, I try and trip myself up if I find myself thinking in those ways. Really this form of analysis is only one set from positivist research analysis, in which we are data crunching often still looking for the same “truths,” universal generalizations. I know analysis through emerging concepts. Conceptual framings are big ideas that have blurred edges and untenured anchors. The concept emerges from being with

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the data I don’t read a book about theorizing with concept and then apply it to my data. The concept comes to me out of being with the data. The concepts might be an idea or theme used by others but my use of it is always come from the data speaking to me and a shaping of thinking going on in that encounter. For example, if you take porosity as a concept, which I did in my working with radiation and childhood entanglements in Kazakhstan. The concept came out of reading about radiation, how it seeps into the earth and the bodies of objects and embeds itself into those earthly bodies and beings for thousands of years, sometimes dormant sometimes not. I am a bit of a science geek, but I never used to tell anyone because it wasn’t really cool to be a science geek when you were a sociologist. What Barad’s work particularly really enticed in me is, it brought out the potential to engage with the science geek in me because I actually really like reading science stuff, so even though in my research reports to UNICEF about the children in Kazakhstan, I didn’t really talk about what is an atom and how did radiation and how do nuclear bombs work. I was reading about it the whole time. I was there because I was really interested in what happens when radiation has been exploded with a nuclear bomb and it’s sitting there in the dirt, and when children talk about the fear of the radiation and talk about it is a real character in their lives, that it is alive. This single idea of radiation as flowing through objects, as an entity with its own agency allowed me to imagine radiation and making contact with childhood bodies. From this thinking, the concept of porosity was born, the next step was to consider with the data “what could porosity be?” How would I follow the story of porosity through my data? If a body is porous does it mean is it no longer exempt from the consequences of its entanglement with the earth and atmosphere? The human story of exceptionalism as somehow not porous not experiences the consequences of our own destructive forces. I’m no longer an island that exists outside of the ecology of the planet, I am part of everything and my body is not just mine, not just human, the story of being a human porous body is the same story of all objects human and non-human on the planet in which we are all implicated… that’s my diffractive theorizing. By using the concept of porosity, I am opening up new possibilities and following the emergence of complexities, not reduction. Themes close data in, close it down, look for order and control. Concepts open data out follow possibilities and the emergence of new possibilities.

16.4 Companion Grief and Children’s Challenges in the Anthropocene CD: What is your perspective about the challenges that children are facing today? Does research have a role in helping children deal with those challenges? KM: I gave a paper at the end of last year in a philosophy conference called Companion Grief. In the presentation I spoke of the politics of grief. That some of “entities” are legitimate objects of our emotions such as grief and loss and some of “entities” are not. This differentiation is crucial in personal and professional politics as it works to

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secure distinctions between those we acknowledge and those we don’t, those who are othered positioned as lesser beings. These distinctions resonate with not just “other species or thing” other animals or mountains, rivers, the atmosphere but also how we have as humans valued and positioned other lives as less important, the Indigenous peoples, the poor, refugees, street people, travelers. That is being out of place, not belonging, being invisible, the unseen majority of the lives in the Anthropocene. Research in privileged minority world countries is unlikely to expose these stories. In the presentation I asked what does it mean to be human on the planet at this time in the Anthropocene in terms of the grief of seeing the loss, whether the loss of animals becoming extinct, the loss of the environment, dead rivers, oceans with plastic and the loss of a sense of control. I think for many children this is their greatest fear. What life and living in the planet will look like and the fear of the unknown, of what the future holds for children. I think is one of their biggest concerns. I strongly believe that we underestimate how much it is affecting children. I’m really disappointed that we’re still doing research with children that is very much about content and experience about climate change as a global phenomenon. Yet we are not really understanding the entangled way that children understand, the way they are connected to the everyday worlds that they live in and that they are implicated in all of these disastrous outcomes of the crisis. I have been in countries where children are being directly affected by climate change now, not in the future, you know, these are the challenges they are facing to survive, this brings the urgency to the fore for me. When I was in La Paz, Bolivia at the end of 2017 the city literally ran out of water overnight and the only way we could get water was through water trucks coming from the Amazon. No one had made a plan. There was no plan. And yet the temperate glaciers had been melting and receding due to global warming for years. Scientists had been monitoring the demise without any way providing any plan of responding. It was going to happen but the crisis point always seemed to be a year in the future. And the children were talking about these things as part of our community workshops, and they were scared about the future. I think that is something that we really need to be working a lot more on. It is not just thinking about how we can overcome some of these problems from a scientific perspective, but also how we as a community are going to deal with the grief of the loss of what we thought our future would be. And in particular for our children and our children’s children. Children will be the ones who will carry that burden. At the beginning of 2019 there was the large school strike climate change marches around eth world. I was in Melbourne my home town and I joined in the march. I was so moved by the passion of the children, very young children with handmade placards demanding for a voice, demanding for adults to take notice of their concerns and fears for the future. It was inspiring, I hope their fears will create a global shift in thinking. Time is short, the evidence is that the extinction of species, the warming of earth planet is all accelerating, and we are at the brink of a catastrophic crisis.

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It is very easy in Western countries where we are privileged and where we separate ourselves from the implications of climate change because in a way we can buy a way out of it, but in these places in the world where I do most of my research children can’t. They are not going to buy themselves time even. They live the consequences of these disasters, litter, rubbish, climate change, loss of water, loss of food, species extinction all of those things. I think many Western privileged academics still conduct romanticized research on children and childhood even in the posthuman/new materialist space and recreate an unrealistic understanding of what the majority of the world’s children are actually experiencing. The nature network, for example, that continues to give step by step plans for parents to renature their children as if this is the experience of the world’s children. The childhood crisis or pandemic as it is often described is not whether our children in the suburbs are spending too much time on computers or don’t go outside to play. It is whether or not our planet is going to be able to sustain life in the future. Childhood anxiety, depression, ADHD, obesity, the list of childhood deficit’s goes on and on and the cure is always “nature,” vitamin N, getting children into greens spaces—evidence shows 3 X 30 min a week is ideal—the children and nature play movement and all its pseudo-medico fear and seduction through so-called “scientific evidence” positions nature as an “object” for human consumption, a restorative a prescription drug for the ills of childhood. It seems like a simple equation to make a compelling story of childhoods that use to be idyllic but are now in crisis, blame the lack of exposure to nature (not schooling, pollution, chemicals in food, destroying the future planet) as the cause and come up with the solution. It is a shame that more resources aren’t focused on what children are telling us about how they feel about the crisis and the challenges they face. PS: Is there any advice that you would give to emerging scholars who are interested in drawing on posthumanist or new materialist perspectives? KM: I would definitely say, one of the things is to use emerging concepts instead of themes when you are doing your analysis. Make sure that those concepts are big enough to support openness. And allow the concepts to emerge from the data not from a book or from your readings. That is don’t impose concepts on your data; allow the data to impose the concepts on you. Maybe taking a step back, my other advice would to be very open with the way you collect data and the methods you use. By focusing on defining instructions (draw me this or that) or narrow set of tools, what you don’t do is allow child/object opportunities to emerge in all its possibilities. When designing your research be open in allowing the children, the community to explore, be creative, be engaged with data with you. When I start a project, I come into the community and I spend a lot of time getting to know the place, the people and when I talk to children I do it in their time, their space. You may say, okay how is that different if this is posthumanist approach? There is a story in my book, where one of the kids is drawing a picture in Kazakhstan of their dream place. I was watching him as he kept drawing squares and squares and more squares, and I was thinking what is he drawing? And at the end, we interviewed him and he said that it is the wall

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that is holding in all the dirt and the dust, and behind that you can see the mountains where there is fresh air and the grass and the trees…when you walk around these communities, there is no pavement. They can’t afford pavement, so it’s all dirt. The dirt actually holds a lot of currency for them about fear of the radiation because they know radiation gets carried through dust and dirt. The next day I thinking about this the idea that pavement in his drawing is a kind of metaphor and a reality for controlling radiation and I’m walking in the center of town in the “city park” and I look down at I am standing on pavement in the same design as his picture. It is the only park or street that has pavement. To be sensitive to those nuances around what children are saying and then try to understand how that fits into the spaces, into their worlds, you have to really deeply be in a place and deeply allow it to unfold for you. Walking methods have become very helpful in my research because walking can slow you down. It allows me to be held in those complex, messy, gritty places. It allows me to spend time seeing, feeling, and sensing what is going on. That is what I think the potential of posthumanism approaches and diffractive theorizing can do. Being able to open up to the possibilities of all those things no matter how small are all in the picture. In the past with having humans as the main character in all of our stories we had relegated the non-human to background. And isn’t that why we are in this crisis, the Anthropocene? If we loved and cared for the earth and all its beings in the same way as we valued money, technology, human life would we be in this place, on the brink of global collapse? Bringing all the world into being through our research is a paramount collective response I think we need to make to the Anthropocene. But this isn’t to ignore humans, to write them out of the stories it is to bring all the entities into play and capture the complexities of our relations with all things.

