A feminist new materialist experiment: exploring what else gets produced through encounters with children’s news media

In this paper we are concerned to grapple with the ways in which real world issues directly impact children’s lives, and ask what else gets produced through encounters with children’s global news media specifically within the contexts of the UK and Norway. Our aim is to experiment with worldling practices as a means to open up generative possibilities to encounter and reconfigure difficult knowledges. We take two contemporary events: the 2017 Grenfell Tower fire tragedy in London, and the 2018 Marjory Stoneman high school shooting massacre in Florida, as a means to attend to ways in which affects are materialised across multiple times and spaces. News reports of these harrowing events, alongside what they produced, in terms of child activism, racism and toxic masculinity, provided a catalyst for a feminist new materialist experiment in generating other knowledges through material-affective-embodied encounters. Newspapers, glue, sticky tape, string, torches, bags and a cartridge for a firearm undertook important work within a speculative workshop, where a small number of early childhood researchers came together to be open to multiple and experimental ways of (k)not-knowing in order to formulate collectively shared problems. Following Manning (2016) we recognise that to avoid getting stuck in familiar ways of thinking and doing we need to undertake research differently. We wondered how might the re-materialisation of these events (through objects, artefacts, sounds and images) shift our thinking about childhood in other directions. We dwell upon the affective work that these high-profile news events perform, and how they might become rearticulated through affective encounters with materiality. Attending to how these events worked on us involves staying with the trouble (Haraway, 2016) as it becomes reignited, mutated and amplified across time and in different contexts. Our goal is to generate other possibilities that seek to reconfigure the ‘image of the child’. By resisting comforts of recognition, reflection and identification we reach beyond what we think we know about how children are in the world, and instead argue for their entanglement with difficult knowledges through, ours and their, world-making practices

Editorial

The first issue of Reconceptualizing Educational Research Methodology in 2016 offers three experimental pieces that hold the potential to produce monstrous entanglements when encountered by the reader/listener/viewer/: the in-betweener. We invite you to be open to the possibilities that the contributors to this issue have created through their experimental work. Each piece seeks to stretch what might be understood as data, as research, and as method

Portal-time and wanderlines: what does virusing-with make possible in childhood research?

This paper emerged from the forces of a pandemic that invited us to wrestle with what ‘virusing-with’ might potentiate in educational research-creation (Manning, 2016a). We sense the Coronavirus perform its agency on childhood in the Capitalocene in new, troubling, and sometimes hopeful ways. Research-creation has compelled us to dwell upon how virusing-with makes attuning differently to the world possible. We contemplate how virusing-with as concept and method holds the potential to disrupt and reformulate ways to undertake research and ways to conceptualise the child. Inspired by Manning’s (2020) recent work in relation to the child of the wanderline, we explore how multiple wanderlines take shape and interweave through research processes. Through the curation of three threshold events we think-do qualitative research in ways that push ideas and practices about childhood in directions that attend to agentic relationalities between the human, non-human and more-than-human. We argue that practices of virusing-with in portal time provides space for coming-into-relations of differences (Manning, 2016a, p.11) as an ecology of practice that shapes how educational research might be conceptualised and practiced

Interesting times: a short introduction from the new editorial team of Gender and Education

Editoria