Children and the Power of Stories: Posthuman and Autoethnographic Perspectives in Early Childhood Education (Children: Global Posthumanist Perspectives and Materialist Theories) [1st ed. 2022] 9789811692864, 9789811692871, 9811692866

Table of contents :
Preface
Acknowledgments
Contents
Editors and Contributors
1 Storytelling the Multiple Self: Posthuman Autoethnography as Critical Praxis
1.1 Not Fixed
1.2 Not Me
1.3 Not Mine
1.4 Not Linear
1.5 Not Narrative
1.6 Not One
References
2 Storying into Resistance: The Use of Purposeful Placement Stories
2.1 Introduction
2.2 Storying our Existence
2.2.1 Insistence of Stories
2.2.2 Storying into Resistance
2.3 Connecting
References
3 The Green Foam Ring and the Sleeping Girl Who Wasn’t Tired: A Posthuman Story of Care
3.1 Introduction
3.2 From What Things Mean to What Things Do
3.3 Feminist Care Ethics and Posthumanism
3.4 Care and Morality—Like Hand in Glove?
3.5 Conclusion
References
4 Storying Observations of a Cardboard Book Through Sticky Micro-moments: Bag-Lady-Carrier-Bag Practices and Memory Stories
4.1 Introduction
4.2 Ethics Through Sitting on the Floor Making Notes
4.3 Micro-moments and Sticky Stories
4.4 Storying as a Bag-Lady in Her Carrier-Bag in ECEC Research
4.5 Memory Stories
4.6 Continue the Search for Differences Through Continuous Storying
References
5 From Multispecies Tangles and Anthropocene Muddles: What can Lichen Teach Us about Precarity and Indeterminacy in Early Childhood?
5.1 Introduction
5.2 Reshaping the World
5.3 A Pause for Thought, a Time to Feel
5.4 Becoming Flâneuse: Walking as Accidental Method
5.5 The (Im)possibilities of Multispecies Flourishing and Researching (with) Children
5.6 The Everyday Art of Noticing Lichen
5.7 Precarity: The Frontline for the Essential Early Childhood Educator
5.8 The Moral Depravity of Global Capitalism
References
6 Storyplay Time at School: Neoliberal and Neocolonial Assemblages in Early Childhood Education
6.1 Prologue
6.2 Introduction
6.3 Storied Place as Assemblage
6.3.1 The Banks of the River
6.4 The Assemblage as Rhizomatic Thought
6.5 How Does the Performance of P4C in This Place with These Children Come to Matter as a Neoliberal and Neocolonial Act?
6.6 CODA
References
7 Storying Other Than the Neoliberal Criticism—Cause I Have a Hunch of Something Being Wrong Here
7.1 Introduction
7.2 Therefore, I Write
7.3 When Educating Teachers Has Become Leadership Training
7.4 The Art of not Knowing
7.5 Writing Ethicized Realisms; Autoethnographic Habit-Challenging Writing as My Conquering Strategy
7.6 The Image of the Rhizome and/as Writing
7.7 A Post-representative Translocal and Heterotopic Guide: Organizational Learning Through Dissolution of Order
7.8 Bringing Back the Child: Crying My Eyes Out Over What Pedagogics Has Been Reduced to
References
8 Nick-Storying and the Body’s Immersion and Participation in the World: Forming Aggregates for Early Childhood Education
8.1 Introduction
8.2 Nick-Storying
8.3 What is in the Nature of the Body?
8.4 Body as a Series of Open-Ended Systems
8.5 Body as Immersed in the Always Forward Movement of Time
8.6 The Biology of the Body is to Live
8.7 Nick-Storying as a Practice for Forming Aggregates to Invent Ways to Live in Early Childhood Education
8.8 How Could the World Be?
References
9 Stories, Places: Storied Place and Placed Story
9.1 Introduction
9.2 The School as Storied and Storified Place
9.2.1 The Hospitable and Inhospitable
9.2.2 Power as In-Formation
9.3 Some Final Thoughts
References
10 An Ethics of Flourishing: Storying Our Way Around the Power/Potential Nexus in Early Childhood Education and Care
10.1 Introduction
10.2 The Potential/Power Nexus of Education
10.3 Growing up in Every Which Way
10.4 An Ethics of Flourishing in ECEC
10.5 Grafting Power and Potential
References
Afterword
One Final Story (for now at least)
References
Index

Citation preview

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

Carmen Blyth  Teresa K. Aslanian Editors

Children and the Power of Stories Posthuman and Autoethnographic Perspectives in Early Childhood Education

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 Editorial Board Gail Boldt, Pennsylvania State University, University Park, USA Iris Duhn, Monash University, Clayton, VIC, Australia Hillevi Lenz-Taguchi, Stockholm University, Stockholm, Sweden Linda Knight, RMIT University, Mill Park, VIC, Australia Walter Kohan, Rio de Janeiro State University, Rio de Janeiro, Brazil Peter Kraftl, University of Birmingham, Birmingham, UK Casey Meyers, Kent State University, Kent, OH, USA Pauliina Rautio, University of Oulu, Oulu, Finland Tracy Skelton, National University of Singapore, Singapore, Singapore

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 https://link.springer.com/bookseries/15731

Carmen Blyth · Teresa K. Aslanian Editors

Children and the Power of Stories Posthuman and Autoethnographic Perspectives in Early Childhood Education

Editors Carmen Blyth University of Cape Town Cape Town, South Africa

Teresa K. Aslanian University of South-Eastern Norway Porsgrunn, Norway

ISSN 2523-3408 ISSN 2523-3416 (electronic) Children: Global Posthumanist Perspectives and Materialist Theories ISBN 978-981-16-9286-4 ISBN 978-981-16-9287-1 (eBook) https://doi.org/10.1007/978-981-16-9287-1 © The Editor(s) (if applicable) and The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature Singapore Pte Ltd. 2022 This work is subject to copyright. All rights are solely and exclusively licensed 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

Preface

Stories have the ability to empower or disempower, to replicate the status quo or challenge and expand it. The key aim of this book is to use the power of stories in early childhood education (ECE) research and practice to challenge our traditional distinctions between personal experience and our entanglements with the more-thanhuman world: to explore the tensions that exist in the liminal space between selfexperience and becoming conscious of the agency of the more-than-human world. We seek, through the power of stories, to stretch our ordinary mode of understanding through posthuman and autoethnographic perspectives to produce new stories that disrupt and thus decoloni(ali)ze traditional ways of thinking about and approaches to ECE research and practice. The varied modes of storytelling and stories collected here share space together, but do not fit easily together. Each disrupts the other, and they do not add up to an answer of where to go to from here. The chapters herein generate new stories about what ECE practice and research can be and what response-abilities it can entail (Haraway, 2012). As early childhood educators, we have experienced first-hand the captivating power of stories and have been inspired and motivated by the ease with which children ‘story’ their worlds as they embrace and occupy the liminal space between the human and the more-than-human. Lost in play, a child can converse and interact with a plastic toy tractor with the same ease that it moments later shares the story they have made with the tractor, or just as easily communicates a need to a friend, parent or teacher. Children’s ability to relate to things, ‘nature’, adults and peers in drastically different but equally sincere ways belies a cognitive flexibility that far exceeds what adults believe children are capable of. Children often express the desire to hear, see and re-tell stories. And it is through stories that children develop an understanding of themselves in relation to the world, what it means to be human and part of a more-than-human world. Yet the power stories have to shape children’s understandings of the world demands a critical and humble appraisal of what stories are being told, by whom and why, as well as what these stories are doing now and in the future. It demands that we focus not on what stories are but on what they do: their impact or lack thereof rather than their structure as fixed, unchanging artefact. It demands that we should, in fact, focus on how their v

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meaning can be ceaselessly deferred, marginalized to become silenced ‘nomadic narratives’ (Tamboukou, 2008) in search of a home or reframed so as to speak to us of nondeterministic, untimely worlds that portend multiple futures and ruptures with the past. For although there is no changing the past it can be used to change the present (Grosz, 2004, p. 252). It demands that we as authors push boundaries and explore new ways to disturb and perturb, question and wrestle with our ECE practice and research. Inspired by children’s ability to embrace the more-than-human world in a deeply personal way, authors combine autoethnography, a research form that takes the ‘self’ as starting point, and posthuman/new materialist perspectives that embrace a relational ontology in which there is no delineated ‘self’: a first decoloni(ali)zing move. Our decoloni(ali)zing effort is furthered by an underlying assumption that personal experience is already more-than-human. Authors document, and sometimes play with, varied modes of understanding their own stories and the stories of other humans and non humans with non-traditional writing styles and experimentation with academic form embraced as ways to know differently. For ‘if we write as a way of knowing, how we write is as important if not more so than what we write’ (Blyth, 2017, p. vii). Using storying as a starting point is to philosophize by way of ‘examples’ (a form of thinking traditionally credited to Wittgenstein), that are the ‘pivot of moral thought in themselves’ (Mulhall, 2009, p. 11). Through combining posthuman and autoethnographic storying, the stories are not ‘a means of getting somewhere, but an end in itself’ (p. 11). The end being the act of grappling with the tensions of self and more-than-human in ECE practice and research.

Autoethnography and Posthumanism Autoethnographic work draws on personal experiences and stories to understand or explore a subject matter in light of political, social, ‘cultural’ and spiritual concerns (Holman Jones, 2005; Lenz Taguchi, 2010; Richards, 2012; Sparkes, 1996, 2000, 2003), the ‘disjunctions’ (Muncey, 2005, p. 2) that mark people’s lives. The reliance on ‘self’ as data renders autoethnography a contentious research method: of being ‘self-indulgent’ (Brooker & Macpherson, 1999, p. 208; Sparkes, 1998, 2002, p. 214) at best, or a ‘blind alley’ (Atkinson, 1997, p. 325) at worst, rather than a method of inquiry. Often used to evoke discomfort and confront otherwise silenced stories, autoethnographers provoke questions about what knowledge is or can be. Similarly, but from what might appear to be a dichotomous starting point, posthumanism attempts to question the very notion of knowledge by decentring the human, discounting the idea of self and rather understanding both human and more-thanhuman as mutually productive and entangled, not one experiencing the other, but both generating reality and experience. Despite the fact that these two perspectives are often construed as antithetical to each other, recent work (Wilde, 2020; Warfield, 2019; Dickinson, 2018) explores what happens when autobiographical stories are understood as already more-than-human. A posthumanist lens turns the focus on

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matter and materiality as entangled (Barad, 2007) assemblages, systems of the human and non human rather than dichotomies with ‘“the human” as an autonomous, rational being who provides an Archimedean point for knowing about the world’ (Pollock, 2011, p. 235). In this volume, research and practice in ECE acts as a canvas, a context with which to explore how autoethnography can become other when viewed through a posthumanist lens. As a consequence the chapters and stories that follow allow for an interplay between the posthumanist and the autoethnographic, an interplay that allows for a very specific type of meaning to emerge; a meaning that traffics in numerous and disruptive possibilities rather than settled certainties. As posthumanism courts interest in fields as diverse as philosophy and the arts, the natural sciences and law, medicine and teaching, what is meant by the terms posthuman and posthumanism remains ambiguous (Wolfe, 2010) to say the least. Given this, and so as to better position this edited volume within the field of posthumanism engaged with herein, we draw your attention to the fact that although primarily interested in new materialist thinking, ‘we “drink” and “eat” from various theoretical frameworks’ (Nordstrom et al., 2018, p. 184). Varied frameworks ‘allow us, like cakes and drinks allowed Alice, to differ, to figure differently as critical researchers engaging with solidarity and hence avoid the danger of stratifying solidarity’ (p. 184). In this volume, we look to Donna Haraway and Rosi Braidotti’s insights and questions as they pertain to ‘man’1 , and those they are inextricably intraconnected with: Gilles Deleuze and Féliz Guattari, Michel Foucault, and Jacques Derrida2 . The critical insights developed by these philosopherscholars are grounded in the work of Baruch Spinoza; they talk to theories of power and governmentality and how they relate to recent technological ‘progress’, most particularly in the field of ECE. We look to the Spinozist understanding of bodies, of what a body3 is capable of (Deleuze, 1968/1992, p. 256): ‘Of what affections, passive as well as active?’ and how far its power extends in order to better understand ‘the production of subjectivity beyond a humanist perception of capabilities built, for example, on divides between human and nonhuman subjects/objects’ (Käll, 2017, p. 7) in the ECE world. This is to understand matter in ways that matter and that align with a Spinozist and Deleuzian understanding of matter. It is to understand that as Wolfe (2010, p. xvi) states: when we talk about posthumanism, we are not just talking about a thematics of the decentering of the human in relation to either evolutionary, ecological, or technological coordinates (though that is where the conversation usually begins and, all too often, ends); rather, [we] will insist that we are also talking about how thinking confronts that thematics, what thought has to become in the face of those challenges. (Wolfe, 2010, p. xvi) 1

Haraway (1991) refers to ‘man’ as ‘the one who is not animal, barbarian, or woman . . . the author of a cosmos called history’ (p. 156). 2 Haraway and others suggest that Derrida is of little use in enabling us to make the non-human more relevant when it comes to, for example, policies for experimental and other procedures. However as Wolfe (2010, p. 98) points out: ‘he is of immense use in forcing us to live with the fact that no matter how such policies are drawn, the distinction between human and animal should be of no use in drawing them.’ 3 For Deleuze ‘A body can be anything; it can be an animal, a body of sounds, a mind, or idea; it can be a linguistic corpus, a social body, a collectivity’ (1988, p. 127).

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There are ‘ethico-onto-epistemological’ (Barad, 2007, p. 381) consequences and as such educational consequences to a world view where humans hold a very different position and role from what they have traditionally held. We hope to confront those consequences for ECE in the storying and storytelling that follows. That said the stories and storytelling in this volume are not comfortable in merely expanding, revising or even deepening an already settled field of inquiry. Rather the volume brings together ‘new concepts for a materialism that is always in the making’ (van der Tuin & Nocek, 2019, p. 815) with the philosophical and pedagogical, matter and thinking, entwined and emergent at the interstices, the gaps and cracks where real and imaginary collide. We do not hope to provide ‘settled’ answers to many of the questions we pose but rather wish to perturb established notions of what it means to ‘do’ ECE, to think materially. For stories are ‘less about content and meaning and more about context and expression; an act, event, [a] happening’ (Andrews & Duff, 2019, p. 129) with the frame-setting stylistic qualities and insertions—such as metaphor—that all stories use ‘acting beyond meaning’ (p. 129). In a ‘metaphysical sense they function as agentic objects with transformative potential, possessing the ability to change the direction of thinking and action as they appear’ (p. 129). Storying and storytelling are deeply performative, physical experiences, intrarelational and more often than not shared. In this respect, they are ‘virtual social imaginaries’ as much as they are ‘autobiographical reports on actual events’ (Andrews & Duff, 2019, p. 129). And they create places of opportunity, what Foucault (1984/1998, p. 177) calls heterotopias: ‘worlds within worlds’, places ‘utterly different from all the emplacements that they reflect or refer to’; anomalies, intra-relational differences at once disturbing yet oddly familiar, they create ‘temporal discontinuities’ (p. 179). They are at once real and realized (Foucault, 1984/1998), providing alternatives to the ‘norm’. They are in relationship with existing realities in such a way as to simultaneously contest, represent, reverse/invert those very relations designated by them to act as a ‘kind of contestation, both mythical and real, of the spaces in which we live’ (Foucault, 1984/1998, p. 177). Placed yet placeless places (p. 179)—concrete and territorial yet a part of the social imaginary specific to certain situations—they are where difference abides and governance, policy, and administration no longer trace lives. Consequently, contributors to this edited volume build on stories in different ways and through different perspectives, including speculative stories, diffractive stories, re-telling/re-mixing stories, having the commonality of being situated in a more-than-human worldview. They use experimental approaches and writing styles to rethink and perturb the notion of child-centred approaches to knowing, be(com)ing and doing within the ECE context, to challenge the Western colonial discourses of education–of West as best with other ways of be(com)ing, knowing and doing viewed as ‘not fit for purpose’—and as such the ‘ethical, political, and pedagogical implications of addressing the colonial histories’ (Pacini-Ketchabaw & Taylor, 2015, p. 2) of early childhood.

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Decoloni(ali)zing Our Own Thinking? In our effort to decoloni(ali)ze our own thinking, entrenched as we are in the Western tradition, we have looked to the South and to the East for inspiration and provocation. We look to the southern African ‘philosophy’ of Hunhu/Ubuntu with which the South African Ubuntu scholar and philosopher Mogobe Bernard Ramose entwines the notion of Hu– and Ubu–, that of being, with that of –nhu and –ntu: knowing: the ontological with the epistemological (Ramose, 1999, p. 50): knowing in being. Both words (Hunhu/Ubuntu) also speak to the character of a person, their conduct and as such also entwines the ethical with the ontological with the epistemological. It is at once philosophy and praxis, a philosophical practice and practical philosophy that sees humanity as part of the never-ending unfolding of life forces and knowledge within a ‘dynamic, relational, and necessarily uncertain/unknowable future’ (Wu, Eaton, Robinson-Morris, Wallace, & Han, 2018, p. 11). From an African perspective, one’s being is always relational, always informed and formed through an active engagement with the cosmos in its entirety (Wu et al., 2018). We have also drawn inspiration from the Buddhist concept of jita funi: where the two are not two but one; where there are no dualities, no boundaries. This is a notion that is implicit to the stories told herein. Insights from our Western traditions have also been pivotal to our posthuman thinking. We build on work within ‘renewed materialisms’ (Coole & Frost, 2010, p. 4)—those materialisms that acknowledge the enormous debt owed to ‘old materialists’ by ‘new materialism[s]’ (Dolphijn & van der Tuin, 2012). New materialists such as Karen Barad, Donna Haraway and Rosi Braidotti share a common conviction: that conceptual boundaries that create binary distinctions such as mind and body, subject and object, are too simplistic as well as ‘directly harmful for the construction of radically sustainable worlds’ (Käll, 2017, p. 6). A focus on matter and materiality requires that we ‘see’ matter with an ‘openness from closure’ (Wolfe, 2010) where systems and their environments have non-permeable borders. This paradoxically results in a self-reference that is simultaneously hetero, irrespective of system unconstrained as it is by the humanist assumption of ‘the subject’ that is seen to ground, leak from or redeem it. Embracing the idea that humans intra-act with non human aspects of the world, our intention with this volume is to re-conceptualize the notion of difference as nonindifference to contribute to forming ‘communities of difference’ (Hickey-Moody & Willcox, 2019, p. 1), heterotopias, and through this work towards decoloni(ali)zing the ECE classroom. For stories have the ability to balance multiple truths at one and the same time (Frank, 2010) making for communities that are more just and more than just human. They are told to remind us, we who share their form of life, what it is we share (Frank, 2000). As Burman (2001, p. 7) takes pains to point out: ‘language creates and governs the horizons of what we can envisage’ within educational research and practice. Our approaches to storying and storytelling allow for these horizons to include the material of the more-than-human in all of its manifestations in the world:

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Preface Our stories are entangled, not easily packaged together, without following a linear trajectory. The stories aggregate; they add up to create other stories and to disrupt taken for granted stories. They are stories that grapple with troubles, with connections that trouble us, but have no generalized moral teachings nor are they finished stories of grandiose research findings. They do, however, have “consequences for response-abilty” (Haraway, 2012, p. 312). (PaciniKetchabaw, di Tomasso & Nxumalo, 2014, p. 34, emphasis in original)

Chapter Overviews In Chap. 1, Poppy Wilde argues for the autoethnographic-I and its use as a capturing of multiplicity, as a site for discovery and of becoming-child. Drawing on Braidotti’s argument that we are constituted of a multiplicity of ‘others’ and that the notion of ‘self’ is laziness of habit, she extends these ideas to consider in more critical detail how the autoethnographic-I can embrace the idea of non-unitary subjectivity whilst working within the humanist capacities that formed it in order to dismantle humanistic notions from within. Ultimately, this means a newfound definition and appreciation for what is meant by the posthuman-I, and an exploration of how storytelling the ‘self’ can allow an opportunity for acknowledgement of the entangled and distributed nature of self-as-emergent. Considering this in pedagogical terms, she argues that storytelling the multiple self affords us the opportunity to radically reconsider what ‘self’ means, to disrupt humanistic hierarchies and the sanctity of the individual. In aligning ourselves with the Deleuze and Guattari notion of becoming-child and the posthuman-I, Wilde argues that we are able to unlearn the problematic aspects of self, such that we might begin to recognize how to teach children and students in more deterritorialized ways. This piece draws together both critical and creative writing as an opportunity for different modes of expression that also breakdown binaries and boundaries between academic and affective writing. Rather than dismissing humanistic practices in their entirety, this work sees humanism as always-already entangled within us, and therefore a part of the assemblage of what we become. As a Black mother and educator, raising Black children in this world, Keishana Barnes knows all too well the power that stories and narratives can have over the trajectory of one’s life. In Chap. 2, she uses autoethnography, Critical Race Theory and Black Feminism to explore the use of stories during the various phases of her own journey into womanhood and motherhood as a means of better shaping what will ultimately be her children’s own stories. Why autoethnography? Why Critical Race Theory? And why Black feminism? For many African American women, Barnes argues, race and gender are the primary components of their identity. To better understand her own story, she acknowledges the need to look to other Black mothers’ stories, as well as her own. She uses Perry, Lyman and Anderson’s explanation of the power of ethnography in general to begin to answer these questions. By interpreting children’s responses to various questions about nature and the physical world, Piaget concluded in the last century that young children’s worldviews are characterized by ambiguous, ontological divisions between people, nature and

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things. Children described things and nature as if on a continuum of life. Things, like people, are understood as co-active and agentic. Historically, this way of thinking has been attributed to children’s immature intellect and ignorance. The idea that clouds can will themselves in any direction, can be interpreted as a kind of anthropomorphizing of clouds. The movement of clouds is understood through a human lens—a lens of one who reflects on their doings and can be held accountable for what is done. Obviously, clouds cannot be held accountable for what they do and their doings are not intentional. Still, clouds do do. Clouds can release water that nurtures or floods crops. Clouds can occlude the sun, causing temperatures to drop and humans to freeze, and they can cause light to scatter, becoming white to our eyes and forming the motif that can be found in children’s drawings across the globe. The idea that clouds are actively engaged in producing the world in which they themselves become, even without the intention to do so, has some credence, and echoes the philosophical position of new materialist perspectives which view the human and the other-than-human as involved and co-constitutive as Karen Barad and other new materialists posit, and in which things are ascribed vitality. Barad’s concept of ‘intra-action’ is of central importance here, and describes an involved, co-constitutive relationship between human and other-than-human phenomena. Materiality is understood as something more than static. This chapter, Chap. 3 by Teresa K. Aslanian, is an exercise in how a change of perspective can highlight new aspects of a well known but neglected topic: care in early childhood education and care (ECEC) centres. The author approaches the concept of care from a new materialist perspective, as a fluid process produced in various constellations of human and other-than-human in the ECEC center. She aims to challenge established ideas about morality as the necessary basis for care, and the human dyadic as a care motif. She asks how care takes place between people and things in ECEC. Posthuman storying is often used to offer generative methodological approaches Anna Moxnes explains in Chap. 4. However exploring them in this chapter is not about forcing stories into standardized recipes, as a search for neat answers, or firm conclusions. Rather the intention is to unfold and investigate, so that storying can continue to work in and explore Early Childhood Education and Care (ECEC), and become new ethico-onto-epistemological adventures that can present surprises about what else is going on in ECEC practices. This is to listen to more than words. It is to listen and be open to differences. The opening story of the chapter dwells upon a series of moments concerning a cardboard book. The intention with the chapter is to investigate the narrative through telling different stories about the story. To help keep the focus, the author asks: How can three narrative strategies, within the feminist new materialism field of research, work to storying differences within a narrative from a nursery? This chapter is meant to be read as a methodological experiment. The observation-story and the three strategies introduced—becoming a Bag-lady and doing Carrier-bag storytelling, as well as Memory stories and Micro-moments—are used to consider the possibilities these ideas of storying in early childhood research offer, and to open up multiple entrances to reading the observation notes differently. The discussion illuminates ongoing cognitive–affective material intra-actions

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through listening to differences, children’s extraordinary competences and exploring intra-actions of nursery practices with the macro-political greenwashing of oceans. Jayne Osgood is inspired in Chap. 5 by the work of Anna Tsing and Donna Haraway and their encouragement to pursue storytelling as a method of earthly survival and multispecies flourishing in the time that we now recognize as the Anthropocene. Together their work invites us to grapple with our infected, entangled and affective relationalities to the worlds around us, and of which we form a part. Storytelling for the author emerged from (an accidental method of) walking-with during a global pandemic with the figure of the modern-day flâneuse mobilized as a feminist praxis to investigate infected, entangled and affective relationalities between the human, non-human and more-than-human as they unfold in the daily tangles to emerge from lockdown life in the city. Crucially, it is by exercising the ‘art of noticing’, Osgood states, and committing to a deep engagement with the ordinary, mundane and habitual muddle that unfolds around us, that we can begin to view the world through a different set of optics. The stories that are told in this chapter are curated from a specific geopolitical moment, which has incited a fearful pause. Researching early childhood from the depths of a global pandemic demands a different optics, alternative places to search for how childhood takes shape, and contemplate the ways in which it is inextricably interwoven through space, histories and temporalities that manifest within chance encounters (with lichen, with hand sanitiser, and with a dead pigeon). By attuning to life in the Anthropocene it might become possible to find ‘ways of living and dying well together’, as Donna Haraway imagines, through commitments to multispecies flourishing. With Chap. 6 Carmen Blyth introduces and uses Deleuze and Guattari’s notion of an assemblage to explore the intersection of race, neoliberalism and neocolonialism at one particular school, in one particular classroom, with one particular teacher and the early childhood students actively involved in his/her ‘storyplay’ lesson presented in an opening vignette. The assemblage allows for neoliberalism and neocolonialism to be explored for what they do rather than for what they are, for how they do what they do within the ‘storyplay’ and storytelling phenomenon within early childhood education. For as philosopher and educationist Richard Edwards reminds us: storytelling practices act as a central political issue in early childhood education given how they materialize, the work that they do and the divisive practices they support in materializing particular worlds. These are practices that allow us to engage with power production at the level of affect: deeply political and deeply affective within the assemblage of place with children, teacher, story, storybook, chairs, mat, the practices that govern a Philosophy for Children (P4C) pedagogy, government and school policies and procedures, and so much more, arranged together to intra-act—to use Karen Barad’s neologism for the notion that individual agencies do not pre-exist or precede the intra-action but emerge from it—in the (de)(re)territorialization of place and (dis)(re)appropriation of bodies within that place to (re)produce or disrupt neocolonial, neoliberal and racial acts. In answering the questions: what is an assemblage and how does it work, the author provides us with a detailed exploration of how matter comes to matter within the early childhood classroom. Three paragraphs in this chapter appeared in the publication: Carmen Blyth, International Schools,

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Teaching and Governance: An Autoethnography of a Teacher in Conflict, 2017, Palgrave Macmillan, and are reproduced with permission of The Palgrave Macmillan published by Springer Nature. Anne B. Reinertsen takes us on an autoethnographic storying and writing journey back to the child in Chap. 7 where she discusses how professional and leadership subjectivities are produced and often constrained within powerful educational discourses. This piece is a critique of the neoliberal discursive production of selves and offers a view of subjective professionalisms produced through autoethnographic storying and writing. It is a new material approach to writing based on the experiential and speculative process philosophy of Deleuze and Guattari, and represents a view of professionalisms, leadership and organization as emergent and constantly in the making. By using stories and autoethnographic storying and writing to produce thought provocations, she critiques neoliberalism and the fact that the conceptual foci of Early Childhood Education (ECE) and leadership is moving away from the child. Her claim is that we need to bring back the missing child into education and our pedagogical practices and stories. This chapter is about storying the child back into ECE and leadership without reducing differences to similarities with learning ultimately theorized as iterative, indirect and informal ethicized processes. In Chap. 8, Susan Naomi Nordström and Camille Eline Andersen think about how bodies become, and how to aggregate ongoing experiments towards a different future for human and more-than-human coexistence in early childhood education and beyond. To do so, they turn our focus towards how human bodies as living matter provide a surface for cultural inscription. In conversation with philosopher and feminist theorist Elizabeth Grosz, they engage with a radical thinking about the nature and ontology of the body, making connections to how this conceptualization might create a different starting point for equity and justice practices in educational early childhood institutions. In doing so, they also perform the practice of nickstorying. Nick-storying is an open-ended storying practice that contains the events of recognizing that one’s body is not one’s own. Nick-storying in this chapter are aggregates that might cohere and unleash material forces in the world to invent ways to live and to live differently. Everything in a school has stories to tell: not all will be legible, easy to translate (if at all), but many will provide compelling, ‘vivid’, articulate, powerful and moving tales of co-existence, interdependence, extinction, dys-appearance and survival. From the graffiti or lack thereof on desks and walls, hallways and restrooms, to those liminal places and spaces of doorways and doors, all ‘tell tales’ of inclusion and exclusion, and all those shades of grey that lie in-between: nonlinguistic performativity in search of an active, willing listener—a home. So what stories does a school housed in buildings that date back to the Cape Town era of the late 1700s have to tell, buildings constructed by the Dutch and lived in with their families; buildings that have known many owners over a significant number of years, have witnessed enormous change take place—ecological, geopolitical and sociocultural—in this tiny south-western corner of the African continent? What stories do these walls and bricks, soil and grass communicate? What did/do those doors keep in, keep out, include, exclude; what difference did/do they allow to ‘connect’, merge for ‘the sake

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of exchange’ as Deborah Bird Rose, the Australian-based ethnographer of Aboriginal Peoples might ask. And how does school as storied and storified place interpolate and interpellate inhabitants and inhabitants place? In Chap. 9, Carmen Blyth uses the notion of hospitality both in Derridean sense of ‘absolute hospitality’ and also in the way it is practiced locally as practical philosophy and philosophical practice together with the Deleuze and Guattari notion of the ‘refrain’ to explore the questions raised above. This chapter was previously published in Interconnections: Journal of Posthumanism, Volume 1(1) and appears here with the kind permission of the editor. According to Spinoza, ethics is always ‘a problem of power never a problem of duty’ and malice lies in preventing someone from doing what they can do. As such Spinoza is never concerned with morality, what we must or should do, but rather with what a body is capable of, its potentia. Potentia, for Spinoza, is a body’s relationship to the whole world: knowing itself and others by the effects produced on its body and by its body on others. Deleuze and Guattari see such desire to know as basic to assembling that which allows the body to persist in its own being, to be a ‘desiring machine’ with humans as desiring machines that continually seek to connect and proliferate. But what if children were ‘desiring machines’ different to those assigned to humans by Deleuze and Guattari in Anti-Oedipus? What if children’s intense desires are on transforming, on always becoming-other, on inhabiting the littoral, the liminal? On potentia rather than potestas4 ? In this final chapter by Carmen Blyth and Teresa K. Aslanian, the authors consider the ethical complexities and conflicts involved in children’s entanglements with early childhood education and care (ECEC) institutions that operate at a nexus of power and potential. The authors understand children in ECEC institutions as both desirous and thus agentic, as well as malleable and thus vulnerable. And they use personal stories from their own childhood experiences, Froebel’s metaphor of kindergarten (child garden) as well as Marder’s work on plant intentionality and intelligence to speculate as to what an ethics of flourishing might entail in ECEC’s power/potential nexus. Cape Town, South Africa Porsgrunn, Norway

Carmen Blyth, Ph.D. Teresa K. Aslanian Associate Professor

References Atkinson, P. (1997). Narrative turn or blind alley? Qualitative Health Research, 7(3), 325-344. Andrews, G. J., & Duff, C. (2019). Matter beginning to matter: On the posthumanist understandings of vital emergence of health. Social Science & Medicine, 226, 123–234. Barad, K. (2007). Meeting the universe halfway: Quantum physics and the entanglement of matter and meaning. Durham: Duke University Press. Blyth, C. (2017). International schools, teaching and governance: An autoethnography of a teacher in conflict. Springer International Publishing. 4

On potestas: potestas needs a referent, something to act on or be acted upon, whereas potentia does not.

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Brooker, R., & Macpherson, I. (1999). Communicating the processes and outcomes of practitioner research: An opportunity for self-indulgence or a serious professional responsibility? Educational Action Research, 7(2), 207–221. doi: 10.1080/09650799900200091 Burman, E. (2001). Beyond the baby and the bathwater: Postdualistic developmental psychologies for diverse childhoods. European Early Childhood Education Research Journal, 9(1), 5–22. doi: 10.1080/13502930185208651 Coole, D. H., & Frost, S. (2010). Introducing the new materialisms. In D. H. Coole & S. Frost (Eds.), New materialisms: Ontology, agency, and politics (pp. 1–43). Durham: Duke University Press. Deleuze, G. (1992). Expressionism in philosophy: Spinoza (Martin Joughin, Trans.). New York: Zone Books. (Original work published 1968) Deleuze, G. (1988). Foucault (Séan Hand, Trans.). Minneapolis, MN: University of Minnesota Press. Dickinson, S. (2018). Writing sensation: Critical autoethnography in Posthumanism. In S. Holman Jones & M. Pruyn (Eds.), Creative selves/creative cultures: Critical autoethnography, performance, and pedagogy (pp. 79–92). Springer International Publishing. https://doi.org/10.1007/ 978-3-3-319-47527-1_5 Dolphijn, R., & van der Tuin, I. (2012). New materialism: Interviews and cartographies. Ann Arbor, Michigan: Open Humanities Press. Retrieved from http://quod.lib.umich.edu/cgi/p/pod/ dod-idx/new-materialism-interviews-cartographies.pdf?c=ohp;idno=11515701.0001.001 Foucault, M. (1998). Different spaces (Robert Hurley, Trans.). In P. Rabinow (Series Ed.), J. D. Faubion (Vol. Ed.), Michel Foucault: Aesthetics, method, and epistemology. Essential works of Michel Foucault 1954–1984: Vol II (pp. 175–186). New York: The New Press. (Original work published 1984) Frank, A. W. (2000, May). The standpoint of storyteller. Qualitative Health Research, 10 (3), 354– 365. doi: 10.1177/104973200129118499 Frank, A. W. (2010). Letting stories breathe: A socio-narratology. Chicago: The University of Chicago Press. Grosz, E. (2004). The nick of time: Politics, evolution, and the untimely. Sydney, NSW: Allen & Unwin. Haraway, D. (1991). A cyborg manifesto: Science, technology, and socialist-feminism in the late twentieth century. In D. Haraway (Ed.), Simians, cyborgs and women: The reinvention of nature (pp. 149-182). New York, NY: Routledge. Retrieved from http://faculty.georgetown.edu/irv inem/theory/Haraway-CyborgManifesto.html Haraway, D. (2012). Awash in urine: DES and Premarin® in multispecies responseability. WSQ:Women’s Studies Quarterly, 40(1 & 2), 301–316. Holman Jones, S. (2005). Autoethnography: Making the personal political. In N. K. Denzin and Y. S. Lincoln (Eds.), The handbook of qualitative research (3rd ed., pp. 763-791). Thousand Oaks, CA: Sage. Hickey-Moody, A., & Willcox, M. (2019). Entanglements of difference as community togetherness: Faith, art and feminism. Social Sciences, 8(264), 1–21. doi: 10.3390/socsci8090264 Käll, J (2017). A posthuman data subject in the European data protection regime. Making MyData Real Working Paper Series 2/2017. Turku, Finland: University of Turku. Retrieved 4 February 2020 from the University of Turku, Turku, Finland. Lenz Taguchi, H. (2010). Going beyond the theory/practice divide in early childhood education: Introducing an intra-active pedagogy. London: Routledge. Mulhall, S. (2009). The wounded animal: J. M. Coetzee and the difficulty of reality in literature and philosophy, Princeton University Press. Muncey, T. (2005). Doing autoethnography. International Journal of Qualitative Methods, 4(1), Art. 5, 1–12. Retrieved from http://www.ualberta.ca/~iiqm/backissues/4_1/pdf/Muncey.pdf Nordstrom, S. N., Andersen, C. E., Osgood, J., Lorvik-Waterhouse, A., Otterstad, A. M., Jensen, M. (2018). Alice’s adventures: Reconfiguring solidarity in Early Childhood Education & Care through data events. In D. R. Cole & J. P. N. Bradley (Eds.), Principles of transversality in globalization and education (pp. 175–194). Singapore: Springer Nature.

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Pacini-Ketchabaw, V., di Tomasso, L., & Nxumalo, F. (2014, Winter). Bear-child stories in late liberal colonialist spaces of childhood. Journal of the Canadian Association for Young Children, 39(1), 25–53. Pacini-Ketchabaw, V., & Taylor, A. (Eds.) (2015). Unsettling the colonialist places and spaces of early childhood education. New York, NY: Routledge. Pollock, G. (2011). Review of Cary Wolfe, What is posthumanism?Journal for Critical Animal Studies, 9(1/2), 235–241. Ramose, M. B. (1999). African philosophy through Ubuntu. Mond Books. Richards, R. J. (2012). “You look very well for a transplant”: Autoethnographic narrative and identity in chronic kidney disease, kidney failure and the life post-transplant. Unpublished doctoral dissertation. Stellenbosch University, Cape Town, RSA. Retrieved from scholar.sun.ac.za/bitstr eam/handle/10019.../richards_transplant_2012.pdf? Sparkes, A. C. (1996). The fatal flaw: A narrative of the fragile body-self. Qualitative Inquiry,2(4), 463–494. doi: 10.1177/107780049600200405 Sparkes, A. C. (1998). Narratives of self as an occasion of conspiracy. Sociology of Sport Online. Retrieved from http://physed.otago.ac.nz/sosol/v1i1/v1i1a3.htm Sparkes, A. C. (2000). Autoethnography and narratives of self: Reflections on criteria in action. Sociology of Sport Journal,17, 21–43. Sparkes, A. C. (2002). Autoethnography: Self-indulgence or something more? In A. Bochner & C. Ellis (Eds.), Ethnographically speaking: Autoethnography, literature and aesthetics (pp. 209– 232). New York: Alta Mira Press. Sparkes, A. C. (2003, December). Review essay: Transforming qualitative data into art forms. Qualitative Research, 3(3), 415–420. doi: 10.1177/1468794103033011 Tamboukou, M. (2008). Visual silences, nomadic narratives. Auto/Biography Yearbook, 2, 1–20. Nottingham: Russels Press. van der Tuin, I., & Nocek, A. J. (2019, Fall). New concepts for materialism: Introduction. Philosophy Today, 63(4), 815–822. Warfield, K. (2019, Special Issue). Becoming method(ologist): A feminist posthuman autoethnography of the becoming of a posthuman methodology. Reconceptualizing Educational Research Methodology, 2(3)2, 247–272. https://journals.hioa.no/index.php/rerm/issue/view/397 Wilde, P. (2020). I, Posthuman: A deliberatively provocative title. International Review of Qualitative Research, 13(3), 365–380. doi: 10.1177/1940844720939853 Wolfe, C. (2010). What is posthumanism? Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press. Wu, J., Eaton, P. W., Robinson-Morris, D. W., Wallace, M. F. G., & Han, S. (2018). Perturbing possibilities in the postqualitative turn: Lessons from Taoism and Ubuntu. International Journal of Qualitative Studies in Education. doi: 10.1080/09518398.2017.1422289

Acknowledgments

We would like to thank the contributors to this edited volume on storying as a human, non human and more-than-human practice in early childhood education—Camilla Eline Andersen, Keishana Barnes, Anna R. Moxnes, Susan Naomi Nordström, Jayne Osgood, Anne B. Reinertsen, and Poppy Wilde—whose words have inspired, shaped and reshaped us and this volume. We and the book have grown in your ‘presence’ while thinking-together. We are also grateful to our editor Grace Liyan Ma for her patience, graciousness and understanding as well as Lay Peng Ang and the reviewers for their guidance, insightful comments and suggestions. We would like to thank the Series Editors: Karen Malone, Sonja Arndt, and Marek Tesar for the opportunity to include our volume in their series and for meeting with us (despite the disparate time zones we live in) to provide valuable guidance and advice. I (Carmen) personally would also like to acknowledge my indebtedness to the words and ways of Taio Kaneta who through his stories made me aware of how we can allow catastrophe to change us but not necessarily break us.

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2

3

4

5

6

7

8

Storytelling the Multiple Self: Posthuman Autoethnography as Critical Praxis . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . Poppy Wilde

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Storying into Resistance: The Use of Purposeful Placement Stories . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . Keishana Barnes

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The Green Foam Ring and the Sleeping Girl Who Wasn’t Tired: A Posthuman Story of Care . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . Teresa K. Aslanian

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Storying Observations of a Cardboard Book Through Sticky Micro-moments: Bag-Lady-Carrier-Bag Practices and Memory Stories . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . Anna R. Moxnes From Multispecies Tangles and Anthropocene Muddles: What can Lichen Teach Us about Precarity and Indeterminacy in Early Childhood? . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . Jayne Osgood

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Storyplay Time at School: Neoliberal and Neocolonial Assemblages in Early Childhood Education . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . Carmen Blyth

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Storying Other Than the Neoliberal Criticism—Cause I Have a Hunch of Something Being Wrong Here . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . Anne B. Reinertsen

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Nick-Storying and the Body’s Immersion and Participation in the World: Forming Aggregates for Early Childhood Education . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 109 Camilla Eline Andersen and Susan Naomi Nordström

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Stories, Places: Storied Place and Placed Story . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 125 Carmen Blyth

10 An Ethics of Flourishing: Storying Our Way Around the Power/Potential Nexus in Early Childhood Education and Care . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 135 Carmen Blyth and Teresa K. Aslanian Afterword . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 145 Index . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 147

Editors and Contributors

About the Editors Carmen Blyth completed her Ph.D. on international schools, teaching, and governance at the University of Cape Town and was a postdoctoral research fellow with the Decolonizing Early Childhood Discourses research project at the same university. She has worked with international schools and universities in Asia, Africa and the Middle East for over 30 years as a teacher, teacher trainer and department founder. She currently enjoys mentoring Ph.D. and IB Diploma candidates and has a special interest in the links between linguistic diversity and biodiversity, and the rights of other language speakers in institutions where English is the medium of instruction. Her publications include a monograph on ethics in international schools: storytelling and autoethnography published with Palgrave Macmillan, journal contributions that engage with posthumanism, as well as book chapters on syllabus design. She holds a B.Sc. (Hons) in Pure and Applied Physics. Teresa K. Aslanian is a trained early childhood educator and Associate Professor of early childhood education in the Department of Educational Sciences at University of South-Eastern Norway. American by birth, she has lived in Norway for 25 years and published on the subjects of care, love and learning with examples and inspiration from Norwegian kindergartens. Her work utilizes and engages with critical and posthuman perspectives in order to reconceptualize taken for granted concepts and themes in ECEC.

Contributors Camilla Eline Andersen Inland Norway University of Applied Sciences, Hamar, Norway Teresa K. Aslanian University of South-Eastern Norway, Porsgrunn, Norway xxi

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Keishana Barnes University of Memphis, Memphis, USA Carmen Blyth University of Cape Town, Penang, Malaysia Anna R. Moxnes The University of South-Eastern Norway, Drammen, Norway Susan Naomi Nordström University of Memphis, Memphis, USA Jayne Osgood Middlesex University, London, United Kingdom Anne B. Reinertsen Østfold University College, Halden, Norway Poppy Wilde Birmingham City University, Birmingham, UK

Chapter 1

Storytelling the Multiple Self: Posthuman Autoethnography as Critical Praxis Poppy Wilde

Abstract This chapter will argue for the autoethnographic-I and its use as a capturing of multiplicity and as a site for discovery. Drawing on Braidotti’s (2013) argument that we are constituted of a multiplicity of ‘others’ and that the notion of ‘self’ is laziness of habit, I extend these ideas to consider in more critical detail how the autoethnographic-I can embrace the idea of ‘non-unitary subjectivity’ whilst working within the humanist capacities that form the ‘I’ in order to dismantle humanistic notions from within. Ultimately, this means a newfound definition and appreciation for what is meant by the posthuman-I, and an exploration of how storytelling the ‘self’ can allow an opportunity for acknowledgement of the entangled and distributed nature of self-as-emergent. Considering this in pedagogical terms, I argue that storytelling the multiple self allows an opportunity to radically reconsider what ‘self’ means and to disrupt humanistic hierarchies and the sanctity of the individual. Furthermore, I suggest that this aligns with Deleuze and Guattari’s (1987) notion of becoming-child, and that, through the posthuman-I, we are able to unlearn the problematic aspects of self, such that we might begin to recognise how to teach children and students in more deterritorialized ways. This piece will draw together both critical and creative writing as an opportunity for different modes of expression that also breakdown binaries and boundaries between academic and affective writing. In many ways, this praxis will offer different insights into both lines of consistency and lines of flight. Rather than dismissing humanistic practices in their entirety, this work sees humanism as always-already entangled within us, and therefore a part of the assemblage of what we become. Yet by giving space to lines of flight, different provocations for the reader are intended to allow different journeys through the work. Keywords Critical posthumanism · Writing as praxis · Autoethnography · Non-linear writing · Lines of flight

P. Wilde (B) Birmingham City University, Birmingham, UK e-mail: [email protected] © The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature Singapore Pte Ltd. 2022 C. Blyth and T. K. Aslanian (eds.), Children and the Power of Stories, Children: Global Posthumanist Perspectives and Materialist Theories, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-981-16-9287-1_1

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P. Wilde

1.1 Not Fixed This may not be my best writing. But ‘my best writing’ suggests that I ‘own’ it, in some way, and I hope this chapter will show how tenuously that is the case. This may not count towards the next REF cycle. This may not be deemed worldleading. But the concept of hierarchies amongst research is just another overthrow of a humanist structure; a suggestion of meritocracy, of linearity, of knowledge spaces and patriarchal values. This is an experimental explanation. An explanatory experiment. This chapter aims to take you on a journey of discovery, considering what posthuman autoethnography is, what it can do, and how it might be expressed. This chapter will argue for the autoethnographic-I and its use as a capturing (performing?) of multiplicity and as a site for discovery. Drawing on Braidotti’s argument that we are constituted of a multiplicity of ‘others’ and that the notion of ‘self’ is ‘laziness of habit’, (Braidotti, 2013, p. 100) I extend these ideas to consider in more critical detail how the autoethnographic-I can embrace the idea of ‘non-unitary subjectivity’ (Braidotti, 2013, p. 93) whilst working within the humanist capacities that formed it in order to dismantle humanistic notions from within. Stylistically, there are a few things to consider. In the below work, I draw on certain ideas regarding writing as praxis. Writing is a way of formulating specific ideas, subjectivities and entanglements. As Cole (2006, p. xiv) argues, ‘storytelling is a way of experiencing the world’. This is important to note; from a posthuman perspective writing is not representative but performative. This is, of course, why the writing of the I is so intriguing—we use this language as a fallacy of construction, as a way of marking the difference between ‘self’ and ‘other’. Language is ‘constitutive of the subject’ (Braidotti, 2014, p. 165), but that does not mean that such constitution cannot be changed. Braidotti argues that ‘writing, even and especially academic writing, has to challenge and destabilize, intrigue and empower’ (Braidotti, 2014, p. 166) and this is where posthuman writing can be proactive and provocative in the consideration of a philosophy that aims to destabilise, disrupt and decentre. By considering writing as praxis, then, we see the power that it has, and we are able to intra-act with that power and channel it into other regimes—we can move beyond the humanistic and individualistic and instead consider how these alterations can allow not only different expressions (seen perhaps as more representative) but also different performances and therefore different aspects of a phenomenon, allowing different subjectivities and considerations of rhizomatic life patterns to emerge. We could give up on writing, give up on the I entirely. But, as I return to throughout this chapter, that would be to deny a constitutive element of who we are and how we have come to be. Better, I suggest, to revolt and rebel within those structures, to use them to articulate and perform different possibilities and allow those to be communicated in accessible, yet complex ways. Ultimately, this means a newfound definition and appreciation for what is meant by the posthuman-I, and an exploration of how storytelling the ‘self’ can allow an opportunity for acknowledgement of the entangled and distributed nature of self-as-emergent. Braidotti (2014, p. 165) sums this up: ‘By exposing the compulsive and rather despotic inclinations of language,

1 Storytelling the Multiple Self: Posthuman Autoethnography …

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the writer thus forces upon the readers a critical reflection into the workings of power itself’. This writing as praxis, then, seeks to embody specific ideas of posthumanist philosophy. I draw on destabilisations of self, on entanglement with others, on the power of words, on the rejection of singular and embrace of multiple, on rejections of linearity and embrace of lines of flight, whilst also accommodating lines of consistency for the sake of (some) sense-making. Storytelling the multiple self in this way, and exposure to such ‘experimental’ forms of writing—and thus being—allows an opportunity to radically reconsider what ‘self’ means and to disrupt humanistic hierarchies and the sanctity of the individual. Furthermore, we must consider the importance of exposure to different kinds of articulations and possibilities of being to the project of ‘education’. Too often education means a very specific kind of education—educating people (both young and old) on what to think, not how to think differently. We pigeonhole, and punish when people don’t conform. I always think back to the work of Keith Johnstone on improvisation. He states, ‘Most schools encourage children to be unimaginative’ (Johnstone, 1981, p. 76). Torrance (1962) ‘has a theory that “many children with impoverished imaginations have been subjected to rather vigorous and stern efforts to eliminate fantasy too early. They are afraid to think.” Torrance seems to understand the forces at work, but he still refers to attempts to eliminate fantasy too early. Why should we eliminate fantasy at all? Once we eliminate fantasy, then we have no artists’ (Johnstone, 1981, p. 76). Johnstone (1981, p. 77) continues: ‘most children can operate in a creative way until they’re eleven or twelve, when suddenly they lose their spontaneity and produce imitations of “adult art”.... You have to be a very stubborn person to remain an artist in this culture. It’s easy to play the role of “artist”, but to actually create something means going against one’s education.’ And so, Johnstone (1981, p. 84) suggests, ‘Students need a “guru” who “gives permission” to allow forbidden thoughts into their consciousness. A “guru” doesn’t necessarily teach at all. Some remain speechless for years; others communicate very cryptically. All reassure by example.’ (As my over-citing of the text suggests, I highly recommend the chapter on spontaneity!) Whilst Johnstone is talking about the art of improvisation in theatre performers, surely the same is true of the role of storytelling in education, not only in early years’ education—for at this stage there are fewer inhibitions anyway—but beyond. Whilst I do not in any way seek to claim that I am a guru, at least in the traditional sense of the word, Johnstone suggests that the role of the guru is to demonstrate that ‘[t]hey are the people who have been into the forbidden areas and who have survived unscathed’ (Johnstone, 1981, p. 84). There are then, perhaps, parallels between the ideas of acting requiring an unlearning of certain restrictions on behaviour and impositions of inhibitions, and the work of posthumanism and posthumanist writing as an unlearning of humanistic restrictions. Altogether more promising, though, for education at early years to circumvent such harmful restrictions in the first place. The work of Cole (2006, p. xiii), whose book is for ‘those who went to residential school band school mission school public school and got miseducated dyseducated antieducated transeducated propaganducated’, demonstrates the political importance of such actions. As, Laurel Richardson (Richardson & St. Pierre, 2018, p. 1411)