Further Reading Malone, K. (2016a). Theorizing a child—Dog encounter in the slums of La Paz using posthumanistic approaches in order to disrupt universalisms in current ‘child in nature’ debates. Children’s Geographies, 14(4), 390–407. Malone, K. (2016b). Reconsidering children’s encounters with nature and place using posthumanism. Australian Journal of Environmental Education, 32(1), 1–15. Malone, K. (2018). Children in the anthropocene: Rethinking sustainability and child friendliness in cities. London, United Kingdom: Palgrave Macmillan.

Dr. Karen Malone is Professor of Education and Research Director, in the School of Arts, Social Sciences and Humanities at Swinburne University of Technology in Melbourne. She is an educator, urban ecologist, environmental philosopher, cultural geographer who engages with postqualitative, ecological, materialist and posthuman approaches. Through her global work Children in the Anthropocene she explores children’s everyday encounters of being/knowing the world with human and nonhuman kin in damaged landscapes. An example of these encounters is her recent study of ‘Children sensing ecologically’, where settler and Aboriginal pre-language toddlers walkwith a host of ‘others’ on urban landscapes and country. Walking-with is a time-travel-hopping in

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the embodied material labour for cutting through/undoing colonialist thinking by exploring possibilities of how children communicate as sensorial beings. During her career Professor Malone has authored 7 books and over 100 other publications. She is sole author of Children in the Anthropocene, co-author of the International Research Handbook on Childhoodnature and first named editor of the education book series Children: Global Posthumanist perspectives and materialist theories.

Chapter 17

Interview with Fikile Nxumalo Fikile Nxumalo, Claudia Diaz-Diaz and Paulina Semenec

While I’m always interested in children’s more-than-human relations, I never want to let go that these relations always take place within racialized, classed and gendered spaces. So Black feminisms really help me to pay attention to these specificities of child–nature relations.

We interviewed Fikile Nxumalo in Vancouver during the Critical Ethnic Studies Association (CESA) conference in June 2018. An important part of Fikile’s research has taken place in the province of British Columbia, Canada where she has collaborated with early childhood educators. With them, Fikile has cultivated ways of creating and practicing place-attuned pedagogies that challenge the legacies of colonialism and anti-blackness in early childhood education and environmental education contexts. In her interview, Fikile talked about the role that Black feminist, Indigenous, and critical posthumanist scholars have played in her research. She reminds us that Indigenous communities have long been thinking about the human in intimate relationship with the more-than-human world. She shared with us how she is currently, in collaboration with an Indigenous scholar, thinking about children’s relations to water through water pedagogies. Our conversation with Fikile invited us to think deeply about the conundrums that decentering the child imposes on researchers in a context where childhoods continue to be situated in racialized, classed, and gendered relationships.

F. Nxumalo (B) University of Toronto, Toronto, Canada e-mail: [email protected] C. Diaz-Diaz · P. Semenec University of British Columbia, Vancouver, BC, Canada e-mail: [email protected] P. Semenec e-mail: [email protected] © Springer Nature Singapore Pte Ltd. 2020 C. Diaz-Diaz and P. Semenec, Posthumanist and New Materialist Methodologies, Children: Global Posthumanist Perspectives and Materialist Theories, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-981-15-2708-1_17

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17.1 Challenging Colonized and Neoliberal Childhoods CD: How did you become interested in children and childhood as a field of study? FN: I came to the field first as an educator and care-giver of young children. It was my involvement in the Investigating Quality project, an ongoing professional learning space for early childhood educators co-founded by Veronica Pacini-Ketchabaw and Alan Pence, that inspired me to pursue further study in early childhood education. It was in this space, where I initially participated as an early childhood educator, and much later as a pedagogical facilitator, that I first encountered perspectives that helped me deepen my understandings of my pedagogical practices with young children. This space, where educators, facilitators came together for challenging dialogues on ECE theory-practice in conversation with pedagogical documentation, was an important inspiration for my scholarly engagement with the ethics, politics, socio-materialities, and complexities of early childhood pedagogies. For example, it was through these discussions that I became interested in how early childhood practices could move beyond a dominant focus on the developmental outcomes of the individual child, and how such movements could also resist neoliberal, settler colonial, and racist formations in early childhood education. Just before this interview, Veronica PaciniKetchabaw and I were also discussing how our own early childhood experiences also brought us to particular orientations in early childhood research and practice. In particular we spoke about the commonalities in our experiences of growing up in colonized spaces and later coming to realizations about the ways in which children’s subjectivities, including our own, were being constructed in educational spaces in very colonial ways. We were also discussing the ways in which we work to unsettle that coloniality in our own work. So all of this is to say that my own embodied experiences of education of a colonial kind has also been a significant influence in the ways in which I have entered into early childhood education and research. CD: You mention these common experiences of growing up in places that are colonized places and how that played and continues to play an important role in the way children grow, and how it changes their subjectivities. Would you like to share some memories of that childhood when you think about growing up in this colonized environment that kind of illustrate what you mean by that? FN: If I have to pinpoint a particular example I think for me language was always something that very much is like a strong imprint in terms of early education for me, in terms of growing up in a former British colony, but still being educated in English and just being really marinated within a British-style education system from a very, very young age. In my book, Decolonizing Place in Early Childhood Education (Nxumalo, 2019), I write about the experience of regularly singing in school an Anglican hymn “All Things Bright and Beautiful,” and how the places described in the song held no connection to the places and spaces of my everyday world. I describe this in relation to the absence of meaningful, situated place-based education in my early schooling experiences.

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17.2 Feminist and Indigenous Frameworks “for” Early Childhood CD: What are the tenants, if you will, of your research? What are the frameworks that help you to go forward with your ideas? What are the main principles that you want to keep in your research? FN: I am inspired by feminist theories and in my work, I always want to attend to the “where” of early childhood education in critical ways. So feminist geographies, especially Black and Indigenous feminist geographies, have been really important for me because they allow me to pay really close political situated attention to place and space in the settler colonial and anti-Black contexts, of early childhood education. I also work with perspectives from Indigenous and Black Studies, feminist environmental humanities, and critical posthumanisms. Taken together, perspectives have been important in helping to conceptualize decolonial possibilities for unsettling romantic, anthropocentric, and uninscribed constructions of place in dominant approaches to early childhood environmental education. Within the early childhood field, Affrica Taylor’s work has also been really inspirational to me in rethinking childhood and normative perspectives of childhood–nature couplings. All of these perspectives have been really important in helping me to pay critical attention to place and space in early childhood education and research. CD: Part of your work is from a Black feminists’ perspective. What are the questions that Black feminist perspectives allow you to bring into the discussions about childhood? FN: Michelle Salazar Perez is someone who’s been very inspiring for me, who draws on Black feminist perspectives in early childhood education in really important and disruptive ways to make visible and challenge the marginalization of children of color in early childhood education spaces. Black feminisms for me, as I mentioned, inform my attention to place and space and childhood in relation to anti-blackness. Black feminist perspectives also help me to consider how attention to the more-thanhuman in early childhood education, can also at the same time bring attention to inequities within the category of the human—in other words to avoid universalization of the human that from my perspective, can be a limitation of working exclusively with Euro-Western theories such as posthumanism or new materialisms. Black feminisms help me to critically interrogate the whiteness of environmental education for young children and to imagine affirmative and emancipatory possibilities (Nxumalo & Ross, 2019). Black feminisms provide me with multiple conceptual and pedagogical tools for challenging the deficit ways in which Black children’s relations to nature are represented. They also help me to attend to the specificities of Black Canadian childhoods. For instance, I’ve written about the connections between the absences of Black place relations in place-based education in Canada, inspired by Black feminist geographers like Katherine McKittrick (Nxumalo, 2019). While I’m always interested in children’s more-than-human relations, I never want to let go that these relations always take place within racialized, classed, and gendered spaces. So

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Black feminisms really help me to pay attention to these specificities of child–nature relations. Those are just some of the ways in which Black feminist perspectives are really helpful and inspirational to me.

17.3 Foregrounding Indigenous Presence Through Research Practices CD: One of the alternative ways of thinking you have proposed through your work is about this idea of refiguring presences. How does this idea help you to think differently about the research you do? FN: I reference Anishnabee scholar Leeanne Simpson who talks about presencing as modes of resisting Indigenous erasures in particular places. This includes foregrounding Indigenous presence, resurgence, and land relationships. For me, refiguring presences became something to think-with about our time in the forest with children and educators as I was wondering about what was there that we were not paying attention to, or that we were not noticing even as there were really interesting things that were happening between children and the forest. What did it actually mean to be doing forest pedagogies in this place where Indigenous peoples had been violently removed? What were some possibilities for thinking and doing differently towards decolonizing practices? Refiguring presences was something that I could grasp onto to begin to configure what were some ways pedagogically, but also conceptually and methodologically, to trouble normative colonial forest pedagogies. For instance, I’ve written about how situated place stories could act in interruptive ways to these pedagogies.

