Re-Generating Research Partnerships in Early Childhood Education: A Non-Idealized Vision

This chapter provides a challenge to positivist notions of partnership in early childhood education, and instead proposes a re-generative posthumanist perspective, based on relationality of partnerships. Specifically, the chapter addresses the troubles and struggles inherited in research partnerships through a non-idealized vision of research partnerships. It experiments with the notions of regenerating ‘change’ and regenerating ‘relationality’. It also addresses the multi-layered aspects of knowledge-in-the-making; non-innocent relations; difficulties of thinking change in research; and the potentialities of conflict and dissension. However, no certainties and closures about research partnerships are provided

Rats, assorted shit and ‘racist groundwater’: towards extra-sectional understandings of childhoods and social-material processes

Reflecting on a study of children’s outdoor play in a ‘white, working class estate’ in east London, this paper argues that social-material processes that are characteristically massy, indivisible, unseen, fluid and noxious have, problematically, remained hidden-in-plain-sight within multidisciplinary research with children and young people. For example, juxtaposing qualitative and autoethnographic data, we highlight children’s vivid, troubling narratives of swarming rats, smearing excrement, and percolating subsurface flows of water, toxins and racialised affects. In so doing, we develop a wider argument that key theorisations of matter, nature and nonhuman co-presences have often struggled to articulate the indivisibility of social-material processes from contemporary social-political-economic geographies. Over the course of the paper, as children’s raced, classed, exclusionary, disenfranchised narratives accumulate, we recognise the urgency of reconciling microgeographical accounts of play and materiality with readings of geographies of social-economic inequalities, exclusions, ethnicities, religions, memorialisations and mortalities. To this end, we initiate an argument for a move from intersectional to extra-sectional analyses that might retain intersectionality’s critical and political purchase, whilst simultaneously folding social-material complexities and vitalities into its theorisation

Researching Neoliberal and Neocolonial Assemblages in Early Childhood Education

The article provides a discussion of ‘‘researching’’ neoliberalisms and neocolonialisms in white settler colonial societies such as Canada. It addresses the research implications after conceptualizing neoliberalisms as assemblages that are always already implicated in colonial histories. Specifically, the article discusses the need to rethink methodologies when neoliberalisms do not follow coherent directions, the kinds of methodological and research approaches necessary for the fluid and nonlinear movements of neoliberalisms and neocolonialisms, and how neoliberalisms and neocolonialisms as connected assemblages open up early childhood research practices that attend to colonial pastpresents

More-than-human emotions: Multispecies emotional labour in the tourism industry

The concept of emotional labour has been subject to critique, evaluation, development and extension over the last 35 years, but it remains firmly anthropocentric. This article begins to address this shortcoming by illustrating some of the productive potential of extending the concept of emotional labour to include more-than-human and multispecies perspectives. Organisations are not solely human phenomena, but research usually fails to consider the role of nonhumans in work in contemporary capitalism. Using the example of trail horses in tourism, I argue that some nonhuman animals should be considered workers, and that they do perform emotional labour in service to commercial organisations. More-than-human and multispecies perspectives capture some of the complexities of everyday organisational practices, and can inform feminist research attuned to the experiences of marginalised others, human and nonhuman

Sticking and tipping points: a case study of preschool education policy and practice in Astana, Kazakhstan

This article presents a case study exploring how national guidance for kindergartens in Kazakhstan was interpreted in practice. Document analysis of the State Education Standards of Preschool Upbringing and Education, together with stakeholder interviews and observations of six Astana kindergarten settings, illustrates how competing perspectives on preparing children for school can both promote and limit opportunities for child-led activity in early education. The article considers postcolonial and neocolonial pasts and their potential to influence the present, identifying potential sticking points that may limit change processes. The article suggests processes for building locally grounded praxis in order to create tipping points where child-initiated pedagogy could become a more frequent feature of practice

Affirmative critique as minor qualitative critical inquiry: A storying of a becoming critical engagement with what happens

In response to the evolving nature of scholarly exchange and collaboration, University of California Press allows its authors to post preprints and postprints on authors' personal websites, and within institutional repositories. You may use the Publisher-generated PDF, and you must display the following Publisher's Statement in tandem with posting: Published as [Andersen, Camilla Eline. (2017). Affirmative critique as minor qualitative critical inquiry: A storying of a becoming critical engagement with what happens. International review of Qualitative Research, 10(4), 430-449. doi: http://dx.doi.org10.1525/irqr.2017.10.4.430]. © [2017] by [the Regents of the University of California/Sponsoring Society or Association]. Copying and permissions notice: Authorization to copy this content beyond fair use (as specified in Sections 107 and 108 of the U. S. Copyright Law) for internal or personal use, or the internal or personal use of specific clients, is granted by [the Regents of the University of California/on behalf of the Sponsoring Society] for libraries and other users, provided that they are registered with and pay the specified fee via Rightslink® or directly with the Copyright Clearance Center (http://www.copyright.com/).publishedVersio

Feminist ethicality in child-animal research: worlding through complex stories

Thinking with feminist scholarship on ethicality, this article draws from two ethnographies with animal and young children to outline new questions for doing research in children’s geographies. Specifically, the article discusses how feminist ethicality within multispecies research challenges the masculinist idea that ethical research should focus on children’s story-making and ability to make meaning of the world. Instead, the authors call for an ethical focus on worlding processes or the making of worlds, and to seek possibilities for recuperation in the midst of children and more-than-human relations. The article concludes by reconfiguring the relations between ethics and research with young children, asking for a focus on what might be possible in the shaping of the present and future