Towards a Posthumanist Institutional Ethnography: Viscous Matterings and Gendered Bodies

This article makes the case for Posthumanist Institutional Ethnography (PIE). In doing so, it builds on and diverges from Dorothy E. Smith’s post-structural work on Institutional Ethnography (IE), and speaks into recent discussions on the contested nature of ethnography. Drawing on the work of Donna Haraway, Karen Barad and Jane Bennet, and on empirical data from two recent projects, the article argues that PIE, in contesting human exceptionalism, places the human in relation to other-than-human objects, bodies and materialities, and thereby radically recasts ontology, epistemology, and ethics. Six features of PIE are identified. These features are put to work via an analysis of material moments which illuminate how gendered inequalities are produced, enacted and materialised in complex institutional ecologies. The article’s theoretical and methodological contributions provide new insights into the fluid, ephemeral and affective materialisation of gendered politics in institutions

Working with (Post)theories to Explore Embodied and Unrecognized Emotional Labor in English Early Childhood Education and Care (ECEC)

Technocratic accountability, which is impacting ECEC practices in England, is where the government favors evidence-based knowledge to work with children. As a result, the emotional aspect of ECEC work and emotional labor have become increasingly complex and are sometimes unrecognized. In this paper we highlight the importance of more relational, connected, and embodied ways to work with young children. Analyzing qualitative semi-structured interview data from two projects, we focus on emotional labor using poststructuralist and posthuman affect theory. We use data from the first project to analyze narratives from ECEC practitioners, highlighting the relationship between government policies and dominant discourses. The second project notes entanglements with human and other-than-human bodies enacted with affect theory, which reveals embodied other-than-human productions of emotional labor generating alternative ways to explore ECEC work. By engaging with these two theoretical and conceptual positions, we offer a different perspective to consider ECEC professional knowledge(s) and reveal the ways these can shed an alternative light on professional practice. The resultant analysis allows us to reconsider knowledge-making practices in ECEC and challenge existing Cartesian dualistic thinking which separates “care” and “education.

Final report - An Evaluation of the Boogie Mites Early Years Music Education Programmes in respect of parents and practitioners. Commission by Boogie Mites UK Ltd.

A research project was commissioned to evaluate the benefits of Boogie Mites Early Years Music Education Programmes. The aims of this project were to understand how participation in music making programmes can support children’s development in the prime areas of Early Years Foundation Stage (EYFS) (DfE, 2010); these being communication and language, personal social, emotional development and physical development. It also sought to investigate parental and practitioner perceptions of the programmes. This report presents the findings from three Boogie Mites programmes: Babies, Minis, and School Ready. It was designed in three phases. During phase one, data was gathered from focus groups with parents, telephone interviews with parents and practitioners about their experiences as they happened during participation in such programmes and retrospectively after the programmes had finished. During phase two, parental feedback forms and practitioners’ evaluation forms were explored which allowed a critical synthesis of practices and behaviours before and after the programmes. These forms enabled comparisons between and within the groups. Finally, the third phase of the project explored key stakeholders’ views on the programmes through analysis of existing feedback forms. This allowed the project to gain a holistic overview of the Boogie Mites programmes. Using qualitative and quantitative methods, the authors show evidence of how Boogie Mites Music Programmes can encourage development and increase parental and children’s confidence in the use of music at home and in the settings

Working in the Umbra - methodological uncertainty and affective flows

In 1992 Gilles Deleuze argued, in a brief essay, that we are witnessing a transition from societies of confinement to 'societies of control'. In societies of control power operates through a process of 'continuous modulation': a regime of 'perpetual training' and assessment. The focus of my doctoral research is to use Posthumanist theorising to explore how Early Years Teachers modulate their practice within their organizations following the introduction of the Teacher Standards (Early Years) (DfE, 2013) in England. This will allow me to provide an alternative lens on the understanding of professional identity formation and (re)imagine professional becomings (Fairchild, 2015) as a means of charting affective flows in and between Early Years Teacher assemblages. Drawing on St. Pierre (2011:613) my productive engagement with the work of Deleuze and Guattari has allowed me to consider a ‘reimagination of social science inquiry’. I have been grappling with how to creatively embrace a Posthuman onto-epistemology of difference and have been working in the umbra (shadows) as I challenge the traditional views of qualitative research practice. Early Years Teachers work in human and material organizational contexts as they engage with children, policy, practice, the nursery/school environment and spaces for play and teaching. Posthumanism allows for an attention to materiality and affectivity and gives a new articulation of the concept of identity leading to the individual emerging as an assemblage. The assemblage as methodology provides the vehicle to explore the affective flows and their relations to Early Years Teacher assemblages. Additionally the assemblage as methodology provides a ‘commitment to thinking with materials and incorporating them as forceful agents in the formation of the social world’ (Meiches, 2015: 479). In charting affective flows I will explore and be entangled within machinic assemblages at a number of levels - material, affective, embodied, corporeal, political and neoliberal. Being part of the research assemblage my methodology is (re)emerging and I currently am enmeshed in a series of rhizoaffective multidimensional events which have (re)(e)volved around my desire to engage with the perceptual, experiential and sensory nature of affective flows. This engagement has led me to question what data will be revealed, what it might want and how might I move away from representation to mapping and charting and reconfiguring and reimaging data (Koro-Ljungberg, 2016). This paper will present the affective flows of five Early Years Teachers as I consider their experiences both spatially and temporally. Data will be revealed using a range of methods including discursive (interviews), visual, material, and political. There will be visits to Early Years Teachers in their workplace and we will engage in an ongoing co-constructed multidimensional dialogue about their experiences, their affects and percepts (Deleuze, 1995) as they fold and unfold. In this way I can attend to social justice by decentring the role of the Early Years Teachers within their organization as I critically analyse materiality and affect within the new regime of modulation. The resultant data analysis is, as yet, unknown – an immanent methodology becoming