17.4 Decentering the Child in Early Childhood Education Research CD: Much of the research under this umbrella of posthumanist or new materialist perspective claims to decenter the child. Would you claim that you work seek to decenter the child? How do you do it and why is it important in your research? FN: The decentering of the human not something new that only comes from posthumanist perspectives. In teachings from my Indigenous Swati culture, humans are not at the center and have never been and there are many stories and other teachings that tell what happens when humans or other beings for that matter, makes themselves the center or put themselves above other more-than-human relations. There are many multiply situated Indigenous knowledges that foreground reciprocal human/morethan-human relations. I think it is important to recognize that it’s not particularly a new perspective that we need to decenter the human. I feel even more now in relation

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to situating my work in environmental education that there’s an urgency that we need to take up these knowledges, both critical posthumanisms and Indigenous relational ontologies that suggest that we cannot continue with the universalized, individual human developing child as the center of what we do. But I think the how is something that I am always working on with teachers and children in trying to do pedagogy differently. Today I was talking about some water pedagogies that I’ve been trying out with a co-researcher, Marleen Villaneuva (Pame), trying to relate to water differently with young children, and trying to find the language to even describe children’s water relations without describing this in developmental language that says this is what the child did, or these are skills the child learned. I don’t think I have the how figured out (which is not to suggest that there is a singular how-to) but I’m still, at least, in my own pedagogy with young children, it’s something that I’m always trying to do because I think like I said, there’s a sense of urgency, at least for me, that we learn to do things differently, and to think about and with children differently in relation to the more-than-human.

17.5 Working with Educators and Destabilizing Dichotomies CD: Can you share with us some of the conversations you have had with teachers about the work you do particularly about we’ve called decentering the child? How do you enter in those dialogues with teachers but also with Indigenous scholars about water pedagogies, for example? FN: I think what’s been really helpful has been having regular learning circles with early childhood educators where we engage with a provocative reading that is connected to what is happening in our inquiries, but at the same time working to trouble the dichotomy between theory and practice. What are the different words we can use? What are the different things we can attend to when we’re outside with children and trying to make those connections in that way? And not to say that everything necessarily connects or that it’s been smooth, but like I said, trying out pedagogies differently. I have recently collaborated on a book chapter with a kindergarten teacher, Libby Berg, that I’ve been working closely with for the past two years. The chapter will appear in an edited book titled “Teaching Climate Change in the United States.” In this chapter, we discuss our grapplings with anti-colonial and non-anthropocentric water pedagogies in Austin Texas as modes of climate change education. One concept and practice that I mentioned earlier, that has been key to orienting our collaborative work with children is refiguring presences (Nxumalo, 2019) which refers to a commitment to pedagogies that resist the erasures of Indigenous land, life, relations, and knowledges in the spaces and places where we spend time with the children—in this particular case, a creek that borders the school. With Libby and Marleen, we have been engaging with what water pedagogies of refiguring presences might look like in this particular place. An important part of this situated work has been pedagogies

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that presence Indigenous Coahuiltecan water stories and water songs (see Nxumalo & Villaneuva, 2019). While I do not think there is a single prescriptive approach into entering these dialogues with teachers, I think it has been helpful to think together about how we might enact pedagogies that have an intentional guiding orientation, yet at the same time are open to what emerges in each encounter between children, educators, place, stories, more-than-human actants, and so on. CD: How do teachers engage with those provocations? FN: We’re not just working in the learning circles outside the classroom. We are working with children and educators on a weekly basis—and through email and documentation in-between the place-based work. And I think that actually makes a huge difference. In the example I just mentioned, I am at the creek with the teachers and children once a week, working closely together on pedagogy and curriculummaking with the children and then documenting those encounters collaboratively with the teachers. In the time between our visits, teachers also engage with the water pedagogies in multiple ways such as arts-based encounters and reading books to children. It has been particularly lovely to see how Marleen’s work with the teachers and children has persisted such as when the teachers and children sing to the creek the water songs that Marleen taught them, and when both teachers and children speak of the liveliness of the water—an important shift away from viewing water as simply a mute playscape or source of child development.

17.6 Collective and Collaborative Research-Creation in Early Childhood Research CD: We are aware you problematize research methods. How do you decide on what research methods you will use? FN: I would say I am guided by a commitment to participatory and decolonial approaches in my research with teachers, children, and other community members. What those methods might look like can be quite emergent in dialogue with the people and places that I am working with. For example, in my current study on Central Texas water stories and climate change, following the lead of the Coahuiltecan elders that I am working with, our research includes both surveys and interviews as ways to engage with people’s perspectives on the Sacred Springs Pow Wow and perspectives on water, and climate change-related water events in Texas. In working with children, it is important for me to work with methods where children can participate in multiple ways; whether it is by taking photos, listening to and telling stories, creating art, walking, and many more emplaced approaches. PS: Is there a way of doing posthumanist research and still using some of those more traditional methods? FN: I teach introduction to qualitative research to graduate students where we engage with mostly with conventional qualitative research methods. In this class, I don’t

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think for me it’s necessarily about discarding those traditional qualitative practices, but perhaps, it’s instead the idea as Haraway says of staying with the trouble— sometimes it is working with and unsettling the conventions at the same time. This also includes making visible their limitations. Limitations that include reproducing the anthropocentric humanist subject and the coloniality therein. I also teach an advanced qualitative research methods class. In that class, we work with critical posthumanist and decolonizing research methods and I encourage students to try out different postqualitative approaches. I have found the text Thinking with Theory in Qualitative Research by Lisa Mazzei and Alecia Youngblood Jackson particularly useful in this regard as it illustrates ways in which one might work with data such as interviews, in creative and non-anthropocentric ways beyond conventional coding practices.

17.7 Writing About What Troubles Us PS: Can we ask about how you approach analysis if you’re not coding in a traditional sense? When you have your data and all your observations and photographs and so on, how do you think about what’s happening? How do you write it up? How do you pay attention to those things? FK: I think it depends on what I’m writing. Lately, I’ve found diffractive ways of writing about what I’m interested in and it has been really productive. For example, with the water pedagogies that I just discussed, I juxtapose in my writing, pedagogical encounters with other water stories that are erased from our water pedagogies but are very much connected. So I’ve found that storytelling kind of device to be something generative and productive, which I don’t know for the reader might be frustrating because I’m not doing like a set analysis where I say: “This is what I did with the children and this is what happened” but instead I’m telling this little mundane story about children at the creek, and then I’m juxtaposing that with like an Indigenous story about water, or my own memories about water, to kind of trouble and complicate what’s happening and bring something else to it. Quite a few things that I’ve written have come out of educators’ pedagogical documentation, that we’ve then brought to the learning circle and discussed and brought readings to think with. So, it’s often not an individual process in terms of what to think with and focus on. CD: We were wondering about what your experience is teaching this new way of doing research. As you said, universities still pretty much appreciate a very particular way of research methodology, quantitative and qualitative research methods. If you don’t follow that method in a way, some may say that it lacks rigor. I wonder how do you navigate through those challenges when you teach? Do the students expect you to have one answer to their questions? FN: Like I said I teach the intro to qualitative course which has specific things that I need to teach around coding, and you know the Creswell 5. But I have also had the

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opportunity to build my own advanced qualitative research course where I get to do the things that I’m interested in. But I think in both of those courses, I always try to not create a binary, to give students the possibility to know different ways of doing research. That’s not saying that this way is better, because I think sometimes with the “post” it is easy to create a binary or like a linear progressive approach; like if you’re doing postqualitative research, you’re doing something better. I’m consciously not trying to create that kind of binary. I haven’t really had any tensions. For me, it’s really more about thinking with theory/knowledges and putting theory closely with method and so we use the Mazzei’s and Jackson’s as our text, but we also read Indigenous scholars, Black scholars and really dig deep into theory and try to bring theory close to method to talk about what that might look like with students. CD: Writing has become, I would say, a very important way of thinking with, not as an end product, but as a way of developing curiosity, these tensions you were talking about, and as a way to share with others how you are thinking about something. What is writing for you and how does it help you to develop your thoughts and your ideas in your research? PS: And if you have a writing practice that you would like to share with us, that would be very helpful. FK: I wish I had a writing practice (laughs). I read all these wonderful things about writing practices. But I feel like my writing is very much just…wherever I can find the spaces to do it. I wish I had more of a writing practice. I really feel privileged to work in a space where that’s a big part of my job, is getting to put things out in the world that hopefully some researchers and educators might read and take something from and find useful. I think it’s quite a privilege to be able to do that. And I’m challenging myself in how I can put some of those ideas in the world differently for different audiences. I’m talking about those many challenges that young children are facing. One of the things I have been doing is participating in an Op-Ed project where I get to learn how to write for a mass audience about some of these issues. So, this continues to be a really good and an important challenge for me, but I don’t have any big advice, but I do think that it is a huge privilege and one of the best parts of my job for me is the writing. I wish I had more time to do it. CD: Part of your research is engaged with the challenges that children are facing today. What are those challenges? What are those more pressing challenges? How is the work you are doing engaged in looking at those challenges? FN: So many, it’s hard to know. But I think encapsulating them within settler colonial heteropatriarchy, racial capitalism, and climate change and then how to raise children within all of that, without kind of you know, repeating those discourses that we were talking about earlier, such as then centering the child and constructing the child as the future savior. So, what does it mean to do education differently within these settler colonial, highly uneven worlds that children are living in and inheriting alongside more-than-human others? What does that mean and what does that look like? I think for me what’s helpful even though it’s not like I’m thinking of a grand solution, I

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try to think about what does that look like in everyday practice with young children like in those small mundane moments by the creek that I mentioned earlier. For instance, I think of these “minor” everyday pedagogies as actually world-making. So, for example, that shifts in children’s affective water relations actually matter for the potential of making more livable worlds, and that affective pedagogies are also an important and necessary part of decolonial climate change education. So, what are the shifts that can happen, and what kinds of situated (not universalized) curricular and pedagogical orientations are generative? I have to think that these everyday pedagogies make a difference or else I wouldn’t do the work. But at the same time, I do feel overwhelmed when I think about the huge monstrosity of things that are facing current and future generations.