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points out, when demonstrating the cloying effects of certain educational practices, they have a detrimental effect on writing as praxis: ‘I had been taught, as perhaps you were as well, not to write until I knew what I wanted to say, that is, until my points were organized and outlined. But I did not like writing that way. I felt constrained and bored. When I thought about those writing instructions, ... I recognized that those writing instructions were themselves a sociohistorical invention of our 19th-century foreparents.’ The damage that certain institutional ideologies have done, therefore, needs to be challenged, and examples of alternative expeditions through qualitative space that quantifies the ‘self’ should be made available. Similarly, Murris and Haynes (2018, p. 70) argue that in our learning and teaching spaces we must not pass up the opportunity to ‘cut through the core of Western metaphysical subjectivity that has otherised child from the adult-Subject as an object of study and knowledge consumer, rather than knowledge creator’. It feels to me as though this is exactly the sentiment that the above statements from Cole and Richardson capture: that in humanistic educational practices we are causing harm. This operates in a number of ways, and needs to be challenged in the ways in which we work with children, learn from children, and are guided by them. We need to move away from a hierarchical conception that believes, without question, that we are teaching children and students the right way of thinking or knowing, or indeed the right knowledge. We must then remember that, returning to Johnstone’s gurus, students who have not been taught that some thoughts are forbidden do not need a guru to ‘give permission’ for those thoughts to be let in—those students have never had that permission rescinded, or taught out of them. I suggest that Johnstone’s ‘gurus’ are perhaps those who have been successful in what Deleuze and Guattari (1987) conceptualize as ‘becomingchild’. Becoming-child, Murris and Haynes (2018, p. 57) explain, ‘is a process of unlearning that unleashes a particular active relationship to thinking... and it is this playful relationship with knowledge that comes easier for children who have not yet invested as much of their identity in what they know’. This posthuman autoethnography is, in some ways, perhaps an experiment in becoming-child—unlearning the I, and actively playing with what it means, how it is performed and expressed. Kennedy (2013, p. 148) argues that becoming-child ‘epitomizes, not a form of subjectivity, but in fact an “inhuman”, a non-subjective form, a deconstruction of what they call the “molar” world, and an entering nomadic space, which is “molecular”’. This space is affective, continually transforming, and means living ‘tolerantly’ with multiplicity, difference, polymorphism, polyvocalism, and with the absence of clear boundaries between self and other (Kennedy, 2013). Perhaps, when our educational structures are more decoloni(ali)sed and posthumanized, there will be a future where harmful learning is not enforced such that it has to be unlearnt. In the meantime, I hope for this chapter to demonstrate how posthuman autoethnography might go some way to demonstrate the ways in which becoming-child ‘deterritorializes and deconstructs the discrete’ (Kennedy, 2013, p. 150) and embraces the multiple, so that our children and our educational practices have more opportunities and examples of expressions of becoming that do not conform to singular expectations. Practically, then. In the following chapter, there are a few things to note. The text is nonlinear. Nonlinearity itself becomes an act of resistance, because linearity is an

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imposition. Cole (2006, p. 21), who writes with creativity and resistance, states that ‘the idea of chapter is anathema to who I am as an indigenous person it implies western order and format as “the” legitimate shapers of discourse the presumption being that the universe is ordered into rationally constructed geometries’. Hein (2019, pp. 83– 84) argues that: ‘Nonlinear texts are organized in a way that fails to meet the modernist demand for a linear, internally coherent, and unified narrative. Being a traitor to one’s own writing involves writing against any stabilizing sense of identity and against other modernist categories and boundaries.’ This notion of being a traitor to one’s own writing is defined as ‘against any stabilizing sense of identity’ (Hein, 2019, p. 84). In my previous autoethnographic work, this has signalled more accounting of the primacy of ‘others’ in my entanglement. My work on the avatar-gamer as posthuman subjectivity embodied the shifting negotiation of a subjectivity that was at once me/her as well as we/us. ‘I’ variously meant gamer, avatar, and avatar-gamer dependent on the moment of articulation, and the affective and agentic experiences of embodiment between a physical and virtual body (for a negotiation of that posthuman autoethnography as methodology, see Wilde, 2020). In this chapter, I seek a different style and explore the possibilities of expressing multiple encounters. This piece will draw together both critical and creative writing as an opportunity for different modes of expression that also breakdown binaries and boundaries between academic and affective writing. This draws on the role of autoethnographies to be evocative texts, which is itself an arguably feminist posthumanist standpoint to take: rejecting linearity, coherence and rationality in favour of affective writing that ‘moves’ the reader. This mode of writing is there to appeal to, and resonate with, our lived experiences rather than attempting to attract the reader through a series of complex cognitive tasks for the purpose of ‘validating’ our knowledge. But, of course, affects are complex too, and cognitive too. We cannot draw boundaries and binaries where there are none. Cognitive complexity and affective complexity weave together through the articulation of feelings, and thoughts, of being embodied and entangled. I hope to appeal both to the humanist who holds on to the safety blanket of the I as well as the posthumanist who aims to seek new discursive practices. We need both; we are both. In many ways, this praxis will offer different insights into both lines of consistency and lines of flight (Deleuze & Guattari, 1987). Lines of flight offer a diversion, a detour, and an opportunity for the disparate to be articulated; they are about offshoots, out-bursts and inconsistencies. Rayner (2013, npn) suggests that ‘lines of flight are bolts of pent-up energy that break through the cracks in a system of control and shoot off on the diagonal’. And Usher (2010, p. 71) suggests that lines of flight are ‘a metaphor for everyday resistance... opening up contexts to their outsides and the possibilities therein. They break-down unity and coherence.’ Whilst they suggest that these lines of flight might diverge in any direction, I have grounded my lines of flight in just a few directions. This is because of, or engendered through, the lines of consistency, those that ‘connect and unify different practices and effects and by so doing establish hierarchies and define relations between center and periphery’. (Usher, 2010, p. 71). Whilst lines of flight are seen as where there are ‘possibilities for change and movement... the means of escape from the repressive strata that are

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everywhere’ (Usher, 2010, p. 71). I suggest that not all lines of consistency are repressive, and some can, at least for now, still be useful. Rather than dismissing humanistic practices in their entirety, this chapter sees humanism as always-already entangled within us (me?), and therefore a part of the assemblage of what we become. Thus, lines of consistency are entangled within us, too. Yet by giving space to lines of flight, different provocations for the reader are intended to allow different journeys through the work. ‘From the side of intensive multiplicities, machinic lines of flight tend to deterritorialise semiotic processes, to open them up, to connect them to other matters of expression,’ (Guattari, 2011, p. 120) which function as performative (p. 129). They enact ‘deterritorialization and destratification’ (Deleuze & Guattari, 1987); it is a decolonial move to remove oneself from a specific path, when that path comes with a history as problematic as the catastrophic effects of Western imposition. This could be linked to Braidotti’s work on nomadism without moving, which ‘refers to the kind of critical consciousness that resists settling into socially coded modes of thought and behaviour’ (Braidotti, 2014, p. 182). Such a move is necessary when we consider the pervasiveness of the violent interjections in cultural, social and historical thought that Western culture is responsible for. Unfortunately, many of our current technologies of writing and reading are not suited to finding different ways through texts, and so the options for expression of (what Braidotti terms) nomadism here are limited not only by the desire to convey a meaning (itself problematic) but also the desire to convey that meaning in a printable way. There are lines of flight within this chapter, signified by the indentations away from the margins—away from the boundaries. But the lines of flight are there too within the potential of making choices as a reader—you need not follow any flight, and certainly not to its indented end. You might wish to follow the lines of consistency—the neatly margined, conforming paragraphs. Hierarchies are, indeed, formed here. Yet, as this chapter will show, our writing is entangled and emergent, and therefore it only follows that our reading is too. For those whose reading practices are entangled with screen readers, which may enact a specific agentic journey through the text due to its layout, please contact Springer Nature directly to obtain differently structured versions if preferred.1

1.2 Not Me There is something specifically ironic about having put together an abstract for this chapter, discussing ideas of multiplicity, lines of flight, storifying the self, etc., and then my having followed it with my short biography. This bio, of course, serves as a reassurance, to anyone who reads it. A reassurance that I am capable, trustworthy, reliable. That I have the necessary knowledge and expertise to deliver on something that I propose. And it is just one story about the ‘me’ that I ‘am’, and the ‘me’ I might 1

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‘become’. Furthermore, the bio I write speaks nothing to the processes by which I write, the self-proclaimed ‘keyboard bashing’ I do. How much of my writing is luck? How much is ‘me’? Like Cole (2006, p. xiv), ‘I do not see my writing as having been composed (least of all) by me’ yet ‘the typing hands type on’. Terry Pratchett, the renowned fantasy author, in his book Men at Arms (1994) writes of ideas as falling dust from the sky, aiming for the right brain to land in. To me, Pratchett’s ideas of inspiration speak much more to the convergence of multi things than the ownership of the ‘author’. Ideas streak, sometimes unbidden, across my brain. Perhaps part of being an academic is knowing which to grab hold of, and which to let go?

When ‘I’ write, then, I do not always have a sense of ownership over what I am writing. For me, it is always as much of a process of discovery. Writing is praxis, and autoethnography is no different. The process of writing is a process of creation, and part of that creation is an understanding of ‘my’ experiences, but it is also much more. It is not introversion, or the ‘navel-gazing’ that it can be accused of, that creates the story of autoethnography. It is a process of multiplicity—of being entangled and of expressing that entanglement. I recently read about someone dictating academic work and was baffled yet marvelled at the process. There is so much thought that occurs between my fingers and the keyboard and the screen, that, whilst acknowledging my own limited and able-bodied perspective, dictating has never worked for me. Where does a story start? How does it happen? How does articulating through voice, or hand, or keyboard, or any other mechanism or device augment and alter the story that is told? I have autoethnographic notes on paper, but I never felt the flow of these in the same ways as at my computer (doubtless some others feel the exact opposite). I wrote about this in my autoethnographic thesis–I questioned whether it was because the research was computer-based (in videogames) and the entanglement with my laptop was, therefore, more… what? Important? No. Integral? Imperative? Obvious? Adam Clark (2008) makes similar reference to the flow between words, person, page, ‘tool’. Here it becomes evident that what we claim of as a ‘tool’ is no mere appropriation of technology, but an integral apparatus in the process of writing.

As Nayar (2014) explains, where most humanistic traditions suggest a focus on ‘being’, posthumanism allows a re-articulation, a shift to acknowledge instead of multiple ‘becomings’. We are in a constant state of flux and movements, shifting subjectivities, and responding, changing, adapting to and intra-acting through and with, our environments and others around us. I imagine this as though we are a three-dimensional constellation of stars, each star embodying different points on the webs of our connection. As we move into different spaces, places, moods, environments, abilities, the constellation-us shifts and different ‘stars’ come into focus; a different pattern emphasised. Yet, the other stars are still there–those connections are not lost, they do not disappear completely from view, and the web-that-we-are remains connecting to a plethora of ‘things’ not immediately in focus. This analogy itself is flawed though–it suggests a distinction between each star, an individuality of each node that retains that humanistic desire for separation.

We are entangled, enmeshed, overlapping, a giant Venn diagram of experiences and encounters. This is why the ‘I’ is an issue. From what point does it speak? Where in the constellation? Where on the diagram is this I situated? If we are always in a

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constant state of becoming—or, perhaps more accurately, becomings—then what place does this I have, and hold? This notion of becomings as plurality strikes me as important—a demonstration of the outward ripples that all aspects of posthumanism must have. It is not enough to drop a stone in the centre of the static world and only expect the ripples to extend so far. But, perhaps, that is what I am trying to do, retain the island of I? I do not think so. I do not suggest that I is not affected by the undulations of critical posthumanism. I only question how we make use of that in a way that acknowledges humanism as a part of the entanglement. A diffractive reading would read posthumanism through humanism, rather than against it. Or perhaps the other way around?

And what a fallacy it is, to write as I-now, and I-later, and I-before, all the whilst from different points along places within and through my becomings (points along suggests a linearity that is only partially ‘true’). When I continue writing tomorrow, my ‘being’ will have experienced things my current embodiment of becoming has not yet. Who knows how ‘I’ or the world may have changed, and aren’t those two the same things anyway? Let me be clear—the Venn diagram, the constellation-us that we emerge from, is not merely made up of different ‘bits’ of a thing named me. For any aspect of myself to be eminent, I am constituted through, and with, those others. As Irigaray has argued, the notion of an ‘I’ or ‘me’ is itself constituted through difference—‘I’ am ‘me’ because ‘I’ am not ‘you’. Yet to critical posthumanism, this is not enough. I am not only me because I am not you, I am me because of and through you, too (Irigaray, 2017, p. 51). Each of the multiple subjectivities that we embody are enabled, enacted and entangled with others. If we remove ‘other’ elements in this phenomenon (as Barad would call it), the phenomenon is irrevocably changed. As Nayar (2014, p. 17), drawing on Irigaray, argues ‘We need to think of a more fluid sense of the self/identity’ and that is most certainly true. However, to suggest that we are not entangled with our histories seems, to me, problematic. Perhaps I am not a radical enough posthumanist—as I cling to the ‘I’. Is it fear? The great unknown that holds me back? The concern of who am I without the me? I think, in fact, it is worse than that.

Perhaps I make this as an excuse for myself, but I do not know how to think without an I. I blame this, of course, on the ‘others’ that have made me—societal, cultural and historical. I have been created a certain way which demonstrates the Frankenstein’s monster I am. Made from other parts (albeit conceptual ‘bodies’ rather than entirely physical ones—yet how can they be separated?) ‘you made me, and you left me to live’. That those others are problematic does not mean I can deny their presence within me, their operation through me, my embodiment of them. I am entangled with humanistic practices, with neoliberal assertions, with capitalist economies, with meritocratic attitudes. To denounce them is not to be completely removed from them, when/if they shape the societies we live in. In the same way that it is not enough to be not racist, one must be actively anti-racist; one must situate oneself in the society they are in and bear the responsibility of ethical improvements.

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What I seek, then, is an incorporation (not unproblematic) of these broader facets of these cultural issues, and more, in my work. And, just as language evolves, what we do with it can change. Braidotti (2014, p. 163) agrees, and suggests that ‘more conceptual creativity is necessary, and more theoretical courage is needed in order to bring about the leap across inertia, nostalgia, aporia and the other forms of critical stasis induced by our historical condition. It has become like a mantra to me: we need to learn to think differently about the kind of subjects we have already become and the processes of deep-seated transformation we are undergoing.’ The ‘I’ therefore needs more conceptual creativity, whilst acknowledging the falsity of the demarcations it has often enacted.

1.3 Not Mine Autoethnographies are viewed with scepticism in a variety of ways. Their reliance on ‘self’ and experience of the self are problematic to humanists too, who suggest that self is not enough (in an apparently un-egotistical move), where posthumanists would suggest that self is ‘too much’ (egotistically). There is an—apparent—clash of philosophical standpoints between autoethnography and posthumanism, captured by Warfield (2019, p. 149) thus: ‘the term autoethnography is premised on the humanist notion of the “self”–an “auto” upon which we can reflect and write–and posthumanism is premised on a decentered subject or the becoming of the subject’. I have therefore faced some scepticism towards my methods. I have had people question, is it a reliable method if it only is about the self? There is no only. There is no self. If only it were that easy. Braidotti draws on the ways that a variety of thinkers and philosophers have suggested we use language in ways to deconstruct the very power that language, and the written word, seeks to enforce. She suggests ‘exposing the compulsive and rather despotic inclinations of language’ (Braidotti, 2014, p. 165)—and I suggest that that is what a posthuman autoethnography can do. By using nonlinear and creative language to push and critique the parameters of language, we can begin to articulate the fallacies therein, or move to a rearticulation of what those things mean—e.g. what do we mean when we say ‘I’? For some, this seems like a reliance on humanist constructs and boundaries—a tactic that falls short of the radical movement needed to deconstruct anthropocentric thinking. Yet, some other options we have are, I find, as anthropocentrically problematic, when approached from a Westernised perspective. How can we (by ‘we’ I mean those of us who are so deeply entrenched in, and shaped by, histories of Western, humanistic, anthropocentric thought), for example, write ‘as’ something we are profoundly not? How can I write as a bird, or begin the process of articulation of being-bird when I am not? We can use narrative forms to ponder, to philosophise, to imagine and to invent, but to suggest that we have attained anything more than that (transcendentally) is—can be—another fallacy. As Kohn (2013, p. 21) argues when introducing the importance of his ethnographic work on the Runa people of Ecuador, ‘we are colonized by certain ways of thinking

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about relationality. We can only imagine the ways in which selves and thoughts might form associations through our assumptions about the forms of associations that structure human language. And then, in ways that often go unnoticed, we project these assumptions onto nonhumans. Without realizing it we attribute to nonhumans properties that are our own, and then, to compound this, we narcissistically ask them to provide us with corrective reflections of ourselves.’ We must therefore think of ways in which we can decentre our humanist ways of thinking whilst not suggesting an alternative form of elitist transcendence. Instead, we should acknowledge that to explore ‘otherness’ is not an exotic (commodified) adventure but a path that many who have gone before us, with closer entanglements and less problematic pasts than many Western subjectivities, have trodden and are far more culturally equipped to do (see Kohn, 2013, p. 96 re perspectivism). It follows, surely, that we must become critical of the limits of posthuman expressions of self. The critique that posthumanism fails because it is seen as a philosophy about humans, for humans cannot be negated by merely pretending we are (entirely) other than what we wish to escape from. Western models must reject the boundaries of humanism, but not reject the way in which it has shaped Western societies, and the warning lessons there. To write as ‘other’ when so deeply formed by Western humanism would be not only arrogant but anthropocentric too—there is a danger that suggesting that a human could know the experiences of that which we are not enacts a lingering sense of privilege, knowledge, and mastery. I do not know what it is to be not-me entirely, but I know that ‘me’ is not ‘me’ entirely. This expression of self is articulated through the keyboard of the machine I type on. I do not know what words will come next; I write and flow and see what comes out. I type with two fingers only–my index fingers dashing about over the keyboard, tapping out a rhythm that has little to do with purposeful composition. And then, I pause. I look across to my 8-month old kitten (I smile) she is climbing up the new cat tree that I bought her, dangling herself precariously. She is spectacular. I pause. The rhythm that was there three lines ago has changed. The (I look out of the window) keys that I tap have nothing left to say. Perhaps it is time for coffee. And think! How that fuel will change ‘me’ again! As Pepperell (2003) explains it, humans are fuzzy edged beings. With all that we put in and expel out, how could those boundaries ever be drawn.

Instead, then, we must find opportunities in language to express and articulate the entanglements that we are embedded and embodied within. We must speak to shifting relationships, a provocation and consideration of ‘I’ as a discursive fallacy or misnomer, as meaningless as any other word whilst also being so meaning-full. To explore the fullness of the meaning of ‘I’, then, we can use it as an operational enactment to break out of the individualistic suggestion it makes, and to embolden it as a critically reflex becoming through which we make sense of how we experience the world. The ‘I’ is the being one-yet-many that Blackman speaks of in her work on immaterial bodies—we have individualistic, embodied experiences, yet within this ‘one’ there are many—both many aspects to ‘us’ but also all of the others than enable ‘us’ to emerge. Sometimes that might mean a creative incorporation of different elements of the ‘I’ in our writing; sometimes that might be about the freedom to express creative multiplicity. This can be about the rejection of the static self and the

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assumption of a need for a single viewpoint, perspective or indeed ‘answer’. To be more honest in our accounting of our selves and stories, to be more knowledgeable about our place in the world; is that not about expanding viewpoints and horizons, including ‘our’ ‘own’?

1.4 Not Linear The process of posthuman autoethnography is not—cannot—be fixed—for if it were then it would deny exactly the multiplicity, entanglement, and nomadism that it seeks to engage or allow to emerge. It is the process of laying my fingers on a keyboard, tapping away in a specific manner to see what words occur on the page in front of me. It is accounting for the ‘thing-power’ (Bennett, 2010) of those keys as an integral aspect of the articulation, the ideas, the words, the nuances that appear. It is looking at the words appear on the screen in confusion and uncertainty. It is adopting a half stare into the middle of my keyboard where, whilst the periphery of my vision dances around to follow where my two fingers tap, I take little in of the visual. It is the process of articulating the shifts in selves and thoughts and feelings that occur within and beyond and through me. It is the process of accounting for the fluidity of ‘I’ and translating my intra-action with other(s). In my previous use of posthuman autoethnography, I used it as a way to account for the feeling of/with/through an avatar, while playing a videogame. I used autoethnographic fieldnotes to explore, explain, and embody the experience of being entangled with her–my avatar, Etyme. The subjectivity in those fieldnotes, like in this piece, was still partial–bracketed off to focus on a specific intra-action in order to explore it further, rather than attempt to account for the full extent of everything that made ‘us’. I still think of her. It is understanding writing as an immanent practice, a way in which a certain something emerges but not where it ends—a non-static suggestion of expression, emergence.

As Hein (2019, p. 83) argues, ‘For Deleuze, writing is nonreductive, destabilizes meaning, and undermines a thematic reading. More specifically, it rejects a sense of beginning, middle and end; subject-object distinctions; subjects who are developed according to a structure; and a sense of identity.’ There is not, cannot, be one way of doing this. And, depending on the writing and its ‘purpose’ we might not manage all of those things at once. But to use rather than abuse storytelling, to consider the praxis as itself educational, rather than only the content as being so, there must be some element of this destabilization. ‘A posthuman orientation towards researcher subjectivity sees subjectivity as entangled amidst the material, discursive and affective complexities of its nomadic situatedness, and so the researcher subjectivity relationally becomes amidst a myriad of moving parts’ (Warfield, 2019, p. 153). It is only ethical to consider the self as no more important than the next thing. To write as

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an uncomplicated-I becomes extremely complicated. It signals inertia, and compliance to regimes that have been violent in their dismissal of others. By considering ourselves as ontologically entangled, emergent phenomena with a multiplicity of being, that which makes us ‘distinct’ becomes blurred at best. Kohn (2013, p. 16) argues that this, therefore ‘changes our understandings of relationality; difference no longer sits so easily at the foundation of our conceptual framework, and this changes how we think about the central role that alterity plays’. And so, expressing entanglement is never easy.

1.5 Not Narrative Telling stories is, apparently, a natural thing for human beings. We understand ourselves in reference to the great narratives around us, drawing on them as models by which we can make sense of our own lives. Questions abound, now, as to whether we can untangle our sense-making practices from our affective experiences—whilst affect may, technically, precede the ‘sense’, is that gap something we can lengthen? Can we pause in the in-between? Is there such a thing as a difference between thought and feeling?

These might include aspects of Todorov’s (1969) narrative theory: narrating our lives as moving between equilibrium, disruption, recognition, repair, and the new equilibrium. Of course, we do not wait to narrate our lives at the end, an epic eulogising from our deathbed, but continue to articulate and rearticulate, casting different moments in different lights depending on what our experiences tell us; what first seemed a new equilibrium, might later be cast as the start of the next disruption. Perhaps we draw on Propp’s (1968) dramatis personae, casting ourselves in the role of a specific character, consigning the others in our life to fulfil the roles of villain, donor, helper, princess, false hero, dispatcher or hero. Or are we always the hero of our tales? I’m reminded, here, of the film Sucker Punch (Snyder & Shibuya, 2011). At the end, after orchestrating an adventurous escape from a mental facility our ‘hero’ remains with one other who we have seen as a sidekick. Their way is blocked, and the main ‘hero’ character, the one we have followed for 1hr 34mins to this point, realises the missing part of their plan to escape is that she is, in fact, the decoy. She must be caught, so that the other can escape. She is heroic in her self-sacrifice, but she isn’t the one who gets a ‘happy ending’ to her tale.

Narrative structures are all around us and behind us, historically reaching back to the great epics of ancient Mesopotamia, and back further to cave paintings depicting discoveries, battles, and tales of heroism. Yet, within the context of a Westernised, colonialist, and anthropocentric worldview, we have lost sight of the many ways of storytelling that can move beyond self, beyond trope, beyond linear narrative (an issue this volume seeks to address). We rely on certain structures as if they were real— what an alarmingly harmful concept! Stories rarely have a beginning, a middle, and

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an end—we just fool ourselves into thinking they do; to conforming to boxes and categorisations. Elsewhere I have written of the experience of nostalgia as itself inherently posthuman, that nostalgia ‘troubles this temporal figuration by not seeing an event as finite. This enacts a dissolution of linearity: looking back is not only an act of remembering but an act of reconfiguring, and in that way works as a practice of viewing the “self” as emergent’ (Wilde, 2017).

But we often are fooled, we talk about overcoming battles, as if it were mastery of human will. Cole (2006) expresses this narrative fallacy thus: ‘the idea of beginningmiddleend genesis exodus revelation testa corpus coda are ways of linearly encoding a western vision of the world ways of encrypting experience so that little by little we are all molded into believing unthinkingly that there are beginnings middles ends believing that experience can be diagrammed graphed morphed thus’. It is this encoded Western vision of the world, this unthinking belief that needs disrupting, destabilising, dismantling.

1.6 Not One I have argued for the autoethnographic-I and its use as an enactment of multiplicity and as a site for discovery and of becoming-child. This allows the prospect of dismantling humanistic notions from within by demonstrating an exploration of the work that can be done when we accommodate for lines of flight as the expression of the multiplicity of ‘self’ in our writing. As Braidotti has argued, ‘[w]riting is living intensively and inhabiting language as a site of multiple others within what we call, out of habit and intellectual laziness, “the self”” (2014, p. 164). The ‘others’ in this piece are other ‘me’s and different subjectivities, but I have tried to demonstrate how my writing, and therefore my ‘me’s, are made up of others. Human—the theorists I draw on, the authors I cite; animal—my kitten making a guest appearance, if not being fully present in the words then certainly in the rooms they were written in; machine—the laptop I write on, the keys I tap, the screen I find myself frowning at. I am frowning because it is hard not to think that the way I have captured any of these ‘others’ above does not adequately express how much I am of them—how much any of the ‘me’s present, or absent, from, in and through this text are only able to emerge from the chrysalis of their concentration. The form I take—bug or butterfly—is merely boundaried in a momentary suggestion of stabilisation, before disintegrating, dissolving, and then evolving, emerging differentially formed moments later.

But beyond that, those that have not made explicit appearance—every encounter with everyone and everything, some so fleeting, yet some so deeply entrenched that I feel them in me with every breath and thought. The environment around me, whilst writing this piece and watching the field next to my house become a lake, transforming one ecosystem into another, the animals that traverse it changing from humans and dogs to ducks and, for all I know, displaced fish. The cultural context

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of Brexit, and Covid-19, and the storming of the Capitol and Biden’s inauguration and the knowledge that what is making the ‘news’ is done with such a Western lean that genocide is happening elsewhere around the world with more care shown for Meghan Markle’s court case. The connections beyond this machine that take these words and transport them to a cloud, not fluffy and white, or heavy and laden with rain, but huge industrial monstrosities in the sea, there to be kept cool by the oceans that lap around the structures. I am there and they are here and the acknowledgement of that intraconnectedness and impact is, and should be, alarming. Of course, these lines of flight are incomplete, and they too are fallacies. ‘[T]o write as a traitor, a traitor to all, is a difficult task: It involves creation, the establishment of a line of flight–writing against any stabilizing sense of identity and against other categories and boundaries that are dictated by modernist writing’ (Hein, 2019, p. 87). As Deleuze emphasizes, ‘the experimenter is a traitor’ (Deleuze & Parnet, 1987, p. 41; in Hein, 2019, p. 87). I’m not sure if the experiment has ‘worked’, I don’t know that the treachery has been complete. Honan (2007, p. 533) suggests that ‘[r]hizomes do not have clearly identifiable beginnings and ends. It is impossible to provide a linear description of the journey taken through and across a rhizome’. I believe it has been possible to create something of a linear journey through this text—is that to the detriment of its rhizomatic possibilities? As I type into this document, as I try to articulate the thoughts that are ‘mine’ yet come more from without than within, I am in a consistent mode. To offer you an experiential aspect of lines of flight would be to include all of the in-betweens. The breaks, the pauses, the conversations, the coffees, the beings in my home and outside of it. An email pops in, about UKRI resources. (like this).

And this would be a more complex and nuanced demonstration of the shifts and changes, the flights and consistencies. But, I believe, perhaps foolishly, that we still need to utilise those sense-making practices that we are entangled in, to reconceptualise, to rearticulate, to reframe. To find journeys from where we are to where we want to be. My mind might change. In 10 years—or two!—I might disagree with what I wrote here. But it is the writing of this that will have allowed my mind to change—or not. To allow my ideas to develop, even when I know they are not ‘mine’ at all. As Braidotti (2014, p. 163) explains, ‘Writing is an intransitive activity, a variation on breathing, an end in itself; it is an affective and geometrically rigorous mode of inscription into life.’ This piece has been a breath or a breathing. An articulation of some form of becoming. A suggestion that to decentre the human does not mean to disavow the pitfalls, problems, prejudices of humanism but to work with them, through them, against them. To be ‘responsible’ and ‘response-able’ to them. This is why our stories could—should?—work within, against, and through the I, at least for those of us entangled in its complexity. In order to consider what that I is, let us not immediately turn our backs on it but explore it as multiple, entangled. Let us see what it can do if we break the boundaries and binaries of self and other.

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Murris and Haynes (2018, p. 13) argue that ‘for posthumanists the concept “child” is not abstract enough. Each person (of whatever age) is more than his or her body, always connected, embedded and embodied, dynamic and active. The concept “child” does not express an object in the world, but a complex material-discursivity relationality.’ Let us abstract the concept ‘child’ through learning from them, and their abstraction of themselves, which we can consider in light of the sentiment expressed in the Preface to this volume, that referred to the ways in which children’s ability to relate to things ‘belies a cognitive flexibility’ that exceeds adult expectations, and notes ‘children’s ability to embrace the more-than-human world in a deeply personal way’ (Blyth & Aslanian, 2022, p. 7). From this perspective, children already think in more fluid ways. It is our ethical responsibility, then, to not only not teach this fluidity out of them, but also to unlearn the rigidity that we have been exposed to. Let us explore our own becoming-child as a ‘line of escape [that] interrupts, escapes from the system’ (Murris & Haynes, 2018, p. 57) and thereby enable emancipatory modes of expression and education. Let us be mindful of what we show our children and students, what we tell them and story them about those connected, embedded, embodied, dynamic and active ways of relationality that are possible—even when using the I.

References Bennett, J. (2010). Vibrant matter: A political ecology of things. Duke University Press. Blyth, C., & Aslanian, T. (Eds.). (2022). Children and the power of stories: Posthuman and autoethnographic perspectives. Springer Press. Braidotti, R. (2013). The posthuman. Polity Press. Braidotti, R. (2014). Writing as a nomadic subject. Comparative Critical Studies, 11(2–3), 163–184. https://doi.org/10.3366/ccs.2014.0122 Clark, A. (2008). Supersizing the mind. Oxford University Press. Cole, P. (2006). Coyote and raven go canoeing: Coming home to the village. McGill-Queen’s University Press. Deleuze, G., & Guattari, F. (1987). A thousand plateaus: Capitalism and schizophrenia. University of Minnesota Press. Deleuze, G., & Parnet, C. (1987). Dialogues. Columbia University Press. Guattari, F. (2011). Lines of flight: For another world of possibilities (trans: Goffey, A.). Bloomsbury. Hein, S. F. (2019). Deleuze, immanence, and immanent writing in qualitative inquiry: Nonlinear texts and being a traitor to writing. Qualitative Inquiry, 25(1), 83–90. https://doi.org/10.1177/107 7800418784328 Honan, E. (2007). Writing a rhizome: An (im)plausible methodology. International Journal of Qualitative Studies in Education, 20(5), 531–546. https://doi.org/10.1080/09518390600923735 Irigaray, L. (2017). To be born: Genesis of a new human. Springer International. Johnstone, K. (1981). Impro: Improvisation and the theatre. Bloomsbury. Kennedy, D. (2013). Epilogue: Becoming child, becoming other: Childhood as signifier. In A. Muller (Ed.), Childhood in the English Renaissance (pp. 145–153). Wissenschaftlicher Verlag Trier. Kohn, E. (2013). How forests think: Toward an anthropology beyond the human. University of California Press.

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Murris, K., & Haynes, J. (2018). Literacies, literature and learning: Reaching classrooms differently. Routledge. Nayar, P. K. (2014). Posthumanism. Polity Press. Pepperell, R. (2003). The posthuman condition: Consciousness beyond the brain. Intellect. Pratchett, T. (1994). Men at arms. Corgi. Propp, V. (1968). Morphology of the folk tale (2nd ed.). University of Texas Press. Rayner, T. (2013, June 18). Lines of flight: Deleuze and nomadic creativity [Blog post]. Philosophy for change: Ideas that make a difference. https://philosophyforchange.wordpress.com/2013/06/ 18/lines-of-flight-deleuze-and-nomadic-creativity/ Richardson, L., & St. Pierre, E. A. (2018). Writing: A method of inquiry. In N. K. Denzin & Y. S. Lincoln (Eds.), The SAGE handbook of qualitative research (5th ed., pp. 1410–1444). Sage. Snyder, Z., & Shibuya, S. (2011). Sucker punch. Distributed by Warner Home Video. Todorov, T. (1969). Structural analysis of narrative. A Forum on Fiction, 3(1), 70–76. Retrieved January 22, 2021, from www.jstor.org/stable/1345003 Torrance, E. (1962). Guiding creative talent. Prentice Hall. Usher, R. (2010). Riding the lines of flight. European Journal for Research on the Education and Learning of Adults, 1(1–2), 67–78. Warfield, K. (2019). Becoming method(ologist): A feminist posthuman autoethnography of the becoming of a posthuman methodology. Reconceptualizing Educational Research Methodology, 2,3(2), 147–172, Special Issue. Wilde, P. (2017). I, Posthuman: Embodying entangled subjectivities in gaming. Unpublished doctoral thesis. Coventry University, UK. Available from British Library e-theses online service. https://ethos.bl.uk/OrderDetails.do?did=2&uin=uk.bl.ethos.732346 Wilde, P. (2020, Special Issue). I, Posthuman: A deliberately provocative title. International Review of Qualitative Research, 13(3), 365–380. https://doi.org/10.1177/1940844720939853

Poppy Wilde Ph.D. is a Lecturer in Media and Communication at Birmingham City University and an active researcher in the Birmingham Centre for Media and Cultural Research (BCMCR). Her work focuses on what it means and how it feels to be posthuman, by exploring how posthuman subjectivities are enabled and embodied. She has conducted autoethnographic projects exploring the lived experience of MMORPG gaming with particular focus on the avatar-gamer as an embodiment of posthuman subjectivity. In her current work, she is extending this to explore further insights into gaming, from tomboyism to moral ambiguity, as well as researching posthuman subjectivity in a variety of different contexts, from zombie studies to music artists.

Chapter 2

Storying into Resistance: The Use of Purposeful Placement Stories Keishana Barnes

Abstract This chapter considers the myths and falsehoods that Black children will encounter throughout their lifetime. These are numerous and are constantly being reinforced by children’s books, media, school curriculum, and the adults in their lives. As such, this chapter explores the use of and power of the purposeful placement of stories in the author’s role as a Black mother of young Black children in the United States as an attempt to combat these and other racialized realities. Keywords Autoethnography · Black Feminism · Counter-narratives · Purposeful placement stories

2.1 Introduction As a Black mother and educator, raising Black children in this world, I know all too well the power that stories and narratives can have over the trajectory of one’s life. In this chapter, I use autoethnography, Critical Race Theory, and Black Feminism to explore the use of stories during the various phases of my journey in womanhood and motherhood as a means of better shaping what will ultimately be my children’s own stories. Why autoethnography? Why Critical Race Theory? And why Black Feminism? For many African American women, race and gender are the primary components of our identity. To better understand my own story, I must look to other Black mothers’ stories, as well as my own. I partly use Perry et al.’s (2006) explanation of the power of ethnography, in general, to begin to answer these questions. Perry et al. (2006) contend, ‘A central tenet of this approach is that individuals’ experiences are socially organized, and as such, the researcher begins by examining the individuals’ experiences but then proceeds to explore how the broader social relations have shaped them’ (p. 177). When taking this story-telling approach a step further and looking in-ward, I use autoethnography to work to unpack my own beliefs and experiences, in K. Barnes (B) University of Memphis, Memphis, USA e-mail: [email protected] © The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature Singapore Pte Ltd. 2022 C. Blyth and T. K. Aslanian (eds.), Children and the Power of Stories, Children: Global Posthumanist Perspectives and Materialist Theories, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-981-16-9287-1_2

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an attempt to learn more about and share about how ‘power and privilege play out in socio-personal lives and how these entities are reproduced as well as resisted’ (Marx, Pennington, & Chang, 2017, p. 2). Ellis et al. (2011) remind us that when we work to analyze our experiences in a systematic manner, we can understand the broader cultural experiences even more—which is my goal. I seek to not only understand my own experiences but use them to better understand, and ultimately work to help others understand and act to disrupt. Autoethnography is a means of my resistance. As a Black mother, my individual experiences have very specific, contextual meanings rooted in my race. Thus, the act of recognizing broader stories, reclaiming stories, and telling stories to my own children has indeed been shaped by what I have encountered in my lifetime. Critical Race Theory (CRT) helps me by providing more nuanced language to understand such experiences. Delgado and Stefancic (2017) explain, ‘The critical race theory movement is a collection of activists and scholars engaged in studying and transforming the relationship among race, racism, and power’ (p. 3). Specifically, CRT acknowledges that racism is institutionalized in our society and not, as some argue, isolated instances of the distant past; rather, racism has been normalized to the point that it can be nearly impossible to recognize (Delgado & Stefancic, 2000). As both an educator and mother, I utilize CRT continuously in all aspects of my life—even before I formally encountered the theory itself in my studies. I have worked for years fighting against the pervasive cultural deficit model, and now as both a mother and a teacher educator, I continue the work of revealing these truths to my young teachers in hopes that they will become educators who do not place the blame for inequities directly on the students (Solorzano & Yosso, 2002), but will use their knowledge of historical events and present contexts to construct understandings of their students as individuals and as groups that are more accurate, helpful, and just. I appreciate the CRT perspective regarding recommendations for teachers to ‘utilize methods such as: storytelling, narratives, chronicles, family history, scenarios, biographies, and parables to draw on the strength of the lived experiences students bring to the classroom’ (Solorzano & Yosso, 2002, p. 3). I interpret CRT as giving the call to those of us who interact with children—especially with Black children—to stress our children’s beauty, their wholeness, their humanity because even though among other things, Black children are creative, brilliant, curious, witty, and diligent, due to a very purposeful system that has been engineered to keep those in power in power, so many do not describe Black children in this way—including the children themselves. Thus, the need for Critical Race Theory exists in order to properly and fully grasp any and all phenomenon—especially in regards to people of color in the United States and I argue especially in any and all realms involving Black children. It is with this understanding of the importance and power of story-telling, within the existence of a society founded on and powered by racism, that I situate my own intersectional identity. While I am certainly Black and a woman, I am also neither of these things for they cannot be separated when working to understand my experiences. I am, in essence, a Blackwoman. I look to scholar Kimberlé Williams Crenshaw’s ‘intersectionality’ to best explain this phenomenon. Crenshaw (1991) explains that ‘the experiences Black women face are subsumed within the traditional

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boundaries of race or gender discrimination as these boundaries are currently understood, and that the intersection of racism and sexism factors into Black women’s lives in ways that cannot be captured wholly by looking at the race or gender dimensions of those experiences separately’ (p. 1244). As a Blackwoman, themes of Black Feminism must also inform my understandings of my motherhood and ‘motherwork’ (Collins, 1994). Patricia Hill Collins (2000), one of the world’s leading scholars on feminist thought, writes the following about Black motherhood: Through the lived experiences gained within their extended families and communities,individual African-American women fashioned their own ideas about the meaning of Black womanhood. When these ideas found collective expression, Black women’s self-definitions enabled them to refashion African-influenced conceptions of self and community. These self-definitions of Black womanhood were designed to resist the negative controlling images of Black womanhood advanced by Whites as well as the discriminatory social practices that these controlling images supported (p. 13). Furthermore, Collins (1994) specifically addresses motherhood within the context of Black Feminism in her coined phrase of ‘motherwork’ in which she contends that Black motherhood consistently includes work outside of mothering one’s own children as we are invariably mindful of how children in the Black community are impacted collectively. In a book chapter entitled, ‘Shifting the Center: Race, Class, and Feminist Theorizing About Motherhood’, she writes: ‘For women of color, the subjective experience of mothering/motherhood is inextricable linked to the sociocultural concern of racial communities–one does not exist without the other’ (Collins, 1994, p. 47). In other words, we know in our being that the work we do as Black mothers is not only about our own children, but is connected to all Black children. And so, my being a Blackwoman, as a Blackmother, informs the stories I am able to recognize, illuminates those that I need to combat, and directs my creating and telling of stories to my children, as well as other people’s children. The processes and ideas I explore in this chapter aid my reflexivity and further my own understanding of my positionality as a Blackwoman and Blackmother, which in turn helps me to better understand my own story, which then helps me to tell the right stories to my children at the right time.

2.2 Storying our Existence Read me a story, mama! Can I lay in the bed with you? Hold on, I’ll be right back. I know the perfect book for tonight. As parents, we often look forward to reading and telling stories to our children. We fantasize about ‘bedtime’ and visualize ourselves sitting on the edge of our children’s beds with a book that our children have begged us to read to them. This act of parent deciding what story is told to child is an example of where the child has entrusted the parent to give them a framework to understand and navigate life. Hefflin

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and Barksdale-Ladd (2001) beautifully describe the power of children’s stories as follows: Literature is a powerful medium. Through it, children construct messages about their cultures and roles in society. Literature offers them personal stories, a view of their cultural surroundings, and insight on themselves. When children read books that are interesting and meaningful to them, they can find support for the processes of defining themselves as individuals and understanding their developing roles within their families and communities (p. 810).

In so many ways, children’s stories help set the stage for default culture, for what is the ‘norm’, and what is considered ‘other’. Overwhelmingly the majority of characters in children’s picture books are white—which contributes to the continued marginalization of Black children (Koss, 2015). Thomas (2016) expounds on this phenomenon further asserting that this lack of diversity in representing what childhood looks like, sounds like, feels like in both children’s books, as well as other media, also leads to what she calls an imagination gap because such stories ultimately present a narrow worldview. Thus, without proper contextualization, stories continue to dichotomize. They both empower and disempower. Moreover, Bullock et al. (2001) assert that as ‘many mainstream media outlets in the United States are controlled by a few powerful corporations, highly politicized issues are likely to be defined by and to reflect the interests of dominant social groups. When this occurs, less powerful groups (e.g., the poor, people of color, women) are at risk of being devalued and stereotyped in the media’ (pp. 229–230). Undoubtedly, such stories, while customarily considered innocent, traditional, and strictly ‘entertainment’, ultimately work to reinforce certain behaviors and ways of thinking and being. If a parent is not careful, engaging with the most popular stories becomes a way the parent is teaching, and the child is subconsciously learning, that there is one way that is right and all others are wrong. When information lives in our subconscious, it has the power to influence our views, our decisions, our thoughts of ourselves, and our capabilities. To circumvent this, we must be purposeful with the stories our children engage with. These children’s stories are but a part of a broader story that is told to our children. In addition to being conscious of the physical books I bring into my home and the YouTube channels I allow my children to watch, the broader story that I am fighting against as a Black mother is a story that to be Black is to be inferior, to be wrong, to be other, to be bad. My children are none of these things. However, if I do not also use stories to counter this reality, if I neglect purposeful counter-narratives, then my children will be susceptible to believing the myths and lies perpetuated by society. Therefore, I use the telling of stories as a strategy to ‘preempt’, challenge, and attack the harmful stories children will hear, read, and interact with throughout their lives. As I am up against such a strong and established mechanism, I must be strategic and deliberate about which stories my children hear, read, and interact with, as well as when they are told certain stories.

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2.2.1 Insistence of Stories So why stories? Children respond to the structure of stories. Read and Miller (1995) argue that the functionality of stories lies in the understanding that ‘social interaction is central for human beings, and stories are fundamentally about social interaction’ (p. 139). Learners of all ages learn from and remember meaningful stories. I believe as parents and teachers of young children, as well as those who are helping to prepare people to become parents and teachers of young children, we can use stories strategically and purposefully to aid in their development. These purposeful placement stories attempt to halt the internalization of the negative and harmful stories that are emphasized by those in power, as well as the stories that have been internalized and repeated by those who have been oppressed. You are already so loved, Little One. Did you know that your mommy and daddy prayed and prayed and prayed for you to come into our lives? We have been waiting for you. The world has been waiting for you. The world needs you. Are you ready to change the world?

The above is an excerpt taken from the journal I kept while pregnant with my son. I instinctively knew that he could feel my energy and also, at some point, hear my words. I wanted these words to be words of love and strength and of protection. He needed to receive this truth while he was in the place where he would be most protected. I thought, surely, I must begin telling him his story now before the world tells him differently. Patricia Hill Collins (2000) reminds us that engagement between Black mothers and their children is indeed a ‘special relationship’ that ‘can also foster a creativity, a mothering of the mind and soul, for all involved’ (p. 215). I needed to get into the habit of speaking the truth to my son. I needed him to begin to receive his story—even before he was born. And so, this is what I did. I began telling purposeful placement stories as both definitive stories and larger narratives with repetitive themes that I would strategically tell during childhood so that these stories garnered the most impact upon my children while listening to the stories. Without these purposeful placement stories, what stories and myths are my children susceptible to constructing? Which harmful ideas are ever-present, waiting to be absorbed by my children if I do not intervene? I have to look no further than my own life experiences to answer these questions. One such story I share now took place when I was a young special education teacher. My particular positionality during this time was one where I was the only Black teacher at a new school. The culture there regarding the faculty’s views, attitudes, and utter lack of self-awareness toward our Black children can be understood in the following memories I have from that time. It was not uncommon for teachers’ true feelings and views to be revealed via remarks in our faculty meetings. Comments such as ‘Well, these kids just can’t learn!’ were commonplace and of course problematic. Perhaps the one comment that has always remained with me was when one of my colleagues, a white female, while remarking about the beauty of our new building, boldly, and without regard for any historical connotations, asserted, ‘The first time we catch any of these kids writing on the walls or doing anything to mess up this space, I say we take ‘em outside and string ‘em up on the nearest tree’. I sat there in utter shock. I could not believe this woman, this

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teacher, this teacher of Black and Brown children, had flippantly called for lynching. For lynching, neither she nor any of my colleagues seemed at all bothered by her statement as they all continued the discussion around ‘appropriate consequences’ for misbehavior. And so, I sat there, in silence, not knowing what to do or what to say. I feared for our students. If my colleague was obtuse enough to think this and say this, what damage was being done in her classroom? In this entire school? I grappled with my silence as my reaction to situations such as this. Later, another colleague, another white female, would ‘lovingly’ tell me that I should ‘talk more’ in meetings. I remember telling her that as a Blackwoman, I see many, many things wrong with what is proposed and planned in our meetings and if I spoke up each time, no one would listen to anything I had to say. They would see me as an ‘angry Black woman’. However, as this school year went on, I did begin to speak more. I do not know if it was due to an increase in my comfortability to do so, or if it was my inevitable aggravation and rage that had grown to the point where I could no longer be silent. My role as a special education teacher was one where I thought, surely, I can speak with some authority and have my voice, knowledge, and experience respected, and could ultimately help to influence others’ understandings. I can remember advocating for so many of my Black students to receive the opportunity to adjust their educational placement to one where they could increase their instructional time in classrooms with their more ‘typically’ developing peers. These spaces, that by inequitable default, had, relatively speaking, more resources and presented more opportunity for them. I knew from my own studies that in the United States, myths about the Black race and subconscious biases contribute to teachers misidentifying Black children for special education services (Bondy & Ross, 1998). Here it was happening in real time in front of me and with me and possibly, through me. Time and time again, my recommendations, and even pleading, for my Black students would be met with ‘They’re just not ready’. Yet, when I made similar suggestions about the few white students who were assigned to me, like clockwork, my colleagues were excited and the transition to a different learning environment was swift. In my attempt to ‘speak up more’, I began to point out these differences when they happened to my colleagues. In response, I was met with pearl-clutching shock from them. How dare I ‘use the race card’ against them? Did I not know that they ‘didn’t see color?’. I often wonder if I truly did enough for my Black students in these situations. What role do I play in their life story? What different strategies should I have used to indeed make sure my voice, as a Blackwoman was heard and respected by my white female colleagues? What stories had they been told throughout their lifetimes that led them to believe that there was nothing wrong with their thoughts or actions? Perhaps if I had been told similar stories in my own educator preparation program, I would have been equipped to know how to strategically prevent, forfend, and obstruct such displays of anti-Blackness for my own students. This is now part of my story. And it is in turn, stories that I consistently share with the future teachers I now work with so that their story might be different, and conversely, hopefully the stories of Black children will be different.