Earthworm disturbances: the reimagining of relations in Early Childhood Education and Care

This thesis explores the political and ethical entanglements of Early Years Teachers with human and non-human worlds. Early Childhood Education and Care (ECEC) policy, research and professional practice frame expected ways of working with children. This highly-feminised workforce has historically been presented as deficient. I argue this notion sees them as dehumanised subjects (Snaza, 2015), in need of constant upskilling. Posthumanist theorising was employed to reveal Early Years Teachers in relations with other humans (children, teachers) and non-humans (classroom, outdoor environments, objects, policy) forming more-than-human subjectivities. A post-qualitative methodology was developed to attend to more-than-human entanglements, with material-ethno-carto-graphy proposed as a methodological undertaking pertinent to this inquiry. The reconfigured methods-as-affinity-groups built on ethnography to explore connections within/between four Early Years Teacher case studies. The resultant data generated was mapped and read both literally and diffractively where glow data (MacLure, 2010, 2013) was selected for diffractive analysis. I theorised the positions of becoming-professional and being-teacher to reveal how subjectivities take either a more material connected or a more normative subject position and employ the metaphor of the earthworm to debate these shifting forms. Data revealed becoming-professional and being-teacher saw wider relational entanglements within indoor and outdoor spaces drove new modes of professionalism. Furthermore, the influence of an online tool, Tapestry, on subjectivities was explored. Additionally, vital agentic materiality (Bennett, 2010) and cyborg figurations (Haraway, 1991) were encountered in ECEC classrooms. Finally, the influence of nature has been explored where Indigenous ontologies trouble traditional vistas. Generative ways to view the production of Early Years Teacher subjectivities show that human and non-human worlds are always in flux. The more-than-human moments reveal the interplay between becoming-professional and being-teacher as a re-humanising enactment with subjectivities distributed across human and material bodies. These relations are a counter movement to the reified professional in policy, research and professional practice

Working with (post)theories to explore embodied and unrecognised emotional labour in English Early Childhood Education and Care (ECEC)

Technocratic accountability, which is impacting on ECEC practices in England, is where the government favours evidence-based knowledge to work with children. As a result, the emotional aspect of ECEC work and emotional labour have become increasingly complex and are sometimes unrecognised. In this paper we the importance of more relational, connected and embodied ways to work with young children. Analysing qualitative semi-structured interview data from two projects, we focus on emotional labour which is interpreted with poststructuralist and posthuman affect theory. The resultant analysis allows us to reconsider knowledge-making practices in ECEC and challenge existing Cartesian dualistic thinking which separates ‘care’ and ‘education’. Data from the first project sees us analyse narratives from ECEC practitioners highlighting the relationship between government policies and dominant discourses. The second project notes entanglements with human and other-than-human bodies enacted with affect theory which reveals embodied other-than-human productions of emotional labour generating alternative ways to explore ECEC work. By engaging with these two theoretical and conceptual positions we offer a different perspective to consider ECEC professional knowledge(s) and reveal the ways these can shed an alternative light on professional practice

Improvising bags choreographies: Disturbing normative ways of doing research

Post-qualitative research-creation improvisations offer new possibilities to explore method/ology. In this article we question how bags, as seemingly mundane objects, work as ontologically lively matter – as active agencies – to choreograph human-nonhuman relations and heterogeneous materialities. Working from three questions – How might a bag become? What do bags do? What do bags enable and enact? – we discuss four research-creation improvisations and the insights they generated. The article maps how bags choreographies put affects, bodies and materialities into co-motional relations in order to disturb normative approaches to research both within conference sessions and through writing articles

Tags, tagging, tagged, # - undisciplining organ-ization of [academic] bodies

We write as a collaborative mode of embodied writing that moves, tags, and re-sites us elsewhere, that mis/dis/aligns self-other, and permeates various stable body(boundaries). We write as a group of (un)bounded (virtual) bodies who aim to collectively create and tag arguments. We write as a collective body where materialities, ideas, discussions and writing become in the doing. Different relational collective practices shared here disturb, disperse, question, undo and undermine sole authorship and consider how tags work and what tags might produce when these objects/things shape our academic lives. While engaged in tagging we also considered how tags tug, how tags shape the ways we think, feel and experience our academic lives. How are we produced by tags? What do tags produce (in/on) us and in our embodied lives?

Conferencing Otherwise : A Feminist New Materialist Writing Experiment

This article attempts to reconfigure hegemonic framings of "the academic conference" and thereby offer a means to (re-)encounter the spatial, temporal, and affective forces that conferences generate, differently. We are a geographically dispersed but multiply entangled group of academic researchers united by theoretical fault lines within our work that seek to ask what if and what else. This "what if" and "what else" thinking has manifested in experimental and subversive doings otherwise at a series of academic conferences. The storying practices presented in this article were made possible by the vital materialism of a shared google.doc. It was within this virtual environment that we attempted to weave diffractive accounts of what conferencing otherwise produces. This writing experiment offers a series of speculative provocations and counter-provocations to ask what else does conferencing make possible. This article is an invitation to the reader to plunge in and wallow within the speculative accounts which ensue and to contemplate the possibilities of breaking free from sedimented ways of neoliberal conferencing.Peer reviewe