Further Reading Nxumalo, F. (2018, December, 24). How climate change education is hurting the environment. https://thehill.com/opinion/energy-environment/422720-how-climate-change-educationis-hurting-the-environment. Nxumalo, F. (2019). Decolonizing place in early childhood education. New York: Routledge. Nxumalo, F., & Ross, K. M. (2019). Envisioning black space in environmental education for young children. Race, Ethnicity & Education, 22(4), 502–524. Nxumalo, F., & Villaneuva, M. (2019). Decolonial water stories: Affective pedagogies with young children. International Journal of Early Childhood Environmental Education, 7(1), 40–56.

Dr. Fikile Nxumalo is an assistant professor in the Department of Curriculum, Teaching and Learning at the Ontario Institute for Studies in Education (OISE), University of Toronto. Fikile’s research is centered on possibilities for place-attuned early childhood pedagogies that are responsive to the ethics and politics of young children’s inheritances of anti-blackness, environmental damage and settler colonialism. This scholarship, which is published in journals including Environmental Education Research, Contemporary Issues in Early Childhood, Children’s Geographies, and the International Journal of Qualitative Studies in Education, is rooted in multiple perspectives, including those from Indigenous knowledges, Black feminist geographies, and critical posthumanist theories.

Chapter 18

Interview with Affrica Taylor Affrica Taylor, Claudia Diaz-Diaz and Paulina Semenec

… there are others way of thinking about what it means to be human and our place in the world. They already exist. We just have to try harder to find them.

The interview with Affrica Taylor took place on June 2018 via Skype. It was a real challenge to decide what to keep and what to edit out of this interview since it was full of vivid stories about what it means to be human and our place in the world. Affrica’s background in cultural geography and her longstanding collaborations with Indigenous people have placed her in a unique position to do research with children. As she told us, using research methods that decenter the child has come quite easily for her because she never really had a strong interest in looking at the child in isolation, but rather always in relationship to the places they inhabit. Her scholarship, and in particular her attention to critically examine the notion of nature and childhood, has been quite influential for researchers in the field of early childhood, childhood studies, and children’s geographies. While she acknowledges that post-structural perspectives continue to inform her “grab bag” of methods, she is unsatisfied with the limitations of poststructural critique, and this is why it is important for her to move toward common world methodologies for a common world. Affrica also speaks of the challenges in decentering the child. In writing in English, for example, we lack a vocabulary and a grammar to account for the relationships between the child and the more-than-human world. It is a challenge especially because humans are the ones doing the writing. This interview will introduce the work that Affrica is doing A. Taylor (B) University of Canberra, Canberra, Australia e-mail: [email protected] C. Diaz-Diaz · P. Semenec University of British Columbia, Vancouver, BC, Canada e-mail: [email protected] P. Semenec e-mail: [email protected] © Springer Nature Singapore Pte Ltd. 2020 C. Diaz-Diaz and P. Semenec, Posthumanist and New Materialist Methodologies, Children: Global Posthumanist Perspectives and Materialist Theories, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-981-15-2708-1_18

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to engage with difficult questions around the politics and the ethics for living well together in a common world without assimilating difference into sameness.

18.1 Challenging the Divide Between Culture and Nature CD: You wrote the book “Reconfiguring the Natures of Childhood” in which you developed a rich rational for moving away from ideas that persist in the romantization of nature and childhood. Can you tell us more about your ideas in that book? AT: Both childhood and nature are highly romanticized within the Rousseau-inspired Western traditions and coupled together they pose a seductive force. Before I entered the field, the romantic notion of the naturally innocent child that needs protection had already been challenged by post-structuralist RECE scholars, such as Gunilla Dahlberg and Peter Moss. They stressed that what we justify as natural is actually a cultural construct. Apart from this, within early childhood education, the notion of nature remained under-theorized, particularly when used to refer to the physical world “out there,” beyond the classroom. For instance, nature “out there” is the takenfor-granted referent in the push towards outdoor, nature education. As a cultural geographer, I felt I was able to contribute some new insights into the coupling of childhood and this external notion of nature, by showing how prevailing romantic notions of nature-out-there bring additional force to prevailing romantic notions of childhood. I did this by drawing upon Bruno Latour’s STS1 retheorizations of nature, which have had a big influence upon the deconstructive scholarship of cultural geographers, and on Donna Haraway’s feminist blurring of nature and culture. She’s been queering the nature/culture divide for decades, although her work has had less traction within cultural geography. My impetus for tackling romantic Western notions of nature was not entirely theoretical. Some of it can be traced back to my formative experiences teaching in a remote Central Australian Aboriginal community school in the 1980s. The school’s central purpose was to ensure that children learn about their country and culture in order to keep them strong. And all of the school’s Arrernte and Luritja elders kept stressing that children can’t grow up to be strong without culture and country, and that you can’t think and learn about one without the other. They saw culture and country as inseparable. It took me a while to understand the enormous significance of this, but when I started reading Haraway’s and Latour’s challenges to the nature/culture divide as a postgraduate cultural geography student in the 1990s, I knew from all the time I’d spent with Aboriginal people that there are other ways of thinking and being that aren’t premised upon separating humans from the rest of the world. Also, while I was studying in 1990s a leading Australian Aboriginal scholar called Marcia Langton mounted a strong objection to the popular notion of wilderness 1 Science

and Technology Studies.

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that evokes the notion of pristine, unpeopled nature and is upheld in environmental discourses. She insisted that there is no wilderness, or unpeopled land or country in Australia and she likened the White settler myth of wilderness to a form of neocolonialism. It’s a powerful argument, as she drew connections between the new focus on wilderness and the old myth of “terra nullius,” or empty land, that provided the legal justification for the British colonization of Australia. She regarded the discussions about wilderness as a romantic White people’s fantasy to invisibilize Aboriginal people and their ancient presence on land. Her challenges really struck a chord with me. I could see the similarities between this Western romantic pristine notion of nature, as exemplified in the settler colonial wilderness discourses and Western romantic pure and innocent notions of childhood. Both are valorized and seen as needing protection. By the time I started writing the book, Richard Louv’s highly nostalgic movement to “return children to nature” was fast gaining traction in early childhood education. I knew that the time was right to tackle the romantic coupling of childhood and nature and the un-reflexively self-righteous, White settler, middle-class values that it has come to presume and promulgate in countries like the US, Canada, and Australia. For all of these reasons, I knew that the relationship between the two was begging critique and well overdue for some serious queering.

18.2 More-than-Human Methods CD: I’d like to move on research methods as separate sets of actions such as interviews, participant observations, or focus groups. Could you tell us how you use, if at all, these methods in your research? AT: Since working in the field of education, I’ve felt the force field of traditional qualitative research methods like interviews or focus groups and their exclusive concern with human social subjects and their meaning making. Fortunately, I’ve managed to avoid them, because paying prolonged exclusive attention to the human subject and the human world makes me feel quite claustrophobic. I did my Ph.D. in cultural geography, which is one of the few fields in the social sciences that looks beyond the individual human in society and focuses upon the entangled relations between the cultural and the geo, or the physical world. Many cultural geographers take non-human agency into account within these relations. This is unsurprising. It’s just what happens when you attend to what shapes us beyond the cultural or the social. You realize that it’s not all about us! Researching relations between culturaland geo-forces raises all sorts of methodological challenges. For instance, geo-forces have clear material and sometimes also discursive effects, but you can’t interview them. Also, if the primary research purpose is to trace human and geo relations as mutually constitutive, it’s not enough to rely entirely upon singular human narrative accounts. I use a grab bag of methods to attend to the ways in which we discursively and performatively produce separate notions like “nature” or “the environment” on