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2.2.2 Storying into Resistance Black feminist thought can stimulate a new consciousness that utilizes Black women’s everyday, taken-for-granted knowledge. Rather than raising consciousness, Black feminist thought affirms, rearticulates, and provides a vehicle for expressing in public a consciousness that quite often already exists. More important, this rearticulated consciousness aims to empower African-American women and stimulate resistance (Collins, 2000, p. 36)

Purposeful placement stories are indeed an example of Collins’ aforementioned reference to ‘Black women’s everyday, taken-for-granted knowledge’. They both theorize and practice key ideas in Black Feminism, a perspective centering on the specific experiences of Black women in response to white supremacy ideology, patriarchal systems, and classism (Collins, 2000). As well as Critical Race Theory, the aforementioned theoretical perspective unpacks the effects of the permanence of racism on people of color and specifically includes counter-narratives as a feature (Delgado & Stefancic, 2017). Moreover, purposeful placement stories draw on Critical Race Parenting, also known as ParentCrit, which MotherScholar Cheryl Matias (2016) describes as ‘the counter-pedagogical processes that may disrupt how children learn about race’. My own experiences as a Blackwoman have given me a Black Feminist epistemology, which has influenced my choice to apply Critical Race Theory and ParentCrit in this autoethnographic examination. Evans-Winters (2019) contends that ‘Black women’s worldview is shaped by our everyday joys and struggles as well as our quests to solve our own community’s problems and pushback against societal barriers’ (p. 15). It is by delving into my own life stories that I can work to understand my own ‘joys and struggles’ and then, in turn, know how to better tell stories to my own children, as well as, in my continued motherwork, help set the stage for other Black children.

2.3 Connecting Another significant part of my own story is my interest in and study of educational psychology. I am fascinated by all of the various components and overlaps regarding how people learn. This part of my story has certainly influenced my position with respect to the inclusion of purposeful placement stories in the lives of Black children. Among so many other threats, Black children are up against the development and harm of internalized racism (Hughes et al., 2015), the impact of a negative racial regard connecting with potential depression (Settles, Navarrete, Pagano, Abou, & Sidanius, 2010), and a host of other outputs connected to racerelated stressors (Carter & Reynolds, 2011), I know that there is a greater connection between my children as individuals who are learning and our story as a collective. The story-telling must include me teaching my children that these stories I am telling them are not only about me, are not only about them, but they are about Black people as a whole. Research also supports this notion that our own sense of racial identity

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impacts how we see others of the same race (Hughes et al., 2015). Thus, I want the stories I share with my children to not only help determine how they view themselves, but how they view other Black people. Their identity must be tied to the collective. Eventually, it becomes not enough to only tell my children positive stories about Black people without further context. For example, unfortunately, research supports the assertion that while Black media does positively impact one’s racial development, it also simultaneously impacts one’s public regard (Sullivan & Platenburg, 2017). Essentially, the more ‘positive’ stories my Black children consume, while it would help reiterate the importance and value of their ‘Blackness’, it would also reiterate the fact that other groups see the Black community in a not-so-positive light, which in turn could cancel out the intended outcomes of consuming the stories in the first place. Therefore, as my children age, I contend that I must also be very purposeful in my stories and reiterate historical truths and contemporary realities both of which always include the whys and hows of power structures. And I have witnessed them over the years verbalizing and acting these stories. Through their pretend play with their dolls, their costumes, their little kitchen. I hear them playing stories. Using their little world to process, to understand, to inform. In the words they create beyond mother and child, they are using stories in their own growth and transformation. Knowing that I use purposeful placement stories as a way to circumvent my own children internalizing falsehoods and misrepresentations, especially around race, I also recognize that I am essentially storying them into being equipped to successfully fight these aforementioned threats. I must consistently remind them of the following: Even though others want this to be the story, we know that this is actually the story. Thus, I am storying my children into their identity and their identity will be their greatest asset. I need my children to be able to resist—to resist institutional practices, to resist internalizing any and all anti-Blackness concepts, to resist an insecurity of self, and to resist everything that our society thrusts at them. For them to realize, believe, remember, and stand on this is a very act of resistance. This resistance will be their survival—and hopefully—their/our liberation.

References Bondy, E., & Ross, D. (1998). Confronting myths about teaching Black children: A challenge for teacher educators. Teacher Education and Special Education, 21(4), 241–254. Bullock, H., Wyche, K., & Williams, W. (2001). Media images of the poor. Journal of Social Issues, 57(2), 229–246. Carter, R. T., & Reynolds, A. L. (2011). Race-related stress, racial identity status attitudes, and emotional reactions of Black Americans. Cultural Diversity and Ethnic Minority Psychology, 17(2), 156–162. Collins, P. H. (1994). Shifting the center: Race, class, and feminist theorizing about motherhood. In E. N. Glenn, G. Chang, & L. R. Forcey (Eds.), Mothering: Ideology, experience, and agency (pp. 45–65). New York. Collins, P. H. (2000). Black feminist thought: Knowledge, consciousness, and the politics of empowerment. Routledge.

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Crenshaw, K. (1991). Mapping the margins: Intersectionality, identity politics, and violence against women of color. Stanford Law Review, 43(6), 1241–1299. Delgado, R., & Stefancic, J. (2000). Critical race theory: The cutting edge (2nd ed.). Temple University Press. Delgado, R., & Stefancic, J. (2017). Critical race theory: An introduction. New York University Press. Ellis, C., Adams, T., & Bochner, A. (2011). Autoethnography: An overview. Historical Social Research, 36, 273–290. Evans-Winters, V. E. (2019). Black feminism in qualitative inquiry: Writing our daughters’ bodies. Routledge. Hefflin, B., & Barksdale-Ladd, M. A. (2001). African American children’s literature that helps students find themselves: Selection guidelines for grades K-3. The Reading Teacher, 54(8), 810– 819. Hughes, M., Kiecolt, K. J., Keith, V., & Demo, D. (2015). Racial identity and well-being among African Americans. School Psychology Quarterly, 78(1), 25–48. Koss, M. (2015). Diversity in contemporary picturebooks: A content analysis. Journal of Children’s Literature, 41(1), 32–42. Marx, S., Pennington, J., & Chang, H. (2017). Critical autoethnography in pursuit of educational equity: Introduction to the IJME Special Issue. International Journal of Multicultural Education, 19(1), 1–6. Matias, C. E. (2016). Mommy, is being brown bad?: Critical race parenting in a post-race era. Race and Pedagogy Journal: Teaching and Learning for Justice, 1(3), Article 1. Perry, J., Lyman, M., & Anderson, J. (2006). Resisting vulnerability: The experiences of families who have kin in hospital: A feminist ethnography. International Journal of Nursing Studies, 43(3), 173–178. Read, S. J., & Miller, L. C. (1995). Stories are fundamental to meaning and memory: For social creatures, could it be otherwise. In R. S. Wyer (Ed.), Knowledge and memory: The real story: Advances in social cognition (Vol. III, pp. 139–153). Psychology Press. Settles, I. H., Navarrete, C. D., Pagano, S. J., Abdou, C. M., & Sidanius, J. (2010). Racial identity and depression among African American women. Cultural Diversity and Ethnic Minority Psychology, 16(2), 248–255. Solorzano, D., & Yosso, T. (2002). Critical race methodology: Counter-storytelling as an analytical framework for education research. Qualitative Inquiry, 8(1), 23–44. Sullivan, J., & Platenburg, G. (2017). From black-ish to blackness: An analysis of Black information sources’ influence on Black identity development. Journal of Black Studies, 48(3), 215–234 Thomas, E. (2016). Stories still matter: Rethinking the role of diverse children’s literature today. Language Arts, 94(2), 112–119.

Keishana L. Barnes is an educator, wife, and mother based in the United States. Over the past 20 years, she has studied and worked in the field of education and has witnessed and experienced firsthand the frustrations that exist for many families, specifically for families of color, families who are living in poverty, and families of children with dis/abilities. After graduating with a double major in Special Education and Child Development from Vanderbilt University, she earned a master’s degree at the Harvard Graduate School of Education where she focused on Risk and Prevention. Professionally, she has served as a classroom teacher in special education and general education, teacher mentor, administrator, and curriculum developer all while extensively and consistently endeavoring to improve educational outcomes for marginalized communities. Currently, she attends the University of Memphis where she is pursuing a PhD in Educational Psychology and Research and works as a Clinical Instructor and Site Coordinator in Instruction and Curriculum Leadership in the Special Education Department. Her research interests include narrative inquiry, autoethnography, critical discourse analysis, school experiences of Intellectual Gifted children of color, self-advocacy in children, African American mothering, culturally

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sustaining pedagogy, creativity in teaching, and history of schools. Keishana resides in Memphis, TN with her husband and three children.

Chapter 3

The Green Foam Ring and the Sleeping Girl Who Wasn’t Tired: A Posthuman Story of Care Teresa K. Aslanian

Abstract In this chapter, I explore some amoral care processes that take place outside human dyadic relationships in the ECEC centre. The study draws on Fisher and Tronto’s feminist care ethics and posthumanist perspectives. The objective is to explore how amoral care is performed between people and things in order to produce new knowledge about care as a professional practice in ECEC. Keywords Professional care · ECEC · Materiality · Care-ethics · Narrative

3.1 Introduction It puzzles me now to remember with what absurd sincerity I doted on this little toy, half fancying it alive and capable of sensation. I could not sleep unless it was folded in my nightgown; and when it lay there safe and warm, I was comparatively happy, believing it to be happy likewise. —excerpt from ‘Jane Eyre’ by Charlotte Brönte

By interpreting children’s responses to various questions about nature and the physical world, Piaget (1929) concluded in the last century that young children’s worldviews are characterised by ambiguous ontological divisions between people, nature and things. Children described things and nature as if on a continuum of life (Piaget, 1929). Things, like people, are understood as co-active and agentic. Historically, this way of thinking has been attributed to children’s immature intellect and ignorance. The idea that clouds can will themselves in any direction, can be interpreted as a kind of anthropomorphising of clouds. The movement of clouds is understood through a human lens—a lens of one who reflects on their doings and can be held accountable for what is done. Obviously, clouds cannot be held accountable for what they do and their doings are not intentional. Still, clouds do do. Clouds can release water that nurtures or floods crops. Clouds can occlude the T. K. Aslanian (B) University of South-Eastern Norway, Porsgrunn, Norway e-mail: [email protected] © The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature Singapore Pte Ltd. 2022 C. Blyth and T. K. Aslanian (eds.), Children and the Power of Stories, Children: Global Posthumanist Perspectives and Materialist Theories, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-981-16-9287-1_3

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sun, causing temperatures to drop and humans to freeze, and they can cause light to scatter, becoming white to our eyes and forming the motif that can be found in children’s drawings across the globe. The idea that clouds are actively engaged in producing the world in which they themselves become, even without the intention to do so, has some credence and echoes the philosophical position of new materialist perspectives which view the human and the more-than-human as involved and coconstitutive (Barad, 2007, 2014; Fox & Alldred, 2015), and in which things are ascribed vitality (Bennett, 2010). The concept of ‘intra-action’ (Barad, 2007) is of central importance, and describes an involved, co-constitutive relationship between human and more-than-human phenomena. Materiality is understood as something more than static. This chapter is an exercise in how a change of perspective can highlight new aspects of a well-known but neglected topic, care in early childhood education and care (ECEC) centres. I will approach the concept of care from a new materialist perspective, as a fluid process produced in various constellations of human and more-than-human phenomena in the ECEC centre. I aim to challenge established ideas about morality as the necessary basis for care, and the human dyadic as primary care motif. I ask how care takes place between people and things in ECEC. This chapter is based on data from a micro-ethnographic pilot study for a larger fieldwork project in a young children’s division (for children aged 1–3 years). As a participant-observer, I spent 2–3 h each day over a one-week period in the young children’s division of an ECEC centre, where I focused on how care was visible in the encounters between children and things. I wrote short narratives based on field notes, observations and photographs of objects which I believed were involved in the care processes in the division during the time I was there. I chose to write about the care encounters that made a particular impression on me. One such episode was the source of the narrative reproduced below, in which a non-living thing functioned as a performer of care. I read this narrative episode along with new materialist theories (Barad, 2007; Bennett, 2010; Delueze & Guattari, 1980) in order to think differently about care in ECEC (Fig. 3.1). The teachers were busy putting the children to sleep after lunch in the toddler rooms. The children slept outside in prams lined up alongside the building. I stayed indoors and observed the back and forth of teachers coming in and out, plucking up children to be changed and put to sleep in their prams, one by one. After about 15 minutes of this process, there was only one child left in the classroom, ‘Liz’. She wandered around the rooms for about five minutes. Moving slowly from room to room, she started climbing up onto furniture, engaging in what I considered risky play. I seemed to be the only person who saw her. She paid me little attention and had the rooms to herself. I watched her climb up and stand up on a table. I watched her until I feared she may fall, then led her down. Accepting my help down, she continued wandering around, disinterested in me. Eventually she walked into an area with soft climbing toys and shapes. She climbed onto a yellow foam mat that had a large green foam ring laying upon it. The foam ring had about a half meter-wide space in the middle. Liz climbed into that space and curled up tightly inside of it, in a little ball, and closed her eyes–then drifted off to sleep. I was conflicted between letting her remain asleep, curled up inside the little space she had found, or to lift the foam ring and ‘release’ her from it. Was the ring caring for her or strangling her? My concern got the better of me and I lifted it up, waking her. Her body expanded some and she continued to passively lie, staring out into space in front of her, eyes glazed over. The teacher came in shortly thereafter and I told her

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Fig. 3.1 The green foam ring. Photo Author

that Liz was very tired and had already fallen asleep. The teacher replied ‘Liz? Tired? I don’t think so. We put her to sleep last because she’s so fussy and difficult to put to sleep. She wiggles out of her carriage and won’t lie still.’

3.2 From What Things Mean to What Things Do An increasing share of ECEC research embraces new materialisms and invites readers to conceive of children and their environment as interwoven and coming into being, in which both children and non-living things are actors and participants. This perspective is by no means new but is revived in response to the dominance of developmental psychology in ECEC research and practice. An interwoven view of the child and its environment contrasts an incremental worldview in which children are understood in realtion to particular developmental phases and as ready or not ready to enter into new phases that culminate in maturity, when children hold a similar conceptual understanding of the world as adults. A new materialist perspective has been used in ECEC to understand topics such as play (Lenz Taguchi, 2014), gender (Osgood, 2014), and scientific concepts (de Freitas & Palmer, 2016) beyond developmental perspectives. In order to explore materiality as a performer of care, I build on Barad’s (2003, 2007) agential realism and Bennett’s (2010) vital materiality. Barad (2007) takes her point of departure in quantum physics and describes how apparently separate units are actually in a mutual process of creation, where things come into existence by virtue of their relationship to other things. Barad calls this process intra-action, which contrasts

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with the idea of things as independent units, subjects and objects, in which an object is understood as existing independent of a subject. According to Barad (2007), meaning arises through the relationships between various phenomena. This view allocates meaning to material relationships. Children’s relationships with things are understood as mutually productive relationships. In other words, one can analyse what a thing and a child do or produce together, rather than what a child does with or to a thing, or what a thing means to a child. Bennett (2010) takes her inspiration partly from children’s perception of the world and bases her concept of ‘vital materiality’ in part on Spinoza’s ‘affect’, which refers to the ability of things to bring about change in other things. Deleuze and Guattari’s (1980) concept of assemblage is also relevant in this context. This concept describes a deliberate arrangement of things and people, but the things and people are not perceived as delimited, separate units. The parts do not exist outside of their relationship to each other. In an assemblage, it is the relationship of the parts and their effect on other parts that constitute their ontological status, which as such is always fluid and coming into being. You as a reader, I as an author, the keyboard I am writing on, the books I refer to, and the sound of my children talking in the living room—not to mention the cold wind blowing on me through the open window in the room—are a part of an assemblage. Deleuze and Guattari’s (1980) concept of assemblage incorporates how the various forces involved create affects that meet each other and continually create new effects. According to Bennett (2010), humans and everything more-than-human that are involved in a situation are to be regarded as active agents with the capacity to cause an effect on other parts of the assemblage, which come into existence through their relationship to each other, as a fluid state of becoming.

3.3 Feminist Care Ethics and Posthumanism The background for my focus on care is a desire to challenge the Western ‘care paradox’ in which care and caregivers have low social status while care is simultaneously acknowledged as a fundamental necessity underpinning a well-functioning society (Folbre, 2001). These patterns are reproduced in the ECEC sector. Care as a topic is neglected in academia, while care is taken for granted as a basis for practice within ECEC (Tholin, 2011) and as a non-explicit mechanism underlying the positive effect that high-quality ECEC centres have on children’s social and academic development (Garcia et al., 2016). Although care is understood as fundamental to pedagogical practice in ECEC centres, few studies have been conducted on care in the ECEC centre (Tholin, 2011). Research on care mainly entails ECEC teachers’ ways of being in dyadic encounters with children, with a focus on sensitivity, empathy and interest in the child as an individual (Aslanian, 2016; Foss, 2009; Goldstein, 2009; Noddings, 1984; Taggart, 2011). The qualities that describe good care are perhaps perceived as difficult or impossible to learn through education and are understood instead as a way of being that one either has or does not have (Aslanian, 2016). Such

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perceptions play a part in making care both valuable and valueless in an educational context since it is not something one acquires through education, but is something one has by virtue of being a human being, and often a woman. Within feminist care ethics, women’s socio-historical role as stay-at-home caregivers has been used to explain the low status of care (Fisher & Tronto, 1990; Gilligan, 1982; Tronto, 1993). Based on traditions, care is often conceptualised as something that occurs between two individuals, usually between mother and child (Moss et al., 2006; Tronto, 1993). This dyadic understanding confines the concept of care to the individual level, the home and the private sphere. Considering the low status of women through the ages, it is easy to see why and how care has been rendered invisible and taken for granted in society. Tronto (1993) asserts that this implicit boundary between the moral and the political is an obstacle to putting a higher value on care. Traditional boundaries between the home sphere, where moral rules have power, and the political sphere, where logic and rationality have power, have thus ensured that care remains outside of the political. The area where people’s primary care needs are met has slowly but surely been moved out of the four walls of the home and into the political and professional sphere (Sevenhuijsen, 2003). This relocation requires new ways of understanding the phenomenon, as it appears in both the private and the professional spheres. In order to gain more insight into the transboundary aspects of care—the moral and the political—Fisher and Tronto (1990) have developed a wider concept of care that takes into account that care practices are situation based. Care is described as a process rather than as specific types of actions performed by certain types of people (i.e. women). Fisher and Tronto (1990) illustrate this with a story about a single mother who puts dinner in the oven so that her children can warm it up while she is at her second job. She works to earn enough money to pay the rent and still have a roof over their heads. The children do not get to have contact with their mother, but she provides care through her work. The care process is described as a type of activity that entails ‘everything we do to maintain, continue and repair our world so that we can live in it as well as possible’ (Fisher & Tronto, 1990, p. 40). Moreover, it is emphasised that ‘our world’ encompasses not only people but also the environment, which includes care for nature and things (Tronto, 1993). As such, care is not only what occurs between two people, but also everything we do to take care of the world in the best way possible. For ECEC teachers, this may mean that care for children also encompasses the planning of pedagogical activities, development and care-taking of the physical environment, daily plans and routines, and cooperation with parents. Performance of care entails an assemblage that includes professional considerations and decisions about what will happen when, how and with which materials. Care in the ECEC centre occurs in, with and among things. For children, care in the ECEC centre encompasses their encounters with things, since theoretically speaking, children experience things as involved in their lives (Piaget, 1929). Anyone who has spent time with children has surely experienced the power that things have in children’s lives. This phenomenon is easy to spot; just think of how a plush animal, a rag or a blanket gives some children a sense of comfort and security that no human can replace. If the effect of materiality on children has the same qualities as those

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we associate with care, can the materiality’s agency constitute a performance of care? Research connecting materiality and care, usually employs perspectives from phenomenology and developmental psychology that emphasise what things mean to children and what it means to give care to things. In her study of care and the home, Nel Noddings (1984) explores children’s relationship to things. She puts focus on things by emphasising children’s relationship to, for example, collecting treasures such as stones, buttons and other things they find. In this context, the meaning of things is highlighted as aspects of care—having feelings for things and taking care of things as a way of living a caring life. Wood points out that children often feel that things, such as a favourite blanket, have an inherent force that is enticing (Wood, 2005). Wood and Latham (2014) address the meaning that objects from childhood have for adults and ask what objects mean in people’s lives. Objects that have meaning to humans, especially children, have been described from a developmental psychology perspective as transitional objects (Winnicott, 2005) and this perspective continues to be widely used. Objects are understood as representing the child’s mother, and thus are able to produce a sense of security in the absence of the mother, which is the ‘real’ love object. The objects in themselves are regarded as temporary replacements for that which is real, namely, maternal love. In keeping with a phenomenological understanding of care and things, objects do not have an inherent meaning, but are ascribed meaning by humans (Wood & Latham, 2014). In other words, it is the individual’s viewpoint that gives the object meaning (Wood & Latham, 2014). According to Barad (2003), however, it is the intra-action between the object and the person in tandem that creates (the always fluid) meaning of both the human and the thing,1 i.e. that things play a role in giving the human meaning to the same degree that the human plays a role in giving objects meaning. The relationship between things and people is mutually creative. The power of objects in children’s lives is thus not exclusively psychological, but also physical, cultural and social. Materiality affects us not primarily because of what things mean to us, but what they do to us and how they change us, what the thing and the person become together. In this perspective, a beloved object, such as a plush animal, does not provide comfort based on everything the plush animal represents to the child, but because of what the plush animal and the child do with and to each other.

3.4 Care and Morality—Like Hand in Glove? I watched Liz sleep for a few minutes while the teachers tended to the children outside—wondering if the green ring was caring for Liz. Can a green ring care? Then, I began to wonder if she perhaps was squeezed too tightly inside of the ring— perhaps affecting her oxygen intake. If the green ring cared, it certainly didn’t know 1 In addition, the circumstances that allow thing and person to come together, what Barad (2007, p. 167) refers to as the ‘apparatus’ creates the potential for both to come into existence.

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how to care—or when to stop. Within the field of education, there is a deep-seated association between care and ethics (Noddings, 1984). Acting in a caring manner is also acting ethically. Moral considerations have nothing to do with the extent to which things perform care; rather, it is something that happens because the child and the thing have certain qualities and are present in the same place at the same time. In cases of indirect care, the ECEC teacher works with the environment. By ‘thinking with’ things and what they do to the children (e.g. does the space under the table cause children to feel calm or anxious? Is it stable? Should they be allowed to crawl underneath it?), the ECEC teacher is in an active but indirect process of care performance that plays a part in creating and shaping children’s experiences of for example excitement, enjoyment, safety and warmth. It is well established that the experience of warm relationships between staff and children is the most essential aspect of each and every care environment. This contact is always a part of the larger assemblage of things, routines and pressure from various quarters. Dyadic care comes into being in relation to other circumstances or the assemblage that is found at any given time. Some aspects of such an assemblage may be shaped by the ECEC teacher through her/his professional practice, such as the choice of materials in the classroom, rules regarding their use, and routines and the daily rhythm. Other parts of this assemblage, such as the size of the classroom, rules regarding the admission of children, and other politically and financially driven frameworks, lie in the hands of other actors, which as such are also a part of the indirect performance of care in the ECEC centre (Aslanian, 2017). I do not want to suggest that care is independent of the caregiver’s intentions and moral assessments, but that things are also and always also involved in care relations, without either intention or moral assessments. An acknowledgement of objects’ potential to perform care may enhance the quality of the ECEC teacher’s ability to ‘maintain, continue and repair’ (Fisher & Tronto, 1990, p. 40) the ECEC centre’s care environment. The caregiver’s work is to acknowledge or recognise the care that children get from things and to facilitate caring encounters between the children and things. By the same token, it is important to maintain a sensitivity to things that do not perform care: which things seem to be a hindrance or which are children attracted to and offer them opportunities? How do we react to the agency of things–their power to give comfort without wanting or desiring to do so? Are the pacifier, blanket and stuffed animal placed high on a shelf only for the child’s benefit? I argue that in order to take the caregiving power of things and children’s relationships to things into account in care environments, care has to be understood as something that happens both directly through morally motivated physical and emotional contact, and amorally and indirectly through assemblages of human and morethan-human phenomena. Appreciating the nurturing power of more-than-human phenomena could entail an element of risk considering the neo-liberal tendency to delegate responsibility away from humans and to enhance efficiency. One might ask, if things can give care, why do we need so many ECEC teachers? Children are dependent on humans to nurture them, as the crippling and death of young children during the beginning of the twentieth century who did not have access to loving caretakers made tragically clear (Bowlby, 1952). Humans need love from humans:

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morally motivated and emotionally invested care that occurs among and with morethan-human phenomena. Humans’ capacity to love is however profoundly affected by the indirect care produced in the assemblages within which they take part. Care that occurs beyond the dyad enriches children’s independent relationships with the outside world and thus supports their autonomy. I understand ‘beyond dyadic care’ as an aspect of the children’s relationship with the outside world and emotional autonomy. Children’s encounters with things occur between the children and the thing and lie outside the adult caregiver’s control. Perhaps indirect care can be related to what Else Foss (2009) refers to as caring through nearness and distance that emphasises the importance of supporting children’s autonomy. Supporting children’s relationships with the material world, away from adult caregivers, is a part of caring through staying away. Such care processes cannot be controlled or created by the staff. Children find their own relationships and meaningful encounters with the material world. When noticed, however, such encounters can be supported, protected and acknowledged by the ECEC teacher.

3.5 Conclusion In this chapter, I have explored how objects perform care for children in the ECEC centre. The professionalisation of ECEC teaching entails a professionalisation of the conception of care in the ECEC centre’s material context. The choice of materials has significance for the care environment. What does the ECEC teacher bring with her/him to the environment, and why? How can various materials play a part in performing care? Who gets to decide who or what the child wants to receive care from—the child or the teacher? The purpose of this chapter was to explore care in the ECEC centre for children under three years old, viewed from the child’s ontological perspective as described by Piaget (1929), explored through new materialism. A new perspective on care in the ECEC centre can help to breathe new life into a worn-out, almost invisible concept. A posthuman and new materialist perspective also gives us a much broader understanding of care as a fundamental mechanism in society which is also performed by nature and materialities, and thus encompasses our relationship to things and the world. The performance of care in the ECEC centre entails more than what arises in dyadic relationships; it is interwoven with broader professional practice, which also includes planning, rules and routines, organisation and the material content in the ECEC centre (Aslanian, 2017). By attending to indirect care, the focus of care in ECEC is expanded beyond the ECEC teacher alone (often a woman) as a caregiver who can be taken for granted. The complexities associated with amoral care have been discussed in relation to things’ caregiving potential. By taking children’s ontological perspective as described by Piaget (1929) as a point of departure, new aspects of the care environment in the ECEC centre come to light and the indirect care that ECEC teachers perform through their active relationship to the material becomes evident, relevant and significant.

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References Aslanian, T. K. (2016). Kjærlighet som profesjonsutøvelse i barnehagen. Universitetsforlaget. Aslanian, T. K. (2017). Ready or not, here they come! Care as a material and organizational practice in ECEC for children under two. Global Studies of Childhood, 7(4), 323–334. https://doi.org/10. 1177/2043610617747979 Barad, K. (2003). Posthumaist performativity: Toward an understanding of how matter comes to matter. Signs: Journal of Women in Culture and Society, 28(3), 801–831. Barad, K. (2007). Meeting the universe halfway: Quantum physics and the entanglement of matter and meaning. Duke University Press. Barad, K. (2014). Diffracting diffraction: Cutting together-apart. Parallax, 20(3), 168–187. https:// doi.org/10.1080/13534645.2014.927623 Bennett, J. (2010). Vibrant matter: A political ecology of things. Duke University Press. Bowlby, J. (1952). Maternal care and mental health. World Health Organisation. de Freitas, E., & Palmer, A. (2016). How scientific concepts come to matter in early childhood curriculum: Rethinking the concept of force. Cultural Studies in Science Education, 11, 1201– 1222. https://doi.org/10.1007/s11422-014-9652-6 Deleuze, G., & Guattari, F. (1980). A thousand plataeus. Bloomsbury. Fisher, B., & Tronto, J. (1990). Toward a feminist theory of caring. In E. Abel & M. Nelson (Eds.), Circles of care: Work & identity in women’s lives. State University of New York Press. Folbre, N. (2001). The invisible heart. The New Press. Foss, E. (2009). Den omsorgsfulle væremåten: En studie av voksnes væremåte i forhold til barn i barnehagen. Unpublished doctoral dissertation. Universitet i Bergen, Høgskolen i Vestfold. Fox, N. J., & Alldred, P. (2015). New materialist social inquiry: Designs, methods and the researchassemblage. International Journal of Social Research Methodology, 18(4), 399–414. https://doi. org/10.1080/13645579.2014.921458 Garcia, J. L., Heckman, J. J., Leaf, D. E., & Prados, M. J. (2016, Dec.). The life-cycle benefits of an influential early childhood program. IZA–Institute of Labour Economics. Gilligan, C. (1982). In a different voice. Harvard University Press. Goldstein, L. S. (2009). Teaching with love (Vol. 1). Peter Lang. Lenz Taguchi, H. (2014). New materialisms and play. In E. Brooker, M. Blaise, & S. Edwards (Eds.), The Sage handbook of play and learning in early childhood (pp. 79–90). Sage Publications. Moss, P., Boddy, J., & Cameron, C. (2006). Care work, present and future: Introduction. In P. Moss, J. Boddy, & C. Cameron (Eds.), Care work: Present and future (pp. 3–17). Routledge. Noddings, N. (1984). Caring. University of California Press. Osgood, J. (2014). Playing with gender: Making space for post-human childhood(s). In J. Moyles, J. Payler, & J. Georgeson (Eds.), Early years foundations: Critical issues (pp. 191–202). Open University Press. Piaget, J. (1929). The child’s conception of the world. Routledge & Kegan Paul Ltd. Sevenhuijsen, S. (2003). The place of care: The relevance of the feminist ethic of care for social policy. Feminist Theory, 4(2), 179–197. https://doi.org/10.1177/14647001030042006 Taggart, G. (2011). Don’t we care?: The ethics and emotional labour of early years professionalism. Early Years, 31(1), 85–95. https://doi.org/10.1080/09575146.2010.536948 Tholin, K. R. (2011). Omsorg usynliggjøres og trenger en tydligere posisjon. In V. Glaser, K. Hoås Moen, S. Mørreaunet, & F. Søbstad (Eds.), Barnehagens grunnsteiner (pp. 59–70). Universitetsforlaget. Tronto, J. (1993). Moral boundaries: A political argument for an ethic of care. Routledge. Winnicott, D. W. (2005). Playing and reality. Routledge. Wood, E. (2005). Objects matter: The meaning of objects from childhood. Unpublished doctoral dissertation. University of Minnesota, Ann Arbor. Wood, E., & Latham, K. F. (2014). The objects of experience: Transforming visitor-ebject encounters in museums. Routledge.

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Teresa K. Aslanian is a trained early childhood educator and Associate Professor of early childhood education in the Department of Educational Sciences at University of South-Eastern Norway. American by birth, she has lived in Norway for 25 years and published on the subjects of care, love and learning with examples and inspiration from Norwegian kindergartens. Her work utilizes and engages with critical and posthuman perspectives in order to reconceptualise taken for granted concepts and themes in ECEC.

Chapter 4

Storying Observations of a Cardboard Book Through Sticky Micro-moments: Bag-Lady-Carrier-Bag Practices and Memory Stories Anna R. Moxnes Abstract This article explores different perspectives in narrative methodology growing within posthuman, new-materialist and feminist fields of research. Ideas of becoming a bag-lady and doing carrier-bag storytelling, and also memory stories and micro-moments in research are explored. An observation from a kindergarten is used to consider the possibilities these ideas of storying in early childhood research offer, and to open up multiple entrances to reading the observation notes differently. The discussion illuminates ongoing cognitive-affective-material intra-actions through listening to differences, children’s extraordinary competences and exploring intra-actions of nursery practices with the macro-political greenwashing of oceans. Keywords Storying · Bag-lady-carrier-bag · Memory stories · Micro-moments

4.1 Introduction I am sitting on the floor in a nursery observing, where 7 children aged 1.5 years to 2.5 years are taking part in a semi-organised play situation. By semi-organised I mean that the children are free to make some choices between toys and rooms that are made available for this particular group. Much is going on around me, and I am doing my best to take notes. When jotting down some words on the blank pages in my notebook, my thoughts drift on to the analysing process, and further onto how my deficient notes can transform into something … a story, or something? I think of myself as Le Guin’s (1989) little bear Woman, surrounded by stories and stories about stories. All the activities, all the play, all the minor movements going on: suddenly my attention is drawn towards something happening around a cardboard book.

This small happening with the cardboard book is what drives this chapter and the exploring of three narrative strategies; first, micro-moments (inspired by Davies, 2014; Kofoed & Ringrose, 2012; Moxnes, 2019a; Moxnes & Osgood, 2018; Osgood & Giugni, 2015), then bag-lady-carrier practices of storytelling (inspired A. R. Moxnes (B) The University of South-Eastern Norway, Drammen, Norway e-mail: [email protected] © The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature Singapore Pte Ltd. 2022 C. Blyth and T. K. Aslanian (eds.), Children and the Power of Stories, Children: Global Posthumanist Perspectives and Materialist Theories, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-981-16-9287-1_4

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by Haraway, 2004, 2016; Le Guin, 1989) and, finally, memory stories (inspired by Aslanian & Moxnes, 2020; Hohti, 2018; Moxnes, 2019b; Palmer, 2011; Taylor, 2017). According to Tamboukou (2015) narratives can be described as forces, as crucial for opening up research materials and offering other possibilities from which to understand practical work or life. Riessman (2008) highlights the variations in traditions and disciplines wherein narratives are in use and that many scholars in diverse disciplines work narratively with as data. Haraway (1997, 2004, 2016, 2018) activates storytelling as essential in her philosophy and methodological concepts. In this article, the three narrative concepts are all inspired by Haraway’s conceptualization of stories in research. The first narrative concept in use here is micro-moments (Davies, 2014; Moxnes, 2019a), or sticky memories, stories or knots (Kofoed & Ringrose, 2012; Moxnes & Osgood, 2018; Osgood & Giugni, 2015). Micro-moments are introduced as stories to discuss from, or, as I will further outline, as active partakers in discussions. The second concept is the idea of bag-lady storytelling, inspired by Ursula K. Le Guin (1989). This concept is taken up by different researchers, e.g., A. Taylor, Blaise and Giugni (2013), who discuss different approaches and ways in which we can learn to live with, rather than learn about companion species. They activate ‘baglady’ stories to work with entangled human/nonhuman lives. Hohti (2018) makes use of bag-lady storytelling as a way of enacting critical analysis in an affirmative manner since it foregrounds material details and allows various close readings of the complexities of a story. My own work (Moxnes, 2019b) uses bag-lady storytelling as inspiration for explaining the gathering of and further activating of research materials for my studies. The chapter continues with the exploration of the third concept— memory stories (Hohti, 2018; Palmer, 2011; Taylor, 2017). This is to open up what memories can offer when the intention is to discuss storying in the context of early childhood research. Posthuman storying is often used to offer generative methodological approaches (Moxnes & Osgood, 2019; Osgood, 2020; Osgood & Giugni, 2015). Exploring them in this article is not about forcing stories into standardized recipes, as a search for neat answers, or firm conclusions. Rather the intention is to unfold and investigate so that storying can continue to work in and explore Early Childhood Education and Care (ECEC), and become new ethico-onto-epistemological (Barad, 2007) adventures that can present surprises about what else is going on in ECEC practices. Further, it is to listen to more than words. It is about listening and being open to differences (Davies, 2014). The story, the chapter, dwells upon is a series of moments concerning a cardboard book. The intention of the chapter is to investigate the narrative through telling different stories about the story. To help keep the focus, I have constructed the following question: How can three narrative strategies, within the feminist new materialism field of research, work to storying differences within a narrative from a nursery?

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This article is meant to be read as a methodical experiment. The observation story and the three strategies are introduced and will be discussed through the different sections in this chapter.

4.2 Ethics Through Sitting on the Floor Making Notes In the previous section I wrote that the intention is to unfold and investigate so that storying can continue to work in and explore ECEC, and become new ethico-ontoepistemological (Barad, 2007) adventures that can present surprises about what else is going on in ECEC practices. Barad (2007, p. 185) explains that the researcher is understood as having a heightened ethical responsibility for how knowledge is produced through how she is entangled within the world as a researcher. Taking up ethico-onto-epistemology, the researchers’ sensibility is at stake, since this requires creating room for nonhierarchical understandings of knowledge, different beliefs, thoughts and stories. Following Haraway (2016) we have an ‘ethical response-ability’ to take account of and recognize our entangled place in the world. I find inspiration in trying to tell stories that bring this sensibility into everyday life, stories that bring this into the research we undertake with children. I want to tell other stories, stories that involve others—others such as children, room, materiality and myself as the researcher-body in intra-actions, and take account of the entangled materializations of which we are a part (Barad, 2007, p. 384). To be a researcher is about being aware of movements of desire and intensity that connect human, nonhuman, animate or inanimate, virtual and actual, and bodies of knowledge with each other (MacLure, 2013, p. 229). When sitting on the floor in a kindergarten, making notes, I realize how influenced I am by all that is going on in the room. The feeling of the floor under my body, the sounds in the room. The child’s hand trying to take my pen while I am writing, the child’s body climbing on my body, the small child sitting right in front of me investigating a small book made of cardboard, with so many functions that the story is of second order. The smell from a full diaper. All of it draws my attention in different directions, works on me, in me, and makes me feel somehow both comfortable and uncomfortable at the same time. According to Davies (2014): Listening is about being open to being affected. It is about being open to difference and, in particular, to difference in all its multiplicity as it emerges in each moment in between oneself and another. Listening is about not being bound by what you already know. It is life as movement (2014, p. 1).

Listening is sitting on a floor as a researcher, trying to grasp such differences and trying to let go of what I might know about being a researcher. When sitting on this particular floor, I suddenly felt the pressure of some ethical considerations. I had the required approvals to observe the group of children from the Norwegian Centre for Research Data (NSD, 2017). All parents had signed up and accepted or

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refused. I knew which children I could observe and which I should avoid jotting down information about. My ethical-response-ability (Haraway, 2016) to take account and recognize our entangled place in the world is nagging me like a sand-corn in a shoe. Was I aware enough of what was going on beyond the human subject? I realized I had to listen differently. I had to listen to the other, smaller hand that took over my pen. The discomforting smell in the room. Listen to the cardboard book and how it took an active part in what was going on and acted to show as Davies (2014, p. 1) suggests ‘life as a movement’, and to open myself up for further differences. Ethical response-ability (Haraway, 2016), to take account of and recognize our entangled place in the world, brings a unique sensibility into research with young children. When entering the nursery, I had not considered well enough how to act. Myself as a researcher was habituated to traditional ideas when observing children: ideas of the withdrawn, passive observer that should not disturb the situation (Løkken, 2012). When being in the room, the children, the smell, and the pen all worked in unison to tell me that I was there. I was fully visible for everyone, acting on the situation with my presence, my breathing, my body movements and my fingers/hand holding the pen writing down whatever my eyes caught sight of and my ears managing to make sense of/from sounds. However, I had been working with feminist, new materialist storytelling for some years—a small hand taking over my pen made me aware of the materiality, and the result is the following story: When sitting on the floor, I suddenly become aware of a child (approximately 1.5 years) who is sitting on the floor just in front of me. He is holding on to a thick book, where the pages are made of cardboard. I can see, from my position in the room, that the book contains a story about a dog named Spot. The child’s tiny fingers slide over the pages. He curls a finger and the finger scratches on a small fold, but the cardboard is well used and the mechanism difficult to operate. He is trying the same movement repeatedly. I become aware of a kindergarten teacher that watches the child investigating the book. She looks at me, smiles and turns towards the small boy, and asks if she should read. She places herself on the floor, next to the small child; and takes the book and starts to read aloud, without waiting for a reply. Three other children come along. One places her body on the kindergarten teacher’s lap. Two others, a bit older, place themselves close to the kindergarten teacher. One of the bodies squishes itself down partly in front of the boy who first had the book. Both of these two older children put their hands on the cardboard pages, and try to take the book from the teacher. Inside the book, there is a mechanism, a kind of wheel, barely visible, and the fingers of both these two newcomers know how to operate the mechanism and make the wheel turn. I can see, from where I am sitting, that small images pop up on the page. The teacher reads and turns pages. The teacher uses her fingers to push the children’s fingers away from the book to be able to turn the page. The small child that first had the book is now standing on his feet; his face is turned towards the others who have taken over his position, gathering around the book.

Fredriksen (2016, p. 17) writes that the children’s attention, in her study, was ‘directed towards the qualities of the materials they had in their hand’. The qualities in this cardboard book, or the mechanism within the cardboard pages, seem to attract interest for different fingers, with different agendas. Re-reading the story now also makes me recognize a kind of feeling in my fingers of turning a cardboard wheel, like this one. The story about the dog Spot seems not to attract much attention from the three children. It is something about the qualities of the wheel that is

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attractive. In addition, where the teacher places her attention seems to work like a magnet or catalyzer, for where something worth paying attention to might be going on. The researcher also plays into this situation. Being aware of the kindergarten teacher looking and smiling at me forces forward a notion of response-ability for the turning point. What did my body signal back, that made her interrupt the child-book encounter? Being aware of movements of desire and intensity that connect humans and nonhumans (MacLure, 2013, p. 229) is a hard lesson to be confronted with. Taking on ethico-onto-epistemological approaches (Barad, 2007) certainly creates unexpected adventures when doing research in ECEC organizations.

4.3 Micro-moments and Sticky Stories Through this article, I aim to elaborate how narrative strategies can work to storying differences. Micro-moments is one of the strategies I am activating, and Davies (2014) offers micro-moments as her strategy to work against taken-for-granted ways of seeing children’s capacities. Micro-moments work to focus on small happenings within bigger ‘stories’, and is here understood as stories to discuss from, or as active partakers in discussions (Davies, 2014; Moxnes, 2019a). Davies’ concern is on listening to children, and writes about micro-moments that it is about: …mak[ing] visible, within the everyday, the extraordinary capacities children have, and the emergent, the creative, the intra-active encounters they engage in as they do the ongoing work of bringing themselves and their community into being (Davies, 2014, p. 15).

The story, introduced above, can be divided into at least three micro-moments. The idea of micro-moments is to dwell with smaller parts of the story, to better focus on the ‘extraordinary capacities children have’ (Davies, 2014, p. 15). When micro-moments are suggested as active partakers in discussions (Moxnes, 2019a), it is so as to focus attention on what seems like a minor happening, and when they are scrutinized in the discussion they can change the direction of the text, or bring in other elements that become crucial. The small child focusing on the book, investigating the techniques of the wheel and pop-up figures is here seen as one micro-moment in itself. The way the finger meets the cardboard wheel, the concentration the child shows. The not-so-cooperative, well-used material of the book challenges and attracts attention. There is something in the quality of the materials (Fredriksen, 2016). The next moment is when the kindergarten teacher and the three other children take control of the situation. If I turn it towards a materialist focus, a micro-moment could be the attraction of the book itself, both as an element carrying a written story, and also as attractive not because of the story it contains but due to the technique it represents, and the children’s engagement in investigating it. All of the micro-moments show different capacities in both human and materiality, and the intra-actions between them. Adding sticky to micro-moments offers an analytical widget to further explore how matter comes to matter in the kindergarten. Sticky stories, or sticky memories, stories

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or knots (Kofoed & Ringrose, 2012; Moxnes & Osgood, 2018; Osgood & Giugni, 2015) all refer to how some stories force themselves forward towards the researcher, insisting that this particular moment should be paid attention to (Moxnes & Osgood, 2018). Sticky stories are dense moments, stories about being in the middle of something, where material-discursive-semiotic intra-actions entangle and produce something sticky to grapple with (Moxnes, 2019a, p. 50). Searching through the story for moments where human, nonhuman and more-than-human become entangled is about intra-activity. Intra-activity (Barad, 2007, 2014) as a concept relates to relationships where various matter and organisms are involved. Before, after, here-and-now also takes part in intra-actions (Juelskjær, 2019, p. 22). Differences are formed within, or through inter-activity, in inseparability (Barad, 2014, p. 175), and the intra-actions in how different elements interfere intertwines into processes of meaning-making. Sticky stories mix elements such as sound, smell, objects, bodies, thoughts, words, cardboard, books, hidden wheels inside books, here and now, there and then etc. This sticky story was something I could not forget. The differences in how a small book suddenly catches the attention of many people, how one child and the book intra-act, how the teacher read the situation and acted. Another sticky moment is that I also become part of it all. The moment of research is about both what being is, and how it can be understood (Juelskjær, 2019, p. 22), and both micro-moments and awareness of what sticks to the researcher can work to illuminate differences within being and differences in understanding being. The observation is now nearly two years old; it has stuck to me since. My memories have changed from the notes in my notebook. Changed in meetings with other happenings, experiences, knowledge and things—all mixed up in what has become this observation’s bag-lady carrier-bag.

4.4 Storying as a Bag-Lady in Her Carrier-Bag in ECEC Research Inspired by Le Guin (1989) and Haraway (2004) bag-lady carrier-bags practices of storytelling are what will be outlined, in the further storying of differences. The bag-lady is the figurine of the (elderly) woman carrying bags, collecting whatever she finds and carrying it with her. The metaphor of a carrier bag in the hands of a bag-lady is an ethico-onto-epistemological point of departure for thinking and doing research (Moxnes, 2019b). Becoming a bag-lady is a practice of becoming with, a worlding practice, a practice to work for changing the world, through changing the story (Haraway, 2016, p. 40). A worlding practice requires thinking beyond human concerns and engaging in how to live well together and recognize the world of animals, plants, places, skies, technology etc. (Taylor et al., 2013, p. 56). As A. Taylor et al. (2013) highlight, this is not synonymous with human images of the world. I read the bag-lady figurine as both a story of research, a research methodology and a methodic concept, initiating a way of thinking and doing when collecting and further dealing with research materials. Activating the metaphor of a bag-lady requires that

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if we want to obtain knowledge we have to take part in the world and accept that we are part of the world and actively contribute to and be part of its new becoming (Barad, 2007). A bag-lady is a collector who gathers items, expressions, experiences and knowledge from different becomings of the world; she is part of the world and actively taking part in it. Taking this as background with which to understand the carrier bag, the bag then works as a bag or a container for mixing bits and pieces, to try to understand the world differently. Barad (2017, p. 56) asks for us to: ‘take part in troubling the binaries between micro and macro, nature and culture, nonhuman and human’. I think of her, the bag-lady, as a figurine trying to deal with all this: with the carrier bag that is troubling the binaries—and inside the bag are elements of micro and macro, nature and culture, human and nonhuman. An adventurer should not leave home without a sack, writes Haraway (2016, p. 40). The sack is for collecting whatever you find on your way. Haraway (2016) suggests ‘a sling, a pot, and a bottle’, or items, tales, events and things for later use. Thus, it is not about the things in and of themselves. This is about focusing attention on ‘becoming-with’ the world, instead of putting one-self—the human hero—in the center. This is to encourage stopping and searching for what else is there, and what differs. As written elsewhere ‘Bag-lady storytelling invites us to work with difference’ (Moxnes, 2019b), and use the differences as a feminist force, or a compass that allows us ‘to think otherwise’ (Haraway, 2016, p. 40). Differences occur in the bag when unexpected elements and small, unforeseen seeds cluster up together and create something otherwise. This can again create insight into what might be unseen, unnoticed or open up new angles of seeing the world. Going back to the story, the thin descriptions in my notes, I have to search elsewhere and in the bag–lady’s bag the idea is that the story proceeds by letting unexpected partners meet, and search for continuations, instead of endings and beginnings (Haraway, 2004, p. 128; Moxnes, 2019a, p. 51), and through this draw attention to such storytelling as open-ended. The story of the cardboard book is a small piece from a mixture of events going on in the kindergarten at the same time; it is a telling without endings and with an open-ended plot. One of the strengths of open-ended stories is according to Tamboukou (2015, p. 101) the invitations to listening in new and creative ways, which in turn act as channels into open and radical possibilities. Aiming to open such channels into open and radical possibilities, I attend to other micro-moments of the narrative: The young boy (1.5) turns his face away from the group gathered around the cardboard book. From where I am, sitting, it looks as if he is staring at a shelf, a few meters in front of him. He walks towards the shelf where several plastic bottles in fresh colors are lined up in a row. The shelf with the bottles is a bit high up, but when the small child stands on his toes and stretches out his arm he manages to get hold of a bottle. He looks at it and put it back on the shelf again, before he picks another one. He tips the bottles one by one carefully so he can see which one his fingers have gripped, and tips it back onto the shelf. When he finds the right one the small fingers lift the bottle down. The child unscrews the lid of the drinking bottle. The others are doing their thing, still focusing on the book. The child lifts the drinking bottle off the shelf, turns to the others and stretches out the bottle. The others are still busy with the cardboard book. The child walks three steps towards the others. Lifts

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Grappling in my bag-lady-carrier-bag searching for something that can work to read the above story differently reveals a small image from a recently arranged fundraising event. Each autumn NRK, the government-financed TV and radio channel in Norway, arranges our country’s largest information and fundraising event (https://blimed.no/tv-aksjonen-nrk/english/). In 2020, the event was for the WWF and their project was about ocean plastic pollution. Films of rivers, mainly from poor areas of our planet full of plastic, in different colors, with different textures, and with plastic bottles as one of the main figures, have lately flickered over my TV screen. Plastic bottles floating in rivers, within a soup of plastic. The documentary shows that the river turns more into a porridge of plastic as more populated the areas around the river become. With very few systems to handle waste, it often ends up in the rivers, and later in the oceans says the voice commenting on the film. Grey masses with colored bits and pieces. Recognizable plastic bottles dip up and down in the porridge. The plastic bottle in the young child’s hand, thousands of plastic bottles in rivers. The use of plastic in a kindergarten is different since these plastic bottles are meant for reuse. On the other hand, it is also the same: why should plastic bottles in use in a kindergarten have a different status than a bottle in a South-Asian river? A small walk in the hillside surrounding where I live reveals plastic bottles, both ordinary water bottles and more colorful versions, as the one from the kindergarten left in nature—dipping up and down in a lake, or blown (or maybe thrown?) down unreachable steep hillsides. To change the focus towards items, materials and other players can be challenging since as a human it is often easy to centralize humans instead of others as partakers in research. The narrative of this article is human-centered, but the carrier bag helps to change the focus towards nonhumans (Moxnes & Osgood, 2018). The debate over plastic bottles is a dangerous element to pull into the text since it provokes something different and it pulls the attention away from the child’s competences. On the other hand, Haraway’s (2008) concept of worlding stresses that worlds are multiple, overlapping, contradictory, partial, located, messy and always in process. To practice this, worlding requires thinking beyond human concerns. To engage in problems of plastic bottles and other types of plastic filling up rivers is about engaging in how to live well together. It is both a human and nonhuman problem, and it is a problem these young children grow up within, and things filling up the rooms in ECEC organizations the children act within, are not innocent. In this article story, the plastic bottle has another position other than filling up rivers and polluting the world: for the child it works as a tool. He moves towards the others, opens the bottle and drinks and attracts attention from the teacher reading the book. The bottle is acting as something that draws the teacher’s attention away from the book. The bottle and the sound ‘thaw’ is interrupting the reading event, and encouraging the kindergarten teacher to judge the situation as the plastic bottle being empty (or the young boy needing help to open it), and it is the teacher’s task to make

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sure the child’s need for water is fulfilled. I am again putting my fingers into the carrier bag for this particular project to see what can help me continue. What I grab now is an article about plastic pollution by Stafford and Jones (2019), published in the journal: Marine Biology. Here Stafford and Jones (2019) write: [W]e argue that plastic pollution has been overemphasised by the media, governments and ultimately the public as the major threat to marine environments at the expense of climate change and biodiversity loss. We discuss why this can be a convenient truth especially as some mechanisms to reduce plastic waste play into corporate greenwashing in a neoliberal economy rather than addressing the root cause of overconsumption of resources. (Stafford & Jones, 2019, p. 187)

When re-listening to some of the information video from the WWF fundraising, they keep repeating that Norwegian technology will be used to clean rivers and oceans. As far as I can follow, this must be an example of greenwashing in a neoliberal economy. The plastic bottle in the kindergarten is made to be re-used, but it still portrays overconsumption of resources. To work for changing the world, or worlding practices, requires changing the story (Haraway, 2016, p. 40). Stafford and Jones (2019) point of view is a strong message to search for the root cause of plastic overconsumption as an opening to changing the story. Changing the story for ECEC organizations could, for example, be to encourage teachers to search for differences, and being surprised instead of overgeneralizing children’s needs. The bag consists of other things: pictures, news feeds and an autumn leaf. Stuff that is used here, and also things, I do not understand how to activate or can’t due to the size of the chapter. It also consists of memories from my life that will take us over to the next section, where I combine the bag-lady-carrier-bag practice with memory stories.