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the one hand, and to the ways in which places, geo-forces, and non-human entities shape us on the other. As time’s gone by I’ve experimented more and more with the latter. For the first task I use pretty conventional post-structural textual deconstructive methods. They allow me to trace how the geos and our relationships to them have been discursively or culturally produced through the structuring nature/culture and subject/object binaries. I’m always aware of the irony of this method. For although it exposes the structuring logics of Western thinking, deconstructive practice is itself quite predictable and structured. That said, I have to admit I enjoy these deconstructive interludes when I can use a systematic method. In recent years I’ve been using deconstructive methods to reveal how the nature/culture binary works in animal narratives in different kinds of children’s “nature” texts. It’s interestingly complex and varied across geo-historical and political contexts. I’ve particularly enjoyed exposing what’s going on in the newly emerging “eco-nationalist” narratives in settlercolonized places, which are aimed at making non-Indigenous children into environmental stewards. Veronica Pacini-Ketchabaw and I have written about this in our new book The Common Worlds of Children and Animals (Taylor & Pacini-Ketchabaw, 2018). It’s far more difficult to understand how the geos act upon us and produce us through encounter and interaction. Finding new methods to do this is the hardest but also the most compelling task. For me, these new methods must combine an ethnographic and a geographic sensibility—be situated and immersed in everyday life over time, and attuned to unfolding material, more-than-human relations. They must materially enact, not just discursively reiterate, the need for more-than-human methods. I’m forever indebted to all the brilliant feminist researchers who have influenced my thinking about more-than-human method—like Donna Haraway, Isabelle Stengers, Deborah Bird Rose, and Anna Tsing. But no matter how important it is to think collectively with colleagues about more-than-human methods, if we’re serious about methodologically decentering the human, reading, and talking is not enough. We also have to practice these methods in collaboration with the more-than-human world. I have a very literal, emplaced, and embodied approach to experimenting with more-than-human methods. In practice it’s quite counter-intuitive and involves a concerted effort—trying to suspend my reassuring “I know” habits of thought. Trying to tap into as many sensory modes as possible to notice what’s going on around me. Trying to pay attention to how I’m affected by the world and responding to it. This means spending a considerable amount of time away from the written and spoken word, cutting loose, being an observer of the world, paying attention to what is going around and beyond us. From my field observations, if you like, this is a way of being that seems much easier for young children, than it is for those of us who are already well-schooled in the Western tradition of knowing about the world from a distance. The common worlding methods that I’ve been working on for the last decade, along with my close colleagues in the Common Worlds Research Collective, are more-than-human methods. In some instance, I really don’t think we need to do much more than just follow and observe the world-making relations that children are already immersed in. Again, it’s about noticing what’s already happening. But

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to be truthful, we are on a conceptual and methodological mission. It’s to shift the pedagogical and research focus beyond the conceptual framework of the individual child developing in a social or cultural context, and onto the pedagogical and worldmaking relations that children have with the world around them, including their relations with places, materials, and other species. This means we’re inventing new kinds of methods that will help us identify the pedagogical effects of these common worlding relations. The central purpose of these methods is to notice and bring attention to how children learn with, not just about, the world. Different common worlds researchers use different more-than-human methods, but for the past five or so years, I’ve been using a multispecies walking ethnography to hone-in on emplaced and unfolding child-wildlife relations in Canberra, where I work. I’ve had couple of research partners, Duncan Adams, an Indigenous early childhood teacher, and Tonya Rooney, an academic from ACU.2 Our methods of walking with children and urban wildlife have evolved over time. They’ve been very warts and all, and somewhat ad hoc. In fairly typical ethnographic style, we follow whatever happens. It’s not just the children who are responding to what else is going around them either—we all do—so the walks unfold as a series of encounters and interactions between the place itself, the children, the wildlife, the adults and whoever or whatever else is there. It’s not always predictable. In writing about these encounters and interactions, I try to provide a faithful account of what I see happening and unfolding, knowing that there are always limits to any representational practice, and that all accounts, both written and audio-visual, are partial and contingent. I’ve been lucky in the ways I’ve managed to fly under the radar while experimenting with these methods. I got away with it for years, probably because I was never completely incorporated within the mainstream of education. My academic position was in education, but I was always an interdisciplinary interloper. I didn’t even fit the mold of an educational sociologist, which was my first job in an education faculty. There’s definitely more freedom for those of us who are not engaged in the core business, and who aren’t totally wedded to or accountable to any one wellsedimented research tradition. I think I’ve always been what Trinh T. Minh-ha once called an inappropriate/d other in the field of education—an insider-outsider who draws upon more-than-human theoretical positions that are seemingly inappropriate for the discipline, and who uses multispecies research methods with young children and animals that are definitely not “normal.” This is niche research, even by nerdy academic standards. It doesn’t appear to have “appropriate” research subjects and doesn’t seem to deal with anything of suitable scale, relevance, or importance, so I can appreciate that it would be very hard for those in the mainstream to get the point of it. And of course, the wider world of social science research is not only human-centric but also adult-centric, so the more apparently grown up, important and generalizable the research focus, the more gravitas it holds. Mine is small stakes. But I’m proud to work with seemingly-insignificant minor players, off field from the main game. It’s satisfying to cast aside the conventional pressures of performing to scale and significance, and to just get on with the task of observing the minutiae 2 Australian

Catholic University.

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of the small, everyday, ordinary interactions between children and wildlife. So, I’ve been able to throw myself into an altogether otherwise mode of research, noticing and plugging for the overlooked achievements and events taking place between the minor players—noting what we can learn from them. I like working on the edge and turning the tables, it’s always been my preference, and I’ve managed to get better at it over time because I’ve more or less been left alone. I’m very grateful for that, and for the fact that I’ve been able to contribute, via my observations of young children and wildlife, to the broader interdisciplinary opus of otherwise ways of seeing and being in the world.

18.3 Writing as Potentially Playful CD: You have been very explicit about the need to think and write creatively and differently. What do you mean by that? I feel I have a better sense of what it means thinking differently and creatively, but how about writing? How would you describe the action of writing creatively? AT: Well, I’m not sure I’ve yet achieved my own goal of writing creatively, but I certainly aspire to it. I often feel the creative limits to my writing practice because I’m actually a very logical thinker. My writing practice is quite strategic, sequential, and pedantic. I’m always thinking about how my writing will be read, moving slowly and carefully between points to ensure there are no conceptual gaps, so that I can take the reader with me. In my favor, this kind of logical progression is valued in academic writing, but I wish I could find much looser, more creative, and more imaginative ways of presenting ideas. Even though I don’t think of my writing practice as particularly creative, at least not yet, I do have an ongoing urge to resist conventional writing. I mostly try and do this through not being too straight-laced and earnest in my message and by incorporating irony and paradox whenever I get a chance. This is more to do with ways of seeing things and the particular messages I want to convey. I’m not sure if it counts as writing creatively or not. I’ve taken an enormous amount of pleasure and inspiration from the queer sensibility that infuses Donna Haraway’s writing. She’s a very funny woman with a very quirky sense of humor. She laughs a lot, and this comes through in her irreverent and cheeky writing style. It makes me laugh too. She always manages to write about very serious things with a light touch that doesn’t diminish them. And she promotes a very specific ethics for living without resorting to an overly earnest tone or assuming a moral high ground. I’d love to be able to loosen up and write with just some of her playful energy. There’s loads of potential for this kind of playful writing when I’m researching child—animal relations, because these relations themselves are often so quirky, wild, and oddball. The challenge is how to convey this quirkiness in the writing itself. I definitely don’t want to make child-wildlife relations appear seamless and

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noteworthy, by ironing out the paradoxes or the random left-field moments of playful encounter. I actually do take the quirkiness of these encounters quite seriously. I’m particularly interested in the non-normative ways that many children can and do relate to the more-than-human world, by exceeding binary categories such as human and animal, subject, and object. I want to capture the ways that children’s relations with the world can be quite different to those of the adults around them. So, it’s important for me to evoke a sense of the queer possibilities of semiotic and material child-animal relations. The children I’ve walked with often seem very corporeally attuned and affected by the world around them—relative to me, at least, they seem less constrained by normative social expectations and responses. I know I can’t generalize, but nevertheless, there are many eccentric moments when I’ve seen children break out and cross boundaries, so I know it’s possible and I believe it happens quite often. The obvious example is when children suddenly drop to the ground and become the animals they’ve just encountered, but there are many others. I just try and keep the imminent possibilities of these kinds of unselfconscious boundary transgressions alive in my writing. Possibly, my most playful and creative writings are those that explicitly set out to queer child-nature relations, particular those I’ve done with Mindy Blaise (Taylor & Blaise, 2016), but I usually try and keep a queer spark alight in everything I write. And now that I’m thinking about it, even in my recent “Beyond stewardship” article, which critiques the push towards children as environmental stewards, there’s a playful satisfaction, at least for me, in writing against the grain. I’m pushing against the moral orders that assume the inherent goodness of children and the environment— the moral logics that would see assumed-to-be naturally good children as the obvious protectors of the assumed-to-be naturally good environment. This kind of earnest goodness goads me. It feels a bit naughty and sacrilegious to be suggesting that there’s anything strange about enlisting children to be environmental stewards, so I feel I have to be creative in the ways in which I write it. It feels like a creative impulse to break the rules about what can be said, to queer childhood and nature, but at the same time, it’s also a creative art to manage to say it in a way that’s not disrespectful and doesn’t offend too many well-meaning people.

18.4 Decentering the Child PS: What you’re saying reminds me the challenges of writing posthuman research and decentering the child. When we write our research, we tend to still privilege children’s voices and agency. You manage to balance it really nicely in your work, but I wonder if that’s something that you have to keep in mind as you’re writing? AT: Yeah, it’s certainly something that I’ve discussed a lot with my co-writers, Veronica Pacini-Ketchabaw and Mindy Blaise. We’ve written about the fact that it’s so much easier to talk about decentering the human, to theorize it, than to actually do it. Particularly when the act of decentering also means stepping away from the

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posthumanist tomes and literally standing on the grounds of the world, and checking out who else is there with us, and what else is going on. When it comes to writing, it’s ultimately impossible to decenter the human, because the truth is that we’re doing the writing and we’re doing it for each other. But there are degrees of effort that we can make to narrow the gap between the decentering message and the execution of it. The first step would be to do something more than endlessly talking about ourselves, and how clever we are, and citing other clever people. Hard for academics! I’m not a linguist, but it feels like the bones of English grammar are against us. Modern English grammar, at least, seems to be structured around the humanist premise that agency can only be exercised by human beings, so it keeps nudging you back into the familiar pattern of child subject does something to non-human object. It’s hard to break out of this pattern, especially if you want to use pronouns. I find I have to go into battle with the blue squiggly lines, whenever I use the subjective pronoun “who” for a non-human being, like a kangaroo. And when Veronica or Mindy and I are writing a piece together, it’s one of the things we double-check— that we’re not inadvertently re-centering the child as the singular doing subject and objectifying and rendering inert the non-human animals, bugs, sticks, or whatever. It’s quite hard not to slip back into human-centric accountings from time to time, and sometimes it feels like it’s the grammar that leads us back there. I wonder about the kind of grammar that’s required to write with collective or distributed agency. Does any Euro-Western language have it? And there are also formidable disciplinary pressures to keep the child in the center. They’re not only related to writing, but they make it generally hard to claim and hold onto the space to think beyond humanism. I do understand why childhood studies and some branches of education are so invested in promoting children’s agency and voice. It’s totally in line with the human rights’ political agenda, and the move to champion children’s rights and voices is part of the incredibly important social change face of humanism. There’s absolutely nothing wrong with this. But human rights aren’t the only project, and more to the point, at this moment this is not our central project. We’re doing something else right now that requires us to move elsewhere and consider ecological relations that cannot be exclusively human. But in a resolutely humanist discipline like childhood studies or education, we’re constantly called back to account for the child as the agentic learner and the sole subject of concern. It’s as if there is nothing beyond the humanist agenda, and no pedagogy beyond human rationality and intentionality. Nothing else computes, let alone matters. It happens a lot at conferences too. Even when I think I’ve clearly explained that I’m following the relations that emerge from the interactions between the children and non-human others in their common worlds, and not following individual children, I nearly always get asked questions about them, like… “Was there a difference between the individual children’s attitudes to wildlife?” “Were they influenced by their cultural backgrounds?” “How did the walks effect the children’s development?” “Did you follow up what happened to the children when they left the preschool?” So, there’s all of this external pressure, along with our own internalized schooling in humanist thought traditions. And it means that we need to be constantly vigilant in order to secure some space to think and write beyond exclusively human concerns.

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18.5 Rethinking the Politics of Living Well Together CD: One question that I believe is part of your project has to do with the politics of living together. I can see that your cultural geography training or background is there. I remember you have said that it’s very important to think about the ethics of living together but you say also that it’s important to take action towards that ethical commitment. Can you tell us a little bit more about when you say that action is important? What kind of action are you envisioning in response to this question of living together? AT: I will answer your question about taking action regarding the ethics of living together, but I want to start by talking about incommensurable differences. How to live well with differences is always central to the ethics of living together. But when you move beyond an exclusively human or social framework, differences intensify. In the multispecies city, for instance, where more and more wildlife is seeking refuge because of climate change and other anthropogenic environmental changes, living with incommensurable interspecies differences poses all sorts of additional challenges and possibilities. It’s an understatement to say that I don’t think we (meaning most of us humans) do it well. There’s definitely lots of room for improvement! When you focus upon the relational interface of humans, other beings, entities, and forces, like we do in our common worlds research with children and more-than-human others, you have to confront incommensurable differences. I’m stressing this because some people misunderstand what we mean by the common of common worlds. They think it means the same, as in the expression “sharing things in common.” But I want to make it crystal clear that even though we’re committed to forging connections across differences, the common worlds project is not an assimilatory one. It’s not about incorporating everything into our human schema. Commoning has nothing to do with collapsing difference into sameness. It’s about nurturing a collective disposition without assuming exceptionalism or sovereignty. It’s about learning to see ourselves as a component part of a vast and complex collective—just one species among many, but bound up in interdependent, diverse ecologies. Our common world is characterized by incommensurable differences, and it’s these same incommensurable differences that provide the conditions of possibility for the world’s ongoing ecological health and vitality. Which brings me to explain why I think the politics of living together is the greatest challenge we face. Actually, it’s not just the politics of living together, it’s the ethics and politics of living together on an irrevocably damaged planet. Let’s face it, it’s our narcissistic actions, driven by the delusion of human omnipotence and the greedy compulsion of carboniferous capitalism, that have created the worst mess imaginable. We’ve precipitated a maelstrom of mass species extinctions on a rapidly overheating planet and unleashed untold forms of displacement. This is the world we bequeath to children and to the future generations of all surviving species. It’s this catastrophic scenario, some call it the Anthropocene, which compels me, and many of my colleagues, to attend to the ethics of how to live together in ways that allow differences to flourish (Taylor, 2017). This is the action we take.

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We’re constantly looking for other ways of relating and cohabiting—ways that lead towards a respect for incommensurable differences, that are not premised upon human dominion and destruction, and that shine some light on how we might work towards collective recuperation. Obviously, we’re not looking for a universal answer or a thought-through alternative model for living together by researching with children and animals in very local contexts. We’re just looking for hopeful clues. One of things that we promote, along with many other feminist environmental scholars, is that the way we think about what it means to be human, and our place in the world, underpins the way we act. So if we think of ourselves as an exceptional, indomitable, and sovereign species, who can do anything we like to the world around us with impunity, because we’re ultimately separate and superior to it all, we’ll act in delusional narcissistic ways that deny our own ecological vulnerability. It’s an unfortunate reality that many of the underlying premises of such thinking—particularly human exceptionalism and the hyper-separation of humans from the rest—is very closely associated with humanist thinking. So where has such thinking led us? It’s led us to dig up and burn fossil fuels on a scale that’s created planetary toxic pollution and resulted in dangerously escalating levels of atmospheric warming. It’s led us to clear forests on such a scale that we’ve precipitated the earth’s sixth mass extinction event and seriously depleted the earth’s biodiversity. Paradoxically, these actions of presumed impunity not only threaten the earth’s existing life-systems, but our own survival as species. My response is to turn to the otherwise spaces and places where divisive modern Western knowledge systems don’t completely dominate. These kinds of spaces are pretty rare, but if they don’t operate from a presumption of human exceptionalism, they hold the possibility of other ways of thinking about what it means to be human and of showing us alternative ways of cohabiting with other species. I mentioned it earlier in our conversation that I witnessed this kind of difference in the Central Australia Aboriginal school I taught in many years ago. I’ve written about it in an article called “Caterpillar childhoods” (Taylor, 2013a, 2013b) so you can find out more about it there. But just briefly, no one saw the Arrernte and Luritja children at the school as individuals developing in a socio-cultural context. They saw them collectively as caterpillar children, born out of caterpillar country, and this automatically draws them into all sorts of complex kin relations of reciprocal responsibility and obligation to care for all the caterpillar features of their country. This includes the mountain ranges formed by the journeys of caterpillar ancestors, some sacred trees, and rocks associated with these journeys, the “yipe” vines that the caterpillars eat, and other species that are also in implicated in the ecologies of caterpillar country. This is a very particular ethics and mode, or even politics, if you like, of living together, and I’m not suggesting that anyone who is not Arrernte or Luritja could or should appropriate it. I’m just raising it to say, again, that there are others way of thinking about what it means to be human and our place in the world. They already exist. Humanism’s hyper-separated notion of exceptional humanity, separate from and superior to the rest of the world, is not universal. In fact, there are many interesting ontological spaces that exist beyond the adult world and quite close to home. This is why I like researching with preschool-aged

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children, because although they are on the cusp being enculturated into the natureculture divide that structures modern Western/humanist knowledge systems, chances are this process is not yet complete. So there’s always the possibility that young children are not yet manifesting a divided worldview. As I’ve mentioned, in my research, I focus on their ordinary everyday encounters with urban wildlife. Urban wildlife are particularly interesting to me too, because they’re cohabitants, but they’re not pets. They’re not necessary seen as suitable companions for children in the “nice” way that domesticated, caged, or farm animals are, and they haven’t been assimilated into human sociality and domains. I get even more hooked in when these child-wildlife encounters and interactions become quite regular and their relations deepen over time. It’s at this point that they’re no longer just occasional chance encounters. They’re the kinds of relations that can only unfold from living together with incommensurable difference. I want to see what happens. This is where those clues are.