4.5 Memory Stories Memory stories (Aslanian & Moxnes, 2020; Moxnes, 2019a; Palmer, 2011), memory data (Hohti, 2018) or other descriptions of how memories appear in posthuman narrative research (e.g. Niccolini et al., 2018) is what I will discuss in this section, to further storying differences within the story. In what follows I weave personal and collected memory stories of past entanglements with the story about the cardboard book and the capacities of the 1.5-year-old child. The intention is that this, together with Barad’s (2007, 2014) concept of intra-actions, Davies (2014) listening to differences and Haraway’s (2016) concept of response-ability, will help to further shift perspectives on observations of children’s activities as static and objective reductions to generative contributions of the more-than-human world. The point of adding in others’ and personal memories is to create something different, and again discuss what comes out of it. Adding memories into this article is done in order to strengthen what can be different, by breaking up the storyline and letting the memory work as diffractions (Barad, 2007; Moxnes & Osgood, 2018). Diffractions can be easily described as splitting up, changing directions of

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the flow, and here, letting somebody’s memory work as a force to re-tell the story of the article differently. The WWF/NRK fundraising event and the memory from the hike, that I introduced in the previous section, are also memories that work on the article as diffractive elements in the article, spreading out and problematizing the understanding of the child/bottle. Picking up an old textbook from my bag-lady-carrier-bag leads to a personal memory story: As a young student teacher, I felt that I ought to try to understand all theories we were offered in order to give children good age-adequate high quality days in the kindergarten. The memory from the past entangles with the here and now (Barad, 2014; Juelskjær, 2019), and makes the unsure version of myself, actively searching for ‘pegs’ where I could ‘hang’ my knowledge in order to analyze the children I would meet. This is a memory filled with limitations, heavily based on what I was able to read, understand and make sense of when following lectures. It is also a memory full of worries for not being clever enough. After I achieved a Bachelor’s degree and started work as a kindergarten teacher, I remember from my work with children from 1.5 up to 2.5 years that how I met them and worked with them was influenced by how I understood the textbook knowledge I had acquired. If the image of the child did not fit in with what I experienced from reading about children, I do not think I dared listen to it. I vaguely remember that my experiences from being with these children were used as a way to prove theory more than to challenge my personal knowledge. Still, what I am able to see when observing is connected to how I am trained to study young children. I was trained to understand young children through my readings of Norwegian translations and interpretations of theoretical contributions to ‘understand’ human development and being of the world (from, e.g., Piaget, Vygotsky, Maslow, Bronfenbrenner etc.). When I now reopen the textbooks I remember influencing my practice the most, I read that children aged 1.5–2 play when they pick up things and turn them around or hit things against the table. They often bite into their play material, and when they have developed enough abilities to sense things, they begin to role-play only with things, not with other children (e.g. Bruun, 1985, pp. 60/61). The children I met in my early career practices often played differently from what the textbook described, and I vaguely remember that I did not dare to speak too much about my observations to my colleagues, in case I had misjudged the situations, misjudged the children’s knowledge, or maybe worst: misunderstood the theory. A picture of an elderly Piaget in his office, that recently popped up on Facebook, is now picked out of my bag. This activates another memory back to my days as a student teacher trying to understand Piaget’s theories about schema, the cognitive processes and trying to memorize the stages for cognitive development. Two textbooks were in general in focus, and both Bruun (1985) and Evenshaug and Hallen (1984) build on Piaget when they introduce the sensory motoric development (0– 2 years) and concrete operational period (the symbolic thinking phase, 1.5–3 years). For the children present in the observation in this chapter they should have been functioning somewhere between these two stages. Bruun (1985, pp. 40/41) writes that the sensory motor development stage is recognized by repetitions of movements and

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senses, and this is what the child learns through, and for the oldest that they now have reached the symbolic thinking where their verbal language develops. Evenshaug and Hallen (1984) point out that by the end of the second year the child starts to imagine, through the inner representation of things and happenings. I am wondering if had I done the article observation early in my career, what would I have dared think about it? What would I have missed? With the development stages and what to expect from children aged 1.5–2 years play in mind I continue the story where I left it further up, where the kindergarten teacher is offering to fetch water to the small child: The kindergarten teacher lifts the child sitting on her lap down on to the floor and stands up. She walks over to the small child holding the bottle, and realizes at the same time that the bottle belongs to another child. She shouts ‘But that bottle is not yours–wait a minute and I will pick out your bottle’. The child newly placed on the floor leaves the book when the adult gets up, but the two older children remain seated, turning the hidden wheel inside the cardboard book. The small child with the wrong bottle turns the bottle so that some water now flows out on the floor. Now, many things happen at the same time. The teacher comes back with the child’s bottle. When she sees the water running to the floor, she shouts ‘Oh! Give me the bottle it belongs to (name of the child who has been spinning the wheel all the time)’. She fetches some paper, tries to take the wrong bottle from the child and give him his own, which he is not interested in, all at the same time. When the name of the child who spins the wheel is shouted, that child gets up from the floor, leaves the book and runs towards his bottle. The other child also leaves the Spot book. The little child, causing all the attention, runs to the Spot book, picks it up and finds a hidden corner where he again sits down and continues to let his fingers touch the cardboard book.

The small child in this story both differs and can be seen as the ‘same as’ the one Bruun (1985, p. 40/41) describes. The touching, or sensing of the book, the solely play and repetitions of movements. In the observation, there is hardly any verbal language in use by the children. When following Davies (2014, p. 1), this is also a story about being affected, about differences in multiplicity, and it is about being open to ‘not being bound by what you already know’, and it is ‘life in movement’. When I search for differences, affects are provoked from intra-actions in child-materiality movements, as well as teacher–child, and child–child intra-actions. The cardboard book and its hidden mechanism, the plastic bottle are all active partakers in this story. The child’s attraction to the book, the help he gets from the other child’s plastic bottle to get the book back, it all works together to challenge the ideas of children in sensory motor and symbolic thinking development stages as they are described by Bruun (1985) and Evenshaug and Hallen (1984). The small child shows that he understands the routines of the kindergarten. According to Evenshaug and Hallen (1984), a child will start to imagine, through mental representations of things and happenings. This story has worked with and on me for a while now, and I get more and more amused over how the child and bottle work together and create what for me looks like a plot to get the book back. Wondering about the creativity in the moves, the knowledge about pairs and teacher’s reactions invites the question: what do we really know about the youngest children’s knowledge and competences.

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4.6 Continue the Search for Differences Through Continuous Storying As I wrote in the introduction, this article was meant to be read as a methodological experiment. The three different narrative strategies, micro-moments and sticky stories, bag-lady-carrier-bag practices and memory stories, have all been theoretically outlined and used to both story differences and discuss these. The sticky observation is told through different micro-moments, shared in different sections, and the bag-lady-carrier-bag has contributed with somehow strange, but also helpful images to widen the discussion. Memory stories have worked to illuminate and challenge knowledge about the youngest children in the nursery. All three narrative strategies have together worked to open up some discussions for which there are no easy-fix solutions. Discussions as to the heightened ethical responsibility for how knowledge is produced (Barad, 2007), and the ethical response-ability to recognize our entangled place in the world, focused on working to changing the world (worlding) (Haraway, 2008, 2016). As the plastic-bottle-greenwashing diffractions show, there are multi-faceted points of view and challenging decisions yet to make. Through this chapter the ‘extraordinary competences children have, and the emergent, the creative, the intra-active encounters they engage in as they do the ongoing work of bringing themselves and their community into being’ (Davies, 2014, p. 15) has been visible through the story. Each of the micro-moments gave more than enough to discuss, but this article needs a whole series of them to illuminate the ongoing cognitive-affective-material intra-actions. Adding memory stories becomes an extra ethical dimension, since the force in using a private memory is about making the text more personal, but also risks showing openly my weaknesses. To let the storying continue to work, I will end by introducing one more item from the bag: an autumn leaf. I arrive at this kindergarten on a cold, greyish January morning. I have never been here before, so I spend a few minutes outside the building to get some impression of it. When I walk towards the door, the door opens and a teacher and seven children look at me. They welcome me in, and a child points at my head. I bend my head, and a small greyish autumn leaf swirls from it, towards the floor. One child moves their body like the leaf’s dance towards the floor. Soon after seven small bodies preform an ‘autumn leaf falling on the floor-dance’ in the corridor.

References Aslanian, T. K., & Moxnes, A. R. (2020). Making “cuts” with a Holstein cow in early childhood education and care: The joys of representation. Journal of Childhood Studies, 45(2), 53–66. https://doi.org/10.18357/jcs452202019739 Barad, K. (2007). Meeting the universe halfway: Quantum physics and the entanglement of matter and meaning. Duke University Press. Barad, K. (2014). Diffracting diffraction: Cutting together-apart. Parallax, 20(3), 168–187. https:// doi.org/10.1080/13534645.2014.927623

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Barad, K. (2017). Troubling time/s and ecologies of nothingness: Re-turning, re-membering, and facing the incalculable. New Formations: A Journal of Culture/Theory/Politics, 92, 56–86. Bruun, U.-B. (1985). Barns vekst og utvikling 1. Universitetsforlaget. Davies, B. (2014). Listening to children: Being and becoming. Routledge, Taylor & Francis Group. Evenshaug, O., & Hallen, D. (1984). Barne- og ungdomspsykologi. Gyldendal Norsk Forlaf. Fredriksen, B. C. (2016). Attention on the edge: Ability to notice as a necessity in learning, teaching and survival. Visual Inquiry: Learning & Teaching Art, 5(1), 105–114. https://doi.org/10. 1386/vi.5.1.105_1 Haraway, D. J. (1997). Modest_Witness@ Second_Millennium. FemaleMan ©Meets_OncoMouse™: Feminism and technoscience. Routledge. Haraway, D. J. (2004). The Haraway reader. Routledge. Haraway, D. J. (2008). When species meet. The University of Minnesota Press. Haraway, D. J. (2016). Staying with the trouble: Making kin in the Chthulucene. Duke University Press. Haraway, D. J. (2018) Modest_Witness@ Second_Millennium. FemaleMan_Meets_OncoMouse: feminism and technoscience/Interviewer: T. Goodeve. Routledge. Hohti, R. (2018). Siiri and the “Bag Lady”. Reconceptualizing Educational Research Methodology, 9(1 special issue), 6–16. Juelskjær, M. (2019). At tænke med agentisk realisme: Nyt fra Samfundsvidenskaberne. Kofoed, J., & Ringrose, J. (2012). Travelling and sticky affects: Exploring teens and sexualized cyberbullying through a Butlerian-Deleuzian-Guattarian lens. Discourse: Studies in the Cultural Politics of Education, 33(1), 5–20. https://doi.org/10.1080/01596306.2012.632157 Le Guin, U. (1989). Dancing at the edge of the world. Victor Gollancz LTD. Løkken, G. (2012). Levd observasjon. En vitenskapsteoretisk kommentar til observasjon som forskningsmetode. Cappelen Damm Akademisk. MacLure, M. (2013). The wonder of data. Cultural Studies ↔ Critical Methodologies, 13(4), 228–232. https://doi.org/10.1177/1532708613487863 Moxnes, A. R. (2019a). Sensing, thinking and doing reflection in early childhood teacher education. Unpublished doctoral dissertation. University of South-Eastern Norway, Drammen. https://brage. bibsys.no/xmlui/handle/11250/2585243(30) Moxnes, A. R. (2019b). Working across/within/through academic conventions of writing a Ph.D.: Stories about writing a feminist thesis. In G. Crimmins (Ed.), Strategies for resisting sexism in the academy (pp. 247–265). Springer. Moxnes, A. R., & Osgood, J. (2018). Sticky stories from the classroom: From reflection to diffraction in early childhood teacher education. Contemporary Issues in Early Childhood, 19(3), 297–309. https://doi.org/10.1177/1463949118766662 Moxnes, A. R., & Osgood, J. (2019). Storying diffractive pedagogy. Reconceptualizing Educational Research Methodology, 10(1), 1–13. Niccolini, A. D., Zarabadi, S., & Ringrose, J. (2018). Spinning yarns: Affective kinshipping as posthuman pedagogy. Parallax, 24(3), 324–343. https://doi.org/10.1080/13534645.2018.149 6582 NSD. (2017). Norwegian Centre for Research Data. http://www.nsd.uib.no/nsd/english/ Osgood, J. (2020). Becoming a “mutated modest witness” in early childhood research. In C. Schulte (Ed.), Ethics and research with young children: New perspectives (pp. 113–126). Bloomsbury Academic. 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. https://doi.org/10.1177/2043610615597160 Palmer, A. (2011). “How many sums can I do”?: Performative strategies and diffractive thinking as methodological tools for rethinking mathematical subjectivity. Reconceptualizing Educational Research Methodology (RERM), 1(1), 3–18. Riessman, C. K. (2008). Narrative methods for the human sciences. Sage Publications.

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Stafford, R., & Jones, P. J. (2019). Viewpoint-ocean plastic pollution: A convenient but distracting truth? Marine Policy, 103, 187–191. Tamboukou, M. (2015). Narrative as force. In M. Livholts & M. Tamboukou (Eds.), Discourse and narrative methods (pp. 93–103). Los Angeles: Sage. Taylor, A., Blaise, M., & Giugni, M. (2013). Haraway’s ‘bag lady story-telling’: Relocating childhood and learning within a ‘post-human landscape’. Discourse: Studies in the Cultural Politics of Education, 34(1), 48–62. Taylor, C. A. (2017). Rethinking the empirical in higher education: Post-qualitative inquiry as a less comfortable social science. International Journal of Research & Method in Education, 40(3), 311–324.

Anna Rigmor Moxnes Ph.D. is Associate Professor at the department of Early Childhood Teacher Education (ECTE), University of South-Eastern Norway and works as teacher educator in pedagogy. In her Ph.D. project, she investigated different entrances to reflection in ECTE. Recent research-projects include: ‘Children and animals’ relationships in Early Childhood Education and Care’ and ‘Teaching slowly’, a feminist project connected to teaching. She is inspired by feminist new materialism and post-human theories. She has many years of practical experience as a Barnehagelærer (teacher in Norwegian kindergarten institutions).

Chapter 5

From Multispecies Tangles and Anthropocene Muddles: What can Lichen Teach Us about Precarity and Indeterminacy in Early Childhood? Jayne Osgood Abstract This chapter pursues storytelling in the Anthropocene as a method of earthly survival and multispecies flourishing from capitalist ruins. Storytelling emerged from (an accidental method of) walking-with during a global pandemic; the figure of the modern-day flâneuse is mobilised as a feminist praxis to investigate infected, entangled and affective relationalities between the human, non-human and more-than-human as they unfold in the daily tangles to emerge from lock-down life in the city. It is through the art of noticing and the arts of living on a damaged planet that a commitment to engaging with the ordinary, mundane and habitual muddle, that the world is viewed, sensed and encountered through a different set of optics. The stories that are told about lichen, a dead pigeon, and a deadly virus are curated from a specific geopolitical moment where the early childhood workforce, as a highly gendered and classed group of ‘essential’ frontline workers, suffer disproportionately. Storytelling provides a means to attune to life in the Anthropocene that emphasises precarity, indeterminacy and hope. It is only by recognising that trans-corporeality demands an ethical response-ability to all life forms that we might find a means of earthly survival. Keywords Early childhood education · Multispecies · Anthropocene · Storytelling · Walking-method LICHEN Who listens like lichen listens assiduous millions of black and golden ears? You hear and remember but I’m speaking J. Osgood (B) Middlesex University, London, United Kingdom e-mail: [email protected] © The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature Singapore Pte Ltd. 2022 C. Blyth and T. K. Aslanian (eds.), Children and the Power of Stories, Children: Global Posthumanist Perspectives and Materialist Theories, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-981-16-9287-1_5

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J. Osgood to the lichen. The little ears prunk, scorch and blacken. The little golden mouths gape. (Hadfield, 2014)

5.1 Introduction This paper is inspired by the work of Tsing (2010, 2015) and Haraway (2008, 2016) and their encouragement to pursue storytelling as a method of earthly survival and multispecies flourishing in the time that we now recognise as the Anthropocene. Together their work invites us to grapple with our infected, entangled and affective relationalities to the worlds around us, and of which we form a part. Crucially, it is by exercising the ‘art of noticing’ (Tsing, 2012) and committing to a deep engagement with the ordinary, mundane and habitual muddle that unfolds around us, that we can begin to view the world through a different set of optics. The stories that are told in this chapter are curated from a specific geopolitical moment, which has incited a fearful pause. Researching early childhood from the depths of a global pandemic demands different optics, alternative places to search for how childhood takes shape, and contemplate the ways in which it is inextricably interwoven through space, histories and temporalities that manifest within chance encounters (with lichen, with hand sanitiser, and with a dead pigeon). By attuning to life in the Anthropocene, it might become possible to find ‘ways of living and dying well together’ (Haraway, 2016, p. 98) through commitments to multispecies flourishing. As Tsing (2015, p. 34) urges: If a rush of troubled stories is the best way to tell about contaminated diversity then it’s time to make that rush part of our knowledge practices . . . we need to tell until our stories of death, near-death and gratuitous life are standing with us to face the challenges of the present. It is listening to the cacophony of troubled stories that we might encounter our best hopes for precarious survival.

Over the past year life with COVID-19, and the wider social and political forces fuelling the pandemic, have made the interrelatedness across human and more-thanhuman worlds explicit. As a zoonotic disease, the virus reveals social, biological and ecological precarities on a global scale disrupting established ideas about bodily separateness between humans, animals and the environment (Alaimo, 2010). A zoonotic disease is transmitted from animals to humans, yet this simplistic framing obscures the inherently relational nature of the pandemic by principally focusing on the viral properties of the disease, as something caused by animals and passed to humans. Instead, I want to urge that we focus on the deeply fraught and complex relationships that humans have with the more-than-human world, as well as some of the most precarious humans themselves.

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I go to work today, putting my life on the line feeling more undervalued than I ever have before, terrified and completely disillusioned. Children are better in school; nobody here will disagree with that. But the lives of the adults around children, is more important and these same children need their trusted adults at the end of this madness, to be present both physically and mentally, to help them reshape the world, for it will need reshaping. (Early Years Teacher, Nursery World, 2020)

5.2 Reshaping the World It is important to call into question the human exceptionalism that underpins Anthropocentric logic. The Anthropocene is defined as the geo-political epoch in which human induced devastation of planet earth has reached a dangerous tipping point. Human capitalist concerns for unrelenting growth and progress have persistently failed to take into account the needs and concerns for environmental welfare; it has also been a dehumanising project for most humans; and rests upon disregard and exploitation of other-than-human animals. This is reinforced through a hegemonic narrative that hails humans as the dominant force driving planetary transformation. Haraway (1988) argues that the Anthropocene can be understood as ‘the god trick’ where (white, western, elite, hetero-male) humans are placed at the centre of all meaning, and this god-like positioning hierarchically defines everything and everyone relationally. This exclusionary logic drives the decimation of other species and the collapse of global biodiversity. Relatedly and perhaps most pressingly, the Anthropocene accounts for the breeding and spreading of pandemics—it creates and sustains the conditions of possibility that insist that the underpaid, undervalued, precarious early childhood workforce continues to perform its essential role throughout seemingly unstoppable waves of a deadly pandemic. A letter from the Chief Executive of the Early Years Alliance in the UK states: Early years providers have been on the frontline through this crisis. They have put themselves, and their loved ones, at risk to do what the Government has asked and provide vital care and education to the children and families that need it . . . What is being asked of the workforce– to continue operating in the middle of the second wave of the pandemic with little support, even less information and no acknowledgement from the Department that is supposed to represent them–cannot continue. (Nursery World, 2021, p. 11)

5.3 A Pause for Thought, a Time to Feel This pandemic insists upon (and for those privileged enough, provides) a vital pause for reflection. It is time to critically engage with the ways in which a global pandemic can reinscribe and further entrench deep inequalities between humans—locally, nationally and on a global scale. Experiences of the virus are inconsistent and undeniably shaped by both privilege and precarity. As Roy (2020) urges though, we might also embrace this pandemic as some form of portal, as an invitation to take up the

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possibilities that a virus offers for a new imaginary. It can be understood as a call to account for the failures of the Anthropocene, of capitalist logic, human domination and exclusionary rationalism. This time of isolation draws into sharp focus the costs and implications of human exceptionalism and to respond to a deafening call for a different logic. This time of precarity (Tsing, 2015) arrives at a breaking point where reciprocity, ethical responsibilities and care across culture and species become exposed as at best failing, or at worst entirely absent. The asymmetries in the geographical spread of the virus as well as in the economic and relational fallout in response to tackling it are most acutely encountered by already marginalised populations (including the ‘essential’ frontline workers amongst them the early years’ teacher). ‘What do you do when your world starts to fall apart? . . . Go for a walk . . . know that there are still pleasures amidst the terrors of indeterminacy.’ (Tsing, 2015, p. 1)

Like other feminist new materialists and post-humanist researchers (see www. phematerialisms.org) I turn to the hyper-local, to everyday encounters, ruptures and moments that demand something more, that is the activation of a different optics, which have become necessary and vital during months of lockdown-living. Tsing (2015, p. 3) stresses that ‘to live with precarity requires more than railing at those who put us here... we might look around to notice this strange new world, and we might stretch our imaginations to grasp its contours.’ On discovering my little corner of London afresh, by attuning and attending to the microscopic and the seemingly unremarkable, I have discovered ways ‘to explore the ruin that has become our collective home’ (Tsing, 2015, p. 3). This chapter seeks to attend to the interconnectedness and relationalities between the human, non-human and more-than-human in an attempt to shift the focus, begin from the messiness of the middle, and so pursue unexpected lines of enquiry that can offer stories that agitate another logic. I offer stories about (seemingly) not very much, a walk in the park, a sideways glance at what is routinely unfolding, downwards glance at what is routinely underfoot, and upwards glance at what routinely flies and floats above. This noticing, attuning and willingness to be troubled allow for a deeply political, earthly engagement with the Anthropocene in precarious times.

5.4 Becoming Flâneuse: Walking as Accidental Method For as long as I can recall, I have been a walker with purpose. The determination with which I took my first steps is a story frequently recounted at family gatherings: fists clenched, furrowed brow, marching from one end of the long garden to the other, unaided, determined and ultimately triumphant. Over the years, walking has been a vital lifeline, frequently providing space and opportunity to process difficult thoughts, troubling times, and hormonal surges. For months, I have responded to an urgent need to walk without intention, or as Solnit (2014, p. 3) asserts:

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It starts with a step and then another step and then another that add up like taps on a drum to a rhythm, the rhythm of walking. The most obvious and obscure thing in the world, this walking that wanders so readily into religion, philosophy, landscape, urban policy, anatomy, allegory, and heartbreak.

When the world around feels dystopian, unrecognisable and inherently precarious, according to Tsing (2015, p. 6) ‘our first step is to bring back curiosity.’ Walking creates conditions to become unencumbered by the simplifications of progress narratives, and instead attune to the immediate knots and pulses of patchiness that are there to explore. Solitary, energetically paced, directionless walks during lockdown presented otherworldly possibilities to dwell on the knots and pulses that Tsing (2015, p. 6) refers to. I became aware of previously unnoticed events and encounters that unfold in the everyday in-between spaces with sharpened senses ready to attune to sights, sounds and smells that seemed to demand close attention. Walking, then, was never an intentional research method taken up as means to gather data and pursue knowledge production. The solitary, extensive wandering across mile upon mile of my pocket of London has at no point felt like ‘research method.’ There is an extensive literature that charts the long history of walking (Andrews, 2020; Guldi, 2012; Solnit, 2014), and the application of walking methodologies in different disciplines from anthropology (Jenks & Neves, 2000; Jung, 2014) to the arts (Irwin, 2006; Kothe, 2018; Springgay & Truman, 2018; Truman & Shannon, 2018), cultural studies (Ingold, 2004; Veronesi & Gemeinboeck, 2009), education (Lynch & Mannion, 2016; Ruitenberg, 2012; Springgay, 2011), health studies (Butler & Derrett, 2014; Carpiano, 2009), history (Guldi, 2012), landscape studies (Macpherson, 2016), geography (Bassett, 2004; Evans & Jones, 2011; Jones, Bunce, Evans, Gibbs & Hein, 2008; Pierce & Lawhon, 2015; Curl et al., 2018; Richardson, 2015a, b) and sociology (Bates & Rhys-Taylor, 2017; Kinney, 2017; O’Neill & Roberts, 2019). Across these various disciplines, walking as method takes many forms and is undertaken for myriad purposes (see https://walkinglab.org/featured-projects-fromthe-hubs). Walking-with though is typically understood to be a participatory, group exercise, directed by the researcher and intended to bring about a greater understanding of participants’ relations to particular spaces, sites, local histories and connection to neighbourhoods and land. Given the circumstantial restrictions that social distancing makes to in-person research during a pandemic, walking-with became something else: an accidental method that demanded an almost exclusive attunement to the more and other than human. I have come to understand my wanderings as a form of feminist praxis, where time and space are (re)claimed and created to process and theorise the ways in which precarity in the Anthropocene might be understood as an inherently feminist issue. The act of physically removing myself from the domestic sphere, especially during months of hard lockdown calls into sharp focus my white, middle-class privilege. The autonomy that I have over daily working practices is not enjoyed by others; the safety, warmth and comfort of home again, is not something that is universally enjoyed. Turning to the experiences of ‘essential’ frontline workforces, early years teachers included, is an uncomfortable,

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daily reminder to recognise the tensions that shape the relativities of precarity and privilege, risk and safety, freedom and oppression. Following Woolf (1930), and more recently Andrews (2020), Elkin (2017) and Solnit (2014), I want to reclaim the vital, transgressive work of the flâneuse, in opposition to the more readily accounted for flaneur, for the feminist complexion it adds to walking-with the peculiarities of the city. Solnit (2014, p. 200) points to the flaneur as an imaginary: The only problem with the flaneur is that he did not exist, except as a type, an ideal, and a character in literature. The flaneur is often described as detective-like in his aloof observation of others, and feminist scholars had debated whether there were female flaneurs.

In contrast to the male figure of privilege and leisure, with time and money to amble around the city to be inspired by urban spectacle, the flâneuse was assumed to be a streetwalker or a homeless woman, walking the city streets of necessity and frequently subjected to street harassment. Conspicuous by comparison, the flâneuse is required to blend into her surroundings, to attune, and to find ways to stretch her imagination, to grasp the contours of a world that becomes unfamiliar on close inspection. The flâneuse then provides a working definition of an accidental feminist research methodology that refuses the god-trick and instead relies on intuition and sensing affective forces. Or what Tsing (2015) has termed the arts of noticing when in search of pleasures amidst the terrors of indeterminacy. The past year I have assumed some modern-day incarnation of a flâneuse as I have pursued wanderlust (Solnit, 2014) in the capitalist ruins shaped by precarity and indeterminacy. This wandering has invited research in the Anthropocene to take unexpected forms, which have called into question what counts as valid knowledge; and who and what can be a knower (Lather, 2004). Daily walks with no discernible purpose have generated rich multispecies encounters that draw into sharp focus the need for storytelling and an on-going imperative for off-the-beaten-path thinking. Literally and metaphorically treading the lesser-known paths of London streets and woodlands has presented surprises and forced deep engagements with ‘contaminated diversity’ (Tsing, 2013, p. 29), which can be found everywhere. Stories of contaminated diversity are ubiquitous, complicated, ugly and humbling because they implicate survivors in histories of greed, violence and environmental destruction. Walking as accidental method during a global pandemic has meant that I have been directly confronted by these stories and implicated in recounting them.

5.5 The (Im)possibilities of Multispecies Flourishing and Researching (with) Children The playground at the edge of my local park is busy, flashes of blue surgical masks make themselves felt, but more often park-goers appear bare-faced and not always two metres apart. Officially, the playground should be closed to the public. But it is not.

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It is a cold January morning, red hands, breath in the air, bare trees, and mud underfoot. Exercise and fresh air–the key to health and wellbeing–but not without risk. As I walk by, I notice a sizeable gaggle of small children, around 20, maybe more, but there is a sense that there are insufficient adults. On closer inspection, it becomes clear that this is a nursery on an outing with a 4:1 ratio. The distinctive, almost chaotically choreographed way in which this group moves around has a profound familiarity: too much, too many, frenetic, zig zagging around—a child is purposefully placed in one seat of a double buggy, I imagine to even out the strain of adult:child ratios and impose some order. A large bag full of equipment and supplies occupies the second seat, quickly a child descends towards the double buggy and sets off on a journey across the playground, but before much ground is covered, there is quick and decisive action by a nearby adult, the brake is applied—a health and safety incident averted. A child makes a fast descent down the shiny, cold slide, rolls over in his puddle suit and staggers towards the parked buggy. Meanwhile, there are loud tears, a tumble from another in the group, just out of view. Hurriedly two early childhood teachers scoop the child off the floor, wrap arms around him, provide comfort, reassurance, careful attention to the child’s immediate needs, wiping away snot and tears. The child is bundled in multiple layers of warm and waterproof clothing, rubber welly boots protrude from the ankle cuffs of a puddle suit. There are looks of concern on the faces of the adults, they do not wear masks, their mask-less non-verbal communication with the child appears to sooth. But still hot tears and heavy sobs can be heard from my vantage point way across the park. Hauntings are agitated: about practice, about care, about the injustices of early childhood policy and the unreasonable demands made of these women, in the cold outdoors, with the omnipresence of an invisible virus that alters what is possible but demands that the same is delivered. My attention is diverted to another small body, also encapsulated in multiple waterproof, weatherproof insulating layers. Bundled up in this way movement is awkward, the swivel of a head means that vision is impaired by the hood, a woolly hat slides over eyes, stiff rubber boots appear heavy and clumsy. The small bodies and what they can do are reconfigured by the clothing that is designed to enable greater freedom but somehow imposes restrictions. Awkwardly this toddler body bends double having noticed something on the ground. Poking, scraping, stamping then scraping again. Chubby hands are red from the coldness of this January day, gloves or mittens have been discarded, and there is freedom to explore with the senses: picking, poking, scraping. I am not the only one to notice this child body noticing. I am unsure what the white splodge adhered to the floor of the playground might be, possibly chewing gum but its out-of-placeness in this place sets off affective forces, a scrummage in the bag of equipment and supplies produces a pack of baby wipes and a bottle of hand sanitiser. Or ‘hanitiser’ as social media informs me it is now commonly referred to by the youngest of the COVID generation.

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Without much hesitation, and with movements suggestive of a familiar and frequent ritual, the hands are efficiently wiped, and a small dot of anti-bacterial gel is administered, the child instinctively swipes one palm against the other, and then the other way—unfalteringly, habitually, routinely. The white splodge remains but for now, the noticing is extinguished. Flapping feathers at the nearby boating lake demand my attention. I spy the familiar pedal boats in the shape of gigantic 10-foot swans. They align the edge of the far side of the water; tethered to each other and then attached to the pontoon. Like so much else, these boats are locked down, sheltering-in-place. Unlike the breathing, flapping birds: ducks, geese, moorhens—free to dip in and out of the icy water. Close by a small flock of pigeons congregate on the bank. Lockdown means that they have not been gifted food by humans to the same extent, as a consequence there are noticeably fewer of them. As I come closer, there is a pigeon lying immobile on its back, it is out of reach, the other side of the fence designed to keep humans, birds and deep water a safe distance apart. From this vantage point, I can see that it looks dishevelled and malnourished. It is dead. Instinct tells me to alert the staff in the nearby café—but it too is locked down. I am uncertain of what to do. I will look up the number of the park warden when I get home. Shaken, I quicken my pace and head for the wooded hill at the other side of this urban park that has persistently promised ‘recreation for all’ since its creation in Victorian times. As I come to the end of my walk, I ascend the hill to my house and I notice white splodges underfoot, at first glance I conclude it is discarded chewing gum, or possibly pigeon dropping—it appears similar to the white splodge noticed by the weatherproofed child. On closer inspection though my assumptions are incorrect. Soon I am unable to not see a tapestry of splodges; different in texture, size and colour, but each contrasting boldly against the black-grey of the London pavement. There are multiple layers, different hues: some bright white like paint, others faded almost pink, others pale green like washed out algae; various sizes; inconsistently spread across some paving stones and not others–not chewing gum at all or bird poo. But Lichen! Following Pringle (2017), I have become increasingly intrigued by lichen, which has involved embarking upon extensive desk research that has revealed its potential to open up other ways to encounter the world. Mycologist Anne Pringle researches lichens that grow on tombstones. She observes the slow growth, and occasional disappearance of lichen, she regards them as more-than-ghosts of the past and yetto-come. She understands lichens as symbiotic assemblages of species: filamentous fungi and photosynthetic algae or cyanobacteria. Many are potentially immortal; they spread in continually renewed filaments, for thousands of years. As Tsing, Swanson, Gan, and Bubandt (2017) note: ‘when we notice their tempo, rather than impose ours, they open us to the possibility of a different kind of livability.’ Many kinds of time—bacterial, fungal, human and colonial—meet in the tempo of lichen-time. Lichens disrupt the anthropocentric logic of linear time. ‘Lichens are ghosts that haunt us from the past, but they also peer at us from a future without us’ (Tsing et al.,

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2017, p. G9). And so, noticing lichen in a London park provides the means to pursue the ‘art of noticing’ advocated by Tsing (2010), in order that I might attune to worlds otherwise and contemplate childhood, gendered labour and precarity in other ways.

5.6 The Everyday Art of Noticing Lichen Lichen is ubiquitous in both the wilderness and urban conurbations; from the arctic circle to the tropics; deserts to mountains, and frequently found affixed to buildings and pavements (National Geographic, 2018). Lichens shapeshift, fade to the background, offer mosaics of past–present–futures. Lichens are the essence of symbiotic cooperation, with a self-reliant relationship lichen can withstand extreme temperature changes and dehydration without fear of extinction—some are more than 415 million years old (Pringle, 2017). Lichens thrive in some of the harshest environments on earth, where plants cannot grow, they prepare the way for other vegetation by breaking down bare rock and creating soil through secretion of certain chemicals and by mere attachment to stone (Figs. 5.1, 5.2, 5.3 and 5.4). Lichens are storytellers, if only we are able and willing to attune to their language. Lichenometry estimates the age of exposed rock surfaces by lichen growth rates (Pringle, 2017). With their sensitivity and tendency to accumulate certain pollutants, lichens have been used as bio-monitors of air quality. Thriving in clean atmospheres, the biggest threat to lichen survival is dirty air. The effects of air pollution on lichens have been recognised since the 1800s (Nash, 2008), and lichens are now one of the most widely used bioindicators of pollution (Nimis et al., 2002; Wellburn, 1994;

Fig. 5.1 Noticing lichen everywhere (author’s own photos)

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Fig. 5.2 Noticing lichen everywhere (author’s own photos)

Fig. 5.3 Noticing lichen everywhere (author’s own photos)

Wolterbeek et al., 2003). Lichens have been used as indicators of sulphur dioxide (SO2 ) concentration since the 1970s (Saunders & Hawksworth & Rose, 1970; Vick & Bevan, 1976; Wood, 1973). More recently, several studies have shown a significant correlation between lichens and both oxides of nitrogen (NOx ) and reduced nitrogenous pollutants, such as ammonia (NH3 ) (Davies et al., 2007; Gadson et al., 2010; Larsen et al., 2007; Seed et al., 2013; Vilsholm et al., 2009; Wolseley et al., 2009). In

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Fig. 5.4 Noticing lichen everywhere (author’s own photos)

the recent past, environmental scientists have reported an alarming absence of lichen across London, which was caused by microscopic concentrations of sulphur dioxide gas. The sulphur from burning fossil fuels (i.e. coal in homes and factories) was oxidised to sulphur dioxide (SO2 ) and when mixed with rainwater fell as sulphurous acid (H2 SO3 ). H2 SO3 polluted the city, creating ‘London fog,’ a poisonous yellow photochemical brew of sulphur and nitrogen oxides. More recently, London has been threatened by high levels of nitrogen oxide in the air caused by road traffic pollution. Hauntingly, nitrogen dioxide gas can inflame the lining of the lungs and can cause respiratory symptoms such as shortness of breath and persistent coughing. Nitrogen dioxide can also decrease an immune response to lung infections. Noticing the presence of lichen on the streets I walk generates a stutter, a moment to contemplate our multispecies flourishing at a time of capitalist ruin. What stories does the current proliferation of lichen on the streets and pavements in my neighbourhood tell? I resist falling into the trap of telling the by now wellrehearsed ‘re-wilding’ story: a simplistic narrative that claims animals and otherthan-human species are thriving in the absence of normal human activity thanks to pandemic shutdowns and sheltering-in-place, which is not universally the case. Take the pigeon populations of London that have long histories of living in cities alongside humans. The interconnections and interdependencies of multispecies are also rendered invisible in this narrative that assumes removing humans from the equation would be beneficial to multispecies flourishing. Liminal animals, such as the seed-fed pigeons in my local park, have entirely different routines to their wild counterparts, and therefore their earthly survival has become intertwined with human relationalities, just as our enmeshment with lichen tells a complex and potentially hopeful story. As Tsing (2015, p. 22) reminds us: ‘we are stuck with the problem

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of living despite economic and ecological ruination. Neither tales of progress nor of ruin tell us how to think about collaborative survival. It is time to pay attention... to open our imaginations.’

5.7 Precarity: The Frontline for the Essential Early Childhood Educator Again, as early years practitioners we have to put ourselves on the front line. We have more contact with the children we care for, cuddling them when they are upset, wiping their tears and snotty noses as they are not at the age to do this for themselves. (Early Years Teacher, Nursery World, 2020)

The storytelling I am offering here exposes complex multispecies interdependencies, with lichen holding the potential to remove pollution from the air that we breathe, to Covid-19 providing an exemplification of trans-corporeal bodily vulnerabilities that refuse categorisation. Alaimo’s (2016) concept of trans-corporeality stresses that the porosity of species boundaries is most acutely felt when the exploitative forces of power penetrate human bodies. Addressing the material relations between social inequality and bodily health, Alaimo (2010, p. 28) focuses on the ‘pancreas under capitalism’ and the ‘proletarian lung’ that testify to the physiological effects of social class (and racial) oppression. The image of the ‘proletarian lung’ is haunting precisely because it so provocative of images of ‘essential workers’ that are by now such a regular feature on the daily news. Distressing images of frontline workers, struck down by COVID-19, attached to tubes and monitors, desperately fighting for their next breath, breath taken from them because they have served in the line duty. I have written previously about the classed and gendered nature of early childhood education (Osgood, 2012) and it resurfaces here in this current storytelling about earthly survival and multispecies entanglements. As members of the frontline of essential workers, the early childhood workforce bears the intense burden of precarity and experiences it bodily. Through the provision of nurturance and education to very young children, which is vital to enable (other) parents to work, this marginalised and devalued workforce becomes complexly implicated in the preservation of capitalism but at an extraordinarily high cost to personal health and well-being. The ‘proletarian lung’ of the early childhood worker exemplifies the means by which external social forces can transform an internal bodily organ, and so further reinforce oppression and exploitation. Many early years practitioners were already incredibly worried about continuing to work during this period. It is unacceptable that, yet another government announcement has been made without reference to any scientific evidence explaining how those working in the early years are expected to be able to keep themselves and their loved ones safe at a time when those in schools are being told that it is simply too dangerous to go to work. (Chief Executive of Early Years Alliance, Nursery World, 2020, p. 11)

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Pursing what Tsing (2015, p. 5) terms ‘disturbance-based ecologies’ reveals the complexities that come to characterise how multispecies come together in curious, generative, troubling and sometimes deadly ways. Cuddles, tears and snotty noses, lichen, bacteria and liminal animals that together populate a trip to the local park offer a powerful account of inequality and precarity, which incites a stutter to our thinking and doing. Alaimo (2010, p. 28) asserts that one’s body is ‘never a rigidly enclosed, protected entity, but is vulnerable to the substances and flows of its environments.’ She goes on to argue that humans and other animals are never separate and distinct from the environments and landscapes within which they exist, and in turn exist within them: the logics of capitalism determining the nature and availability of early childhood education is intricately bound up with the re-emergence of lichen and the death of a pigeon during lockdown against a global pandemic. These are inseparable, each working on, with and against the other. We co-exist in a system of constantly interweaving subjectivities, which can never be truly separated from each other. Haraway (2016) conceptualises this as sympoiesis: collectively producing systems that do not have self-defined spatial or temporal boundaries. As Pringle (2017, G157) asserts in respect of lichen: What was once thought to be mutualism involving two species may be an entangled symbiosis of thousands of species, interacting in every conceivable fashion. A lichen is not just a fungus and its photosynthetic algae. Lichens house hundreds, thousands or perhaps tens of thousands of other species within the thallus, including other kinds of fungi and myriad bacteria.

She goes on to argue that lichen are nature in that lichen are alive, not manmade and have the capacity to grow in altered landscapes. They signal clean air and stability. Turning to the question posed in the title of this chapter, it is imperative that we take seriously what lichen can teach us about the precarity of childhood in the Anthropocene. In order to directly address this, a re-turn to Tsing’s (2015) concept of contaminated diversity, and Alaimo’s (2016) concept of trans-corporeality is useful to arrive at some form of inconclusive ending.

5.8 The Moral Depravity of Global Capitalism Contaminated diversity (Tsing, 2015) as it presents during this global pandemic exposes the moral depravity of global capitalism as the source of suffering by further intensifying inequality and injustice, which is intensely felt by the early childhood workforce precisely because it is shaped by gender, social class and race in ways that exacerbate how the pandemic plays out in daily life. Many of the most marginalised are compelled to continue working on the front line as ‘essential’ workers and in doing so risk their own health because other ways to survive are inconceivable. Fears of contracting coronavirus are real and terrifying but the threat of unemployment, permanent reliance on foodbanks and inability to pay the rent have created escalating levels of anxiety within marginalised communities. As celebrated heroes, they are framed in a narrative that effectively obscures the reality of being held hostage to an

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economic system that has further entrenched deep inequalities through its response to COVID-19. Narratives that claim the shape of the pandemic is the inevitable act of an indiscriminate virus do not account for the failings of capitalist economic systems based upon competition where disparities between winners and losers are acute, and human exceptionalism places value on certain life forms above others. What my walking adventures, chance encounters with lichen, urban parks, woodland, a dead pigeon, and a nursery outing, and subsequent delving into a wide range of literature from across disciplines has drawn into focus is the need to understand COVID-19 as an issue of interspecies environmental injustice. Environmental justice rests upon a commitment to address the unfair distribution of environmental burdens and harms upon marginalised groups—from early childhood workers, to liminal animals and to unassuming but quite remarkably robust and tenacious lichen. Alaimo’s (2015) concept of trans-corporeality emphasises the physical embodiment of environments or landscapes through unjust social and political processes, which offers an important optics through which to analyse the current crisis. Alaimo argues that human and more-than-human bodies are porous and absorbent of one another, and never truly distinct from the well-being of the other. Haraway (2008, p. 32) contests that ‘to be animal is to become-with bacteria... and, no doubt, viruses and many other sorts of critters.’ This invisible virus has exposed how utterly decentral and unexceptional the human species is and demands that we leave the portal not in search of a ‘new normal’ but with a deepened sense of ethical response-ability for multi-species flourishing. COVID-19 has demanded that we become sensitised to the border transcending nature of multispecies co-dependency. The lichen is central to this project. It is by taking lichen seriously, and attuning to the stories it has to tell that we can begin to pursue new imaginaries that fully grasp both precarity and hope, as Tsing (2015, p. 20) states: Precarity is the condition of being vulnerable to others. Unpredictable encounters transform us; we are not in control, even of ourselves. Unable to rely on a stable structure of community, we are thrown into shifting assemblages, which remake us as well as others. We cannot rely on the status quo; everything is in flux, including our ability to survive. Thinking through precarity changes social analysis. A precarious world is a world without teleology. Indeterminacy, the unplanned nature of time, is frightening, but thinking through precarity makes it evident that indeterminacy also makes life possible.

The Anthropocene as an epoch has been called to account; it is clear the abstraction of human and more-than-human others through a narrow exclusionary lens of a minority of phallocentric man (Braidotti, 2013) is failing. I hear desperate pleas for a ‘return to normal’ or to settle on ‘a new normal’ that should not be too dissimilar from the old normal. The belief that ‘normality’ can be restored by human exceptionalism (in the form of a vaccine but little other change) misses the point entirely. It is only by reimagining and becoming more attentive to our relations, both human and more-than-human, that our species and many others on this planet will survive. This call for worldly justice, for earthly survival, is forcibly sensed through the arts of noticing. Earthly survival rests upon an appreciation and respect for trans-corporeality, that in turn demands that social, health and environmental justice involve every critter (Haraway, 2016) from lichen, to SARS Cov-2, to liminal

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pigeon, to pavement, and tree. Perhaps this epoch will instead come to be defined by an invisible force transforming our awareness from within, towards heightened multispecies ethical response-abilities. Or as Pratt (2017, p. G172) so beautifully proclaims, that what is needed is: Curiosity, the practice of reading the landscape as it is walked, a deep love of the earth and its creatures, and perhaps above all, the desire to find magic, to enchant or reenchant the world, to make it possible to inhabit it with love.

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Seed, L., Wolseley, P., Gosling, L., Davies, L., & Power, S. A. (2013). Nov.). Modelling relationships between lichen bioindicators, air quality and climate on a national scale: Results from the UK OPAL air survey. Environmental Pollution, 182, 437–447. Springgay, S. (2011). The Chinatown foray as sensational pedagogy. Curriculum Inquiry, 41(5), 636–656. Springgay, S., & Truman, S. E. (2018). Walking methodologies in a more-than-human world: WalkingLab. Routledge. Solnit, R. (2014). Wanderlust: A history of walking. Granta. Truman, S. E., & Shannon, D. B. (2018). Queer sonic cultures: An affective walking-composing project. Capacious: Journal for Emerging Affect Inquiry, 1(3), 58–77. Tsing, A. L. (2010r). Arts of inclusion, or how to love a mushroom. M¯anoa, 22(2), 191–203. Tsing, A. L. (2012). Unruly edges: Mushrooms as companion species: For Donna Haraway. Environmental Humanities, 1(1):141–154. Tsing, A. L. (2013). Sorting out commodities: How capitalist value is made through gifts. HAU: Journal of Ethnographic Theory, 3(1): 21–43. Tsing, A. L. (2015). The Mushroom at the end of the world: On the possibility of life in capitalist ruins. Princeton University Press. Tsing, A. L., Swanson, H., Gan, E., & Bubandt, N. (Eds.). (2017). Arts of living on a damaged planet. University of Minnesota Press. Veronesi, F., & Gemeinboeck, P. (2009). Mapping footprints: A sonic walkthrough of landscapes and cultures. Convergence: The International Journal of Research into New Media Technologies, 15(3), 359–369. Vick, C. M., & Bevan, R. (1976). Lichens and tar spot fungus (Rhytisma acerinum) as indicators of sulphur dioxide pollution on Merseyside. Environmental Pollution, 11(3), 161–244. Vilsholm, R. L., Wolseley, P. A., Søchting, U., & Chimonides, P. J. (2009). Biomonitoring with lichens on twigs. The Lichenologist, 41(2), 189–202. Wellburn, A. R. (1994). The spectral determination of chlorophylls a and b, as well as total carotenoids, using various solvents with spectrophotometers of different resolution. Journal of Plant Physiology, 144(3), 307–313. Wolseley, P., Leith, I. D., van Dijk, N., & Sutton, M. A. (2009). Macrolichens on twigs and trunks as indicators of ammonia concentrations across the UK-a practical method. In M. A. Sutton, S. Reis, & S. M. H. Baker (Eds.), Atmospheric ammonia-detecting emission changes and environmental impacts (pp. 101–108). Springer-Verlag. Wolterbeek, H. T., Garty, J., Reis, M. A., & Freitas, M. C. (2003). Biomonitors in use: Lichens and metal air pollution. In B. A. Markert, A. M. Breure, & H. G. Zechmeister (Eds.), Bioindicators and biomonitors (pp. 377–419). Elsevier. Woolf, V. (1930). Street haunting: A London adventure. Read Books.