18.6 Research as Bringing up Difficult Conversations CD: As I was listening to you I was thinking about your postcolonial work in relation to place and particularly thinking about kangaroos. When I was reading this chapter about the kangaroos, and you say, we know that these kangaroos are the symbol of Australia and we see a sort of romanticized relationship between children and kangaroos but we don’t talk about the histories of kangaroos and how they were killed in mass in the past. You suggest that those conversations are important and needed because they make us to pay attention to the unattended places and its colonized nature. AT: Yeah, it’s tricky because you don’t necessarily want to drag all sorts of past settler atrocities into conversations with the children, make them feel guilty, and ruin their walk with the kangaroos. It’s much easier to discuss the historical details and trajectories of fraught settler-kangaroo relations in written articles, than it is in a conversation with the children. But there are always moments and ways in which these histories and trajectories can be directly relevant to what is currently happening, and not just delivered, out of the blue, as shocking information overload. I’m thinking about the events that unfolded when we came across the huge decomposing body of a dead kangaroo. It had been hit by a car and thrown back over the fence into the paddock where we were walking. We didn’t know it was there, we just came across it, and the children were initially horrified because it was so big, and it stank and it was covered in flies, and maggots … it was very grisly. Apart from the awful smell and sight, it was extra confronting because these children had spent most of the year getting to know this mob of kangaroos and imagining what it would be like to live in a kangaroo’s body—making and wearing big tails, cuddling up in pouches, hopping around. And then all of a sudden, there was this confronting big nasty dead kangaroo body. It had a big effect on them. And for several weeks following, they

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asked to come back and see it. One of the things these encounters did was open up the space of possibility for talking about kangaroo deaths at the hands of humans. The children spoke at length about their experiences in their family cars. They’d all had some kind of driving encounter with a dead kangaroo, because they’re so often run over on the roads. If they hadn’t been in a car that collided with a kangaroo, or had a near miss, they’d seen lots of dead kangaroos on the sides of the roads. There were ongoing conversations about that. It also helped us to talk about why the kangaroos were there in the first place, living on the university campus instead of out in the countryside. We talked about how they first moved into the city in the last 10-year drought because they were starving to death. The farmers had over-cleared the paddocks to graze more sheep and in the drought most of the topsoil blew away and the paddocks were bare dirt. The kangaroos found more grass and water in the city, and they did quite well and stayed. Now they can’t really move back out to the country because there are too many roads for them to cross. Farmers used to shoot kangaroos in the olden days, but now they’re protected, so their numbers build up. These kinds of conversations open up lots of bigger, broader questions about our historical relationship to the kangaroos, how kangaroos are affected by the environmental changes caused by Australian White settlement, how they got to be there in the first place. The children already knew the kangaroos were more than a cute national symbol, as they’d been meeting them and studying their strange corporeality all year. But this event gave them a much stronger sense that like them, the kangaroos also have life stories. The conversations also gave the children the sense that the kangaroos’ stories and lives are quite complexly entwined with their own.

18.7 Thinking Collectively with More-than-Human Methods PS: Can you tell us a little bit about what drove you to start Common Worlds and what is the plan behind it and where is it going now that you’re retired? And are you still hoping to be a part of it? AT: The term common worlds comes from Latour. It’s originally his expression. I first came across it around 2010, when I was reading his book, The Politics of Nature, and researching for my book Reconfiguring the Natures of Childhood. I immediately thought it was a fantastic concept because it pushes past the human-centric limits of “society”—the very human-centric term we always use. It helped me to envisage how we could shift our thinking about childhood and nature, if our starting point was that children grow up in a common world, not just in a society. I also loved the word common. Like Latour, I see it more as a verb than a noun or adjective—as the act of commoning or bringing together. Apart from that, I’m an old socialist, so the notion of commoning has always interested me because it’s the opposite of individualization and privatization. In the assemblage sense that Latour uses it in,

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commoning is also much more than human. It’s a collective agentic process. So, the whole idea of common worlds, commoning worlds, or worlding, which is Haraway’s parallel expression that I equally love, really speaks to me. It just provides such a good foil to the bubble-like connotations of society—the suspended space where humans are supposed to grow and live somehow magically separated off from the rest of the world. To paraphrase Haraway, it’s become my shorthand way of insisting that we are all creatures of the earth, and that we can neither live nor act alone. Other people felt the same. Miriam Giugni was a postdoc early childhood researcher working with me at the time, and she liked it too. We co-wrote an article introducing it as a new inclusive conceptual framework for early childhood education. Veronica also loved it and introduced it to her graduate students, Mindy did the same, and the phrase just took off from there. It seemed to get richer and richer the more we moved with it. Then the big Anthropocene debates broke onto the scene and Veronica and I got very involved in feminist responses and critiques, especially those coming out of the feminist environmental humanities. We couldn’t ignore that the environmental challenges posed by the Anthropocene were now both the background and the future of children’s lives. So, it seemed even more absurd to be still talking about children growing up within the confines of a human society, even as this same society was rapidly trashing the world and making human lives untenable. It all seemed more and more pertinent, and important to run with it. When we formed the common worlds research collective, we were trying to offer a bigger framework for thinking about childhood, and to encourage a different, or more “worldly,” kind of research. Since that’s happened, a lot of people have contributed their own interests to the collective body of work. For instance, Fikile Nxumalo has brought a Black feminist critique into the mix, along with a strong anti-colonial impetus. Denise Hodges has worked on reframing an ethics of care within early childhood. Narda Nelson has forayed into children’s relations with death and decay. Catherine Hamm has focused upon pedagogies flowing from Indigenous Australian notions of place. Nicole Land has brought her physiological science background into conversations about children’s bodies. Tonya Rooney has worked on the affect of weathering pedagogies. Veronica and I have researched settler colonial childwildlife relations on damaged lands. Mindy and I have collaborated on queering projects (Taylor & Blaise, 2016) that blur categorical boundaries. And there are many others. It’s a very pliable concept, which means that a large collective of likeminded scholars, researchers, and educators can mold it to fit their particular interests and expertise, expand it, and take off in new directions. All of which is fantastic. Now that I’ve retired, I still plan to keep a toe in the Common Worlds Research Collective. It’s quite easy as it has a strong online presence, and I can always read the blogs and tweets and write the occasional blog myself. The collective has its own life, but I’ll still pop in and out occasionally. Now I have the luxury of time to spend with the rocks and waters of the Wee Jasper valley, and of course, to write. Writing in creative dialogue with the creek that I live beside is my next big project. I’m crossing my fingers that this writing will flow out in bubbling, gurgling, and creekily engaging ways. Watch this space.

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18.8 Justice and Activism CD: Do you think that children face a particular challenge today? And how do you define social justice in this more-than-human framework? AT: Can I do the second part first? I don’t feel that I need to define social justice from a more-than-human framework. I mostly just talk about justice—which obviously encompasses social justice but doesn’t condone it off as an exclusively human-deserving right. Quite often I’ll specifically refer to intergenerational and ecological justice in this time of climate change, but that’s because this has been my focus over the last decade or so. For me, justice is neither a zero-sum game nor a competition, nor simply empty liberalist rhetoric. It has to be lived and worked hard for. For the last 40 years, I’ve been an activist for a more just world—as a feminist and a member of the LGBTQI+ community; as a close ally of Indigenous Australians; as an active opponent of the Vietnam war, apartheid and nuclear power; as an active proponent for a modest, healthy and sustainable way of living on the planet. Now I’m a member of the Australian knitivist group “Knitting Nannas for a Fossil Fuel Free Future” which supports young people’s call for action on climate change, and lobbies to stop coal mining and other forms of fossil fuel extraction. And that leads me to what I consider to be the greatest challenge for children today. I think it’s the overarching challenge of surviving on this trashed, sick, and damaged planet, which is rapidly becoming incapable of supporting life on earth as we’ve known it. Global warming, mass extinctions … there’s a long list of cascading planetary systems collapsing …. Children will inherit the mess that we have created and have not adequately prepared them to deal with it. How will they know how to respond? Will they be able to maintain any hope that recuperation is still possible? I’ve already suggested that I’m horrified at the prospect of simply passing the mess on for the next generation to deal with, under the guise that we’ve educated them to be good citizens and environmental stewards. It’s a depressing question to end on, and I think I’ll just finish off by recapping. I think children’s greatest challenge is to learn how to inherit and recuperate this world without repeating our conceits and mistakes.

Further Reading Taylor, A. (2017). Romancing or reconfiguring nature? Towards common worlds pedagogies. In K. Malone, S. Truong, & T. Gray (Eds.), Reimagining sustainability education in precarious times (pp. 61–75). Amsterdam: Springer. Taylor, A. (2019). Countering the conceits of the Anthropos: Scaling down and researching with minor players. Discourse: Cultural Politics of Education, 1–19. Taylor, A., & Pacini-Ketchabaw, V. (2018). The common worlds of children and animals: Relational ethics for entangled lives. London: Routledge.

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References Taylor, A. (2013a). Reconfiguring the natures of childhood. London: Routledge. Taylor, A. (2013b). Caterpillar childhoods: Engaging the otherwise worlds of central Australian aboriginal children. Global Studies of Childhood, 3(4), 366–379. Taylor, A., & Blaise, M. (2016). Queer worlding childhood. In C. Gowlette & M. L. Rassmussen (Eds.), The cultural politics of queer theory in education research. London & New York: Routledge.

Dr. Affrica Taylor is an adjunct associate professor at the University of Canberra. She has background in Indigenous Australian education and a Ph.D. in cultural geography. Both have shaped her abiding interest in the relations between people, place and other species on damaged settler colonized lands and in the need to decolonise these relations in ecologically challenging times. She explores these relations in numerous publications, including: Reconfiguring the Natures of Childhood; Unsettling the Colonial Places and Spaces of Early Childhood Education; and The Common Worlds of Children and Animals: Relational Ethics for Entangled Lives.

Afterword

The interviews in this book have played a pivotal role in how we have come to think about doing research with children. While questions regarding the social construction of the child and childhood have long guided childhood studies scholars’ inquiries like ours, posthumanist and new materialist critiques of human supremacy and exceptionality have shifted the ways of thinking about the human—and for us—about the child. We embarked on this book project with the aim of exploring how early childhood scholars were using posthuman and new materialist theories in their research. We engaged them in conversations about how their research aimed to decenter the child, and how they moved away from child-centered methodologies. While scholars in this collection all responded differently to our questions, all of them shared a desire to break with a category of the human that excludes, first and foremost, those less human (Wynter, 2003) and non-human others (Braidotti, 2013). The scholars in this collection have made clear that the unprecedented economic, social, and environmental crisis has pushed them to think deeply about the frameworks used to produce knowledge. In this line of thought, posthumanist and new materialist methodologies have offered them a way out of anthropocentrism through focusing on the multiple and often unseen relations children have in the world. In the current social, political, economic, and environmental context, children continue to be subjects of othering, and this is why we are reminded that drawing on posthumanist and new materialist methodologies should never leave the child out of research. Through our conversations with each of the scholars, we came to realize that moving away from the notion of an autonomous and rational human opens up opportunities for more affirmative and diverse childhoods. As we were made aware, research methodologies constitute powerful devices of knowledge production and as such, the researcher’s choices are key terrain for examination. We noticed that unraveling a narrowed notion of the child can be achieved by decentering the practices and discourses that often pin children into one way of being in the world. We came to understand decentering the child as a methodological move

© Springer Nature Singapore Pte Ltd. 2020 C. Diaz-Diaz and P. Semenec, Posthumanist and New Materialist Methodologies, Children: Global Posthumanist Perspectives and Materialist Theories, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-981-15-2708-1

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that allows researchers to open up spaces for children to be in the world differently. Through the interviews, the scholars showed us that decentering the child can be used (1) as a methodological move to interrupt and destabilize ideas that situate the human as superior and exceptional; (2) as a method to expand understandings of the child and childhood; and (3) as a lens to look at the world as relational and situated. Before we conclude, we would like to highlight some key ideas from the interviews that we believe are important for the field of early childhood studies and research methodologies. The multiple stories that researchers shared with us speak to how these ideas are shifting the field. As with any theoretical framework, posthumanist and new materialist perspectives are enacted by researchers who have particular ethical and political commitments. Through these conversations we realized that these scholars, beyond thinking with posthumanist and new materialist perspectives, are embarking on research that is feminist, affirmative, and pedagogical.

Imagining Other Worlds The complexity of the world currently demands that researchers create methodologies that render the often unseen side of children’s lives visible. Animals, materials, places, drawings, and photographs have become vital actors in research with children. These actors matter because they offer new ways for children to be in the world. Attending to children’s relationships in the world is not only a matter of understanding children, but it is about making other ways of living well together possible. It is about composing other worlds for children who are inheriting a place in crisis with the hope they face the challenges ahead with new tools than our previous generations did. This is important and represents a shift in research because the very real, and complex lived realities of children are not ignored, but looked at alongside other forms of existence. Children still matter, and matter greatly, but they never exist in isolation of all the other things going on—children are of the world, and for many scholars, drawing attention to how these worlds get made is crucial in their research practices and pedagogies. In imagining other worlds, many of the scholars we interviewed take seriously the role that the more-than-human play in orienting their inquiries. Encounters with animals, artifacts, and places—when attended to—offer ways for embodying other researcher subjectivities. Using their own bodies to attune to the more-than-human actors in their research, scholars have also challenged themselves to reconsider what it means to be a researcher in posthuman times. Moving away from ideas of the human as rational and autonomous also pushes academics to rethink their role in composing other worlds. Through the interviews, we have come to see that collective thinking with research fellows and the children themselves constitute a central piece of their ethical-political commitment. Whether as part of a collective, or in doing research in multidisciplinary and collaborative ways, researchers are drawn to asking different

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questions, and experimenting with and putting to work approaches that destabilize the foundations of the rational and autonomous researcher. For example, thinking with concepts—a practice that came up in a number of interviews—has helped researchers undo child-centered notions in research. For many scholars, thinking with concepts enables them to make sense of a relational ontology that situates children in their intimate relationships with more-than-human others, including animals, places/spaces and the world in all its diversity. These shifts, sometimes radical, in research methodologies respond to the reconfiguration of methodological notions such as agency, voice, data, and analysis.

(With) A Strong Feminist Ethics Through the interviews it was clear to us that many of the researchers are driven, first and foremost, by a strong feminist ethics. They have expressed that shifting methodologies is a challenge that requires working collectively to support each other in this endeavor. However, researchers also face a number of institutional barriers. While there is growing attention to promote international collaborations and interdisciplinary projects, in many cases, funding models continue to limit innovative research. For example, academic publishing metrics reward individual achievements over the collective. As these researchers have demonstrated, the task is challenging but not impossible if it is undertaken as an effort of mutual support in carrying out their research. International collaborations have resulted in interdisciplinary projects that have a meaningful impact in children’s everyday lives, teachers’ practices, and other practitioners’ approaches to childhood. These actions have the potential to shift what it valued by funding agencies and academic institutions. To work against institutional limitations, researchers have also committed to shifting research paradigms in the academy. An important part of the work these scholars are carrying out is building capacity of early career and mid-career researchers. This effort requires them to engage in different conversations in higher education contexts. They have been opening up pathways to communicate how a shift in research can contribute to teacher education programs as well as in graduate programs. Doing this work also involves contesting the foundational assumptions about research and expanding the notion of justice beyond the social. As we stated in the introduction, these scholars have insisted that they pursue their scholarship with the awareness that posthumanism and new materialism is not “new,” and that much of this thinking is informed by other knowledges including the teaching of Indigenous peoples. Much of the research that these scholars are doing confronts us with ethical dilemmas about the past, present, and futures. At the core of these dilemmas is an intention to transform our everyday relationships in which human and non-human does not become assimilated into the dominant narratives and practices that have long defined the ideal child and childhood. In this vein, an intention to decenter the child has meant moving away from a paradigm obsessed with human improvement. Their scholarship is committed to create new forms of relationships for a damaged planet.

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Afterword

More-Than-Human Pedagogies In her book When Species Meet, Haraway (2008) invites us to think carefully about expanding our relationships with more-than-human others. Today, researchers are pushing their research toward pedagogies for more-than-human encounters. In this way, they seek to make research meaningful for children’s lives through pedagogies. But these pedagogies respond to Haraway’s invitation to become worldly—in intimate relationships with the world, the animals, the water, the land, and the artifacts that surround us to unsettle unsustainable relations. More-than-human pedagogies challenge researchers to question long-standing assumptions about the pedagogue, the learner, and their relationship, as well as the curriculum that orients that pedagogical practice. A move away from child-centered methodologies has also led researchers to move away from child-centered pedagogies that assume that the teacher has to be a human. More-than-human pedagogies are the result of engagement with the world, where the forest, the water, the climate also teach—adults and children—to become human differently. Through the many stories shared throughout this book—stories about birds, mud, kangaroos, boxes, greenhouses, water, Lego, plastics, and many more, we can begin to envision how and why “staying with the trouble” (Haraway, 2016) is so important for childhood research in an increasingly complex world. At the core of decentering the child is a broader ethical project of composing other worlds. It is with this in mind that we encourage graduate students and early career scholars to immerse in these scholars’ invitations to question, collaborate, and experiment with theories and approaches that inspire research that is feminist, affirmative, and pedagogical. There is no better time than now.

References Braidotti, R. (2013). The posthuman. Malden, MA: Polity Press. Haraway, D. (2008). When species meet. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press. Haraway, D. (2016). Staying with the trouble: Making kin in the Chthlucene. Durham and London: Duke University Press. Wynter, S. (2003). Unsettling the coloniality of Being/Power/Truth/Freedom: Towards the human, after man, its Overrepresentation—An argument. CR: The New Centennial Review, 3(3), 257– 337. https://doi.org/10.1353/ncr.2004.0015.