Jayne Osgood is Professor of Early Childhood Studies 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 pursues issues of social justice by critically engaging with early childhood policy, curricular frameworks and pedagogical approaches and 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 journal Contemporary Issues in Early Childhood (2006, 2016, 2017, 2019, forthcoming) and Narratives from the Nursery: Negotiating Professional Identities in Early Childhood (Routledge, 2012) and currently Feminist Thought in Childhood Research (Bloomsbury Series). She is a member of several editorial boards including Contemporary Issues in Early Childhood, and is currently Co-Editor of Gender & Education Journal and Co-Editor of Reconceptualising Education Research Methodology.

Chapter 6

Storyplay Time at School: Neoliberal and Neocolonial Assemblages in Early Childhood Education Carmen Blyth

Abstract This chapter engages with Deleuze and Guattari’s notion of an assemblage, what it is and how it works, to explore the intersection of race, neoliberalism and neocolonialism at one particular school, in one particular classroom, with one particular teacher, and the early childhood students actively involved in his/her ‘storyplay’ lesson presented in the opening vignette. I view storytelling practices as a central political issue that allows us to engage with power production at the level of affect: deeply political and deeply affective within the assemblage of place with children, teacher, story, storybook, chairs, mat, the practices that govern a Philosophy for Children (P4C) pedagogy, government and school policies and procedures, and so much more, coming together to intra-act—to use Karen Barad’s neologism for the notion that individual agencies do not pre-exist or precede the intra-action but emerge from it—in the (de)(re)territorialization of place and (dis)(re)appropriation of bodies within that place to (re)produce and/or disrupt neocolonial, neoliberal and racial acts. Keywords Storied place · Neoliberalism · Neocolonialism · Assemblage · Philosophy for children · Coloniality · Decoloniality

6.1 Prologue I present the background to this chapter at one particular ‘colonial’ school as the first act of ‘a surrealist drama about a surreal, yet real’ (Richardson, 1997, p. 296) South African school. Richardson (1997) explains that the surreal can seem equally ‘isomorphic to the real’ (Richardson, 1997, p. 298), appropriately equal if not identical in form and relations. In other words, the words and setting might differ from what actually occurred but the contexts and meanings are inherently the same. The example I provide below uses school as a site for the production of power at the level of affect: deeply political and deeply affective within the assemblage of place. C. Blyth (B) University of Cape Town, Penang, Malaysia © The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature Singapore Pte Ltd. 2022 C. Blyth and T. K. Aslanian (eds.), Children and the Power of Stories, Children: Global Posthumanist Perspectives and Materialist Theories, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-981-16-9287-1_6

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C. Blyth A group of about 20 children–all the colours of the rainbow nation–gather together on the mat with the guest teacher–a proponent of the Philosophy for Children pedagogy–and s/he begins to read. The class is taking place in a private grammar school situated near the banks of the River1 in Cape Town, South Africa. The language being used is English. The teacher stops reading at an illustration of a vampire bat. One of the children cries out ‘It’s disgusting’ and in response to another child’s ‘Why?’ says because it has thin razor sharp teeth, Yet the same student states that no real bat looks like that for she had seen the prettiest of bats on the television: it was creamy grey and hiding hanging upside down from a tree branch. The teacher suggests a pink bat with sharp teeth; the child rejects the suggestion. Another student ignores what is being said and congratulates himself out loud for having correctly identified the mammal in the illustration as the only mammal to feed exclusively on blood. The teacher meanwhile says s/he doesn’t understand why the bat is pretty until it shows its teeth and the child explains that she would be scared of it then. The teacher suggests looking up vampire bat teeth but another child says there is no need as he is biologist that specializes in this flying, blood-sucking mammal. The teacher looks askance and the boy explains that he learnt from books and his uncle. Another child states that she is an entomologist and explains that it is someone who studies insects when questioned by the teacher. Another child chimes in to say that she is a lawyer and yet another that she is a banker. The teacher is incredulous that they could have learnt all these things from just reading books: one child says that yes it is possible, sometimes, but only if you enjoy what you are doing like thinking up inventions and giving them away to people who need them. The teacher is again incredulous that the child would give the inventions away rather than sell them for money. The children continue to talk about the careers they would like to follow and continue reading. One child goes to the book shelf and takes down a book on mammals to try and find the vampire bat and shows the class a picture of it explaining that it is the only bat that lives solely off blood. Then suddenly a child shouts out with glee: ‘Oh look the bat found gold! Loads of gold!’ The other children become very excited and the teacher reads the last pages of the book and the end of story. One child is puzzled by the ending as the gold has been buried and seemingly ‘lost’; another child laments the fact that it all came to nought and the teacher says s/he is puzzled and for the children to pass ‘our puzzled’ look around. Yet another child says she is puzzled because the story ends with ‘it was’.

6.2 Introduction Within the sections that follow I use Deleuze and Guattari’s notion of an assemblage to explore the intersection of race, neoliberalism2 and neocolonialism at one particular 1

I use the capital ‘R’ for river in lieu of the actual name of the river throughout this chapter so as not to identify the school itself. And the specific name of the school is not mentioned throughout this chapter to ensure that the ethical rights of others are not infringed or violated. 2 What I mean by neoliberalism here is explained beautifully by Ronen Shamir (2008, p. 3) when he says that neoliberalism should be treated ‘neither as a concrete economic doctrine nor as a definite set of political projects’. Rather, neoliberalism should be seen ‘as a complex, often incoherent and even contradictory set of practices that are organized around a certain imagination of the “market” as a basis for “the universalisation of market-based social relations, with the corresponding penetration in almost every single aspect of our lives of the discourse and/or practice of commodification, capital-accumulation and profit-making.”’ Neoliberalism with a capital N and neoliberalism with a small n is not only ‘about money but also about minds’ (Ball in conversation with René Kneyber,

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school, in one particular classroom, with one particular teacher, and the early childhood students actively involved in his/her ‘storyplay’ lesson presented in the opening vignette. The assemblage allows for neoliberalism and neocolonialism to be explored for what they do rather than for what they are, for how they do what they do within the ‘storyplay’ and storytelling phenomenon within early childhood education. For I see storytelling practices as a central political issue in early childhood education given ‘how they come to be and the work they do and the dividing practices they promote in materializing particular worlds’ (Edwards, 2012, p. 525), practices that allow us to engage with power production at the level of affect: deeply political and deeply affective within the assemblage of place with children, teacher, story, storybook, chairs, mat, the practices that govern a Philosophy for Children (P4C) pedagogy, government and school policies and procedures, and so much more, arranged together to intra-act—to use Karen Barad’s neologism for the notion that individual agencies do not pre-exist or precede the intra-action but emerge from it (Barad, 2007, p. 33)—in the (de)(re)territorialization of place and (dis)(re)appropriation of bodies within that place to (re)produce or disrupt neocolonial, neoliberal and racial acts. But what is an assemblage? How does it work? Deleuze and Guattari (1987, p. 3) ‘define’3 an assemblage as that which has no object and no subject. Rather it is ‘lines of articulation or segmentarity, strata or territories, lines of flight: of deterritorialization and destratification’ (Deleuze & Guattari, 1987, p. 3): different yet at one and the same time the same. The rate of flow along these lines determines whether the phenomenon is of high viscosity and slow or fast and of ‘rupture’ (Deleuze & Guattari, 1987, p. 4). And it is these lines and speeds that in intra-acting with each other constitute for Deleuze and Guattari an assemblage that in intra-acting with other assemblages defines itself as its capacity to affect and be affected (Deleuze, 1981/1988). An assemblage allows for a sideway point of entry into a phenomenon rather than a structural hierarchical one, a sideway glance rather than a look in the mirror of reflexivity (Haraway, 1997) where ‘the One that becomes two, the two that becomes four’ (Deleuze & Guattari, 1987, p. 5) abides. It is an apt methodological approach when trying to pin down the ‘ephemeral, the indefinite and the irregular’ (Law, 2004, p. 4) as constituted by neoliberalism and neocolonialism acting as they do in tandem and allow for them to be conceived as material-discursive forces, which in tension with each other produce what was there before: a deterritorialization and reterritorialization (Deleuze & Guattari, 1987, p. 3) at one and the same time. As such Deleuze and Guattari’s assemblage is always concerned with questions of power and not just a way of understanding complicated 2015, p. 39, my emphasis), children’s minds especially, and is the site of common interest between C/capital and S/state (Ball in conversation with René Kneyber, 2015). In short, as Stephen Metcalf (2017, para. 6) reminds us, ‘“neoliberalism” is not simply a name for pro-market policies, or for the compromises with finance capitalism made by failing social democratic parties. It is a name for a premise that, quietly, has come to regulate all we practise and believe: that competition is the only legitimate organising principle for human activity.’ It has invaded ‘the grit of our everyday lives’ with ‘the attitude of the salesman... enmeshed in all modes of expression’ (Metcalf, 2017, paras 4, 5). 3 Deleuze and Guattari eschew definitions preferring to discuss the ‘how’ of any term used.

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systems—though it allows for that too. It also serves to reconfigure both research and researcher as ‘modest witness’—‘suspicious, implicated, knowing, ignorant, worried, and hopeful’—rather than ‘oppositional’ (Haraway, 1997, p. 3) so as to better disrupt the claims of (re)colon(ial)izing research practices that teach that ‘knowers are manipulators who have no reciprocal responsibilities to the things they manipulate’ (Battiste & Henderson, 2000, p. 88).

6.3 Storied Place as Assemblage Place is itself an assemblage onto which that of the early childhood educationstoryplay-listening-talking assemblage can be mapped. This ‘storied’ (Iovino & Oppermann, 2014) place—for ‘the universe is not simply a place but a story, a story in which we are immersed, to which we belong, and out of which we arose’ (Swimme & Tucker, 2011, p. 2)—on the banks of this particular river in Cape Town, South Africa is a palimpsest of stories: historical, political, social and economic, that stretch backwards and forwards in time, from the primeval when the River together with the Black River flowed into the Salt River and then together with the Diep River from the north created an extensive system of marshes centred around Paarden Eiland, to the recent ‘public’ reclamation and reterritorialization of marshes albeit for a mere 8 kms along the River’s banks: a political ‘nod’ to ‘nature’ that occludes the extensive colonization of place that has occurred and continues to occur. This place as assemblage is what Buchanan (2015) calls the productive point of intersection of actions, bodies and things with affects, words and ideas: it is where content intersects with expression. However, it is important to recall that both content (the empirical plane of organization) and expression (the abstract plane of immanence) are independent of each other; there is no causality or referentiality in their intersection: ‘the one implies or demands the other but does not cause or refer to it’ (Buchanan, 2015, p. 390). The sound of waves crashing on a shore is the result of sound waves hitting our ears but this does not cause us to hear them as beautiful; and vice versa, our concept of beauty does not compel us to hear sea waves as such. As such the physical and biological that is this place, this territory, this particular school at this particular point in place4 timematter (with thanks to Barad, 2007 and her notion of ‘spacetimematter’), is the ongoing process of arrangement, an assemblage—a deliberate realization of a unique plan that always benefits someone or something outside of the arrangement (Buchanan, 2015). Consequently if as Deleuze states: 4

It is place and the stories it tells, rather than space or location, which limits or liberates who or what we are becoming: place can allow us to ‘continually re-think our place in all its forms, re-configure it to be adequate for the times, and ultimately “release it to the Cosmos.” Place becomes something more than simple location, but less than essence, entitlement, or citizenship’ (Janz, 2001, p. 395), the arboreal trappings of the state. It cannot be pointed to on a map and cannot be reduced to power alone (Janz, 2001). It defies abstraction and predetermination: both central to the notion of space, and as such can allow for nomadic, rhizomatic becomings: for the nomad ‘makes[s] the desert no less than they are made by it’ (Deleuze & Guattari, 1987, p. 382).

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‘When a social formation exhausts itself and begins to leak on every side, all sorts of things come uncoded, all sorts of unpoliced flows begin circulating’ (Deleuze, 2004, p. 268, my emphasis), then at this particular time in this particular place the materiality that is the school is something ‘made possible of ands’ (Murphy, 2006, p. 12), an assemblage of ‘actants’ (Latour, 2004a) that in creating fluid sets of relationships brings into being that which we know as this school. Building on the deleuzoguattarian notion of multiplicity—’multiplicities of multiplicities’ (Deleuze & Guattari, 1987, p. 3)—we, therefore, ask of this building: ‘what are its ands’ and ‘what did its historical relations make possible’ (Murphy, 2006, p. 12): how are the ‘leaks’5 in past social formations allowing this school’s becoming? And how does the dynamic nature of that which we call a school, this school, with its increased capacity for leaking exceed that which is conveyed by naming it as such, making it polyvocal, polysemic? In the pages that follow I hope to explore these questions, how storied place is ultimately composed through a relational materiality intimately entwined with the dominant social systems and discourses (Rose & Carr, 2018) of place, and thus seek to understand the what and how of coloniality in this particular place. That the form in which the narrative that follows is written is linear in no way detracts from the non-linearity of the processes themselves. For as Deleuze and Guattari ( 1983, 1987) maintain: the ‘field of coexistence’ does not refer to an external coexistence of social formations in a historical spacetime, but rather to an ‘intrinsic coexistence of powers and processes in a non-historical space–time, a continuum in which divergent temporalities coexist’ (Smith, 2018, p. 241). This is what Deleuze (in Smith, 2018, p. 241) calls the ‘plane of immanence’, a field ‘where all the powers of the social machine coexist virtually, in constant becoming, enveloped and implicated in each other in “a topological space and a stratigraphic time”’.

6.3.1 The Banks of the River The primeval marshlands along the River extended inland to form part of an extensive wetland system that reportedly stretched from Rietvlei in the north, across the Cape Flats, to Sandvlei in the south (Aikman & Winter, 2002). Large animals— elephant, hippo, Cape buffalo—provided pathways to open channels and pools amidst palmiet and reedbeds in the marshlands; and the banks of the River provided pasture for herds of antelope and zebra. Sand plain fynbos dominated with riverine scrub and woodland near the mountain. The biodiversity of the area according to one study (Aikman & Winter, 2002) would have been ‘inestimable’. For millennia, small groups of hunter-gatherers ‘followed the seasonal round in this landscape, collecting plants and seafood, catching wild birds and animals’ (Aikman & Winter, 2002, p. 8), 5

Kushinski (2019, p. 12, original emphasis) avers that ‘leaks can be utilized as means for understanding the world as entangled networks of material and immaterial, mediate and immediate, human and non-human actors.... Leaks are always sites of multiple actors (human, non-human, more-than-human) and always have material and ideological implications.’.

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finding shelter in either caves or rock formations, erecting windbreaks and waterproof ‘skerms’6 in more open areas (Boonzaier et al., 1996). Fast-forward to around 2000 years ago and the nomadic pastoralists with herds of sheep, goat and cattle who started to visit the Peninsula each season (Aikman & Winter, 2002; Boonzaier et al., 1996). To extend the pastures, the grasses would be burnt yet despite this the grasslands would have only been able to support such herds for short periods of time each year (Aikman & Winter, 2002). And as the grazing dried out, so too would the pastoralists have had to move back into the interior or up the coast to the north west (Aikman & Winter, 2002; Boonzaier et al., 1996). This movement of large herds of domestic animals across the landscape is thought to have created broad trails where once only narrow pathways existed and according to Mossop (1928) formed the basis of the road system still in use today: the past is always with us (Barad, 2007), materially and discursively, embedded and embodied in the present. (To echo Muecke (2004), in Other cosmologies being can be held in place, and in place, enduring, in contrast to modernity’s sense of time, place, matter and hence of history where the past is a thing of the past.) It is likely that this kind of movement had a significant impact on the Peninsula’s ecology especially as according to archaeological evidence the pastoralists were also hunters and used dogs to run down game (Boonzaier et al., 1996). Yet according to one botanist’s report dating from the 1700s, and cited in Boonzaier et al., (1996, p. 39), this constant moving around was ‘less destructive of the ecology than Dutch farmers who settled in one area.’ Additionally, there was a ‘clear understanding [by the Indigenous people] that land could not become the property of individuals, including the chief, and could not therefore be disposed of, in any manner whatsoever, by the chief’ (Boonzaier et al., 1996, p. 39). As Deleuze and Guattari argue in Anti-Oedipus ‘primitive society knew of the terrors of the State ... long before any states actually existed’ and staved off the formation of State through ‘customs and rituals’ that prevented the accumulation of ‘wealth’ (land, seeds, weapons and the like) with for example the giving of gifts (Buchanan, 2015, p. 389). For with the accumulation of wealth State creates its own conditions for existing (Deleuze & Guattari, 1983, p. 446). Given this, the numerous claims ‘by settlers of having “purchased” land from local chiefs probably misrepresented the Khoikhoi’s understanding of the transaction’ as they would have viewed any payment ‘a tribute’ for the temporary usage of the land by the settlers (Boonzaier et al., 1996, p. 39). Yet with the settlers claims to having purchased land, the smooth shifting territories occupied by nomadic societies, territorialized but without being measured and divided, became striated, captured and divvied up into plots to be rented out to those whose title to such land was dependent on their position within the State hierarchy.7 The State that had previously been only an idea, came 6

An Afrikaans word meaning a temporary dwelling for nomads and/or travellers. The origin of geo-metry lies in the notion that: ‘… the constitution of the earth (geo) and its measurement and striation (metron) are coexistent. Every year in Egypt, after the Nile foods, land surveyors or “rope-stretchers” (hardenonaptai) would restriate the land; the Greeks called them, precisely, the “measurers of the earth” (geo-meters) ... The measurement and striation of the earth was the condition for the extraction of rent and tribute, since rent requires a direct and quantitative comparison of yields to be drawn between qualitatively different lands’ (Smith, 2018. p. 225).

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to function to the extent it had become immanent and as Deleuze and Guattari make clear: ‘The State was not formed in progressive stages; it appears fully armed, a master stroke executed all at once; the primordial Urstaat [protostate], the eternal model of everything the State wants to be and desires’ (Deleuze & Guattari, 1983, p. 217). The State does not evolve but rather exists within a single field of coexistence (Deleuze & Guattari, 1987) with history merely translating ‘a coexistence of becomings into a succession’ (p. 430, original emphasis). State deterritorializes land, subordinates it to a central imperial power that exists outside and beyond the land striated, with ground rent ‘the apparatus through which the earth is captured and made the object of the state’s higher unity’ (Smith, 2018, p. 225). With the advent of the Dutch colonial period and the establishment by the Dutch East Indies Company (VOC) of a ‘refreshment station’ for their Bavarian fleet of ships in Table Valley the speed of change in the landscape increased and became ‘much more dramatic’ (Aikman & Winter, 2002, p. 9): the State seemingly had plans to stay despite statements to the contrary. The first Dutch commanders were ‘required to stay on good terms’ with the Indigenous people so as to be able to trade for cattle for use by the Dutch fleet as it made its way back and forth between the East and Europe (Aikman & Winter, 2002, p. 9). However, the pastoralists were progressively pushed back, prohibited from grazing their herds along the River until finally in 1657 freehold grants were ‘given’ to settlers, the Free Burghers, by the Dutch which effectively prevented the pastoralists from accessing and hence using the land for grazing (Aikman & Winter, 2002; Boonzaier et al., 1996). With the construction of palisades along this and the Salt River between 1657 and 1660, and the establishment of a wild almond hedge that was planted from the Salt River to the hill at Wynberg (and where extensive sections still endure), Indigenous access was effectively curtailed (Aikman & Winter, 2002, p. 9), land appropriated, commodified, and colonized as colonialist places. During this time, the settlers established farms to grow settler fruit and vegetables and planted wheat between the River and the main route to the south, though their main activity remained herding as had been the Indigenous people’s habit (Aikman & Winter, 2002). Little remains today of the extensive pasture lands and fields however the main house constructed by a Dutch settler in the late 1700s on which the school is sited, remains intact, little changed, a storied presence and material and hence discursive reminder of this land’s past/present, and now used by the current head of the school as residence. Chattel slavery formed the backbone of the labour force of the Dutch Cape and the farming estates, with slaves first sourced from elsewhere in the East Indies and India, as well as those on board a captured Portuguese slaver bound for Brazil, with Angolans (mostly children) on board, diverted to Cape Town (South African History Online [SAHO], 2015). Slaves from the Guinean coast (1658) were also sourced to serve (SAHO, 2015). But many ran away and those given to the free burghers were returned to the Company for fear of desertion. By 1731, slaves formed 42% of the Cape Town population working on farms, as domestic servants, and as skilled artisans for their owners with origins as diverse as Malagasy, Indian, Indonesian and African (SAHO, 2015; see also Boonzaier et al., 1996); yet as with their bodies so too with their cultures and languages, being and becoming (Deleuze & Guattari, 1987)

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commodified, appropriated and territorialized: a striation of what is the spacetime of human activity (Smith, 2018). With the capture of these bodies, human activity was transformed into the State apparatus of ‘labour’ for there is no ‘labour’ without the State. By the 1820s with the start of the British colonial period, many settlers rather than buy slaves sought to hire them. There was no commitment by the VOC to an urban settlement/town. Rather the settlement was established as commodity: a garden, an outpost, a garrison, and some farmlands to provide supplies to the Dutch East Indies fleet as it made its way to and from East Asia. The building of a town, a colony, was frowned upon by the VOC and an idea that Van Riebeck, their company commander in Cape Town, was told to abandon (Aikman & Winter, 2002). With the onset of British colonial rule residential, commercial and industrial development began to intrude on the agricultural landscape, deterritorialize the land of its latest if albeit ‘foreign’ inhabitants looking to settle. Yet the area where the school is located remained largely intact with ‘plots of vegetables and orchards, fields of winter wheat and screens of poplars to protect them from the winds’ (Aikman & Winter, 2002, p. 10). The building of institutions, what Deleuze and Guattari would call the virtual structures of authority, such as the reformatory school, military hospital and mental asylum in the area, however, led to the abandonment of farming by the authorities leaving large grassed open spaces along the River and the fairly rapid (re)appropriation of the place by woodland, a reterritorialization, a leaking of sorts by the land and former non-human inhabitants (Aikman & Winter, 2002). However, marked industrial expansion during the 1900s was responsible for increased river pollution with the once extensive wetland reduced to a few residual reed beds near the Royal Observatory and along the Black River canal by the end of the twentieth century (Aikman & Winter, 2002). In the 1990s, the ‘public’ expressed concern with the state of the River and lobbied for its redevelopment and enhancement with the establishment of a ‘green’ corridor, which runs for approximately 8 kms along the River bank. This, although, can be seen as serving the colonial project by drawing attention to the ‘fact’ of the matter, a representational stance, and hence away from the matter of greater concern: that extensive encroachment on the land had been and continues to be made at the expense of the land and its natural inhabitants. For as Latour posits matters of fact give only a very partial glimpse of the entire phenomenon to become matters of concern only when one’s attention is shifted ‘from the stage to the whole machinery of the theatre’ (Latour, 2004b, p. 39). It matters ‘what comes to matter and what doesn’t’ (Barad, 2014, p. 175). Yet how does this storied place storify the current inhabitants? I explore this question in the sections that follow for as Herod and Aguiar (2006, p. 435) make clear: [N]eoliberalism is a spatial project that is spatially projected because, despite the rhetoric of how neoliberal globalization is purportedly producing a flat and borderless world in which distance and geography no longer matter, the sway of place still shapes how political praxis is imagined and articulated in these neoliberal times—the histories of social struggles and their institutional memories are very much tied up in the spatialities of the global economy and

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greatly influence how neoliberalism is being implemented locally and nationally. (Herod & Aguiar, 2006, p. 435)

In other words, place and its stories are entwined, co-constituted: matters for and of concern and can cause neoliberalism to stutter. And the State through its use of the abstract notions of geometry to territorialize the land, of labour to territorialize bodies, and of taxation/money to territorialize goods and services, taken together, has come to equalize, homogenize, compare, appropriate and stockpile place, this place, and the stories it tells (Smith, 2018). It ‘operates by abstraction and it itself an abstraction’ (Smith, 2018, p. 227, original emphasis). However, just as the State operates through capture (money, labour, property, populations), it can never fully capture completely: there are always ‘flows that escape the apparatus of capture’ (Deleuze & Guattari, 1983, p. 223). In other words, leaks are inherent to any system irrespective of its status. They are intrinsic to any ‘container’, an ‘accident’ waiting to happen, with the threat/promise of future leaks as Brian Massumi contends operating ‘on an affective filter’ and inhabiting ‘a nonlinear time’ (Massumi, 2010, pp. 56–57) yet ‘rooted in a settler future’ (Spice, 2018, p. 44). Capitalism, what Zygmunt Bauman aptly calls ‘liquid modernity’,8 is one such leak to escape the apparatus of capture, to reach beyond the limits, beyond the powers of the State, and has meant that the nature of State’s apparatus of capture has and is ‘becoming’ other, shapeshifting from a transcendent one to be realized to an immanent one of realization (Deleuze & Guattari, 1987). This is bringing into being a genuine heterogeneity of state-forms under the idea of Capitalism that yet remain isomorphic in relation to a single global capitalist market (Deleuze & Guattari, 1987, pp. 464–465). In the sections that follow I explore what neoliberalism and neocolonialism are becoming as they work in tandem with Capitalism to recapture those bodies, those stories that have leaked, looking for other ways of being and becoming within the context of this particular storyplay lesson. For leaking is not just an individual thing but always relational.

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As Bauman says: ‘Forms of modern life may differ in quite a few respects—but what unites them all is precisely their fragility, temporariness, vulnerability and inclination to constant change. To “be modern” means to modernize—compulsively, obsessively; not so much just “to be”, let alone to keep its identity intact, but forever “becoming”, avoiding completion, staying underdefined. Each new structure which replaces the previous one as soon as it is declared old-fashioned and past its use-by date is only another momentary settlement—acknowledged as temporary and “until further notice”. Being always, at any stage and at all times, “post-something” is also an undetachable feature of modernity. As time flows on, “modernity” changes its forms in the manner of the legendary Proteus... What was some time ago dubbed (erroneously) “post-modernity” and what I’ve chosen to call, more to the point, “liquid modernity”, is the growing conviction that change is the only permanence, and uncertainty the only certainty. A hundred years ago “to be modern” meant to chase “the final state of perfection”—now it means an infinity of improvement, with no “final state” in sight and none desired’ (2000/2012, p. 2).

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6.4 The Assemblage as Rhizomatic Thought Arborescent thought as defined by Deleuze and Guattari in A Thousand Plateaus manifests itself in teaching and schools as it does in society at large: as divisions of socioeconomic class, race, gender, ethnicity: those who dominate, and those dominated, Others and other-than-human Others, with white, able-bodied Anglo male seen as individual, autonomous and free. Although these modes of thought remain entrenched, hierarchical bifurcations in teaching that reflect a humanist perspective on epistemology and ethics with an ontology restricted to that of human existence (St. Pierre, 2000), captured in both time and place, neoliberal and neocolonial ‘rationalities and mentalities work as rhizomatic, contradictory, and mobile assemblages’ (Pacini-Ketchabaw et al., 2014, p. 49) to (re)territorialize and (re)appropriate bodies as ‘progress’ and ‘change’ take flight. The rhizomatic assemblage according to Deleuze and Guattari (1987) is a connected, multiple, a-signifying, heterogeneous multiplicity: a cartography that functions outside of language (signifiers and signification) despite using signs. It is metamodelling at its best both creating and producing at one and the same time, providing multiple entry and exits points and as such its own ‘lines of flight’ (Deleuze & Guattari, 1987). Being both ‘detachable’ and ‘connectable’, ‘reversible’ and ‘modifiable’ (Deleuze & Guattari, 1987, p. 21), it can be understood only as oxymoron: thought as movement, movement as thought that generates other movements, other thoughts (Rabinow & Rose, 2003). In this case, it maps the territory of coloni(ali)zation, de- and re-coloni(ali)zation, racialization as well as de- and re-racialization under the guise of development and progress, rather than tracing it, where tracings can be added but do not define the map (Deleuze & Guattari, 1987). In returning to the vignette at the start of this piece, I note that the guest teacher is visiting from a country with an entrenched neoliberal educational system, a system that views schools as part of the market place and education a product-based enterprise, strictly controlled, however, by the state through the ‘strong accountability requirements of outcomes-based education and performance management’ (Blackmore, 2006b, p. 190). Within this neoliberal assemblage discourses of equal rights, individual choice, competition, being personally and professionally accountable, are what constitute the constant refrain of the assemblage as it shapeshifts, adapts to new political policies to retain control. For who can take offense at the notion of and the desire for equal rights and personal choice? However, as I have previously argued elsewhere (Blyth, 2017), the matter for/of concern is that these ‘desires’ have replaced those of ‘equity, comprehensiveness and co-operation’ (Blackmore, 2006b, p. 190), with the ‘discourse of choice’ reduced to ‘rights’ rather than ‘needs’, supplanting the social liberalist notion of ‘collective interests’ with the ‘competitive individualism’ of neoliberalism (Blackmore, 2006b, p. 190). The matter that matters is that whereas previously the assumption had been that all students were capable of learning and entitled to access all of ‘life’s goodies’ (Blackmore, 2006a, p. 182) irrespective of ‘differences’, and that this might require extra resources as well as time to achieve,

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students are now viewed as needing to ‘fit into economical imperatives, be “polished up” in a particular way’ (Blackmore, 2006a, p. 182) and to be held personally accountable for not being disciplined enough, not having worked hard enough, not having ... (fill in the blank) if they fail to live up to the required mark on standardized tests and testing. This is testing that does not take into account the diversity of a school’s student population, nor that the required timeframe for reaching certain ‘benchmarks’ might be inappropriate for the school population concerned. As such by placing the burden for and of failure on teachers and students alike it ensures that any deficiencies and the inequalities these might engender due to neoliberal policies and practices remain hidden. This constant positioning of certain schools, teachers and students as failures irrespective that their achievements may have been substantial relative to where they started has led to ‘self-perpetuating cycles of despair’ (Blackmore, 2011, p. 222), fear and anxiety: ‘stress and distress’ (Blackmore, 2011, p. 222). It is also a stark example of what social power can enable in the production of identity prejudice, with particular social groups at once stereotyped, stigmatized and colonized, unable to understand their own social positioning (Fricker, 2007, pp. 13– 14) as academic failures. And for those concerned with social justice, it leads to the perpetual ethical struggle between what the right thing to do is rather than what is in your own best self-interest (Taylor, 1989), for it is undoubtedly better in terms of self-interest to comply but what of the demands of social justice for colleagues and students alike (Blackmore, 2011)? Governmental neoliberal policies focused on effectiveness and quality have continued to influence educational policy in countries such as England and Wales for over two decades and continue to do so primarily because they easily align themselves with the notion of the self-managing school, isolated and seen as a ‘discrete unit’, with ‘leadership’ as the solution to ‘“underperforming schools”’ in the 1990s (Blackmore, 2014, p. 504), teachers as the solution to underperforming students in the 2000s (Hattie, 2008) and ‘effective’ schools as having identical attributes irrespective of terrain: the context and/or demographic (Thomson, 2002), with the end goal being to ‘out-source’ public educational systems (Blackmore, 2014). My concern is that such educational policy is perceived as being fair to all—as if the playing field is indeed level and all it takes is for the individual student (whatever their positionalities, their historicities) to be self-disciplined, self-motivated, work hard, and take responsibility for their own actions—and demonstrates how neoliberalism works as assemblage to (re)colon(ial)ize and (re)appropriate bodies: those of students and teachers alike.

6.5 How Does the Performance of P4C in This Place with These Children Come to Matter as a Neoliberal and Neocolonial Act? Burman (2001, p. 7) takes pains to point out that: ‘language creates and governs the horizons of what we can invisage’ within educational research and practice. As such

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I emphasize the ‘for’ in the Philosophy for Children pedagogy (P4C) that the guest teacher is a proponent of as indicative that it is a philosophy developed by adults (university researchers) for use by adults (teachers) with children rather than being developed by children for child or even adults with children. A Western-oriented, human-centered pedagogy, P4C was developed in the late 1960s and early 1970s by Professor Mathew Lipman who ‘influenced by educators and philosophers such as Vygotsky, Piaget, Dewey as well as the tradition of Socratic dialogue’ (Society for the Advancement of Philosophical Enquiry in Education [SAPERE], 2016), sought to focus on the child as individual within a ‘community of enquiry’. His aim was to teach children ‘how to create their own philosophical questions’, questions that become the focus of the philosophical enquiry and dialogue by the group of children with the teacher facilitating and guiding the dialogue that ensues (SAPERE, my emphasis). According to Vansieleghem and Kennedy citing Lipman (2011, p. 174): it is an approach that helps children ‘become more thoughtful, more reflective, more considerate and more reasonable individuals’ (Lipman cited in Vansieleghem & Kennedy, 2011, p. 174, my emphasis). Haynes (2009, p. 38, my emphasis) argues that P4C ‘values independence of mind, learning through participation and co-operation and democratic decision making. It promotes critical, creative and caring thinking through its distinctive approach to collaborative and reflective dialogue’: an inward looking, individual-centred discursive process where children are seen as lacking and needing to learn to be critical, creative and caring individuals who think independently rather than as relational subjectivities and being(s) that emerge from entanglements engaged in and therefore always becoming, transforming in new, fluid and unexpected metamorphoses. As a pedagogy P4C simply is not sufficient even when performed according to Lipman’s intent. For in order to capture the complex entanglements of meaning and matter in a dynamic ECEC assemblage pedagogy needs to be opened up to the indeterminate and unpredictable flows of potentialities rather than closed down to them. It requires what Gola´nska (2017, p. 158, original emphasis) calls an ‘un/learning’ where unlearning is not in diametric opposition to learning but rather in Gola´nska’s words: rests on dynamic tensions between nondualistically organized processes of learning and unlearning, where unlearning can, and should, be considered as a productive learning procedure. These two tendencies, importantly, are not organized in an oppositional way, but rather they are the two dimensions of one and the same process, that is, the constant differing or becoming-other. (Gola´nska, 2017, p. 159)

This requires: ‘forgetting old routines and rules, disavowing structured regulations imposed on the multiplicity of processes of knowledge production, in order to open up to the new, that is, to learning of a different logic of thinking or a different form of life’ (p. 159). Such a move requires that we think in terms of ‘fragility rather than pure efficiency’ as demanded by a ‘Western culture oriented towards a progressive quest for might and control over the world conceptualized as external to, and put at the disposal of, a human being’ (p. 159). Slocum’s (2008) observations on food-eating practices as ‘racial practices’ that are ‘materially produced through what people buy, who they talk to, where they grow

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vegetables, as well as through phenotypic differences’ (Slocum, 2008, p. 857) are pertinent here and can be equally applied to storytelling practices: that the stories we buy into, the people we tell our stories with/to, where we tell them, as well as our phenotypic differences matter in what is materiallysociallydiscursively produced in terms of storied bodies and embodied stories. As such the matter for concern is that the P4C teacher in this instance might have been so focused on ‘empowering’ the students that s/he failed to ‘examine [his/her] own actions and assumptions and how those perpetuate traditional power relations’ (Strom & Martin, 2013, p. 222) to produce stories and storied lives that perpetuate the status quo, with the story chosen by him/her, the discussion directed by him/her and dialogue/discussion between all students, the communal dialogue advocated by Vansieleghem and Kennedy (2011), minimal if at all existent, and the collaboration as noted by Haynes (2009) where goal and agenda among participants are aligned indeed lacking. Such lines of flight created by curtailing those of Others, human and non-human, risks not only neoliberal and humanist reterritorialization of place and inhabitants but also their (re)colonization and continued colonialization. With his/her choice of provocation, a choice that is his/hers alone, s/he (re)introduces into this storied place the commodification of matter. With his/her questioning of the child who stated that she/he would give his/her inventions away for free to people that needed them rather than sell them for money as suggested by the teacher, s/he (re)introduces into this storied place the stratifying desire for money (Deleuze & Guattari, 1987), the notion of surplus production, its making-money practices as commodity. And with his/her response that a child consider a pink bat with very sharp teeth to be beautiful, to a child’s comment on the beauty of the ‘creamy grey bat’, s/he recentres the human and humanist notion of beauty rather than follow the line of flight already initiated by the child. Yet this refrain shifts shapes, adapts to a new logic and topic—that of careers—to retain control and bring them back to the stratifying and striating, homogenating and colonializing ‘refrain’ of money. The refrain is what Deleuze and Guattari (Plateau 11. 1837: Of the Refrain) call those habits, as much individual as they are social and cultural (Janz, 2001) and inclusive of the stories we tell and retell, that show us for who we are; we carry them with us to protect us as the body ventures out along ‘lines of drift’ (Deleuze & Guattari, 1987, p. 312). The refrain here is one of gold and treasure, who gets to keep it and who does not: a return to what is both the same and different. It works to the extent that it can bind together content with expression, create an association between bodies, actions, and things, with affects, words and ideas. In the end even the attempt to initiate a different line of flight away from the neoliberal market place, to matters of concern: confusion and understanding, is countered by teacher’s order: to pass ‘our’ puzzled look around the circle—‘order-words’ (Deleuze & Guattari, 1987, p. 79), language as judgement (Deleuze & Guattari, 1987, p. 7), which rather than communicate ‘produce state and social order’ (MacLure, 2016, p. 175) and are as such deadly. The use of such words (a common occurrence in the teaching world) is to effectively curtail the rhizomatic potential of the child, of the child’s statement to cause language to pause, to stutter, to make false starts and pose a threat to state and social order (MacLure, 2016). It is to (re)appropriate child, (de)(re)territorialize the notion of child from ‘a-grammatical’ (MacLure, 2016, p. 176), an ‘embodied

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flow of pauses and rushes’ (Hickey-Moody as cited in MacLure, 2016, p. 175), a ‘question-machine’ (Deleuze & Guattari, 1987, p. 256) no less, to one that is different to adult and deserving of such ‘childish’ ways. It would seem that the teacher failed to understand the storied nature of the place and the students’ storied and ‘different positionalities, historically situated oppressions, and the deep societal conditioning that accompanies both’ (Strom & Martin, 2013, p. 222), perhaps assuming that the students would happily go along with the post-colonial notion that ‘they are all equal, have a voice, and should work together to interrupt the status quo’ (p. 222) as performed by him/her, yet unaware that to connect with them, ‘think-feel’ (Massumi, 2008) with them, s/he had to ‘sympathize’9 as in be(com)ing together with them: a synthesis, an affirmative yet plastic, plastic yet monist, ‘wit(h)nessing’ (Ettinger as cited in Gola´nska, 2017, p. 196, original emphasis) together/apart rather than apart through the cuts made. Even those moments afforded by the story where a genuine encounter is made, where we are forced to pause and think, where ‘[i]t produces a cut, a crack ... the rupturing encounter [that] also contains a moment of affirmation ... of a new world, in fact a way of seeing and thinking this world differently’ (O’Sullivan, 2006, p. 1), are seemingly dismissed by the teacher, unable it seems to remain ‘attentive to the unknown knocking at our door’ (Deleuze as cited in Puig de la Bellacasa, 2017, p. 91, original emphasis). With acts such as these, the children at this particular placetimematter are thus denied on three counts: ‘epistemically for being wrongfully mistrusted, ethically for being wrongfully excluded, and ontologically for being wrongfully positioned as lesser beings’ (Blyth, 2017, p. 7). Social position and social power are what determine the extent to which a person is considered epistemically trustworthy Fricker (2007) contends. They are involved in ‘two of our most basic everyday epistemic practices: conveying knowledge to others by telling them, and making sense of our own social experiences’ (Fricker, 2007, p. 1). And as Fricker goes on to explain: when you are seen as a type rather than an individual your credibility as a giver of knowledge can be diminished to such an extent that you are silenced, dismissed: you dysappear10 (Leder, 1990). Fricker calls this kind of epistemic injustice based on ‘identity

9

Referring to the etymologies of the terms ‘empathy’ and ‘sympathy’ Gola´nska (2017) reminds us that: ‘whereas Greek ™ν (en [or em]) refers to “in, at,” σν ´ (sun [or syn/sym]) stands for “with, together” and implies connections or assemblage. Different from empathy, sympathy—as defined within the new materialist context—connotes togetherness or withness rather than being in, or speaking from, the position of others.... Thus construed, the concept invokes constant, transformative and, often unpredictable material-semiotic becoming with the world/the others’ (Gola´nska, 2017, pp. 193–194, original emphasis). 10 Drew Leder (1990), the philosopher and medical sociologist, describes ‘social dys-appearance’ as the act of seeing oneself as an ‘alien thing’ through the ‘assertoric gaze’ of the narrow-minded, the ‘dogmatic, intolerant, rigid, fixed, inflexible, exclusionary’ (Levin, 1988, p. 440) gaze of those in power; shunned, rendered invisible, seen as a type rather than an individual, the dys-appeared in turn seek to hide from the antagonistic stare, psychologically and physically, and so become complicit in their own dys-appearance and disappearance.

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prejudice’11 (Fricker, 2007, p. 4, original emphasis), any arbitrary fact such as age— that you are child, skin colour—that you are black, sex—that you are woman, or otherwise positioned as Other, testimonial injustice. If, however, we fail to understand our own social situation, ‘our own social experiences’ (Fricker, 2006, p. 96), due to unequal power structures, ‘structural identity prejudice’ (Fricker, 2007, p. 155, original emphasis), then this can lead to what Fricker (p. 6, original emphasis; see also Fricker, 2006) calls ‘hermeneutical injustice’, with certain social groups unable to make sense of their own situations and experiences and thus unable to contest the distorted interpretations of these by others (Fricker, 2006, 2007). Children and Others thus need to be heard with ‘an openness’ to who they are and what they have to say (Fricker, 2012, p. 287) rather than positioned as lacking, less-than. And this demands an approach that inspires speaking from one’s own situated position ‘yet always with others, in their tremendously fluid richness and diversity’ (Gola´nska, 2017, p. 196, my emphasis).

6.6 CODA The colonial/postcolonial/decolonial legacy in South Africa is a highly complex and disputed ‘territory’, as is the placetimematter of coloniality in which the school is situated. Coloniality as Nelson Maldonado-Torres states is different from colonialism and requires a different praxis altogether referring as it does ‘to long-standing patterns of power that emerged as a result of colonialism, but that define culture, labor, intersubjective relations, and knowledge production well beyond the strict limits of colonial administrations’. Thus it is that: coloniality survives colonialism. It is maintained alive in books, in the criteria for academic performance, in cultural patterns, in common sense, in the self-image of people, in aspirations of self, and so many other aspects of our modern experience. In a way, as modern subjects we breathe coloniality all the time and every day. (Maldonado-Torres, 2007, p. 243)

And at schools such as this school the children of elites, native and other, and Others continue to breathe in ways that leave intact the political theory and political economy, which allow coloniality and hence modernity and Capitalism to survive and thrive, with ethico-onto-epistemologies (Barad, 2007) that differ to the separate and separable epistemology, ontology and ethics of Western civilization silenced, disavowed and marginalized. As African philosopher Ndlovu-Gatsheni notes: the African child ‘begin[s] a journey of alienation from their African context the very moment they step into the school’ (Ndlovu-Gatsheni, 2013, p. 11), and learns to speak with the voices of others (Bakhtin, 1975/1981). With their own mother tongue viewed as ‘primitive’ within the school/educational system, its use at times prohibited and punished, the connection between the child and their community is thus irretrievably lost (Ndlovu-Gatsheni, 2013, p. 11; see also Sumukungwe, 2019). The African child 11

Fricker (2007, p. 4) defines ‘identity prejudice’ as ‘a label for prejudices against people qua social type’, which leads to ‘testimonial injustice’.

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becomes Other not only within the educational system but also within their own community. Linguistic pluralism as a language policy and practice that promotes social justice is, therefore, a matter of fact here and the matter for concern, ‘a call to care’, a situated matter of care, an engagement with care that ‘requires a speculative commitment to neglected things’ (Puig de la Bellacasa, 2011, p. 85) rather than a focus solely on the facts of the matter or even the matter of concern. It is to care about and respect the concerns of all those concerned in the matter. It is to address needs rather than rights: the ethico-onto-epistemological needs of those at this particular place, at this particular time, at this particular school so that ‘care comes to matter’ (p. 92) in this assemblage of possible becomings: ‘an ontological requirement of relational worlds’ (Puig de la Bellacasa, 2012, p. 199). Post-colonialism and decoloniality have the history of Western colonialism in common, yet conceptually the ‘post’ in post-colonialism keeps ‘you trapped in unipolar time conceptions’ for as far as Western (since the Renaissance) cosmology is concerned: ‘“time” is one, singular and universal, you have no way out: you are trapped in a universal time that is owned by a particular civilization. Therefore, what comes after X has to be conceptualized as post-X’ (Mignolo, 2017b, pp. 2–3). In other words, post-colonialism fails to acknowledge that colonialism continues to exist in every facet of post-colonial life: from ways of being to ways of knowing and doing. Decoloniality, however, ‘opens up to the multiple times of cultures and civilizations upon which Western Civilizations impose its conceptualization of time. The “de–” indicates above all the need and the goal of the re-: epistemic reconstitutions, reemergence, resurgence, re-existence. That is, neither new nor post’ (Mignolo, 2017b, pp. 2–3) but in the here and now. This is to free the mind from Euro-American centric ways of being, knowing and doing, ways that have been profoundly affected by the Western modernity project. As Haraway might suggest: Staying with the trouble does not require such a relationship to times called the future. In fact, staying with the trouble requires learning to be truly present, not as a vanishing pivot between awful or edenic pasts and apocalyptic or salvific futures, but as mortal critters entwined as myriad unfinished configurations of place, times, matters, meanings. (Haraway, 2016, p. 1)

For it is in the present where we can decolonialize story, reconfigure it as one where subaltern has the potential to become a part of the subject with agency. Decoloniality is as Mignolo (2017b) says neither a ‘de-westernization’ (with a struggle over who will control the ‘colonial matrix of power’ (Mignolo, 2017b, p. 2)) nor a ‘re-westernization’. Rather it is one option among many (see Mignolo, 2017b) with which to challenge the hegemonic Western concept of West as best, and the Western neoliberal concept of the ‘human’ as autonomous, rational, Anglo White male, with nature and culture separate and separated. By calling into question the very notion of ‘human’, and what that means decoloniality seeks to build and re-build the ways of life that ‘modernity disavowed and destroyed’ (Mignolo, 2017b, p. 5; see also Bonney, 2020, p. 3), to seek possibility in difference. It seeks to re-constitute knowing from the standpoint of the colonized as questioner, one that is not only skeptical of the superiority of Europe/America a priori (Maldonado-Torres, 2017. p. 118) but also doubtful of the colonized’s position as less-than-human.

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As such in schools such as the one discussed in this chapter, the issue of decoloniality is a project that has as yet to be acknowledged and embraced. For in schools such as these a pedagogy/ideology of supposed ‘colorblindness’ (Schofield, 2007; see also Aragón, Dovidio & Graham, 2016) where all are said to be seen as ‘equal’ with difference collapsed and not acknowledged at all although seemingly quite progressive is rather part of ‘flexible and malleable neoliberal assemblages’ (PaciniKetchabaw et al., 2014, p. 39). This is a pedagogy which by virtue of its covertness is much more divisive, exclusionary and potentially destructive than an overt pedagogy/ideology of apartheid where difference is seen as Other, with the Other subordinated and subordinate to what is considered the sociopolitical and discursive ‘norm’, excluded yet not indifferent to their very difference. Such a pedagogy is to deny the past and ‘its impact on the present’ (Leibowitz & Naidoo, 2017, p. 157) to perform difference differently. It is to consume Others’ fundamental difference, their otherness, and in so doing appropriate rather than affirm their difference, disrupting the ‘ethico-onto-epistemological logic of new materialism’ (Gola´nska, 2017, p. 201). And it is by ignoring difference, what is different and valued by Others, that the school ‘in-forms’ (Massumi in conversation with Mary Zournazi, 2002, p. 224) the Other—forms them, colonizes them, from the inside out to see difference as less than, shameful and valueless. Such internal colonization is a colonialization, a conditioning, that forms and sediments ‘the fascist inside you, the fascist you yourself sustain and nourish and cherish’ (Deleuze & Guattari, 1987, p. 215) and as such perpetuates the status quo. It is what Massumi following Foucault calls ‘power to’ rather than ‘power over’: It ‘informs’ us, it’s intrinsic to our formation, it’s part of our emergence as individuals, and it emerges with us–we actualise it, as it in-forms us. So in a way it’s as potentialising as what we call freedom, only what it potentialises is limited to a number of predictable paths. (Massumi in conversation with Mary Zournazi, 2002, p. 224)

The colonial matrix of power, a European invention that was formed in the 1500s ‘in the name of salvation to justify their crimes’ (Mignolo, 2017b, p. 5), a matrix of power that has since operated as a pincer movement to build itself as a ‘civilizational project’ (p. 5)—while at the same time destroying all other civilizations, by ‘silencing, disavowing, and racializing’ (p. 5) through the use of a vast range of vocabulary that erases cultures, denies them and makes the ‘non-existence, non-history’ (Said, 1998, p. 6) of a people reality—is still very much alive and kicking. It will remain so for as long as minds remain enslaved to the rhetoric of modernity and coloniality, globalization and neoliberalism. To escape requires becoming ‘a person who values the communal rather than the individual, values conviviality rather than individual success, values slow motion rather than speed (be first, be the first, not let them pass you, all these modern-postmodern-stories that trap your subjectivity)’ (Mignolo, 2017a, p. 5), values the material discursive more-than-human community in all ‘its differential becoming’ (Barad, 2007, p. 185; see also Puig de la Bellacasa, 2012): values that are difficult to embody in schools as they are performed in the here and now. However, Haraway (2016, p. 35) shares an important lesson when she tells us that ‘it matters what stories tell stories’: that it is by revisioning (Richardson,

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1997) stories that the invisible is made visible (and compelling), the links between place and inhabitant made known (Gruenewald, 2003), ‘an-other logic’, ‘an-other thinking’ unveiled (Mignolo, 2005, p. xx), and the chance to make a difference becomes determinate.

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Massumi, B. (2010). The future birth of the affective fact: The political ontology of threat. In M. Gregg & G. J. Seigworth (Eds.), The affect theory reader (pp. 52–70). Duke University Press. Metcalf, S. (2017, 18 August). Neoliberalism: The idea that swallowed the world. The Guardian. www.theguardian.com/news/2017/aug/18/neoliberalism-the-idea-that-changed-the-world Mignolo, W. D. (2005). Preface: Uncoupling the name and the reference. In W. D. Mignolo (Ed.), The idea of Latin America (pp. x–xx). Blackwell Publishing. Mignolo, W. (2017a, Jan. 17). Interview–Walter Mignolo/Part 1 Activism & trajectory. Retrieved from https://www.e-ir.info/2017/01/17/interview-walter-mignolopart-1-activism-and-trajectory/ Mignolo, W. (2017b, Jan. 21). Interview–Walter Mignolo/Part 2 Key concepts. Retrieved from https://www.e-ir.info/2017/01/21/interview-walter-mignolopart-2-key-concepts/ Mossop, E. E. (1928). Old Cape highways. Maskew Miller. Muecke, S. (2004). Ancient and modern: Time, culture and Indigenous philosophy. University of New South Wales Press. Murphy, M. (2006). Sick building syndrome and the problem of uncertainty: Environmental politics, technoscience, and women workers. Duck University Press. Ndlovu-Gatsheni, S. J. (2013). Why decoloniality in the 21st Century? The Thinker for Thought Leaders: THe Journal for Progressive Thought, 48, 10–15. O’Sullivan, S. (2006). Art encounters Deleuze and Guattari: Thinking beyond representation. Palgrave. Pacini-Ketchabaw, V., Nxumalo, F., & Rowan, M. C. (2014). Researching neoliberal and neocolonial assemblages in early childhood education. International Review of Qualitative Research, 7(1), 39–57. Puig de la Bellacasa, M. (2011). Matters of care in technoscience: Assembling neglected things. Social Studies of Science, 41(1), 85–106. https://doi.org/10.1177/030631271038030 Puig de la Bellacasa, M. (2012). ‘Nothing comes without its world’: Thinking with care. The Sociological Review, 60(2), 197–216. Puig de la Bellacasa, M. (2017). Matters of care: Speculative ethics in more than human worlds. University of Minnesota Press. Rabinow, P., & Rose, N. (2003). Introduction: Foucault today. In P. Rabinow & N. Rose (Eds.), The essential Foucault: Selections from the essential works of Foucault, 1954–1984 (pp. vii–xxxv). The New Press. Richardson, L. (1997). Skirting a pleated text: De-disciplining an academic life. Qualitative Inquiry, 3(3), 295–303. https://doi.org/10.1177/107780049700300303 Rose, J., & Carr, A. (2018). Political ecologies of leisure: A critical approach to nature-society relations in leisure studies. Annals of Leisure Research, 21(3), 265–283. Retrieved from: https:// doi.org/10.1080/11745398.2018.1428110 Said, E. (1998, May 7). Between worlds: Edward Said makes sense of his life. London Review of Books, 20(9), 3–7. Schofield, J. W. (2007). The colorblind perspective in school: Causes and consequences. Wiley. Shamir, R. (2008). The age of responsibilization: On market-embedded morality. Economy and Society, 37(1), 1–19. Slocum, R. (2008). Thinking race through corporeal feminist theory: Divisions and intimacies at the Minneapolis Farmers’ Market. Social and Cultural Geography, 9(8), 849–869. Smith, D. W. (2018). 7000 BC: Apparatus of capture. In H. Somers-Hall, J. Williams, & J. Bell (Eds.), A thousand plateaus and philosophy (pp. 223–290). Edinburgh University Press. Society for the Advancement of Philosophical Enquiry in Education. (2016, June 8). What is P4C [Web site]. Retrieved June 8, 2016, from http://www.sapere.org.uk/Default.aspx?tabid=162 Spice, A. (2018, September). Fighting invasive infrastructures. Environment and Society 9(1), 40– 56. https://doi.org/10.3167/ares.2018.090104 St. Pierre, E. (2000). Poststructural feminism in education: An overview. International Journal of Qualitative Studies in Education, 13, 477–515. South African History Online. (2015). The early Cape slave trade [Web site]. Retrieved August 7, 2017, from https://www.sahistory.org.za/article/early-cape-slave-trade

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Strom, K. J., & Martin, A. D. (2013). Putting philosophy to work in the classroom: Using rhizomatics to deterritorialize neoliberal thought and practice. Studying Teacher Education, 9(3), 219–235. https://doi.org/10.1080/17425964.2013.830970 Sumukungwe, M. (2019). Universities as sites for advancing education for decolonization. In C. Herbert Manthalu & Y. Waghid (Eds.), Education for decoloniality and decolonization in Africa (pp. 69–87). Palgrave Macmillan. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-15689-3 Swimme, B. T., & Tucker, M. E. (2011). Journey of the universe. Yale University Press. Taylor, C. (1989). Sources of self: The making of modern identity. Cambridge University Press. Thomson, P. (2002). Schooling the Rustbelt kids: Making the difference in changing times. Allen & Unwin. Vansieleghem, N., & Kennedy, D. (2011). What is philosophy for children: What is philosophy with children—After Matthew Lipman? Journal of Philosophy of Education, 45, 171–182. https://doi. org/10.1111/j.1467-9752.2011.00801.x Zournazi, M. (2002). Navigating movements–with Brian Massumi. In M. Zournazi (Ed.), Hope: New philosophies for change (pp. 210–243). Pluto Australia.

Carmen Blyth completed her Ph.D. on international schools, teaching, and governance at the University of Cape Town and was a postdoctoral research fellow with the Decolonizing Early Childhood Discourses research project at the same university. She has worked with international schools and universities in Asia, Africa, and the Middle East for over 30 years as a teacher, teacher trainer, and department founder. She currently enjoys mentoring Ph.D. and IB Diploma candidates and has a special interest in the links between linguistic diversity and biodiversity, and the rights of other language speakers in institutions where English is the medium of instruction. Her publications include a monograph on ethics in international schools: storytelling and autoethnography published with Palgrave Macmillan, journal contributions that engage with posthumanism, as well as book chapters on syllabus design. She holds a B.Sc. (Hons) in Pure and Applied Physics.

Chapter 7

Storying Other Than the Neoliberal Criticism—Cause I Have a Hunch of Something Being Wrong Here Anne B. Reinertsen

Abstract Professional and leadership subjectivities are produced and often constrained within powerful educational discourses. This piece is a critique of the neoliberal discursive production of selves and offers a view of subjective professionalisms produced through autoethnographic storying and writing. It is a new material approach to writing based on the experiential and speculative process philosophy of Deleuze and Guattari, and represents a view of professionalisms, leadership and organization as emergent and constantly in the making. To be general or universal, criticism of neoliberalism paradoxically needs to be particular. Stories and autoethnographic storying and writing can do that because they contribute to or engender a sensitivity to the immanent intensive and affective processes that condition thought. They produce thought provocations or collapse ‘ushering’ us towards experiences that more closely resemble the intensive level and desire they operate, activating the ethical task in education. Affective processes bring concepts into play and seek to continue keeping them in play. Critical concepts are thus always performative and methodological, inherently experimental and open to yet-unknown territories of thought. Thinking with, through, and beyond concepts involves developing conceptual foci while also, at the same time, designing for debate. I have a hunch though that something is wrong here and that the conceptual foci of Early Childhood Education (ECE) and leadership are moving away from the child. Neoliberal systems and policies seem primarily to operate as self-reinforcing mechanisms on their own accord, closing in on themselves. I therefore claim that we need to bring back the missing child in education and our pedagogical practices and stories. This is about storying the child back in ECE and leadership without reducing differences to similarities therefore always storying other: learning ultimately theorized as iterative, indirect and informal ethicized processes. The story in italics coming in from the right-hand side guides my writing. I put it in italics to do difference. Keywords Autoethnography · Ethics · Research with critical concepts · Habits · Leadership · Philosophy of education · Post-representation · Heterotopia A. B. Reinertsen (B) Østfold University College, Halden, Norway e-mail: [email protected] © The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature Singapore Pte Ltd. 2022 C. Blyth and T. K. Aslanian (eds.), Children and the Power of Stories, Children: Global Posthumanist Perspectives and Materialist Theories, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-981-16-9287-1_7

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7.1 Introduction I do not know how many times I have read books, articles, research reports, PhD and Master theses and exam papers claiming to be critical and opposed to—and offering alternatives to—educational programs and policies based on neoliberal public management ideals (NPM) within corporate-based models of goal orientation and performance management. These are authors and researchers framing their work and positioning it as a general self-explicatory perspective challenging establishment and/or tradition. I applaud it because I think we need new educational thoughts, policies and programs. I think professionalization of the early childhood field as knowledge and research-based or research-informed practises is vital. In the current situation of governance and audit culture however, and despite all good will and intentions, I sometimes wonder what happened with the child? What happened with the child as our first and foremost knowledge base? Simultaneously, therefore, I am very uneased by what I applaud because there is no potentiality, newness or justice in the criticism per se unless both the subject and object of criticism are conquered. Moreover, unless I do, conquer that is, criticism and its polarized public rhetoric, discourses and policies might work as much against newness and educational innovation as the opposite within a logic of liberal illiberal bifurcation only, both sides caught up in a deadlock between critique and transformation equally arguing from a crisis and/or lack standpoint. The conquering processes therefore that I speak of are not about the empirical subject or object of criticism itself but about all images surrounding it, actual and virtual, to multiply, story, create and learn from. In short, and in a deleuzeoguattarian process philosophy and/of writing, to conquer is forcefully to diffract yet pragmatically balance It/X repeatedly, with iterative questioning and non-algorithmic thinking: asking not about what to learn and how, rather asking about what one can learn from this thing? Following on from this, and in order to be universal, criticism needs to be more particular. What is it about current public management ideals that we criticize? What is the It/X or thing and what can I learn from it? Further, after having identified the thing, how to write a critique and go on learning from it? A writing therefore, which is more and other than just being for or against public management and/or forwarding anti-neoliberalist perspectives. Rather, a writing, a thinking and storying, with what management and ultimately leadership must not become: instrumental, reductionist, abusive, authoritarian, with the misappropriation of power misconduct… But even more severe because it is subtle, shifty often hidden from us; censoring, habitual, uniform, robotical and unconscious: a fear of closeness, care, warmth and sincerity, a spiritualmaterial want turning leaderships silently and unnoticed away from the child that we are there to care for in the first place. Powerful discourses are reducing leadership and organizational learning into epistemologies1 and teleology.2 Hence, knowledge is lost as we manage and ‘lead’. Difference at worst reduced to loneliness… 1 2

Theories about knowledge production and how. A view of humans as always intentional and rational.

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I therefore advocate a writing and storying producing thought provocations or collapse ‘ushering’ us towards experiences that more closely resemble the particular simultaneously universal intensive level and desire such storying operates activating the inseparable ethical task in education, new norms of radical inclusive and collective differences. Love, care, learning transmigrating throughout the eons of time. I draw from Karen Barad’s (2007) notion of ‘ethico-onto-epistem-ology’ (p. 90) and ‘ethics of worlding’ (p. 392), a view of ethics as inseparable from ontology3 and epistemology when engaging in (scientific) knowledge production, with scientific practices, and with the world itself and its inhabitants, human and non-human beings that intra-actively co-constitute the world. I have a hunch of something— X—being wrong here affecting me, affecting me beyond emotions and beliefs hence beyond post-factual power struggles over authority, beyond neoliberalism and not. Rather, something is urging me to proceed by inquiry. A zetetic4 or a sort of skeptical autoethnographic writing of leadership and research on leadership produced through affected curiosity. In Deleuze and Guattari (2004), the concept of affect/affection does not denote a personal feeling. Drawing from Spinoza’s affectus l’affect is an ability to affect and be affected. It is a prepersonal intensity corresponding to the passage from one experiential state of the body to another and implying an augmentation or diminution in that body’s capacity to act (Massumi in Deleuze & Guattari, 2004, p. xvii). Deleuze and Guattari (2004) speak of intra- or intergroup passages occurring in group individuation with group individuation as that which constitutes affect (p. 376). Affective processes bring concepts into play and seek to continue keeping them in play. More on this below. In this piece, and to be clear, the thing to learn from is leadership in Early Childhood Education (ECE) and autoethnographic writing and storying is/as my conquering strategy and method. My hypothesis is that autoethnography as both theory and method or ‘theorymethod’ are enabling me to attend to critique, innovation and change differently than other theories and methods might. But to be clear, there is no method and methodological position including those of posthumanisms and autoethnography that can determine other peoples’ positions and what they might want or need to do. Autoethnography is not any sort of self-indulgent narcissism, nor any type of therapeutic technique or claim of being authentic. It is a move from matter to becoming materially identifiable subjects for one another, a constitution of subjectivity producing some sort of agency. Autoethnographic writing is therefore not unbiased. Its power lies in asking about the values we build on and coming to terms with values we want: the power in asking what value paradigms we are heading against. Autoethnographic writing hence challenges habits and introduces a healthy dose of realisms through opening up the leadership action, concept or event itself for new and more visions of social realities and becomings. It positions leadership as affectively (particularly simultaneously universally) ‘located’ in experience, in nature, in culture and in life, as immanent ethicized collective 3

What we think about the nature of things. Zetesis, or in ancient Greek ζητησις, means search, examination or inquiry www.marriam-web ster.com retrieved 04.03.2020.

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knowledge—and learning practices. Learning ultimately theorized as iterative, indirect and informal ethicized processes. Autoethnographic writing fueling and mobilizing constant productive tensions within poshumanist research approaches and methodological positions. Poshumanisms being the canvas I write with for other. Ravaisson (1830–1900) argued that habit, as habitual movement and, therefore, an embodied tendency or practice, must be looked at from a specific point of view. He states that: ‘Both physical and rationalist theories are lacking on this point. The law of habit can be explained only by the development of a Spontaneity that is at once active and passive, equally opposed to a mechanical Fatality and to reflective Freedom’ (Ravaisson, 1838/2016, p. 44). As both active and passive, traversing mind and body, individual and social, it can have potentially empowering/emancipatory as well as potentially harmful effects/affects (van der Tuin et al., 2019). Given such habit-challenging healthy realisms, autoethnographic writing can therefore also be conceptualized as doing research with critical concepts. Critical concepts for the creative humanities are always being performative and methodological, inherently experimental and open to yet-unknown territories of thought (van der Tuin & Verhoeff, forthcoming): a research theorymethod that is intrinsically dynamic, as concepts are never applied onto neither subjects nor objects. Rather it is to research with concepts to sharpen our theoretical toolbox. Thinking with, through, and beyond concepts involves developing conceptual foci while also, and at the same time however, designing for debate. These are interiological approaches and/of betweenness. I therefore ask what can a concept and a story about leadership do, and what can I continue to ask and learn from it? Fabulations and uncertainty is a necessary resource that I need to make sure is being understood as a greater good in the personnel group. It is something that we need to bring up in plenary many times during the year, and is probably due to none of us being trained to offer attention and give space to any doubts. Why should we then give space to insecurities and what is truth? Why is it wise to make stops together? It takes a lot of effort and practising before a pedagogical leader is confident to challenge her colleagues. We are afraid of hurting each other and need to practice being honest, supportive, and forward cultures in which doubts and insecurity is regarded as high competence. We therefore need to highlight doubt as a resource. I have experienced that this is something we need to rehearse at different meetings and forms of meetings. We have to highlight that doubts and critical views of our own practises is pivotal for a kindergarten to be innovative. We explore new approaches, experiment and explore repeatedly. It implies that we want increased understandings of processes through constantly searching for better solutions. (Reinertsen & Flatås, 2017, p. 168)

7.2 Therefore, I Write Ellis and Bochner (2000) offer a classical definition and description of what autoethnographic writing might be: ‘Autoethnography is an autobiographical genre of writing and research that displays multiple layers of consciousness, connecting the personal to the cultural’ (p. 739). Further, the writer uses her own experiences in a particular culture ‘reflexively to bend back on herself and look more deeply at self-other interactions’ (2000, p. 740). I add the personal and cultural to the natural,

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the personal, cultural, natural to the political. As far as reflexivity is concerned, I add diffractions and refractions laying bare decentered and multiple connections between selves, concepts, words and world. Ultimately, I am proposing an innovative view of wor(l)ding with texts as expression and action, and of writing as an act of conquering acknowledgements. It implies a de facto end of critique embracing change—that which always comes, as the normal (Reinertsen, 2019, 2020) ultimately leaving the field of ECE and leadership to neither tradition nor empiricists but to storytellers and writers. Autoethnographic writing might be evocative, analytic, braided, performative, critical, multimodal, collaborative and collective focusing equally on the unknown and unconscious in thoughts as the unknown and unconscious in the body. Therefore, we need expanded research methods and methodologies and to speak of research with and withness, as I try here to write with the concept of leadership and/for to put it in play. Instead of brooding over own feelings, this is about engaging in research to get closer to the child when researching leadership. It is a documentation of discoveries and the value of post-representative micro-perspectives. Ellis (1999) claims that it is possible to avoid representation if we view our projects as closer to art than science. She writes: ‘… then your goal would not be so much to portray the facts of what happened to you accurately but instead to convey the meanings you attached to the experience. You’d want to tell a story that readers could enter and feel a part of. You’d write in a way to evoke readers to feel and think about your life and their lives in relation to yours. You’d want them to experience the experience you’re writing about’ (p. 674). In my case, this is about ECE leadership and bringing back the missing child. I will start with asking what I can learn from Early Childhood Teacher Education (ECTE) having been turned into leadership training. The way I see this, it is part and parcel of the current ‘quality’ discourse: the construction of a ‘quality crisis’, and how leaders are supposed to be part of the solution. I write from a Norwegian policy and practice perspective. The last years we have experienced a huge quantitative expansion of the field and a private public divide. And further, huge efforts to, so call, professionalize the field. Second, I ask what I can learn from and ask between? Learning and asking between different types and conceptualizations of leadership, between different subject matters, between different types of knowledges with/in different levels of hierarchies: asking between multiple theories and methodologies of change and continuity, and hence discussing the place of curious contestation—or more precisely the lack of it, in early childhood leadership education and discourse. Third, I ask what I can learn from the intensity and desire of raw–in this case– leadership moments (Deleuze & Guattari, 2004, p. 355) in which habits and hierarchies may be reversed or temporarily dissolved, creating a fluid, malleable situation that enables new thoughts, insights, knowing, institutions and customs to become established. I ask what the dissolution of order can teach me about what kind of qualities and abilities ECE leaders need to be equipped with? I concentrate on leadership for organizational learning, a view of leadership and organization as emergent and constantly in the making, constructing affective assemblages of becomings as possibilized heterotopias with heterotopias seen as ‘counter-sites of enacted utopias

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through which reality is simultaneously represented, contested, and inverted’ (Charteris et al., 2017, p. 340). Heterotopias are ‘physical or mental spaces where, although norms of behaviours are suspended, there are connections with a plethora of other spaces’ (Charteris et al., 2017, p. 340, my emphasis). I both start and end with an attempt to bring back the child, and in writing to conquer an estranged but widespread understanding of pedagogy and pedagogical practices as glue, gluing theory, practice, people and subject matters together hoping for some sort of amalgamation. In my view, we do not need glue. We need a decentered educational system with strong local control and professional de-authorized or (non)5 autonomy cultivating creativity and/of/with individual talents, creating heterotopologies that are translocal and post-representative. Paraphrasing, this is my indirect take on mapping humans in/as/of/with the center of localization, diversification, personalization and leadership. Focusing on the child first and foremost and what we think a child and childhood might become, the becoming child and childhood… Further, and important as far as learning is concerned, I think that to be educationally practical, any leadership, application or platform must be designed for production as change itself not for any types of rewards or fixed, distance goals. Implicitly this is partly also why I mess up my own language sometimes. Learning can probably never be a visible phenomenon, and glue is in no way a practical metaphor. Deleuze and Guattari (2004) write: ‘For it is through writing that you become animal, it is through color that you become imperceptible, it is through music that you become hard and memoryless, simultaneously animal and imperceptible: In love’ (p. 208). These are vulnerable processes but honest, genuine or authentic touching ground…

7.3 When Educating Teachers Has Become Leadership Training Leadership and the leadership of early childhood education services is recognized as an important factor in the quality of education and care experienced by children and their families. Educating Early Years professionals has largely become leadership training. Through 3 or more years of studies, students, later professionals, are expected to learn how to lead learning processes of children (first year of study), colleagues (second year) and organizations (third year). The concept of leadership is comprised of strategic, pedagogical, human resource and administrative aspects and methods. And further, as an obligation and role to lead learning and knowledge creation processes for competence building for change; ultimately, for social and educational justice (Norwegian Directorate for Education and Training, 2017). Professionalization of the early childhood field is recent, when compared with other sectors of the education profession. This means that new leaders still rely mainly on tradition, custom and practice in developing as leaders, rather than on approaches 5

More on the non, aporia and formal negativity below.

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that have been locally tested and developed theoretically and empirically. This is partly due to contemporary models of leadership for early childhood settings having been drawn from contexts such as schools and business, which are professionally, culturally and industrially different to early childhood services (Heikka et al., 2013; Reinertsen & Flatås, 2017). Further, the application of New Public Management (NPM) goal orientation and performance management has resulted in a uniformity of the field leading to a lack of theoretical and scientific crossover and/or transdisciplinary approaches within the field itself. Formal structures, calculations and tradition are preventing interdisciplinary collaboration and theory–practice development for change. These are conceptualizations which position the expectation of leadership in/of education as an always, already assumed component of the social/political contexts within which educators work, and one, which often remains unchallenged by those very educators. This leaves the ECE field and leadership in a paradoxical high stake but vulnerable position in need of a (non) autonomous, empirically diffractive construction of itself as profession/al: of leaders–able to reflect critically and control their own practices based on propositional knowledge that can be incorporated into their own leadership practices. It is a sort of quantum entanglements and/or a quantum flow (Deleuze & Guattari, 2004, p. 239) and/of/for quantum competences with relations of obligations to the child interwoven into the fabric of the ECE world (Reinertsen & Flatås, 2017, p. 24). Leaders seen as conceptual workers putting their leading practices in collective play with the child and becoming. In a New Public Management and audit culture, pluri- or post-factual6 but polarized public discourse, the concepts of professionalism and leadership are therefore vital for a field to conquer. This is to get away from post-positivist thinking and unbridled optimisms of connections in organizations, in learning, in science and research alike. And further require situating rich and complex views of professionalization and leaderships in the making that eschew simplistic notions of ‘equity’, ‘quality’ or ‘access’ to particular forms of educational provision and models. In a power struggle perspective, this is a condition often both experienced and expressed as a loss of power of definition and struggles of/for factual authority. In my view, this is pointless because concepts and knowledge are always there and everywhere to think with regardless. Building on this, Braidotti (2019) claims that we are situated between a posthuman collapse between the fourth Industrial Revolution and the sixth Extinction of Species, between advanced knowledge economies, which continue discriminating patterns of inclusion, exclusion and threats of climate change. Piketty (2014) has already given us the numbers and history. However, such collapse demands critical interventions regarding how we constitute subjectivity, how we view knowledge creation generally and how we construct or form our academic in general and leadership practices specifically. It is a time in which knowledge production no longer exclusively belongs to 6

Post-factuality refers to a situation in which people are more likely to accept an argument based on their emotions and beliefs, rather than one based on facts www.dictionary.cambridge.org (retrieved January 13, 2020).

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academic and formal scientific and educational institutions and it challenges opinions that isolate learning as something primarily academic and linguistic. With Braidotti, and given this view of post-factuality and polarized public discourses of power struggles and/of/for factual authority, it becomes impossible to find a joint or common point of agreement about what information, numbers, data and facts might function as and lay a foundation for good knowledge-based solutions. The struggles are about who should produce facts, what kind of facts, how and why. But instead of viewing this as possibilizing contestations for difference and change, navigating knowledge landscapes of professionalisms and leadership, deliberations and dialogs are turned into mundane battles of facts through the excluded algorithmic middle: facts produced through an individual self or, rather, ownproduced facts, paradoxically based in a belief in facts, but neither seen as preliminary nor mutually agreed upon. This leaves, as I see this, concepts and performances of professionalism and leadership, ultimately education and pedagogy, in a dichotomous stasis between transgression and change, and in need of being taken back to the ECE field itself to think with and to be conquered. Conquered through autoethnographic writing with reference to the zetetic and prepersonal intensity and affected curiosity, as both method and means for creating emancipatory spaces for ECE leaders and learning, and a production of facts through the logics of the included middle requiring the ability of textual pluri—or polycritical activisms (Reinertsen, accepted for publication), and being allowed to. Free to lead in the moment and locally where I/we/you are: performing leadership through passaging from one experiential state of my/the body to another, increasing my/the (body’s) capacity to act… My approach here can therefore also be seen as a widening and deepening of traditional conceptualizations of participatory action research theories and methodologies advancing the ECE field however, beyond simplistic-centered conceptualizations and policies and/of autonomy and identity, moving it with/in immanent ethicized collective as group individuated knowledge and learning practices.

7.4 The Art of not Knowing Before I continue, I will quickly return to the first question I asked about what to learn from ECE having become leadership education. Given the situation of stasis described above, I claim that reaching our goals of evidence-based and knowledgeinformed leadership practices, professionalization, learning and development might depend on the opposite, might depend on opening up to the art of not knowing expressed as a nomadic patience and endurance and hence embracing positions of open autoethnographic affective explorations and storytelling. It is an aporetic position, a formal negativity challenging and/or helping unpack ingrained habits. Indirectly, I try to theorize what leadership education and learning might involve. What kind of processes leadership, learning and knowledge creation, let alone innovation and change, demand. There are ghosts in the/our/my machineries, and I think we paradoxically ask too much and too little simultaneously. We have high expectations

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but I wonder if we ask the right questions, if we ask young professionals what it means to do the right thing(s). In considering the 22- or 23-year-old who is supposed to lead: What is it that we ask? What is it fair to ask of them? What can we ask? What should we ask? What do we expect our students to become/perform? What do we actually teach them to perform? Why do we teach them leadership instead of teaching them about becoming child? I claim that we both ideally and normatively encourage leaders to be daring and radical: to take risks. We ask them to translate policies and programs radically combined with forwarding methodological freedom and decision-making practices. Freedom for all, within NPM discourses and rhetoric specifically is seen as a gift to be knowledgeable about and with the best interest of ultimately the child in mind. It is wonderful but without critical interventions as those called for by Braidotti (2019) and others, about how we constitute subjectivity and create knowledge, I am afraid we will not succeed. The work, given current conceptualizations and/of/in postfactual conditions, is too hard, unhealthy, too demanding and too risky individually and personally (Reinertsen, 2014). As such, instead of opening up to risk taking and innovation, potentialities of vitality and productive contestation go unnoticed, leading to conformity and tradition. Here then, is where doses of constant realisms must start working to position leadership as collective knowledge creation and learning practices emergent and in the making, building, with reference to the question about what qualities and abilities ECE leaders need to be equipped with, the type of (non) autonomous shared but decentered organizational patience and endurance that is required. The art of not knowing, the aporetic prefix non, exposes simultaneously embraces positions of open autoethnographic affective and radical explorations of habits. It is what we want, but always differently, and paradoxically much more profoundly and urgently than I think we tend to believe. Rather, it demands a r/evolution (Reinertsen, 2018) in how we think we think. The concepts of leadership, professionalism, autonomy are— as all concepts must be—collapsed, diffracted, put into play and wor(l)ded through (with a nod to both Ravaisson again and also Simondon (2017)) the Deleuzian (2002) philosophy and pedagogy of the concept of desire, as a system of: a-signifying signs with which fluxes of the unconscious are produced in a social field. There is no blossoming of desire, wherever it happens–in an unremarkable family or a local school– which does not call established structures into question. Desire is revolutionary because it always wants more connections and assemblages. (Gilles Deleuze in Deleuze & Parnet, 2002, pp. 78–79)

Deleuze (and Guattari) forward a productive processuality as a sort of machinic model through desire. As such, they go against, for example, a Freudian conception of unconsciousness as a representation of something–often unclear and unsettled–in need of bursting through. Instead, they claim that desire (2004) is not an imagined force based on, e.g., lacks, wrongs or shortcomings, but a real and productive force. Hence, this is action research but as activism spoken by life, productive contestations and minded mattered languaging, attributing subjectivity and potential to all beings, human and non-human, considering aesthetics and affect as the fabric that binds all existence:

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Praise and affirmation is important and increase in value and potential if the respondent parallel to this asks good questions that are mirroring praxis in our goals and children’s thoughts. This will increase both competence and engagement in exploring possibilities, pursue a project or theme over a longer period. We are often too hasty and finish things too early, and this makes us primarily move on the surface of things. With a larger focus on exploring and experimenting the personnel’s curiosity and eagerness to learn increase. These conditions have to be created before one again can support the child in rich processes. (Reinertsen & Flatås, 2017, p. 169)

7.5 Writing Ethicized Realisms; Autoethnographic Habit-Challenging Writing as My Conquering Strategy To consolidate and with (again) calls for critical interventions in mind, I write an autoethnographic approach aiming at conquering and/or taking the concept of leadership back to think with it and explore, asking what I can learn from it—and ask between—challenging habits. Writing as doing with texts to foster patterns of becomings, thus affirming the positive structure of difference. Writing as opening the self up to possible encounters with affective outsides, collapsing divides in me. Writing as moving between different theory and practice perspectives, and through this providing knowledges serving to stimulate and decenter the conscience of ECE leaders, on what they know, enabling us/them to develop that knowledge and allowing us/them to have a point of reference to fit our/their own experiences. Productive contestations as what we must… To be clear, critical concepts are productive and experimental ‘doings’, enmeshed in practice, rather than fixed, retrospective labels for things that seemingly exist before and outside of research. They guide me to where and when I start, and to the encounter with/in which both I/we as researcher and you/us as researched come into being/becoming. ‘The concepts are, contrary to making positivism-induced retrograde movements, inherently experimental and open up to yet-unknown territories of thought’ (van der Tuin & Verhoeff, forthcoming). The aim is to affirm the existence of different onto-epistemologies and the exigence of learning how to think, transgressing qualitative-quantitative, freedom-control, subject-object, individualcollective, nature-culture and body-mind divides. It is a move from centered views of leadership focused on identity and individuality, to a decentered view of leadership with a focus on collective becomings. Writing is thus ultimately conceptualized as an ethical endeavor to explore and to cultivate more inclusive orientations for research, for leadership and learning. To do autoethnographic research with concepts, habits and conquests is to actively balance through differentiated spaces and affects repeatedly to escape the tyrannies of perceived opinions, to avoid nudging becoming shoving (Reinertsen, 2020), creating ‘bigger’ places and spaces, embracing also that which is not yet there. Always rewriting what is, moving other ways, moving the immobile, moving difference: with difference in situations always already classed, gendered and ethnicized. Leaving

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me/you/us always with preliminary knowledges, which I/we through autoethnographic writing can continue to reveal and explore further as a constant activist interrogation of our subjective judgements and ethical onto-epistemic conduct.

7.6 The Image of the Rhizome and/as Writing I build on the deleuzeoguattarian image of the rhizome. The rhizome stretches from biological cell and microscopic levels of particles to our abstract dreams and thoughts about and in life. It is an image and notion of the meaning of connections and movements, productions of constant importance of—and for—each/other. The importance of—and for—the child. It is real and virtual and ‘operates through variation, expansion, conquest, capture, offshoots’ (Deleuze & Guattari, 2004, p. 23). The rhizome breaks all patterns and creates new, as lines and points, which affectively collapse with/in themselves, and is like a constant writing—or machinic short-term memory creating constant new movements and dynamic maps for leadership and educative quality. Creating shifting subject positions. Autoethnographic research therefore never leaves us to it: it always urges us to rethink, think repeatedly and again, and loving it even if it is exhausting sometimes and unpleasant. This is the stuff of collective reciprocity and responsibility in professionalism and leadership: a constant de-authorized desire or energy of doubtful rethinking. Scientifically speaking, this is an interiology again, perhaps with aspects of neologism. It cannot be written in traditional conceptual languages of logics and causality. It needs concepts that are vibrating with potentialities, not positivist representation. This is therefore an attempt to theorize leadership from within, open up the leadership action or event itself for new and more visions of realities, and to position leadership, as stated above, as ‘located’ in experience, in nature, in culture and in life, as collective knowledge—and learning practices constantly in the making, (non)teleological and contingent. We continued writing about what we were part of and how to succeed in practice. We worked a lot with children’s voices, and about being sensitive towards every child. As time went by, we saw that there were many different things we could work with. Gradually we linked our writing to the GWPs that regulate all ECECs in Norway and the leadership-contract with our local municipality. In the beginning, we wrote about what we succeeded at, but gradually we started speculations and wonderings about [if] what we were doing actually was in line with goals and intensions?–and I think we felt that what we wrote actually broke with the intentions. That which is at the executive level that is and a commitment for working in ECECs in the first place. That was exiting and it opened up perspectives and possibilities about thinking differently about us. … Finding out more about what we are doing, and if we could recognize it as learning? Could we define it as learning?–or reduce it to/as learning … (Holly, in Thomas & Reinertsen, 2016, p. 93)

It is an investment in and creation of amplifying affects through writing and storying that contributes to or engenders a sensitivity to the immanent intensive

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and affective processes that condition thought: thought provocations or collapse that usher us towards experiences that more closely resemble the intensive level and desire it operates. Activating the ethical task in education, which demands that we/I approach other stories, the other stories, stories about the other and me… riddles of being, voicing and not, because I must and stories do. Asking between, becoming educationally practical… Every word becoming a tracing of what that word looks like in practice right now, recognizing leadership for quality when you see it. Turning leadership simultaneously into something both minor and major. The space one builds for newness turns into a place in which one empties or deconstructs one’s own words and practises only to fill them up again. These are iterative processes. Dimensions of time and space are opened up and broken, alternative cartographies of leadership and learning are possibilized. Language workers in materiality all… I, this article, this quantifying writing constructs autoethnography as a heterotopology of ECE. I deploy translocal fabulations and/or speculative philosophy to re-story leadership. What I can learn from it, and what kind of qualities and abilities leaders need to be equipped with… Leadership subjectivities are produced and often constrained within powerful educational discourses. This is a critique of the discursive production of selves. Subjectivations of identity politics in matricized assemblages may be, even if momentarily, evaded, refused and agentically resisted, ultimately, producing thought-propelling leaders capable of doing more than within doxa where articulating theoretical goals, visions, rules and measurements are the ‘order’ of the day. Rather, the leader and child are continually becoming each other’s particular but universal motifs. Did I say organization and learning… For me the core in pedagogy and pedagogical leadership is durability, the sensual, respect and enthusiasm for the individual human being. I am concerned with the whole personnel group achieving professional piece of mind and simultaneously know[ing] an urge to grow in their respective positions, an urge to go further, try more, to understand and perform their work through constantly new and better approaches. Life in kindergarten is complex, and to a large extent it consists of decision making in relation to what the singular employee must and can prioritize in every interpersonal relation throughout the (every) day. Dynamic or movable practices are required–and expected of everyone. The whole personnel group must be prepared to make new decisions and prioritize between which traces to follow at all times. (Reinertsen & Flatås, 2017, p. 93) The child and the pedagogue’s abilities of duration, sensation, respect and enthusiasms touches and affects. The child becomes alive and positively visible for the group, and a good or able pedagogue will make new realizations in meetings with a child again and again, see the child again and again. (Reinertsen & Flatås, 2017, p. 113)

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7.7 A Post-representative Translocal and Heterotopic Guide: Organizational Learning Through Dissolution of Order Rapid developments in society might lead to changes in educational structures and contents in the future. In strategic work with education research, one should therefore look far ahead, for example, through use of foresight (framsyn), through including different user groups. Regardless of this, there will be a need for new perspectives and approaches in research about and for the sector in the future. This requires willingness to take risks in research and innovation, which is something the department wishes to facilitate. (Ministry of Education & Research, 2020, p. 13, my translation)

What then about all these realisms and subjective becomings? This real deleuzoguattarian force and desire… Further, and to continue; what about the questions about what abilities leaders and researchers need to be equipped with? I can only answer indirectly. Through what it must not be/come. Leadership is made from virtualities, events and singularities. This does not imply a lack of realities, only that something has become procedurally actualized. The way I see this, and indirectly also referring to the Norwegian Government Ministry of Education White Paper (2018) on the long-term plan for research and higher education 2019–2028, this not only highlights the importance of the speculative, utopian or/or fabulative aspects of this theorymethod. It forwards foresight in our practices and research, hence the necessity of building in the post-representative and translocal aspects of the same practices and research to create movement in our subjective judgements, writing forward another concept of quality as force in everyday practices. Leadership for quality through movements materialized through procedural events. Leadership as a pulse for action and the sense of joy from the weight of a bucket of sand: moments when tidying up the mess on the floor are seen as traces of active hands. Leadership sensing the attention as educative processes and values, not only as training and duties. Leadership as a possibility to turn knowledge into knowing, wanting into doing, seeing into owing, owing into sensing… Steinnes (2004) in referring to Jacques Derrida (1930–2004) points out that ‘questions bring us… to the paradoxical truth that unambiguous truths do not exist. A rigorous quest for truths leads us beyond a wish for unambiguous eternal truths and into landscapes where truth instead shows a face of multiplicity, plasticity and transformation’ (Steinnes, 2004, p. 674, my translation). The virtual conditions the conquest as iterative tracings of the becomings of events without fitting it into certain logics and narrative aspects. Moments in which importance and meanings are liberated and sensational becomings continue to work. Transforming one event into the other navigating knowledges in/of/for life and leadership for new. Newness in (non) planned moments underway in our daily activities, a choice of expertise in context. Leadership as learning difference. Leaders enduring the toil and liberated from it. Leaderships and leaders living places saturated with pictures, sounds, smells, people, sorrows, joy, walks and landscapes, odd and funny in fine-grained thought webs. Dripping wet raincoats and the light in the windowsill is red, lilac, no blue…

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There was this boy about five years of age. He had many things in his home situation to–so called, think about. When he sensed that I sensed some of it, he said, ‘Please, don’t ask me.’ I promised not to. We played together and had many good days. One of the challenges in his home was how to wash clothes. Especially how to wash woolen garments, which shrink if, washed in too hot water. We almost could not get the sweaters passed his ears sometimes. Often we just let him borrow another sweater. We have this reserveclothesbox … On one occasion, I cut his sweater open with a scissors, crochet around the neck and sowed in a button. The boy and his parents were pleased with it. One morning he came, very quiet, and with his eyes lowered. I sat down with him and asked if he wanted to go and play with the others? He whispered, ‘Can you cut this one open too?’ We just went and did it. Afterwards, he went to play bringing with him a chance to learn … with his friends and safe (Reinertsen & Flatås, 2017, p. 36)

This is leadership with a view to leading and organizing the kindergarten and those who work there professionally closer together, and closer to the individual child. It is leadership and an ethics in which change is built in along a continuum of movements in tensions between the personal and the political, the ECE leadership discourses becoming politicized in a micro-perspective, putting difference in motion creating moments of educational justice. Such leaders—and in non-dichotomous and informal ways: –operate beyond an ego, but continue their personal development and learning. They are radical, ethical, authentic, emotionally intelligent and caring. They are capable of building in authentic, ethical and emotionally intelligent behavior into the organizational DNA and build strong collaborative relations and create practices that strengthen actions that contribute to ethics, care and sustainability. (Young, 2016, p. 1)

In his seminal work Archaeology of Knowledge (1969) Foucault examines which practices make the establishment of knowledge possible. There are different knowledge practises: economic, political, moral, religious, judicial and so on. All knowledge production stages knowledge practices, and Foucault’s knowledge archaeology describes how different sciences incorporate, reactivate and create a network of different strategies. Foucault determines that knowledge and power constitute each other. For example, knowledge about the individual leader can primarily be generated through a set of power mechanisms: discipline, monitoring, examining, registration, classification and hierarchization. Individualized knowledge is therefore built on procedures of power forwarding knowledge about an individual. Knowledge acquisition is seen as conditioned through the exercise of power. Leaders will be required to follow some of these mechanisms, but as we have seen, I claim that there are other ways and methods to create knowledge: where, how, which knowledge and for whom. With Foucault, I think that the normative or critical significance of knowledge is irrelevant. What is interesting, and with reference to neoliberalism and New Public Management, is that which is accepted as knowledge in a society. Foucault denies that a piece of knowledge represents an independent reality. Rather, a ‘discourse is the historical, social and cultural conditions possibilizing that an utterance or action is

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considered as natural or acceptable’.7 Foucault’s historical works are about showing how new epistemics grow forward often in processes comprised of diverse fields of theories and practices, gradually melding together. Foucault wanted to break with a view of science as teleological and corresponding ways of telling stories of science and research as constant improvements, constant higher levels of rationality bringing simultaneously to the fore ‘disqualified knowledges’ through ‘which criticism performs its work’ and with it ‘a return of knowledge’ (Foucault, 1980, p. 82). I think it also applies to the field of pedagogy and leadership and importantly what is considered natural and acceptable. I, therefore, cannot not mention the current debates about the two dominating programs in Norway aimed at improving schools and kindergartens. The programs are called decentralized arrangement for competence increase in schools (DEKOMP) and regional arrangement for competence increase in kindergarten (REKOMP).8 Both have turned into centralized and commercialized programs and discourses of knowledge creation.9 A raw power struggle about contents and values, about quality and quantity, learning as process or product, left-wing right-wing politics has erupted. This has happened contrary to all good intentions and talk of the importance of local initiatives, local ownership and efforts by professional teachers within their own practices. I have a hunch that something is wrong here… and a need to break… At a personnel meeting, the theme was how to organize groups of children together. Due to maintenance work in our buildings, we had to regroup. This was not a new situation, our environment has to be maintained regularly, but this time the personnel sensed that there were things that did not work well. We talked about the current situation, ad hoc solutions and more long-term improvements. It turned into critical reflections through stories that moved us alternately triggered laughter and tears. We talked a long time about the psychosocial environment for both the children and the professionals. Many difficult and critical questions were asked, and I highlighted all the positive things that they succeeded in, and expressed that they were self-reflexive and discovered all challenges themselves. The questioning continued and then one of the assistants said: ‘Yes, now you can see what this turns into when we invest so much in critical reflection!’ We all laughed, and an empowered personnel-group started the practical work to change, maintain and renew our environment. We touched a lot concerned with collaboration, workflows, individual and joint responsibilities. That is not easy to manage in personnel-groups that are not trained in meaning-exchange, positive valuations of resistance and doubt. Here we meet in a highly competent group trained to present, discuss and argue while caring for each other and the children. (Reinertsen & Flatås, 2017, p. 145)

7

Grue, Jan: diskurs i Store norske leksikon på snl.no. Hentet 14. februar 2021 fra https://snl.no/dis kurs. 8 DEKOMP (Desentralisert ordning for kompetanseheving i skolen) and REKOMP (Regional ordning for kompetanseheving i barnehage). 9 www.dagsavisen.no.

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7.8 Bringing Back the Child: Crying My Eyes Out Over What Pedagogics Has Been Reduced to I write about bringing back the child and in writing to conquer the understanding of pedagogy and pedagogical practices as glue. My particular criticism of neoliberalism is that it lures me into seeing leadership and myself as an individual but innocent or neutral bystander, observing the ECE world from a freestanding perspective. Turning the pedagogue, the leader, me into a too little/too much, good or bad amalgamation glue. The pedagogue easily turned irrelevant and overshadowed by other persuasive discourses. This might be seen as a side effect of centralized control and my discussion here as a defence of the subjective judgment of leaders. It both is and is not. In ethicized practices there must never be an either or, for or against, central or local, subject or object, private or public, left wing or right wing… And as an always necessary digression: I am not a ‘Brahman’ (Piketty in Jakobsen, 2019). The traditional left-wing parties and policies have become, what Piketty calls, brahmanized. They forward middle class values and draw voters from the well-educated middleclass. They reduce distribution issues and focus on values anchored in the self-assertive asceticism of the educational elite, turning them into carriers of a middleclass moralism which estranges them from the working classes. Left-wing right-wing divisions in politics no longer express divisions between classes but rather, a rivalry between money elites and educational elites (Jakobsen, 2019, p. 25, my translation). I add rivalry within… Therefore, there is no glue, only more and other connectivities and difference always but as something affectively eternal traversing time and place. Something imperceptible, affirmative, particular and universal. Focus is the child and nothing else: subjective professionalization and pragmatic work within different discourses through zetetic inquiry. It turns the pedagogue and pedagogical leadership into the ultimate sharpened profession and science, demanding of us an increased focus and deeper scientific professionalization and quantum competences through being allowed to, allowing oneself to affect and being affected. Therefore and again, I advocate using embodied autoethnographic writing and stories as a resource for learning and complexity, expansions and insights. Turning early childhood organizations, institutions and schools into post-representational localities or places of transition, their main task becoming that of not passing on traditions but to prepare for future contingent events. Asking questions about what would be the right thing to do for the child/ECE/school that is involved as an ethicoonto-epistem-ology in practice, here and now. I speculate… authentic, ethical and emotionally intelligent behavior into the organizational DNA… ‘[h]eartful’ (Ellis, 1999) writing… The child is already there waiting for me and my leadership. Like most small children, my son is an active, curious and creative boy with a strong desire to discover the world around him. However, he insists to do that in his own way and resists any effort of being taught. As I watched him grow, I became more and more aware that the conventional school wouldn´t give him enough space to develop.

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These are the words of my seven-year-old boy expressing his frustration over the class-management principles practiced in his school, feeling that he is being treated as an object, rather than a person with his own interests, thoughts and feelings: ‘Nobody asks me what I want to learn. If I finish a task before the others, I have to sit down and draw. The only time I can rest at school is during dictation–in the pause between two words.’ (Parent in email correspondence, autumn 2019).

References Barad, K. (2007). Meeting the universe halfway: Quantum physics and the entanglement of matter and meaning. Duke University Press. Braidotti, R. (2019). The critical posthumanities. Keynote presented at the 10th new materialisms conference: New materialist reconfigurations of higher education, University of the Western Cape, Cape Town, South Africa. Charteris, J., Jones, M., Nye, A., & Reyes, V. (2017). A heterotopology of the academy: Mapping assemblages as possibilised heterotopias. International Journal of Qualitative Studies in Education, 30(4), 340–353. https://doi.org/10.1080/09518398.2016.1250178 Deleuze, G., & Guattari, F. (2004). A thousand plateaus: Capitalism and schizophrenia. Continuum. Deleuze, G., & Parnet, C. (2002). Dialogues (H. Tomlinson, B. Habberjam & E. R. Albert, Trans.). Columbia University Press. (Original work published 1977). Ellis, C. (1999). Heartful autoethnography. Qualitative Health Research, 9(5), 669–683. Ellis, C., & Bochner, A. P. (2000). Autoethnography, personal narrative, and reflexivity: Research as subject. In N. K. Denzin & Y. S. Lincoln (Eds.), Handbook of qualitative research (pp. 733–768). Sage. Foucault, M. (1969). L’Archéologie du savoir. Éditions Gallimard. Foucault, M. (1980). Two lectures (K. Soper, Trans.). In C. Gordon (Ed.), Power/knowledge: Selected interviews and other writings, 1972–1977 (pp. 78–108). Pantheon Books. Heikka, J., Waniganayake, M., & Hujala, E. (2013). Contextualizing distributed leadership within early childhood education: Current understandings, research evidence and future challenges. Educational Management, Administration & Leadership, 41(4), 30–44. https://doi.org/10. 1177/1741143212462700 Jakobsen, K. A. (2019). Ulikhetenes verdenshistorie. Thomas Piketteys «Capital et idéologie» forklart. https://agendamagasin.no/artikler/ulikhetenes-verdenshistorie-thomas-pikettys-capitalideologie-forklart/ Ministry of Education and Research. (2018). Long-term plan for research and education 2019–2028. https://www.regjeringen.no/no/dokumenter/meld.-st.-4-20182019/id2614131/ Ministry of Education and Research. (2020). Forskning, kunnskapsmegling og bruk; Strategi for Utdanningsforskning 2020–2024. https://www.regjeringen.no/no/aktuelt/forskning-kunnsk apsmegling-og-bruk/id2684854/ Norwegian Directorate for Education and Training. (2017). Framework plan for the kindergarten. https://www.udir.no/laring-og-trivsel/rammeplan/ Piketty, T. (2014) Capital in the twenty-first century (A. Goldhammer, Trans.). The Belknap Press of Harvard University Press. Ravaisson, F. (2016). Of habit (C. Carlisle, Trans.). In M. Sinclair (Ed.), Félix Ravaisson: Selected essays (pp. 31–58). Bloomsbury. (Original work published 1838). Reinertsen, A. B. (2014). The choice: Teaching difficult avoiding silencing or the multiplicities of our words and our subjectivities. Open Review of Educational Research, 1(1), 20–27. Reinertsen, A. B. (2018). My ordinary revolutions. Educational Philosophy and Theory, 50, 14. https://doi.org/10.1080/00131857.2018.1458776.

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Reinertsen, A. B. (2019). The end of criticism producing unconscious: Non-personal activist academic writing. In L. M. Thomas & A. B. Reinertsen (Eds.), Academic writing and identity constructions: Performativity, space and territory in academic workplaces. Palgrave MacMillan. Reinertsen, A. B. (2020). Fuzzytechie languaging and consilience: Dataphilosophy and transdisciplinary digital force for justice. Policy Futures in Education. https://doi.org/10.1177/147821031 9900599 Reinertsen, A. B., & Flatås, B. (2017). Ledelse og poesi i barnehagen; Affektive perspektiver i pedagogiske praksiser:/Leadership and poetry in kindergarten; Affective perspectives in pedagogical practises. Fagbokforlaget Simondon, G. (2017) On the mode of existence of technical objects (C. Malaspina & J. Rogove, Trans.). Univocal Publishing. Steinnes, J. (2004) «Er det mulig å være pedagog» / Is it possible to be pedagogue. In Steinsholt K. & Løvlie, L. Pedagogikkens mange ansikter, pedagogisk idehistorie fra antikken til det postmoderne. / The many faces of pedagogy, a history of ideas from antiquity to postmodernity. Oslo: Universitetsforlaget, pp. 669–683 Thomas, L., & Reinertsen, A. B. (2016). Writing matters in leadership practice. Reconceptualizing Educational Research Methodology, 7(2), 85–100. van der Tuin, I., Verhoeff, N., Dagiene, V., de Freitas, L., & Sinclair, N. (2019). Researching with «habit». Symposium at the 10th new materialisms conference: New materialist reconfigurations of higher education, University of the Western Cape, Cape Town South Africa. van der Tuin, I., & Verhoeff, N. (forthcoming). Critical concepts for the creative humanities. Rowman & Littlefield International. Young, G. (2016). Women, naturally the best leaders for the 21st century. Transpersonal leadership series: White paper two. London.

Anne B. Reinertsen is professor in philosophy of education, qualitative research methodologies, knowledges of practice and evaluation research. She has worked as teacher, teacher educator and leader. Her research interests are subjective professionalism, leadership, materiality of language, new configurations of research methodologies and slow scholarship. She has been a visiting scholar at Stanford University and the University of Illinois, USA. Her publications include national and international books, journals and book chapters.

Chapter 8

Nick-Storying and the Body’s Immersion and Participation in the World: Forming Aggregates for Early Childhood Education Camilla Eline Andersen and Susan Naomi Nordström Abstract This chapter concerns thinking about how bodies become, and how to aggregate ongoing experiments toward a different future for human and more-thanhuman coexistence in early childhood education and beyond. To do so we turn our focus toward how human bodies as living matter provide a surface for cultural inscription. In conversation with Grosz (The nick of time: Politics, evolution, and the untimely, 2004) we are grasping a radical thinking about the nature and ontology of the body and making connections to how this conceptualization might create a different starting point for equity and justice practices in educational early childhood institutions. In doing so we also perform the practice of nick-storying. Nick-storying is an open-ended storying practice that contains the events of recognizing that one’s body is not one’s own. Nick-storying in this chapter are aggregates that might cohere and unleash material forces in the world to invent ways to live. Keywords Storying · Nick-storying · Body · Nature/ontology of the body · Grosz · Social regulation · Political activism · Just futures 30 trillion cells 30 trillion different forms and functions working to produce movement and thought 30 trillion cells generated by DNA to create a unique iteration of generations of history 30 trillion cells creating a now in human form moving through space and time

C. E. Andersen (B) Inland Norway University of Applied Sciences, Hamar, Norway e-mail: [email protected] S. N. Nordström University of Memphis, Memphis, USA e-mail: [email protected] © The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature Singapore Pte Ltd. 2022 C. Blyth and T. K. Aslanian (eds.), Children and the Power of Stories, Children: Global Posthumanist Perspectives and Materialist Theories, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-981-16-9287-1_8

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8.1 Introduction A starting point for us in this chapter is that human bodies are socially regulated and central for worldly struggles, and that this is of ethical and political importance for the field of early childhood education. To assert that bodies are socially regulated relates to a tradition in sociological and cultural theory that focuses on how bodies are inscribed by culture, and how social and cultural processes manifest in thoughts, actions, in the becoming of the body, and in the habits of subjects so that they appear natural and automatic (Blackman, 2008; Grosz, 2004). Human bodies are key to worldly struggles as differences and inequalities due to social inscription are lived through the body; they are embodied (Coffey & Watson, 2015). Accordingly, how we know and approach phenomena such as, for example, discrimination and inequality is co-productive of the becoming of these phenomena and hence also affects how to work with them in early childhood pedagogical practices (Barad, 2007). Posthuman storytelling can function as a practice that challenges habitual ways of knowing. This implies that how we write stories is of importance when grappling with knowing and doing differently. We owe much to feminist theorist Elizabeth Grosz for the partly traditional partly experimental storying practices that run through this chapter. Specifically Grosz’ (2004) argument that if we want to develop political strategies to transform existing social regulation(s) of bodies, we need to work from a more ‘nuanced, intricate account of the body’s immersion and participation in the world’ (p. 2). We read this as a call for working from an account of the body as of the world and as becoming with the world to make different forces of patriarchy, racism, nationalism, colonialism, capitalism, anthropocentrism, and more. Furthermore, this entreaty has inspired us to draw from feminist new materialist conceptualizations of the body, and mainly Grosz’s (2004) philosophical explorations of how the body always finds itself in larger cosmological and biological orders, to create transformative thinking-doing tools for our current ‘posthuman condition’ (Braidotti, 2019). This chapter then is concerned with thinking about how bodies become, and how to aggregate ongoing experiments toward a different future for human and more-than-human coexistence in early childhood education and beyond. In child and youth studies, it is commonly understood that the body is intrinsically linked to issues such as difference and equality (Coffey & Watson, 2015). However, Coffey and Watson (2015) argue that in research focusing on these issues, conceptualizations of the body are more often implicit than explicitly articulated and rarely a ‘central aspect of study in its own right’ (p. 196). Differences and inequalities are instead indirectly understood as lived through the body, positioning the body

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as merely a medium for the living life (Coffey & Watson, 2015). Moreover, they encourage childhood and youth studies scholars to pay more attention to the body and place the body at the center of analysis. In the first paragraph of this text, we wrote of bodies as socially regulated. Conceptualizations of childhood bodies as inscribed by discourses and culture are put to work by many scholars in the field of early childhood education (e.g., Dahlberg & Moss, 2005; Robinson & Jones-Días, 2016). We find this work tremendously important and productive. However, what is difficult to grasp within the logic of bodies as socially constructed is how bodies also have materiality and biology, and how bodies are affected by other bodies (Blackman, 2008). The materiality of the body is marginalized in constructivist conceptualizations of the human body; they lack corporeality (Blackman, 2008; Grosz, 2004). This problem of separating the body from culture, but also the problem of mind– body dualism, has been addressed in the context of feminist debates in relation to sex and gender (Blackman, 2008). These debates led to the emergence of a corporeal feminism, a branch within feminism that affirms a complex relationality between ‘cultural inscription and materialization of the body’ and further suggests basing the understandings of the body upon connection rather than separation (Blackman, 2008, p. 77). Grosz was important for this emergence together with philosopher Rosi Braidotti, who both embraced philosophy as an approach to the problems of cultural inscription (Blackman, 2008). More recently, early childhood education scholars have put to work conceptualizations of the body as relational with affective potentials, and with the quality of acting and of being acted upon (e.g., Antonsen, 2020; Otterstad & Rossholt, 2014). Some 10 years after Grosz’ early movements toward a corporeal feminism, she wants to create a ‘reconfigured concept of the biological body’ (2004, p. 4). She does not leave behind bodies as both culturally inscripted and spatially embodied beings, but adds another layer by exploring a natural world that ‘prefigures, contains, and opens up social and cultural existence to endless becoming’ (pp. 1–2). In turn, Grosz explains, ‘cultural transformation provides further impetus for biological becoming’ (p. 2). Hence, approaching the problem of regulated bodies that embodies inequality in early childhood research should not only work from an engagement with how bodies are inscribed by culture. Rather, we need to include ‘what these bodies are such that inscription is possible’ (p. 2). From this then two questions have become central to us: what is in the nature of human bodies, and how can storying with this account of the body be productive of inventing ways to live in early childhood education? We, the authors, met at a conference on qualitative inquiry in 2014, and have since found various ways of connecting and collaborating. This is, however, the first time we place the human body at the very center for our ongoing shared commitment to include questions concerning thinking politics and ethics anew in our research. Our interest in exploring conceptualizations of the body has emerged from (so far) close to

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five decades (times two) of living as White, female, able-bodied, middle-class bodies that were raised and have continued to live (mostly) in the US and Norway, from embodied conversations over the years on how our bodies are given subjectivity and habits through culture, and also from our previous research separately (e.g. Andersen, 2017; Nordstrom, 2019), and together in a researcher collective. In a publication from this collective, we were concerned with the ways our bodies experienced solidarity based on difference (Nordstrom et al., 2018). In this chapter, however, we turn our focus toward how human bodies as living matter provide a surface for cultural inscription (Grosz, 2004) drawing on the thinking Elizabeth Grosz offers in the book The Nick of Time: Politics, Evolution and the Untimely (2004). Here she explores questions that might seem far from early childhood educational practices. In her words she explores: ‘how the biological prefigures and makes possible the various permutations of life that constitute natural, social, and cultural existence’ (p. 1). In conversation with Grosz (2004), however, we engage a radical thinking about the nature and ontology of the body and making connections to how this conceptualization might create a different starting point for feminism, antiracism, and questions about the politics of globalization. We believe this matters as much to the early childhood education field as any other field. We suggest everyone, no matter how familiar or unfamiliar they are with combining knowledge on biological processes with knowledge on cultural processes when approaching questions of social regulation and worldly struggle in early childhood, to be curious of how this can affect what early childhood education might become. Inspired by Grosz’ (2004) call to work from a more nuanced and intricate account of the body’s immersion and participation in the world presented and by the storying theme that unites the authors contributing in this book, we suggest that there are two main storylines running through this chapter. One being the storying of a philosophical thinking where the body lingers in the space between the biological and the cultural, and the other being the storying of a poem of how bodies become through natureculture entanglement. The chapter is organized in four parts. The first part lays the groundwork for the poem, 30 Trillion, what we call a nick-storying, that runs through the chapter. This poem evocatively disrupts the body of a more traditionally written chapter and materializes key ideas about the body as we are re-imagining it in this chapter. The second part is the storying of a philosophical political thinking that urges us to include the biological in our accounts of the body if we aim to work against the forces shaping limited possibilities for subjectivity and community in early childhood education. The third part engages with what we have learned from our entangled storying practices and what this allows us to do when thought of as forming aggregates for ways to live in early childhood education. And finally, we end by turning to an open question: What could the world be? a playground 30 trillion body kicking a ball to another 30 trillion body 30 trillion sliding and bumping into other 30 trillions

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30 trillions playing agreeing disagreeing laughing living together population-dense playground

8.2 Nick-Storying As mentioned in the introductory section, one of the two main storylines in this text is the storying of a poem on how bodies become. Inspired by Grosz (2004) we have named this practice nick-storying. Nick-storying is an open-ended storying practice that contains the events of recognizing that one’s body is not one’s own. Drawing on ‘concept as method’ (Lenz Taguchi & St. Pierre, 2017), nick-storying is a posthuman storytelling practice that uses Grosz’ concept of the nick to story bodies in a more-than-human worldview. A body is written with history, culture, and society. A body and its past-present-future are never its own. Rather, the body is a container, aggregate, and accumulation of history and culture. Nick-storying in this chapter are aggregates that might cohere and unleash material forces in the world to invent ways to live. Grosz suggests that artworks can be understood as experimentations with the world drawing on the creative qualities from the material forces found in the world and how those forces have effects on the world (Kontturi & Tiainen, 2007). We propose that stories can be and do the same. Hence, we work methodologically with nick-storying as a (re)telling of events that created moments of recognition in bodies and that radically reconsider the body itself as a densely entangled entity with both nature and culture. From this moment in the text we intersperse the poem 30 Trillion to create nicks and ruptures in the reading experience but also to offer a different understanding of the body. 30 trillion plus 30 trillion plus 30 trillion plus 30 trillion plus 30 trillion plus 30 trillion plus 30 trillion plus 30 trillion plus 30 trillion plus 30 trillion plus 30 trillion plus 30 trillion In the poem, the body is a porous container for the 30 trillion cells that live in it. Those 30 trillion cells are past-present-futures of a body bodying as it moves through space and time. The poem can be read as interruptions to the storying of the chapter, much like Koro-Ljungberg’s (2012) intervals and voids that may prompt readers to think differently, or by itself. It can also be rearranged in order to materialize the

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ways that bodies can be rearranged for different relational politics that are more just. The poem attempts to materialize three different ideas. First, the poem demonstrates the argument of the chapter. The body of the chapter (pun intended) is traditionally written. The interspersed poem nicks the traditional ideas much like a rhizome strangles the arborescent ways of knowing the body (Deleuze & Guattari, 1987). Second, the poem attempts to materialize how bodies have navigated histories, resisted norms, been complicit to norms, and offer up new and different relational politics. Third, drawing on Bernadine Evaristo’s (2019) Girl, Woman, Other which contains little to no punctuation, the poem is written without punctuation or capitalization (except for proper nouns) to create a way to consider the connectivity of bodies, always flowing together. In so doing, it materializes a relational politics and ethics of our rethinking of the body for early childhood educational settings. an event passes through the 30 trillions in a playground a singular event becoming at least 30 trillion expressions of an event 30 trillion expressions + 30 trillion expressions + 30 trillion expressions + 30 trillion expressions + 30 trillion expressions + 30 trillion expressions moving across space and time, transforming expressions becoming incomprehensible

8.3 What is in the Nature of the Body? The body has become a significant theme in research across disciplines such as sociology, cultural studies, anthropology, and psychology, and further approached from a diversity of theoretical perspectives (Blackman, 2008; Coffey & Watson, 2015; Rogowska-Stranger, 2017). Despite that the body has been approached, conceptualized, and analyzed with very different questions since the second half of the twentieth century, and regardless of that this history discloses both conflict and dissent, questions of the body still open up many urgent theoretical issues (Rogowska-Stangret, 2017). Examples of such questions are what can bodies do? and how are bodies done? (Blackman, 2008). Rogowska-Stangret (2017, p. 59) suggests that the body is an ‘ambivalent category’ with many ‘different disguises’ that bring out ‘a spectrum of affects, attitudes, and values’, and that because of this it can be seen as a generative starting point for thinking anew in relation to ‘subjectivity, community, ethics, and politics’. These four matters are in many geopolitical spaces connected to early childhood education institutions’ mandates such as supporting children’s sense of being, becoming and belonging, promoting democracy, diversity, equity and equality, and countering all forms of discrimination toward children and their families. Although none of these responsibilities in themselves are easily ‘secured’, our current times with rapid developments in technology, millions of people immigrating and the acceleration of extinction, ask of us to embrace conceptual diversity so that other ‘hybrid

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mixtures of practical and applied knowledge’ can occur (Braidotti, 2019, p. 29). In the following parts, we present three ways of conceptualizing the body, all from Grosz (2004), interrupted by nick-storying. 30 trillion is never just 30 trillion ancestral DNA repeated over and over again in a 30 trillion cell form two feet move with innumerable pairs of generational feet that came before them one is always such a crowd

8.4 Body as a Series of Open-Ended Systems With her philosophical exploration of the region between bodies and sociotemporal organizations Grosz (2004) hopes to remind social, cultural, and political theorists, especially those interested in feminism, antiracism, and questions of the politics of globalization, that they have forgotten that which makes the body ‘possible and which limits its actions’ (p. 2). In Grosz’ words, we have forgotten ‘the precarious, accidental, contingent, expedient, striving, dynamic status of life in a messy, complicated, resistant, brute world of materiality, a world regulated by the exigencies, the forces, of space and time’ (p. 2). As humans we have forgotten where we come from, she claims. Accordingly, Grosz’s (2004) call for work in double forgetting. She wrote: This is a double forgetting: of the elements through which all living things are born and live, a cosmological element; and of the specific body, indeed a chain of bodies, from which we come, a genealogical or maternal element. (p. 2)

Put another way, bodies are both cosmological and material. They are an openended system of the ontology of the body and the epistemological frameworks (e.g., culture, psychology, history, and so on) that shape bodies, or a series of open-ended systems (Grosz, 2004). Each movement in a body as open-system, are events. Events that pass through us and leave remnants, memories of bodies that once were and bodies to come. Our bodies keep score, as Bessel van der Kolk (2014), noted. They keep score of all the systems that pass through us. Our bodies are porous, event-filled miracles. Moving lively human bodies can hence be understood as systems functioning with other systems it has no control over (Grosz, 2004). The miraculous system of a human body is the result of an assemblage: cells, DNA, blood, the food we ingest, the air we breathe, and so much more. Hence, all human bodies are interconnected with other bodies and vice versa (e.g., ancestral bodies, nonhuman bodies, material bodies, immaterial bodies, systemic bodies, and technical bodies) so that lively human bodies are never detached from their milieu. Philippopoulos-Mihalopoulos (2015) writes that ‘when a human body moves, a whole assemblage of material and immaterial bodies moves along’ (p. 4). They are never alone.

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30 trillion histories of generations living dying and regenerating histories we may never know histories we may celebrate histories that may be too painful not to know histories that have just been made histories to come 30 trillion different expressions and responses to an event 30 trillion plus innumerable histories 30 trillion historical futures forming and functioning together 30 trillion plus histories of millions + futures plus 30 trillion plus histories of millions + futures plus 30 trillion + histories of millions + futures plus 30 trillion + histories of millions + futures plus 30 trillion + histories of millions + futures plus 30 trillion + histories of millions + futures plus 30 trillion + histories of millions + futures plus 30 trillion + histories of millions + futures plus 30 trillion + histories of millions + futures plus 30 trillion + histories of millions + futures plus 30 trillion + histories of millions + futures plus 30 trillion histories of millions becoming incomprehensible

8.5 Body as Immersed in the Always Forward Movement of Time In her 2004 book, Grosz specifically argues that the body is the site of past, present, and future actualizations in between the natural and the cultural. Human bodies are stretching toward both a past and a future. Because the past is never fixed, it can be rewritten, actualized again in bodies in the present. The past is always available to other actualizations (Grosz, 2004). In so doing, these different articulations can create different futures. Because of the possible actualizations of the past in the present in the body, the body is political. A different story, a more socially just story, is always possible. These stories can work toward creating more just futures. As Grosz wrote: Life is a becoming beyond what it is because the past, not fixed in itself, never fixes or determines the present and future but underlies them, inheres in them, makes them rich in resources and forces them to differ from themselves. (p. 255)

In this chapter, we focus on this excessiveness, the expansiveness of the past to create different futures by revisiting to re-see our pasts through stories that aim to create different iterations of early childhood bodies. Nick-storying acknowledges that humans are creations of the past, of all pasts, pasts that we may cherish, pasts that may trouble us, pasts in which we are complicit in, pasts which we wish to eschew in favor of other more positive pasts. Nick-storying views time as ‘a condition of what is living, of matter, of the real, of the universe itself’ (Grosz, 2004, p. 4). Such a conception of time is inclusive of the entire diversity of experience that shapes the past that moves into the future. Grosz calls this endurance. The past most certainly endures. It is always there, demanding that we acknowledge our complicity in it, the absences within it, and the powers it may hold.

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However, we are to be careful in terms of fully immersing ourselves in the past, for this can undermine the present (Grosz, 2004). The present will always demand so much of us. Grosz wrote, ‘history remains a political force, the site for the unraveling of the givenness of the present’ (p. 253). As we work to unravel the present, the past is a political force because it is needed to unravel the present. The past, which shapes current political structures, has created conditions for the present. As we work toward unraveling the present, we must activate history as political force and consider what isn’t in the past, what is absent, and what stories must be told. millions of histories already connecting humans millions of histories connecting humans now millions of histories connecting to become something otherwise something as yet unknown

8.6 The Biology of the Body is to Live Drawing from Bergson, Grosz (2004) articulates a life that is full of dynamism. Grosz explains such a dynamic life as follows: As living beings, we are the accumulation and concretion of our history, of what has happened to us and what we have done, perhaps even before any personal or subjective existence. The past, including one’s personal life, the past of one’s parents, one’s cultural history and even biology, are carried with every living being. The history of all living beings is contained not only in its full detail as world history, the past; it is also contained within all beings, compressed in their genetic lineage, in the living remnants of earlier times, their continuing inheritance from their earliest ancestors. (p. 196)

A body, then, is never just in the present, it is a past-present-future. A body is an accumulation of the past. As Grosz notes, this is not just a person’s past. Rather, it is the past of the person’s parents, their parents, culture, biology, history, and so on. An early childhood body, then, is always already dynamic with so much history. A young body is quite old. An early childhood body, then, is all the events of the past, the events of the present, and events-to-come. Grosz (2004) wrote the following about events: Events erupt onto the systems which aim to contain them, inciting change, upheaval, and asystematicity into their order. Embedded in and incited by the force of unpredictable events, life evolves and transforms itself and, to some extent, its world, as a provisional mode of dealing with, responding to, the events that impinge on and affect it. (p. 8)

For example, COVID-19 has unleashed a series of events that have incited change across the globe. There has been significant conversation about how much learning may be lost due to students not being schools, even in early childhood settings. However, the event of COVID-19 is being unleashed on bodies that carry with them the history of other pandemics. Just as life evolved and transformed itself in the 1918 pandemic, life will evolve and transform itself. And, just as in other

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pandemics, certain populations that run on race and class lines have been unfairly hit by pandemics because of structural inequalities. Bodies carry these histories with them as they evolve and change. Even now. Human bodies have adjusted to the changes that COVID-19 made. Human bodies’ daily life and living, in general, has changed, transformed itself, because of a virus. To live. In this sense, humans have evolved with the virus. In turn, the virus has shaped new realities: wearing masks, favoring outdoor gatherings, limiting numbers of humans gathering, and so on. It has happened in less than a year’s time. Still, we have evolved with it. This example seeks to demonstrate the work against double forgetting that Grosz (2004) calls us to do. This work is about ‘understand[ing], with perhaps more urgency than in the past, the ways our biologies work with, and are amenable to, the kinds of cultural variation that concern politics and political struggles’ (p. 2). As humans continue to live and change, we must not forget that the body is an ontological entity that evolves alongside and with epistemological concerns. This is the work of the concept of storying in this chapter. Working with stories in this way allows us to see how life persists, mutates, molds, and gets to work in change, the ever-present constant in life. The work of double forgetting in a present that is constantly changing is to situate oneself in a conceptualization of time that is at once past, present, and future (Grosz, 2004). All bodies are Zeno’s arrow, at once moving through space in the present while carrying with them the past and moving toward an unknown future. Double forgetting becomes the storying movement of the body as arrow. Grosz (2004) explains: The more clearly we understand our temporal location as beings who straddle the past and the future without the security of a stable and abiding present, the more mobile our possibilities are, and the more transformation becomes conceivable. (p. 14)

With change as the constant, we have the capacity to continually actualize what might be while still acknowledging the past. The ever-dynamic body encounters events that call it into an unsteady ruptured moment of recognition. A moment in which the arrow is held by parentheses calls us into recognizing ourselves into ontological and epistemological realizations. It is the work of the parentheses that we are interested in, the holding that the story does, so that we can form aggregates to invent ways to live. words nick at the possibilities of the 30 trillion + deferred incomprehensibility of one of many

8.7 Nick-Storying as a Practice for Forming Aggregates to Invent Ways to Live in Early Childhood Education In this section, we work to articulate what we have learned through nick-storying, when doing this as a practice entangled with our reading of Grosz’ philosophical

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approach to the body. We suggest that nick-storying helps us to recognize and familiarize ourselves with the ethical moment of acknowledging that our bodies have always been open-ended systems. The term recognition is critical here. Grosz (2004) explains that recognition ‘occur[s] when a memory-image that resembles a current perception is carried along with the perception by being extended into action’ (p. 171). The process of writing a nick-story is the act of perceiving the memory image through writing. The writing, then, always carries with it the memory image. The image is an expansive image that merely grasps the inexhaustibility of the past. Moreover, nickstorying is a moment in the present that draws energy from the past (Grosz, 2004). ‘Whereas the past in itself is powerless, if it can link up to a present perception it has a chance to be mobilized in the course of another perception’s impulse to action’ (Grosz, 2004, p. 176). Nick-stories then are perceptions of the energetic past materialized as writing. In this way, nick-storying is both psychological and ontological. Again with Grosz, ‘[The past] exists, whether we remember it or not, and it exerts whatever is unexhausted in it only through access to the present’ (2004, p. 178). No matter the nick-storying, the expansive past is there, pulsating, undulating, and moving within the present story. Each word is a past-present-future. Nick-storying then contains a dynamism of past, present, and future. Further, nick-storying happens in the body, where we perceive memories. It allows us to place ourselves within the past (Grosz, 2004) as we write in the present moment. We move from intuition, the feltness of past experience, to rendering that feltness into intelligibility with language, with concepts. In this way, nick-storying is about moving in and out of oneself. As we move in and outside ourselves to write, to become with these stories, we draw upon the resources of our pasts to make one’s own history (Grosz, 2004) and, in so doing, offer up opportunities for others to make their own histories. Grosz suggests that ‘[t]he more we avail ourselves of [the past’s] resources, the more enriched are the current possibilities of transformation’ (p. 257). Nick-storying allows us to draw on those past resources in the present to erupt new possibilities that are ‘not the predictable, foreseeable continuation of the past’ (p. 257). Instead, the events in nick-storying open up becomings to more just ways of thinking about bodies as continually dynamic beings of space, time, and concepts. However, one only grasps this continual dynamism with nick-storying. ‘Life is always richer, more complex and more simple, more diverse and more unified than the intellect can comprehend’, Grosz asserts (2004, p. 192). In other words, nickstorying merely grasps at life, or nicks at the continual dynamism that is life. They are a return to knowledges that are in ‘tune with the real articulations of the world, its real differences, its qualitative intensities’ (p. 194). These knowledges are part of the continual dynamism of life. As we work toward more just becomings for all bodies, we must recognize that all bodies, even early childhood bodies, are accumulations of history, both ancestral and worldly. These pasts are stored within bodies, recognized as nicks to become nick-stories, that have the potential to add more histories and create ruptures that create more just futures in which all bodies, all histories, are politically valued. These concepts—in this instance, how we are conceptualizing the

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body—have the potential to radically alter our present understandings and future possibilities. Nick-storying is about the relations and constellations that constitute bodies (Rogowska-Stragert, 2017). Nick-storying waits, ages, and endures with bodies as they navigate these relations and constellations (Grosz, 2004). They are about the ontology of the body that is ‘the conditions under which bodies are enculturated, psychologized, given identity, historical location, and agency’ (p. 2). In other words, nick-storying activates identities, histories, and agencies that are always already in bodies. The internal and external movements of these memories render the human body as ‘vulnerable, dependent on factors it cannot rule or tame, like space and time, evolution, agency, transformations, and unruliness of the more than human’ (Rogowska-Stragret, 2017, p. 63). The unruliness of historically constituted bodies has the potential to open up different political futures. Nick-storying is very much about radical politics. Drawing on the rich traditions of Critical Race Theory’s counter-narratives and other kinds of narratives (e.g., LatCrit’s testimonios) that have been used to share stories to revise history from oppressive victors, nick-storying aims to understand one’s past as an open-ended system that presses on into unknown futures. Similar to the work of Drew and MacAlpine (2020), Haraway (2016), Hohti and Tammi (2019), and Moxnes and Osgood (2019), we use storying practices to imagine different futures. In nick-storying, we use affect-rich intuition that is then made intelligible with language and concepts; nick-storying is about ‘bringing into existence new social relations, distributions of force, theoretical models, concepts, and ethical values, the likes of which have never existed before’ (Grosz, 2004, p. 260). Nick-storying produces a more just distribution of forces emanating from a body that is always already connected to so many others. Specific to early childhood, we see the early childhood body as an open-ended system that always carries with it the past as it animates new futures. For too long, the early childhood body was just that, a small body without agency, without rational thought, and without all the things that truly make it human. Nick-storying attempts to see childhood bodies as a biological series of open-ended systems, rich with distributive forces. Lastly, the work of nick-storying allows us to study an aggregate, an invention of life. Deleuze (1988) wrote, ‘you do not know beforehand what good or bad you are capable of; you do not know beforehand what a body or a mind can do, in a given encounter, a given arrangement, a given combination’ (p. 125). Because one cannot know beforehand what a body does, one holds these past aggregates, combinations in parentheses, and studies them. One studies to see what the combination was but also what it points toward, to the virtual, to the as-yet-unknown that is announcing itself. Doing this allows one to ‘bring into existence futures that dislocate themselves from the dominant tendencies and forces of the present’ (Grosz, 2004, p. 14) that shape the parenthetical stories. These aggregates and inventions, however, are not solutions. The stories are ethical moves of knowing bodies differently in early childhood education and care. They aim to create new memories to come by storying the aggregates to generate new and different ways of knowing. In this way, they follow Haraway’s (2016) call for new stories. She wrote, ‘Each time a story helps me remember what

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I thought I knew, or introduces me to new knowledge, a muscle critical for caring about flourishing gets some aerobic exercise’ (p. 29). These stories are ethical moves creating more and different muscle memories to create more just futures. The world desperately needs more just futures for all bodies, human and nonhuman. The more stories of possibilities the more we have to create more just futures. These stories are experimentations as we continue to experiment, to live, contingently moving in ever-changing presents. These stories point toward actualizing what might be, to those more just futures. such a crowd humans are such a crowd one human is

8.8 How Could the World Be? In the introduction we presented two questions as central to us in this chapter: What is in the nature of human bodies, and how can storying with this account of the body be productive of the invention of ways to live in early childhood education? Throughout the chapter, we have attempted to show that to ask such questions is a highly political practice. Reconfiguring the body as an open-ended system creates a way to think of bodies as a priori interconnected. The body is always immersed not only in the present but with the cosmos. No body is singular. Whether we like it or not, we are all connected together. We always have been. It is in our biology. A body’s biology is to live. So, a body’s biology is to connect. Our biological connections create a politics, perhaps which has always already been there. We are all connected, and we are so many. Just saying this, however, does little good. There is much work to be done in answering our question that we end this chapter with, ‘How could the world be?’ Nick-storying we hope will begin to do such work. Also, Grosz has supplied us with concepts that can be creative thinking-doing tools that direct feminist, antiracist, and postcolonial discourses and struggles in early childhood education to securing short- and long-time ambitions. Rather, with her philosophical explorations of what is in the nature of bodies, she opens up a practice of rupturing the pasts. She wrote: life is always politics: it is always about the perseverance of one or many groups at the cost of others. But what has been victorious, that is, prevails at a particular period, does not wipe out the traces of all others, even those rendered extinct. (2004, p. 256)

In other words, one group may be victorious but that does not mean that there were not other voices. Grosz argues that the past is different, it is never exhausted in possibilities. There are other stories to tell. We hope that nick-storying provides such a way to add more to the past, to fill it with different stories. It is for this reason that we have kept the poem fairly open-ended. We recognize our position as White middle-class Western women. The world has many of our stories but has so few of

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others. We wish for readers to take nick-storying to create ‘another reading, another context, another framework that will animate [the past] in different ways’ (Grosz, 2004, p. 254). These stories are vital to the work of creating different presents and futures. The more we add to the past, the more stories of different ways of being and knowing and our inherent connections to those different ways, the more we can ‘overcome the present [and] bring about a future’ (Grosz, 2004, p. 257). In this chapter, we have engaged with nick-storying as a form of political activism to engage in ‘ongoing experiments rather than solutions’ (Grosz, 2004, p. 14). Nickstorying is about putting to work the expansiveness of the past. It is beyond the capabilities of nick-storying to do policy work. Despite that early childhood education institutions for decades, like all educational institutions, have targeted and sought to work against how children and their families are socially regulated in discriminating and limiting ways; how they are sexed, raced, gendered, (dis)abled, colonized, and more through processes of cultural description. There is still work to do. Hence, to be curious of ways to conceptualize how the body is immersed in and participating in and with the world is to perform an affirmative critique that has the hope of a different future as its drive. What we hope is that nick-stories open up dialogs about bodies that may turn into policies. We recognize that such a pursuit is lofty, especially considering the specters of the enlightened subject that is solitary, rational, all-knowing, and most certainly a White male adult. However, like Grosz (2004) we believe that additional stories to the inexhaustible past may very well begin to overwhelm, along with policy work, the dominant structures. Such work, ‘like all living things, [is] strategically, utilizing what of itself and its surroundings it can to do what it believes it is able to’ (p. 243). In others, this is a politics that is experimental, scrappy, and strategic. It draws on the living to create new and different ways of living. Such a politics is an ongoing practice of ontoethics. Grosz (2011) describes this practice as a thinking about the world’s openness to change and most importantly ‘the becomings it might undergo’ (p. 1). The politics of nick-storying and rethinking the body, in this chapter with an eye toward early childhood education, is about the body’s inherent capacity for change and that each and every body (both human and nonhuman) is a complex assembling of pasts, presents, futures, natures, cultures, and so on. Assembling is change. It is becoming. As the body keeps score, change is the only constant. Becoming otherwise is the only game. The process of assembling keeps score and opens itself to undergo more just ways of thinking and being. As bodies open up to new and more socially just configurations, it is critical to acknowledge and work toward understanding how bodies have kept score and how we may use those histories to open up different assembling of bodies. 30 trillion + already a mighty crowd already a history to come imagine

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References Andersen, C. E. (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. https://doi.org/10.1525/irqr.2017.10.4.430 Antonsen, C. M. (2020). Restorying the image of the child’s body in early childhood education. Contemporary Issues in Early Childhood, 21(1), 7–19. https://doi.org/10.1177/146394911880 5435 Barad, K. (2007). Meeting the universe halfway. Quantum physics and the entanglement of matter and meaning. Duke University Press. Blackman, L. (2008). The body: The key concepts. Berg. Braidotti, R. (2019). Posthuman knowledge. Polity Press. Coffey, J., & Watson, J. (2015). Bodies: Corporeality and embodiment in childhood and youth studies. In J. Wyn & H. Cahill (Eds.), Handbook of children and youth studies (pp. 186–200). Springer Link. van der Kolk, B. (2014). The body keeps the score: Brain, mind, and body in the healing of trauma. New York: Penguin Books. Dahlberg, G., & Moss, P. (2005). Ethics and politics in early childhood education. Routledge. Deleuze, G. (1988). Spinoza: Practical philosophy. (R. Hurley, Trans.). City Lights Books. https:// doi.org/10.1177/1463949118805435 Deleuze, G ., & Guattari, F. (1987). A thousand plateaus: Capitalism and schizophrenia (B. Massumi, Trans., 2004 ed.). London/New York, NY: Continuum. Drew, J., & MacAlpine, K-A. (2020). Witnessing the ruins: Speculative stories of caring for the particular and the peculiar. Journal of Childhood Studies, 45(2), 27–39 https://doi.org/10.18357/ jcs452202019737. Evaristo, B. (2019). Girl, woman, other. Black Cat. Grosz, E. (2004). The nick of time: Politics, evolution, and the untimely. Allen and Unwin. Grosz, E. (2011). The incorporeal. Ontology, ethics, and the limits of materialism. Colombia University Press. Haraway, D. (2016). Staying with the trouble: Making kin in the Chthulucene. Duke University Press. Hohti, R., & Tammi, T. (2019). The greenhouse effect: Multispecies childhood and non-innocent relations of care. Childhood, 26(2), 169–185. https://doi.org/10.1177/0907568219826263. Kontturi, 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. https://doi.org/10.1080/ 08038740701646739. Koro-Ljungberg, M. (2012). Researchers of the world, create! Qualitative Inquiry, 18(9), 808–818. https://doi.org/10.1177/1077800412453014 Lenz Taguchi, H., & St. Pierre, E. (2017). Using concept as method in educational and social science inquiry. Qualitative Inquiry, 23(9), 643–648. https://doi.org/10.1177/1077800417732634 Moxnes, A. R., & Osgood, J. (2019). Storying diffractive pedagogy: Reconfiguring groupwork in early childhood teacher education. Reconceptualizing Educational Research Methodology, 10(1), 1–13. https://doi.org/10.7577/rerm.3240. Nordstrom, S. (2019). Losing my religion: Bodily confessions of an organism trying to make a body without organs. Reconceptualizing Educational Research Methodology 10(3), 207. https:// doi.org/10.7577/rerm.3676. Nordstrom, S. N., Andersen, C. E., Osgood, J., Waterhouse, A.-H. L., Otterstad, A. M., & Jensen, M. (2018). Alice’s adventures: Reconfiguring solidarity in early childhood education and care through data events. In D. R. Cole & J. P. N. Bradley (Eds.), Principles of transversality in globalization and education (pp. 175–193). Springer Nature. Otterstad, A.M., & Rossholt, N. (2014). Affektive tilstander; bevegelser i kropp og boks. Pedagogisk Forskning i Sverige, Nr 2–3 (Posthumanistiska Perspektiv), 153–172. Philippopoulos-Mihalopoulos, A. (2015). Spatial justice: Body, lawscape, atmosphere. Routledge.

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Robinson, K. H., & Jones-Diaz, C. (2016). Diversity and difference in early childhood education: Issues for theory and practice (2nd ed.). Open University Press. Rogowska-Stangret, M. (2017). Corpor(e)al cartographies of new materialism: Meeting the elsewhere halfway. Minnesota Review, 88, 59-68.

Camilla Eline Andersen is a professor of early childhood education in the Department of Social and Educational Sciences at Norway Inland University of Applied Sciences. She also holds a small position in the Department of Child and Youth Studies at Stockholm University. Andersen has a background as a kindergarten teacher. She has published in a variety of early childhood education and qualitative research journals including Contemporary Issues in Early Childhood and Qualitative Inquiry. Andersen is co-editor of Reconceptualizing Educational Research Methodology and has guest edited several Special Issue journals. Her main interest over years have been to explore how to critically and creatively engage with diversity and difference. Currently she is thinking with process philosophies and feminist theories to expand our knowledge of how to practice decolonial and justice-oriented research methodologies and pedagogies in the field of early childhood. Susan Naomi Nordström is an Associate Professor of educational research (Qualitative Research Methodology) in the Department of Counseling, Educational Psychology and Research at the University of Memphis. She earned her PhD from the University of Georgia in 2011. She has published about postqualitative methodologies as well as human and nonhuman relationships in postqualitative methodologies in leading qualitative research journals such as Qualitative Inquiry and Cultural StudiesCritical Methodologies. She has also published about mentoring in qualitative inquiry and human–water connections in the Anthropocene. She has guest-edited two special issues of Reconceptualizing Educational Research Methodologies. She has lectured and/or given workshops across the United States and in Oulu Finland, Stockholm, London, Brisbane, Sydney and Oslo. She is currently writing a book (under contract at Routledge) about methodological considerations in multispecies qualitative inquiry.

Chapter 9

Stories, Places: Storied Place and Placed Story Carmen Blyth

‘... the universe is not simply a place but a story–a story in which we are immersed, to which we belong, and out of which we arose’. —Brian Swimme & Mary Evelyn Tucker.

Abstract For a while now I have been ‘wondering’ about, pondering the link between story and place, inhabitant and colonizer: the inextricable and intractable connections that come into being between them. And so in this short diffractive piece where a constellation of concepts (space, place, story, performance, hospitality, refrain, vibe, power to/power over, rhizomes, etc.) come together with no one ‘truth’ privileged, I hope to explore those connections, to trouble perceived ways of knowing, and invite you to explore some compelling examples of story as place and place as story with particular reference to one particular place, a school, and the inhabitants of that particular school in Cape Town, South Africa. For in schools where matter, in all its forms, is ‘storied’–has its own story to tell–and storified, stories matter. Keywords Storying · Storytelling · Posthumanism · The Refrain · Space · Place · Performance · Hospitality · Vibe · Power to/Power over · Rhizomes

9.1 Introduction According to storyteller and medical sociologist Arthur Frank stories ‘enact realities: they bring into being what was not there before’ (Frank, 2010, p. 75); they become lives, the lives of places and all that inhabits those places, capable of constituting conditions for either enriching or diminishing those lives. By inflicting themselves on places, their inhabitants, stories can limit or liberate them ‘according to whatever imagination the stories make available’ (Frank, 2012, p. 49): subject, object, subaltern, elite–all can be created, positioned, and ‘revision[ed]’ (Richardson, 1997, C. Blyth (B) University of Cape Town, Penang, Malaysia © The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature Singapore Pte Ltd. 2022 C. Blyth and T. K. Aslanian (eds.), Children and the Power of Stories, Children: Global Posthumanist Perspectives and Materialist Theories, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-981-16-9287-1_9

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p. 299) by the story told. The story of terra nullius, for example, created and propagated by the settler colonizers and colonials of Australia by storifying matter as a commodity there for the taking, uninhabited and ownerless as the story goes, enacted a reality of dispossession and established a hegemony of white Anglo male with all else ‘othered’, their stories pathologized, colonized. However the reverse is also true: realities can enact stories, stories that when not silenced allow the ‘other’ to be heard, to be seen. These are stories that make visible (and compelling) the invisible–the links between place and inhabitant (Gruenewald, 2003). Yet to decolonialize1 a story, reconfigure the story as one where subaltern has the potential to become a part of the subject (Barad, 2007) with agency, within the context of the story told, can be (as in the case of Australia) a ‘narrative struggle’ (Collins-Gearing & Osland, 2010, para. 10) for the ‘othered’. For place that had once been hospitable to its inhabitants–home–has been rendered inhospitable by the colonizers’ stories, limiting ‘others’ to the margins of colonial life: liminal spaces–‘a borderland... a vague and undetermined place created by the emotional residue of an unnatural boundary’ (Anzaldúa, 1987, p. 3)–where imaginary resources with which to contest those myths of colonization are scarce (Fricker, 2007), if existent at all. Yet the power of stories lies in their capacity to ‘become true as they are told’ (Frank, 2010, p. 49). For ‘the core truth’ about stories is ‘not correspondence but performance’ (Frank, 2010, p. 41; see also Slaby et al., 2017) and their very ability to balance multiple truths at one and the same time (Frank, 2010). This is what lies at the heart of any story. Stories can thus provide a different way of knowing and a way of knowing differently (St. Pierre, 1997, p. 177), a way of contesting and decolonializing those stories, the discourses and practices, within places and spaces where the myths of Western colonization live and breathe, replicate and reproduce: schools and universities. For a while now I have been ‘wondering’ (MacLure, 2013, p. 228) about, pondering this link between story and place, inhabitant and colonizer: the inextricable and intractable connections that come into being between them. And so in this brief diffractive piece where a constellation of concepts such as space, place, story, performance, hospitality, refrain, vibe, power to/power over, rhizomes, come together with ‘truth’ emanating from their entanglement, I hope to explore those connections, to trouble perceived ways of knowing, and invite you to explore some compelling examples of story as place and place as story with particular reference

1

Coloniality as Nelson Maldonado-Torres (2007, p. 243) says is different from colonialism and requires a different praxis referring as it does ‘to long-standing patterns of power that emerged as a result of colonialism, but that define culture, labor, intersubjective relations, and knowledge production well beyond the strict limits of colonial administrations. Thus, coloniality survives colonialism. It is maintained alive in books, in the criteria for academic performance, in cultural patterns, in common sense, in the self-image of people, in aspirations of self, and so many other aspects of our modern experience. In a way, as modern subjects we breathe coloniality all the time and every day.’ The ‘de- ‘ in decoloniality therefore ‘indicates above all the need and the goal of the re-: epistemic reconstitutions, re-emergence, resurgence, re-existence. That is, neither new nor post’ (Mignolo, 2017, pp. 5–6).

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to one particular place, a school,2 and the inhabitants of that particular school in Cape Town, South Africa. For in schools where matter, in all its forms, is ‘storied’ (Iovino & Oppermann, 2014, p. 1–2)–has its own story to tell–and storified, stories matter.

9.2 The School as Storied and Storified Place Everything in a school has stories to tell: not all will be legible, easy to translate (if at all), but many will provide compelling, ‘vivid’, articulate, powerful and moving (Cohen, 2015, p. 275) tales of ‘co-existence, interdependence... extinctions and survivals’ (Iovino & Oppermann, 2014, p. 14). From the graffiti or lack thereof on desks and walls, hallways and restrooms, to those liminal places and spaces of doorways and doors, all ‘tell tales’ of inclusion and exclusion, and all those shades of gray that lie in-between: nonlinguistic performativity in search of an active, willing listener–a home. So what stories does a school housed in buildings that date back to the Cape Town era of the late 1700s have to tell, buildings constructed by the Dutch and lived in with their families; buildings that have known many owners over a significant number of years, have witnessed enormous change take place–ecological, geopolitical and sociocultural–in this tiny south-western corner of the African continent? What stories do these walls and bricks, soil and grass communicate? What did/do those doors keep in, keep out, include, exclude; what difference did/do they allow to ‘connect’, merge for ‘the sake of exchange’ (Rose, 2002, p. 314)? How does school as storied and storified place interpolate and interpellate inhabitants and inhabitants place? In the sections that follow I use the notion of hospitality both in Derridean sense of ‘absolute hospitality’ (Derrida & Dufourmantelle, 2000, p. 25; see also Derrida, 2005, p. 6) and also in the way it is practiced locally as practical philosophy and philosophical practice by matter as text and text as matter (Barad, 2007; see also Iovino & Oppermann, 2014), as well as the Deleuze and Guattari (1987) notion of the ‘refrain’ to explore the questions raised above.

9.2.1 The Hospitable and Inhospitable The notion of hospitality and how it is practiced locally in South Africa differs from how it is practiced in the West according to Deumert and Mabandla (2017) in one major respect: unconditionality (Derrida, 2005; Derrida & Dufourmantelle, 2

I chose this particular school as the locus of my meditations as it is emblematic in its totality of how coloniality reterritorializes: with its very name, its storied colonial buildings, its colonial language of instruction, its Eurocentric curriculum, uniforms, customs and rituals, all pointing to the fact that epistemic reconstitutions, re-emergence, resurgence, re-existence are far from being embedded in the African context. The specific name of the school is not mentioned to ensure that the ethical rights of others are not infringed or violated.

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2000)–that which is beyond duty or rights. The West with its middle-class urbanized Christian values retains the Kantian trace of tolerance, a socially held affect, posited by Kant in his Third Article of Perpetual Peace (1795), where the ‘stranger’ remains on the threshold–physically and metaphorically–made aware, corporeally and affectively rather than by word of mouth and/or written, that they are tolerated, virtually unwelcome ‘guests’ for whom the consequences of deviating from the behavioral norms required of the ‘guest’ can be dire. So too in South African Black urbanized upper and middle-class populations (Deumert & Mabandla, 2017). Yet in South Africa those positioned as poor, working class exhibit a different praxis altogether (Deumert & Mabandla, 2017): that of ‘absolute hospitality’ (Derrida & Dufourmantelle, 2000, p. 25) where the ‘stranger’ is not seen as ‘other’ at all but rather different yet unconditionally welcome and welcomed (Deumert & Mabandla, 2017): a stranger within (Derrida, 1998, 2003; see also Anzaldúa, 1987; as well as Ahmed, 2000) with stories to tell. However it is not just inhabitants that make place hospitable to some inhospitable to ‘others’; storied and storified place creates boundaries, a ‘vibe’ (Deumert & Mabandla, 2017, p. 404), that can at one and the same time be welcoming and exclusionary, inclusive and exclusive, tentative, tolerant, curious, judgmental and absolute. Different yet familiar, a ‘set of rhythms that define the place as home’ (Janz, 2001, p. 395), the vibe is an interplay of sounds that not only create place but ‘voice a position’ (p. 397), a stance in this ever changing place. It is an ‘auditory motion that organizes and fends off chaos that draws from the earth a set of contingent meanings that lead to identity’ (p. 395), an identity that is never fixed, never stable for ‘[t]here is no fixed self, only the habit of looking for one’ (Boehme as cited in Janz, 2001, p. 397). The vibe at this particular school is one of white Anglo male where ‘otherness’ at the superficial level of skin color and sex is tolerated as long as the caveat of ‘essence’, that which is considered essential to belonging, is ‘right.’ That English is taught as the home language points to what that essence might comprise. This is a school that is named after the English patron saint of crusades–slaying all that is strange, a stranger: not white, not Western–and presents itself as a (English) Grammar school, down to the very English school uniforms that can both constrain and liberate by the sense of ‘belonging’ it promotes or denies. So too the curriculum that offers only a patronizing nod to its ‘situated[ness]’ (Haraway, 1988, p. 581; see also Spry, 2001, p. 710) in the African context and continent with its inclusion of Afrikaans and isiXhosa as languages additional to the English taught, a compulsory ‘home’ language despite students coming from many different linguistic backgrounds and home languages. The ‘vibe’ as such is not just a personal corporeal presence but one that flows between inhabitants, a materiality of feeling that ‘sticks’ (Ahmed, 2004, p. 100) with students storified to the ‘norm’, the English grammar school norm where the historical experience of apartheid interpolates and interpellates them as nothing other than the stranger within, ‘strangers to [them]selves’ (Kristeva, 1991). This is a system that despite its political demise has managed to reconfigure itself, to ‘reterritorialize’ (Deleuze & Guattari, 1987) what was there before. As such the Deleuze and Guattari geo-philosophical notion of the ‘refrain’ (Plateau 11, 1837: Of the Refrain) is relevant here as the refrain of schools past–English

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grammar schools–has taken flight to land anew from whence it departed. The refrain, habits as much individual as they are social and cultural (Janz, 2001) and material, is the stories matter tells and retells that show us for what we are, leads us down different paths yet to the same ontology of story as something always a part of matter, that protects as it ventures out along ‘“lines of drift”’ (Deleuze & Guattari, 1987, p. 312) with their ‘different loops, knots, speeds, movements, gestures, and sonorities’ (p. 312): features that draw the listener in as does the refrain from any popular melody that we hum along with without realizing, and which when not fixed–not striated and striating, not sedimented and sedimenting–allows the body to deterritorialize. This is refrain as ontology, an ontology: that provides tools to describe transformative, creative forces and movements . . . it presents a world understood as a complex of interconnected assemblages (earth, territory, forms of deterritorialization and reterritorialization), where the overriding norm is that of deterritorialization. (Patton, 2000, p. 9)

However the refrain is as much a part of ‘horror stories’ as it is of ‘fairy tales’ (Deleuze & Guattari, 1987, p. 312), positioning ‘storyteller’, whatever its form, as victim, or agent with the potential to challenge and thus to deterritorialize and/or reterritorialize their ‘life’ stories and hence their ‘lives.’ Thus the paradox of the refrain, of these habits, is ‘the possibility of both rupture and sameness, in other words, difference and repetition’ (Mazzei, 2016, p, 151). And in this particular place at this particular time it repeats. For the place may have changed, deterritorialized (Deleuze & Guattari, 1987, p. 3), its doors storified to admit a few of those previously excluded (the female, the colored) but this refrain, striated and sedimented, acts to reterritorialize, recolonize, and restorify the ‘guest’ as ‘unwelcome guest’ with management–predominantly white Anglo male with one sole token colored woman administrator appointed (Frank, 2000, 2012; see also Fricker, 2012)–the keepers of and at the ‘gate.’ You might be allowed in but terms and conditions apply.

9.2.2 Power as In-Formation Such schools often posit that their practices are inclusive of all, different and alike. Such a pedagogy/ideology of supposed ‘colorblindness’ (Schofield, 2007; see also Aragón et al., 2016, p. 2) where all are said to be seen as equal with the difference not acknowledged at all although seemingly quite progressive is rather part of ‘flexible and malleable neoliberal assemblages’ (Pacini-Ketchabaw et al., 2014, p. 39) which by virtue of their covertness are much more divisive, exclusionary and potentially destructive than an overt pedagogy/ideology of apartheid where difference is seen as ‘other’, with the ‘other’ subordinated and subordinate to what is considered the sociopolitical and discursive ‘norm’, excluded yet not indifferent to their very difference. For by ignoring difference/diversity, what is different and valued by ‘others’, ‘in-forms’ (Massumi in conversation with Mary Zournazi, 2002, p. 224) the ‘other’– forms them, colonializes them, from the inside out to see difference as less than,

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shameful and valueless. Such internal colonialization means that the ‘other’ others themselves with no need for the dominant’s ethical condemnation (Leder, 1990) and is a colonialization, a conditioning, that forms and sediments ‘the fascist inside you, the fascist you yourself sustain and nourish and cherish’ (Deleuze & Guattari, 1987, p. 215) to perpetuate the status quo. It is what Massumi (Massumi in conversation with Mary Zournazi, 2002, p. 224) following Foucault calls ‘power to’ rather than ‘power over’: Power comes up with us from the field of potential. It ‘informs’ us, it’s intrinsic to our formation, it’s part of our emergence as individuals, and it emerges with us–we actualise it, as it in-forms us. So in a way it’s as potentialising as what we call freedom, only what it potentialises is limited to a number of predictable paths. It’s the calculable part of affect, the most probable next steps and eventual outcomes. (Massumi in conversation with Mary Zournazi, 2002, p. 224)

As Foucault (1980/2000, p. 275) reminds us: power produces rather than represses, regularizes rather than diversifies. And to produce a subject power requires ‘the destruction of what we are as well as the creation of a completely different thing, a total innovation.’

9.3 Some Final Thoughts Hospitality as productive power, one that resists the gravitational pull of Western doxa, is about understanding that commitments to diversity that do not bring about that which is promised are best understood as non-performative (Ahmed, 2012). The all-too-often use of student demographics to demonstrate and celebrate diversity and equality as something already accomplished is however a clever (though dishonest) strategy that obscures the reality within, creating the fantasy that discrimination is indeed ‘over’ and a thing of the past. The creation of documentation attesting to diversity and equality in and of itself confirms this to be a matter of fact in the minds of the institution. Nothing could be further from the ‘truth.’ And so it falls to the ‘stranger within’ to perturb this fantasy, perturb possibilities of acting other and ‘other.’ The fact that the stranger is already within ensures that the ‘danger’ posed is one of political ‘auto-immunity’ (Derrida, 1998, 2003), a challenge at once ontological as it is ethical and epistemological, with the institutional body politic under attack by its very self: a deconstruction of the self by the self. For storying and storytelling are deeply performative, physical experiences, intra-relational and more often than not shared. In this respect they are ‘virtual social imaginaries as much as... autobiographical reports on actual events’ (Andrews & Duff, 2019, p. 129). And they create places of opportunity: placed yet placeless places–concrete and territorial yet a part of the social imaginary–where difference abides and governance, policy, and administration no longer trace lives. These are places of opportunity that allow African notions of hospitality, that which underpins the southern African ‘philosophy’ of Hunhu/Ubuntu, to be neither consumed nor compromised in an effort to work against the normalizing tendency of schools to privilege presence

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over absence, Western ways of knowing, being and doing over an entirely different material reality. In linking the Zulu/isiNdebele word Ubuntu with its Shona equivalent Hunhu, the South African Ubuntu scholar and philosopher Mogobe Bernard Ramose entwines the notion of Hu– and Ubu–, that of being, with that of –ntu and –nhu: knowing: the ontological with the epistemological (Ramose, 1999, p. 50): knowing in being. Both words (Hunhu/Ubuntu) also speak to the character of a person, their conduct and as such also entwines the ethical with the ontological with the epistemological. As such the Western conception of Ubuntu that views it as an anthropocentric philosophy could not be more misguided as it is at once philosophy and praxis, a philosophical practice and practical philosophy that sees humanity as part of the never-ending unfolding of life forces and knowledge within a ‘dynamic, relational and necessarily uncertain/unknowable future’ (Wu et al., 2018, p. 11). From an African perspective one’s being is always relational, always informed and formed through an active engagement with the cosmos in its entirety (Wu et al., 2018), colonizers included. And to ignore this is to negate the very humanity which binds us all together to the world in all its material discursive entirety (Ramose, 1999). To ‘move beyond the conditional acceptance of difference is at the heart of the ethics of hospitality’ Deumert and Mabandla (2017, p. 404) state and to allow difference to interconnect and merge for the sake of exchange, ‘to facilitate interdependence’ (Rose, 2002, p. 314) vital if we are to decolonialize the places where the colonial refrain remains the same: intact. For it is only in so doing that the refrain will effect the ‘holding together of heterogeneous elements’ (Deleuze & Guattari, 1987, p. 323) that allows for deterritorialization to fold and unfold. And it is only under such conditions, where the ‘other’ can tell their stories in their own ways dispelling myths of inferiority (Maldonado-Torres, 2017, p. 130), that place and inhabitant become ‘agrammatical and a-signifying’(MacLure, 2016, p. 173), a ‘potential threat to order’ (MacLure, 2016, p. 175) that can cause the colonizers’ stories to stutter, to make false starts, to pause (MacLure, 2016, p. 176), to facilitate what Deleuze and Guattari (1987) call ‘rhizomatic’ assemblages to manifest, an ‘embodied flow of pauses and rushes’ (Hickey-Moody, 2013, p. 278) to emerge and make decoloniality, currently virtual-potentiality-in-the-making, a reality. It is to extend hospitality to difference rather than turning one’s back on it.

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Maldonado-Torres, N. (2007). On the coloniality of being: Contributions to the development of a concept. Cultural Studies, 21(2–3), 240–270. Maldonado-Torres, N. (2017). On the coloniality of human rights. Revista Crítica De Ciências Sociais, 114, 117–136. Mazzei, L. A. (2016). Voice without a subject. Cultural Studies—Critical Methodologies, 16(2), 151–161. doi:https://doi.org/10.1177/1532708616636893 Mignolo, W. (2017). Interview–Walter Mignolo/Part 2 key concepts. Retrieved from https://www. e-ir.info/2017/01/21/interview-walter-mignolopart-2-key-concepts/ Pacini-Ketchabaw, V., Nxumalo, F., & Rowan, M. C. (2014). Researching neoliberal and neocolonial assemblages in early childhood education. International Review of Qualitative Research, 7(1), 39–57. Patton, P. (2000). Deleuze and the political. Routledge. Ramose, M. B. (1999). African philosophy through Ubuntu. Mond Books. Richardson, L. (1997). Skirting a pleated text: De-disciplining an academic life. Qualitative Inquiry, 3(3), 295–303. https://doi.org/10.1177/107780049700300303 Rose, D. B. (2002). Dialogue with place: Toward an ecological body. Journal of Narrative Theory, 32(3), 311–325. Schofield, J. W. (2007). The colorblind perspective in school: Causes and consequences. Wiley. Slaby, J., Mühlhoff, R., & Wüschner, P. (2017). Affective arrangements. Emotion Review. https:// doi.org/10.1177/1754073917722214 Spry, T. (2001). Performing autoethnography: An embodied methodological praxis. Qualitative Inquiry, 7(6), 706–732. St. Pierre, E. A. (1997). Methodology in the fold and the irruption of transgressive data. Qualitative Studies in Education, 10(2), 175–189. Swimme, B. T., & Tucker, M. E. (2011). Journey of the universe. Yale University Press. Wu, J., Eaton, P. W., Robinson-Morris, D. W., Wallace, M. F. G., & Han, S. (2018). Perturbing possibilities in the postqualitative turn: Lessons from Taoism and Ubuntu. International Journal of Qualitative Studies in Education. https://doi.org/10.1080/09518398.2017.1422289 Zournazi, M. (2002). Navigating movements–with Brian Massumi. In M. Zournazi (Ed.), Hope: New philosophies for change (pp. 210–243). Pluto Australia.

Carmen Blyth completed her Ph.D. on international schools, teaching, and governance at the University of Cape Town and was a postdoctoral research fellow with the Decolonizing Early Childhood Discourses research project at the same university. She has worked with international schools and universities in Asia, Africa, and the Middle East for over 30 years as a teacher, teacher trainer, and department founder. She currently enjoys mentoring Ph.D. and IB Diploma candidates and has a special interest in the links between linguistic diversity and biodiversity, and the rights of other language speakers in institutions where English is the medium of instruction. Her publications include a monograph on ethics in international schools: storytelling and autoethnography published with Palgrave Macmillan, journal contributions that engage with posthumanism, as well as book chapters on syllabus design. She holds a B.Sc. (Hons) in Pure and Applied Physics.

Chapter 10

An Ethics of Flourishing: Storying Our Way Around the Power/Potential Nexus in Early Childhood Education and Care Carmen Blyth and Teresa K. Aslanian

Abstract In this chapter, we consider ethical complexities and conflicts involved in children’s entanglements with early childhood education and care (ECEC) institutions that operate at a nexus of power and potential. We understand children in ECEC institutions as both desirous and thus agentic, as well as malleable and thus vulnerable. Embracing stream of consciousness as method, we use our personal stories from our own childhood experiences, and Froebel’s metaphor of kindergarten (child garden) to speculate as to what an ethics of flourishing might entail in ECEC’s power/potential nexus. Keywords Ethics · Potential · Power · Flourishing · ECEC · Stream of consciousness · Autoethnography · Storytelling

10.1 Introduction According to Spinoza (in Deleuze, 1978, para. 38), ethics is always ‘a problem of power never a problem of duty’ and malice lies in preventing someone from doing what they can do. As such Spinoza is never concerned with morality, what we must or should do, but rather with what a body is capable of, its potentia. Potentia, for Spinoza, is a body’s relationship to the whole world: knowing itself and others by the effects produced on its body and by its body on others. Deleuze and Guattari see such desire to know as basic to assembling that which allows the body to persist in its own being, to be a ‘desiring machine’ with humans as desiring machines that continually seek to connect and proliferate. But what if children were ‘desiring machines’ different to those assigned to humans by Deleuze and Guattari in Anti-Oedipus? What if children’s intense desires are on transforming, on always becoming-other, C. Blyth (B) University of Cape Town, Penang, Malaysia T. K. Aslanian University of South-Eastern Norway, Porsgrunn, Norway e-mail: [email protected] © The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature Singapore Pte Ltd. 2022 C. Blyth and T. K. Aslanian (eds.), Children and the Power of Stories, Children: Global Posthumanist Perspectives and Materialist Theories, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-981-16-9287-1_10

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on inhabiting the littoral, the liminal? On potentia rather than potestas1 ? In this chapter, we consider ethical complexities and conflicts involved in children’s entanglements with early childhood education and care (ECEC) institutions that operate at a nexus of power and potential. We understand children in ECEC institutions as both desirous (Deleuze, 1978) and thus agentic, as well as malleable (Malabou, 2008) and thus vulnerable. We use our personal stories from our own childhood experiences, and Froebel’s metaphor of kindergarten (child garden) to speculate as to what an ethics of flourishing might entail in ECEC’s power/potential nexus. Our approach in this chapter is experimental and eclectic, inspired by plant life to embrace an academic form of stream of consciousness (James, 1890/1950) writing. James (1890/1950) introduced the term stream of consciousness, which later was adopted by literary giants such as Virginia Woolf and James Joyce, to describe what he called the ‘The first and foremost concrete fact which everyone will affirm to belong to his inner experience.’ ‘Thought’, he pointed out, ‘goes on’ (James, 1890/1950, p. 224, our emphasis). The stream of consciousness is characterized by the uniqueness of each thought and the quality of continuity–that each thought, while different, is part of an ever becoming present that is the culmination of past thought, while still being in a process of becoming new thought (James, 1890/1950). Teixeira (2011, p. 2) argues that James’ thinking was a forerunner of process philosophy pointing out that for James, ‘reality is a process of coming into being, a flux that unravels itself so that it can achieve its own existence.’ A stream of consciousness is both continuous, and discontinuous, with interruptions that serve to disrupt as well as to build upon as reality ‘buds and burgeons, changes and creates’ (James, 1909, pp. 264–265). With James’ metaphor of the stream of consciousness and Froebel’s metaphor of a child garden, we think through Barad, Haraway, Deleuze and Guattari, Spinoza, Irigaray and Marder, a diverse group of thinkers that contribute to our thinking about flourishing and ECEC. A generative question served as the ‘seed’ of this endeavor: what motivates us to research early childhood education and care through posthuman and autoethnographic perspectives? From that question, the focal area of this paper emerged: children, flourishing and education. We have co-written and co-thought this stream of consciousness effort, in which we as co-authors have let ourselves be affected by the other’s thoughts and attempted to grow together as we sent this chapter back and forth between us over the course of four months. This chapter is an experiment in letting a paper grow like a plant, driven by our intra-acting streams of consciousness. Borrowing James’ metaphors, we have used our personal stories as resting places for our thoughts to ‘perch’ (Osowski, 1992). These stories spurred our thoughts into new flight patterns, informed by previous thoughts while impregnating the future. We want to embrace the radical openness to being in and of the world suggested by thinkers such as Spinoza, Deleuze and Marder without ‘consuming’ in every sense of the word the other–natal and non-natal kin (Haraway, 2014, 2016)–and to take 1

On potestas: potestas needs a referent, something to act on or be acted upon whereas potentia does not (Deleuze, 1988–1989).

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seriously the notion that to be one is to be many (Barad, 2007; Haraway, 2014) and that to be this rather than that is a matter of determinacy (Barad, 2007). We understand our interest in the entanglements of children, flourishing and education as a form of love. And we draw on Deleuze, Deleuze and Guattari, Spinoza, and Marder and their understanding that to love is to love without interests. We do not aim to conclude, but to explore and to express the eternal return following Spinoza and Nietzsche as proposed by Marder, Deleuze and Guattari, that affirms and reaffirms existence in all its materiality, requiring only absolute difference in itself. We understand ties such as family, race, religion, gender and the like, as systems that both include and exclude, and thus that repress the (unconditional) desire to be one and thus many as espoused by Spinoza, Deleuze and Guattari, Arendt and Weil. This chapter is the result of our attempt to live this desire: to show without telling, to inscribe without signs of signs from positions of desire (Irigaray, 2013; Deleuze, 1988–1989; Deleuze & Guattari, 1972/2000, 1980/1987), to embrace the ecological rather than the economical (Haraway, 2014, 2016; Irigaray & Marder, 2016).

10.2 The Potential/Power Nexus of Education The goals of education are rooted in both power and potential, with potestas having to do with futurity and control and potentia having to do with futurity and freedom. The roots of early childhood education and care have a particular relationship to the idea of potential. Froebel had an afflatus that the institution he was developing should be called ‘kindergarten’: literally ‘child garden.’ In this chapter, we draw on the evocative name of kindergarten to explore the ethics of flourishing as goal of ECEC. We embrace Froebel’s plant metaphor to think about how intra-actions between children’s desires and capabilities, and the aims and interests of ECEC institutions together mediate children’s potential. Thinking-with Deleuze and Guattari’s concept of ‘desiring machines’ and Spinoza’s understanding of morality as the mediation of the body’s potential as well as Barad’s intra-action, we explore how children’s worlds are awash with ‘competing signals [that] vie for the plant[/child]’s attention, localized and dispersed throughout all its organs without exception’ (Marder, 2012, p. 1368). My first day at school had not gone well. At age 4.5 I had pestered my parents to send me: I wanted to learn to write my name. ‘But we can teach you’ ‘But you’re not teachers.’ And with that they had succumbed and enrolled me at my sister’s primary school. I had arrived with satchel in tow and once seated at my desk had proceeded to take out pencils, 2, eraser, 1, and a brand new exercise book. ‘Ok children let’s go play. You can choose the sand-pit or the Wendy house,’ the teacher had said. The children quickly dispersed to their chosen play area while I remained seated, pencil in hand. The teacher came and stood at my side: ‘Come, time to play.’ ‘I don’t want to play. I want to learn to write my name.’ ‘Oh you won’t learn to read and write for a while

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yet.’ I remained firmly in place. ‘Come and play I said.’ But I would not budge. My mind was made up; I could have stayed home if I had wanted to ‘learn’ to play. The teacher was getting annoyed. She looked at me sternly then picked up the desk-cum-chair with me in it and placed me in the centre of the sand-pit. I stayed put while the children continued to play around me. Lunchtime came and with the teacher at the front of the line she led the class to the dining room. I remained at my desk in the sand-pit. The next day I informed my parents that I was not returning to school.

How can we enable child’s potentia rather than potestas, enable the joy of being (at least momentarily) in perfect harmony with the world by understanding their relation to the world. The joy that comes in the ‘conquest’ of reading one’s name, writing one’s name, rather than the conquest of another whatever that other may be. The joy in being able to say: ‘I have understood.’ It is understanding such as this that Spinoza believes is what makes us ‘less stupid than yesterday’ (in Deleuze, 1978, para. 47). Deleuze’s reading of Spinoza suggests that such liminal affectivity is a ‘melodic line of continuous variation’ (1978, para. 15). The immediacy with which children act and are acted upon, opportunities created and inhibited, demand careful consideration of ECEC as a site where potentialities are mediated, in a continuous process of potential disfiguring, nurturing and sustaining. As noted by Barad: through intraactions ‘“marks are left on bodies”: bodies differentially materialize as particular patterns of the world as a result of the specific cuts and reconfigurings that are enacted’ (2007, p. 176). So too Deleuze explains affections–the ‘first type of knowledge’–as ‘the trace of another body on my body,’ (1978, para. 21), being affected: becoming object inside of an intra-action. Yet what are the effects (rather than affects) of such marks? For what matters is not only what kind of traces are being made and left, are they happy or sad, and for whom, but how children are coming to know themselves through the consequences/effects of such traces: what they are capable of and what their capacity for being affected is. How are they coming to understand the causes of such effects without having to experience them?

10.3 Growing up in Every Which Way Children in their continual becoming can be understood by Deleuze’s use of the word ‘mélange’–mixture (1978, para. 20): a mixture, mixing the world and mixing with the world, a radical openness to being in/with/of the world. And it is this radical openness that is ‘the ethical injunction for openness to the other’ (Marder, 2013, p. 107). According to Marder a ‘plant’s future is entirely contingent on alterity when it comes to the process of ripening, the possibilities of flourishing and withering away, and so forth’ (2013, p. 107). So too with children. Their bodies tell stories of possibilities withering away or flourishing when ‘affected’ appropriately: their capacity to grow but also to decay. What would it take for child to learn be(com)ing like plants, eating/thinking like plants as ‘welcoming the other, forming a rhizome with it, and turning oneself into the passage for the other without violating or dominating it, without endeavoring to

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swallow up its very otherness in one’s corporeal and psychic interiority’ (Marder, 2013, p. 185)? Are as Nietzsche (2005) proposes eating, being and thinking inextricably intertwined: that you are what you eat and food indeed provokes thought? If so, what does this mean for early childhood education? Plants by their very ‘nature’ deconstruct the Cartesian divide between mind and body and, as such, in one fell swoop, that same divide between theory and practice, research and policy (Marder, 2013). The extended, organic and material nature of plant thought, ‘grounded’ as it is in a particular praxis of hospitality: that of sharing with all, ensures that it is at one with all aspects of ‘nourishment and generation’ (Marder, 2013, p. 181). In this sense, plant thinking is plant doing, a way of living which because of this very fact has no practical effects (Marder, 2013). The core implication of this fact for children in early childhood education is that we learn from child: take the side of child, work for the sake of child, their inside/outside worlds. There is no neutrality; there is no objectivity, no obligation, only a propagation of thinkingdoing. For children’s lives are, as are the lives of plants, to borrow from Katz (2008, p. 9): ‘suffused with social relations that can exceed commodification, evade colonization, and recreate the means of existence and subjectivity in new registers.’ There is no obligation to ‘teach’ children but we can co-create alternative life stories with them together with others, relational and reciprocal life stories, never selfsufficient but always response-able and in tune with that world we are a part of and seek to understand (Barad, 2007). It would be to ‘venture off the beaten path to meet the unexpected, non-natal kin, and to strike up conversations, to pose and respond to interesting questions, to propose together something unanticipated’ (Haraway, 2016, p. 130), to imagine different yet ‘intertwined worldings’ (p. 13). It would be to learn the art of living on a damaged planet with the notion that ‘to be a one at all, you must be a many’ (Haraway, 2014, para. 4) (no metaphor intended), that to love place is to love it as home.

10.4 An Ethics of Flourishing in ECEC Barad (2007) describes ethics as ‘taking account of the entangled phenomena that are intrinsic to the world’s vitality and being responsive to the possibilities that might help it flourish’ (p. 369). The current neoliberal figuration of child as ‘spectacle’ (Katz, 2008) takes no account of this. Child is viewed as a source of fear and anxiety (children seen as time and money consuming ornaments to be displayed as models of ‘excellence’) as well as wonder (children as saviors of the world-to-come). Parental ontological insecurity about the future and the ‘quest for “absolute control”’ is what lies at the heart of this current desire and drive to secure the future of children and ‘produce perfect childhoods that supplant and echo the complete control over the domestic’ details of the 1960s and 1970s (Katz, 2008, p. 6). Child thus acts as a focus of parental desire, and distraction, with an ever-growing ‘arsenal of weapons of mass distraction’ (Katz, 2008, p. 9) close to hand. With the shift from the social to the individual and private reproduction of the social we have seen a similar shift in

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education with families scrambling to ensure their child ‘makes it’ in the face of an insecure work future (Katz, 2008, p. 7). As Katz’s makes clear (2008, p. 11), parents intent on securing their own as well as their child’s future compete for ‘prestigious’ pre-school places, with coaches available at a price to ensure they can convince ‘deans of admission’ to accept their child. Children are ever more pressurized to ‘perform’ but continue to inhabit the margins of human life, much as plants do, for the most part ignored, viewed as commodity, ornament and waste (Katz, 2008). How can childhood as spectacle (Katz, 2008), be reworked to become ‘ethical spectacle’ (p. 15) whereby children and adults reflect openly about (and realize) how social life is currently constructed and so can face the possibility of constructing it differently (p. 15), together, facing conflicts and becoming more conscious agents of change? When I was 4,5 years old, I was sent to kindergarten. My family was poor. Any clothing that was new was, for me, spectacular. My grandma had given me a new winter jacket for Christmas. I looked forward to having it on during recess. It had a soft wool lining and brown corduroy outer lining. I buttoned up my jacket and put the warm and cozy hood over my head. Walking out onto the playground, I wandered. I watched the other children running, together–here, then there. . . not understanding what they were doing, I found them interesting to watch. Suddenly, one of them was calling out to me from the top of a climbing apparatus. ‘Hey! Cone head! Cone head!’ My face started burning. He was talking to me; he was making fun of me. Worse still, he was doing it through the jacket my grandma had given me. I thought about my grandma, and about how she would feel if she knew that I was being called a cone head in the jacket she had given me. At that moment I was struck by how my jacket, a beloved gift, was changed into an embarrassing hat and how my grandma’s love for me was stripped of power on the playground.

Children are as leaves, outwardly the same as one another, contingent on the other and ‘other’ to thrive, yet also different the one from the other. Marder (2013, p. 84) scolds Deleuze and Guattari for singling out the leaves of one plant in particular, the tree, in their book A Thousand Plateaus as an exemplar for hierarchical arrangement, the differences between mapping and tracing, products and reproductions: ‘The tree articulates and hierarchizes tracings; tracings are like the leaves on a tree’ (Deleuze & Guattari, 1980/1987, p. 12). They have forgotten, Marder points out, that leaves are not organs of the larger whole. The leaf is he says an: ‘infinitely iterable and radically egalitarian building block of the tree’ being at one and the same time ‘the source, the product, and the minute reproduction of vegetal being’ (Marder, 2013, p. 85) which can at any time drop off. We too seem to have forgotten that children like leaves are both members of the ‘plant,’ i.e., society ‘yet independent entities in their own right’ (p. 85) capable at any time of dropping off. And so although children/leaves repeat they are indeed different and represent most accurately what Nietzsche calls the eternal return: with ‘only absolute difference in itself’ (Marder, 2013, p. 114, original emphasis) capable of repetition. They affirm and reaffirm ‘existence in all its finite materiality’ (p. 112).

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10.5 Grafting Power and Potential As both desirous and vulnerable, child and children require an ethics of care while ECEC increasingly embraces an ethics of auditing. An ethics of ‘gifting’ repels learning goals that demand the child and educator relate to each other ‘within the limits of a sort of game’ as Simone Weil (1959/1978, p. 73) would say–where ‘success’ demands that clearly stated quantifiable measurements on standardized tests be tracked and met. Our interdependence is at the forefront of all we do, where to quote Hannah Arendt it ‘may be [the] curious negative quality of goodness, the lack of outward phenomenal manifestation, that makes good works because they must be forgotten instantly, can never become part of the world; they come and go, leaving no trace. They are truly not of this world’ (1958, p. 74). So it is that in our daily intra-actions with children it is ‘courage that speaks to fear’ (Weil, 1959/1978, p. 99), fear of being tried, judged, and found wanting when it comes to creating childhood and child as spectacle that yet by so doing recreates spectacle as ethical spectacle, a co-construction of child and childhood as different. Luce Irigaray (in Irigaray & Marder, 2016) reminds us that to show without telling, to speak without words, is to establish roots when we are displaced. It is to recover that energy vital to being sensitive when relating to others and ‘others.’ It is to be as plants: conducive to a sharing that is ecological rather than economical (Irigaray & Marder, 2016). It is to be at one with the world, inhabiting the littoral with potentia rather than potestas. When water is in short supply, plants detect the lack of moisture and respond by wilting. If they can be ‘thirsty’, and if desire is associated with the experienced lack of the desired thing in the desiring being, then the fern you have not watered for weeks is, in fact, desirous of water. . . . Does a water-deprived fern really feel the absence of the object of its desire? For Plato, such a feeling is the uncompromising baseline for any life deserving of the name. Further, contemporary botany confirms this intuition. (Marder, 1980, pp. 12–13)

As such a plant as a desiring being ‘knows’ if not conceptually then at the level of praxis. Plants feel and react. Mimosa leaves Chamovitz (2017) tells us close immediately on being touched. The touch causes them to generate an electric charge (very similar to that produced by our own sensory neurons) which causes the leaves to rid themselves of water. This in turn causes the pressure on the cell walls to drop and the leaves to close. The plant not only knows it is being touched but manipulates its physiology to respond to the touch. Plants thus stand at that threshold of living being and of being thing (Irigaray & Marder, 2016; Marder, 1980, 2013). We understand children as also occupying this liminal space, both growing and being grown. As such ‘some seeds die when one tries to assimilate them, to make them one’s own, instead of offering them a hospitable place to take root, to develop, to blossom’ (Irigaray, 2013, p. 67) however limited the hospitable place might be. As a small child, my father looked down at the box on the doorstep. Perplexed he opened the lid to find his meagre possessions packed inside. The woman opened the front door, stepped out and said: ‘Take your things and leave. You’re not wanted here anymore.’ She went inside and closed the door. He heard the lock being turned. He picked up his box and started the 10

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mile walk to his grandma’s house. He was only 7 and 10 miles was a long way to walk before nightfall came but his stepmother had been very clear: this place was no longer home. My father often said that ties such as family, race, religion, gender and the like, were meant to exclude: that they provided the illusion that ‘we’ belong. But that we were all cultures of one and as such it was up to each of us to include the others, whoever or whatever they might be, to be kind and compassionate.

Ethics, thus, according to Spinoza (in Deleuze, 1978), is not about obligation or duty. Rather, being ethical involves the transformation of power to joy, a child’s joy and one’s own, as a sign of flourishing. It is about joy, the joy of living with and through others. As Spinoza (in Deleuze, 1978, para. 46) reminds us: ‘The affects of joy are like a springboard, they make us pass through something that we would never have been able to pass if there had only been sadnesses.’ Yet to live joyfully Spinoza adds (in Deleuze, 1978, para. 47) is to ‘live on the edges, at the limit of her/his own power of being affected… [for] everything which exceeds your power of being affected is ugly.’ Thus it is that ‘a blue that is too intense for my eyes will not make me say it’s beautiful, it will perhaps be beautiful for someone else. There’s good for all, you tell me… Yes, because the powers of being affected are combined’ (Deleuze, 1978, para. 47). Thinking with each other and our company of thinkers, we understand an ethics of flourishing to include exercising potestas always in service of potentia. In ECEC, this can mean navigating children’s desires and sadness related to the intended and unintended consequences of malice, in the Spinozian sense of the word, from educators, other children, family, society at large, or even their own bodies and intensity of experience resulting from the radical openness that characterizes childhood. For sadness inflicted through malice affects children and ‘inhibits’ their potential, their power to act (Deleuze, 1978, para. 14) and thus to flourish as the one and the many. It is a child’s joy and flourishing (through an ethics of potential) that we suggest as a true measure of success in the ECEC classroom.

References Arendt, H. (1958). The human condition. The University of Chicago Press. Barad, K. (2007). Meeting the universe halfway: Quantum physics and the entanglement of matter and meaning. Duke University Press. Chamovitz, D. (2017). What a plant knows: A field guide to the senses of your garden-and beyond. American Scientific/Farrar, Straus, & Giroux. Deleuze, G., & Guattari, F. (1987). A thousand plateaus: Capitalism and schizophrenia. (Brian Massumi, Trans.). University of Minnesota Press. (Original work published 1980). Deleuze, G. (1978). On Spinoza: Lecture transcript (Timothy S. Murphy, Trans.). https://www.web deleuze.com/textes/14 Deleuze, G. (1988–1989). L’Abécédaire de Gilles Deleuze (Gilles Deleuze in conversation with C. Parnet) [Video]. Retrieved from mailto: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=YwLdqi8AOBU& playnext=1&list=PL4E442C79EB9F5C47 Delueze, G., & Guattari, F. (2000). Anti-Oedipus: Capitalism and schizophrenia (R. Hurley, M. Seem, & H. R. Lane, Trans.). University of Minnesota Press. (Original work published 1972).

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Haraway, D. (2016). Staying with the trouble: Making kin in the Chthulucene. Duke University Press. Haraway, D. (2014). Anthropocene, Capitalocene, Chthulucene: Staying with the trouble. Anthropocene: Arts of Living on a damaged planet. Retrieved from http://opentranscripts.org/transcript/ anthropocene-capitalocene-chthulucene Irigaray, L. (2013). In the beginning she was. Bloomsbury. Irigaray, L., & Marder, M. (2016). Through vegetal being: Two philosophical perspectives. Columbia University Press. James, W. (1909). A pluristic universe. Longmans, Greene and Co. https://archive.org/details/plu ralisticunive00jamerich/page/n5/mode/2up?q=stream James. W. (1950). The principles of psychology. Dover Publications. https://play.google.com/books/ reader?id=JLcAAAAAMAAJ&hl=no&pg=GBS.PA1. (Original work published 1890). Katz, C. (2008). Childhood as spectacle: Relays of anxiety and the reconfiguration of the child. Cultural Geographies, 15(1), 5–17. Malabou, C. (2008). What should we do with our brain? (S. Rand, Trans.). Forham University Press. Marder, M. (1980). The philosopher’s plant: An intellectual herbarium. Columbia University Press. Marder, M. (2012). Plant intentionality and the phenomenological framework of plant intelligence. Plant Signaling & Behavior, 7(11), 1365–1372. https://doi.org/10.4161/psb.21954 Marder, M. (2013). Plant-thinking: A philosophy of vegetal life. Columbia University Press. Nietzsche, F. W. (2005). The anti-christ, Ecce homo, Twilight of the idols, and other writings. In A. Ridley & J. Norman (Eds.). Cambridge University Press. Osowski, J. V. (1992). Ensembles of metaphor in the psychology of William James. In D. B. Wallace & H. E. Gruber (Eds.), Creative people at work: Twelve cognitive case studies (pp. 127– 145). Oxford University Press. Teixeira, M. T. (2011). The stream of consciousness and the epochal theory of time. European Journal of Pragmatism and American Philosophy [Online], III-1 | 2011. Online since 01 July 2011, retrieved 12 February 2021 from http://journals.openedition.org/ejpap/872. https://doi.org/ 10.4000/ejpap.872 Weil, S. (1978). Lectures on philosophy. (Hugh Price, Trans). Cambridge University Press. (Original work published 1959)

Carmen Blyth completed her Ph.D. on international schools, teaching, and governance at the University of Cape Town and was a postdoctoral research fellow with the Decolonizing Early Childhood Discourses research project at the same university. She has worked with international schools and universities in Asia, Africa, and the Middle East for over 30 years as a teacher, teacher trainer, and department founder. She currently enjoys mentoring Ph.D. and IB Diploma candidates and has a special interest in the links between linguistic diversity and biodiversity, and the rights of other language speakers in institutions where English is the medium of instruction. Her publications include a monograph on ethics in international schools: storytelling and autoethnography published with Palgrave Macmillan, journal contributions that engage with posthumanism, as well as book chapters on syllabus design. She holds a B.Sc. (Hons) in Pure and Applied Physics. Teresa K. Aslanian is a trained early childhood educator and Associate Professor of early childhood education in the Department of Educational Sciences at University of South-Eastern Norway. American by birth, she has lived in Norway for 25 years and published on the subjects of care, love and learning with examples and inspiration from Norwegian kindergartens. Her work utilizes and engages with critical and posthuman perspectives in order to reconceptualise taken for granted concepts and themes in ECEC.

Afterword

One Final Story (for now at least) One day the wife of a wealthy man who had lost her only child approached the Buddha. She held the body of the dead child in her arms and begged the Buddha to restore him to life. The Buddha told her that he could bring the child back to life but only if she could bring him white mustard seeds from a family where no one had ever died. The woman went from house to house, family to family, asking each one in turn if they had ever lost a loved one. But at every village, every house, every home she visited she only heard stories of sadness and grief, different, not in the depth of the despair felt, but in the details given. With each story of grief she heard, her own grief though no less changed into understanding: that no house is free of mortality; everyone eventually dies; and it is only through death that life is possible. By the time she returned home to the Buddha he had no need to explain. As Taio Kaneta, a Japanese Buddhist priest who tended to the many people who suffered the Japanese tsunami of 2011, explains in Ghosts of the Tsunami: There are no justifications to give to those who have lost a loved one. All we can do is listen and journey with them as they search for understanding.

This story and the stories presented within this volume trace our iterative journeys to becoming, to being in the here and now, the then and there. They seek to position ECEC in a becoming of the world in all its dynamic possibilities rather than a static being in a world of certainties. In the beginning as in the end we are all becoming. We are the sum total of our entanglements, the stories we tell and the marks they and others’ stories make on our bodies and we on theirs: stories human and non human, material and discursive. These are stories that stitch lives together (Smiles, 2015) in ways that words alone cannot. They cause lives to move, to flow with an explosion of desire: ‘a process and not a goal, a production and not an expression’ (Deleuze & Guattari, 1972/2000, p. 133). They are stories of ‘disqualified knowledge’ (Foucault, 1980, p. 82) and taboo subjects: ‘asyntactic, agrammatical: the moment when language is no longer defined by what it says, even less by what makes it a signifying thing’ (Deleuze & Guattari, 1972/2000, p. 133) but by desire, a desire © The Editor(s) (if applicable) and The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature Singapore Pte Ltd. 2022 C. Blyth and T. K. Aslanian (eds.), Children and the Power of Stories, Children: Global Posthumanist Perspectives and Materialist Theories, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-981-16-9287-1

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that has been separated out from the sticky fingers of interests. Eventually though all stories fade, even the most vivid, to become a familiar part of who we are all becoming; they are the stories that bind us to the world in its ‘open-ended articulation’ (Barad, 2007, p. 379). They are there to remind us of our ongoing responsibility and accountability, our ability to respond and account for ourselves, for entanglements past, present, and future as we ceaselessly (re)story ourselves and each other into being.

References Barad, K. (2007). Meeting the universe half-way: Quantum physics and the entanglement of matter and meaning. Duke University Press. Delueze, G., & Guattari, F. (2000). Anti-Oedipus: Capitalism and schizophrenia (R. Hurley, M. Seem, & H. R. Lane, Trans.). University of Minnesota Press. (Original work published 1972.) Foucault, M. (1980). Two lectures (K. Soper, Trans.). In C. Gordon (Ed.), Power/knowledge: Selected interviews and other writings, 1972–1977 (pp. 78–108). Pantheon Books. Smiles, S. (2015, Nov. 13). Turner’s last works: Frameworks and meaning [Video]. Curator’s Talks. Baillie Court, Art Gallery of Ontario. Retrieved from mailto https://ago.ca/events/turners-lastworks-frameworks-and-meanings

Index

A Action research, 98, 99 Affect, 5, 12, 30, 32, 47, 69, 71, 72, 81, 93, 94, 99–101, 110, 112, 114, 117, 120, 128, 130, 138, 142 Affective, 1, 4, 5, 11, 12, 14, 37, 48, 51, 56, 57, 69, 71, 77, 91, 93, 95, 98–100, 102 Agency material, 93 Agential realism, 29 Aggregate, 109, 110, 112, 113, 118, 120 Andrews, Gavin, J., 130 Anthropocene, 51–56, 63, 64 Anthropomorphising, 27 Anti-Oedipus, 74, 135 Anzaldúa, Gloria, 126, 128 Apparatus, 7, 75–77, 140 Aragón, Oriana O., 85, 129 Arendt, Hannah, 137, 141 Assemblage, 1, 6, 30, 31, 33, 34, 58, 64, 69–73, 78–80, 84, 85, 95, 99, 102, 115, 129, 131 Autoethnographic, 1, 5, 7, 11, 23, 91, 93–95, 98–101, 106, 136 Autoethnography, 2, 4, 5, 7, 9, 11, 17, 18, 93, 94, 102 Autonomy, 34, 55, 96, 98, 99

B Bag-lady-carrier-bag, 42, 44, 45, 48 Bag-lady storytelling, 38, 43

Barad, Karen, 28–30, 32, 38, 39, 41–43, 45, 46, 48, 69, 71, 72, 74, 76, 83, 85, 93, 110, 126, 127, 136–139 Becoming with, 42, 43, 110 Bennet, Jane, 11, 28–30 Biological process, 112 Biology, 111, 117, 121 Black feminism, 17 Bodies as living matter, 109, 112 Body as series of open-ended systems, 115, 119 nature of the, 114 ontology of the, 109 researcher, 39 Braidotti, Rosi, 1, 2, 6, 9, 13, 14, 64, 97–99, 110, 111, 115 Buchanan, Ian, 72, 74 Buddhist, 145 Burman, Erica, 79

C Cardboard book, 37, 40, 43, 45, 47 Care amoral, 27, 34 as a professional practice, 27 as process, 27, 28, 31, 34 indirect, 33, 34 morally motivated, 33, 34 performance of, 31–34 performer of, 28, 29 Care-ethics, 27, 31

© The Editor(s) (if applicable) and The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature Singapore Pte Ltd. 2022 C. Blyth and T. K. Aslanian (eds.), Children and the Power of Stories, Children: Global Posthumanist Perspectives and Materialist Theories, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-981-16-9287-1

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148 Caregiving, 33, 34 Carrier-bag storytelling, 37, 42 Child, 1, 4, 13, 15, 19, 20, 24, 28–34, 39–48, 57, 58, 70, 80, 81, 83, 91, 92, 95–97, 99–102, 104, 106, 110, 135–142 Children, 40, 41, 44–48, 53, 57, 62, 69–71, 80, 82, 83, 96, 100, 101, 142 as desiring machines, 135 Cognitive development, 46 Collaboration, 81, 97, 105 Coloniality, 73, 83, 85 Community, 19, 23, 24, 41, 48, 64, 83–85, 112, 114 Continuum, 27, 73, 104 Counter narratives, 20 Covid-19, 14, 52, 62, 64, 118 Critical Race Theory, 17, 18, 23, 120 Cultural inscription narratives, 18 Culture, 3, 6, 20, 21, 43, 54, 75, 80, 83–85, 92–94, 97, 100, 101, 110–113, 115, 117, 122, 142 D Decoloniality, 84, 85, 131 Decoloni(ali)ze, 4, 84 Deleuze, Gilles, 1, 4–6, 11, 14, 30, 69–78, 81, 82, 85, 91, 93, 95–97, 99, 101, 114, 120, 127–131, 135–138, 140, 142 De(re)territorialization, 6, 69, 71, 81, 129, 131 Derrida, Jacques, 127, 128, 130 Desire, 6, 7, 30, 39, 41, 65, 75, 77, 78, 81, 91, 93, 95, 99, 101–103, 106, 135, 137, 139, 141, 142 Developmental psychology, 29, 32 Differences, 22, 37–43, 45, 47, 48, 78, 81, 91, 93, 110, 119, 140 and repetition, 129 Diffractive stories, 125, 126 Discrimination, 19, 110, 114, 130 Dovidio, John F., 85, 129 Duff, Cameron, 130 Dufourmantelle, Anne, 127, 128 Dyadic, 27, 28, 30, 31, 33, 34 E Empathy, 30, 82 Entanglements, 2, 3, 5, 7, 10–12, 45, 62, 80, 97, 112, 126, 135–137

Index Equity, 78, 97, 109, 114 Essential workers, 62 Eternal return, 137, 140 Ethical response-ability, 39, 40, 48, 51, 64 Ethico-onto-epistemological, 38, 39, 41, 42, 84, 85 Ethico-onto-epistemology, 39 Ethics, 27, 31, 33, 78, 83, 93, 104, 111, 114, 131, 135–137, 139, 141, 142

F Feminist, 5, 19, 23, 27, 30, 31, 37, 38, 40, 43, 51, 54–56, 110, 111, 121 Fisher, Bernice, 31, 33 Flaneur, 56 Flâneuse, 51, 54, 56 Flourishing ethics of, 139 Foucault, Michel, 85, 104, 105, 130 Frank, Arthur, 125, 126, 129 Froebel, Freidrich, 135–137 Future, 4, 22, 58, 77, 84, 103, 106, 109, 110, 113, 116–122, 131, 136, 138–140

G Gola´nska, Dorota, 80, 82, 83, 85 Grief, 145 Graham, Mark J., 85, 129 Grosz, Elisabeth, 109–113, 115–122 Gruenewald, David A., 86, 126

H Haraway, Donna, 38–40, 42–45, 48, 52, 53, 63, 64, 71, 72, 84, 85, 120, 128, 136, 137, 139 Heterotopias, 95, 96 Heterotopologies, 96 History, 6, 18, 55, 74, 75, 84, 97, 109, 113–115, 117, 119, 120 Hope, 2, 4, 5, 18, 51, 52, 64, 73, 115, 121, 122, 125, 126 Hospitality conditional, 131 unconditional, 127 Human more than, 120 non, 76, 81 other than, 10 Hunhu/Ubuntu, 130, 131

Index I Indeterminacy, 51, 54, 56, 64 Inequality, 62, 63, 110, 111 Inhospitable, 126–128 Intra-action, 11, 28, 29, 32, 37, 39, 41, 42, 45, 47, 48, 69, 71, 137, 138, 141 Irigaray, Luce, 8, 136, 137, 141

J Janz, Bruce, 81, 128, 129 Jita funi, xi Joy, 23, 103, 138, 142 Joyce, James, 136 Justice, 64, 79, 84, 92, 96, 104, 109

K Käll, Jannice, ix, xi Katz, Cindi, 139, 140 Kindergarten, 37, 39–41, 43–48, 94, 102, 104, 105, 135–137, 140 Knowledge, 2, 4–6, 10, 11, 14, 18, 22, 23, 27, 39, 42, 43, 46–48, 52, 55, 56, 80, 82, 83, 92–101, 103–105, 112, 115, 119, 121, 122, 131, 138 Kushinski, Alysse V., 73

L Leadership, 79, 91–106 Leaks, 73, 77 Learning organizational, 95 Le Guin, Ursula, 37, 38, 42 Lichen, 51, 52, 58–64 Liminal spaces, 126 Lines of consistency, 1, 3, 5, 6 of flight, 1, 3, 5, 6, 13, 14, 71, 78, 81 Listening, 21, 37–39, 41, 45, 52, 72 Littoral, The, 136, 141 Lockdown, 54, 55, 58, 63 Love, 21, 32–34, 53, 62, 65, 93, 96, 137, 139, 140

M Man, 63, 64 Marder, Michael, 136–141 Masks, 56, 57, 118 Material agency, 32 Materialisms, 29, 34, 38, 54, 85 renewed, xi

149 Materialists new, 54 Materiality, 28, 29, 31, 32, 34, 39–41, 47, 73, 102, 111, 115, 128, 137, 140 Matter, 41, 42, 74, 76, 78, 80, 81, 84, 93, 109, 112, 116, 119, 125–127, 129, 130, 137 of concern, 76, 81 of fact, 76 Meaning, 6, 10, 11, 18, 19, 30, 32, 53, 69, 74, 80, 84, 95, 101, 103, 105, 128 Memory stories, 37, 38, 45, 48 Metaphor, 5, 42, 96, 135–137, 139 Micro-ethnographic, 28 Micro-moments, 37, 38, 41–43, 48 Moral, 31, 33, 63, 104 Morality, 28, 32, 135, 137 Mulhall, Stephen, viii Multiplicity, 1, 2, 4, 6, 7, 10–13, 39, 47, 73, 78, 80, 103 Multispecies, 51, 52, 56, 61–65 N Narrative counter, 20, 23, 120 Nature, 1, 2, 6, 27, 31, 34, 43, 44, 52, 62–64, 72, 73, 77, 82, 84, 93, 100, 101, 109, 111–113, 121, 122, 139 Neocolonialism, 69–71, 77 Neoliberalism, 69–71, 77–79, 85, 91, 104, 106 Neoliberal public management, 92 New materialist, 28, 29, 34, 40, 54, 82, 110 Nietzsche, Freidrich, 137, 139, 140 Nomadism, 6, 11 Nomad, The, 72, 74 Nonlinear, 4, 5, 9, 77 O Observation, 28, 37, 39, 42, 45–48, 56, 80 Ontological, 27, 30, 34, 84, 118, 119, 130, 131, 139 Ontology, 78, 83, 93, 109, 112, 115, 120, 129 Organization, 44, 45, 72, 91, 95, 96, 102, 106, 115 Other, 2, 4–10, 12–14, 17–20, 23, 24, 28–30, 32–34, 38–47, 53–55, 58, 59, 61–64, 69–74, 77, 78, 80, 83–86, 91–94, 96, 100–106, 111, 112, 114–117, 119–121, 128–130, 135, 136, 138, 140–142

150

Index

Othered, 126

Roy, Arundhati, 53

P Pandemics, 53, 117, 118 Performance, 2, 33, 78, 79, 83, 92, 97, 98, 125, 126 Philosophy for children, 69–71, 80 Piaget, Jean, 27, 31, 34, 46, 80 Place, 3, 7, 8, 11, 18, 21, 24, 27, 28, 33, 39–42, 48, 52, 57, 58, 61, 64, 69–78, 81, 82, 84, 86, 92, 95, 100–103, 106, 111, 119, 125–131, 136, 138–142 Plants, 42, 59, 73, 138–141 Plastic bottle, 43–45, 47 Poem, 52, 112–114, 121 Political, 3, 31, 52, 54, 64, 69–72, 76, 78, 83, 95, 104, 110, 112, 115–118, 120–122, 128, 130 Politics, 102, 105, 106, 111, 112, 114, 115, 118, 120–122 Pollution, 44, 45, 59, 61, 62, 76 Polycritical activisms, 98 Posthuman, 2, 4, 5, 9–11, 13, 34, 37, 38, 45, 97, 110, 113, 136 Posthumanism, 3, 7–10, 30, 93 Potentia, 135–138, 141, 142 Potential, 6, 23, 32–34, 58, 62, 81, 84, 99, 100, 111, 119, 120, 126, 129–131, 135–138, 142 Potestas, 136–138, 141, 142 Power over, 85, 125, 126, 130 to, 20, 33, 85, 125, 126, 130, 142 Praxis, 1–5, 7, 11, 51, 55, 76, 83, 100, 128, 131, 139, 141 Private sphere, 31 Professionalization, 34, 92, 96–98, 106 Professional sphere, 31 Purposeful placement stories, 21, 23, 24

S Self, 1–4, 6, 8–14, 19, 24, 83, 85, 98, 100, 126, 128, 130 Sensitivity, 30, 33, 59, 91, 101 Social regulation of bodies, 110 status, 30 Space, 1, 4, 6, 21, 28, 33, 52, 54, 55, 72, 73, 94, 102, 106, 109, 112–115, 118–120, 125, 126, 141 Spectacle, 56, 139, 140, 141 Speculative philosophy, 91, 102 Spinoza, Baruch, 135–138, 142 Sticky memories, 38 Sticky stories, 41, 42 Storied place, 72, 76, 81 Stories placed, 127 purposeful placement, 17, 21, 23, 24 sticky, 38, 41, 42, 48 Storytelling, 1–3, 11, 12, 18, 37, 38, 40, 43, 51, 56, 62, 69, 71, 81, 98, 110, 113, 130 Stream of consciousness, 135, 136 Subjectivity, 1, 2, 4, 5, 11, 85, 93, 97, 99, 112, 114, 139

R Ramose, Mogobe Bernard, 131 Refrain, The, 81, 128, 129, 131 Relationships, 4, 18, 21, 28, 29, 32, 34, 52, 59, 84, 135, 137 Researcher-body, 39 Response-ability, 8, 15, 33, 39–41, 45, 48, 51, 64, 79, 101, 146 Rhizomatic, 2, 14, 72, 78, 81, 131 Rhizomes, 14, 101, 114, 138 Richardson, Laurel, 3, 4 Risk, 20, 33, 53, 56, 57, 63, 99

T Taboo, 145 Teleology, 64, 92 Terra nullius, 126 Theorymethod, 93, 94, 103 Thinking-with, 33, 91, 94, 137, 142 Things Children s relationship to, 32 Touch, 47, 102, 141 Trans-corporeality, 51, 62–64 Transformation, 9, 24, 53, 92, 103, 111, 118–120, 142 Tronto, Joan, 27, 31, 33 Tsing, Anna, 52, 54–56, 58, 59, 61, 63, 64 U Ubuntu, 130, 131 Utopian, 103 V Van der Tuin, Iris, 94

Index

151

Vibe, 125, 126, 128 Virtual, 5, 39, 76, 92, 101, 103, 120, 130, 131 Vitality, 28, 99, 139 Vital materiality, 29, 30 Vulnerable, 63, 64, 96, 97, 120, 135, 136, 141

Weil, Simone, 137, 141 Wittgenstein, Ludwig, viii Wolfe, Carey, ix, xi Woolf, Virginia, 56, 136 Worlding, 42, 44, 45, 48, 93, 139 Wu, Jinting, 131

W Walking, 51, 54–56, 64, 140

Z Zetetic, 93, 98, 106