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This collective writing project considers the central issue of how we account for, understand, and talk about, the professional work of care in early childhood education. As an international collective, we stake out some of the messiness, the specificities and complexities of care in early childhood education. Each scholar explores the issue of foregrounding care in the professional work of early childhood educators and reflects on the complexities of care in early childhood education and care. While these musing are collected together in this paper, they are each a standalone provocation to grapple with diverse issues of care in relation to etymology, policy, risk, relationships, power, and racism. As a collective, we explore ways of engaging in the messiness of care and education with a spirit of vulnerability and the courage of risk taking to unpack care in early childhood education.

What if… this chapter asks, might higher education be twenty years from now? This chapter speculates a future that takes place 20 years from now, a future that acknowledges the challenges of the present, as discussed at greater length in the earlier chapters. We take up speculative inquiry as a method to consider a future where the teens of 2021 bring their experience of living and learning during this pandemic time to the shaping and leadership of universities in 2041. Beginning with a what-if scenario of a reconceived higher education, we create a speculative fiction text—a letter from the future—around which we perform a diffractive reading (Barad, 2014). What this diffraction brings about is a higher education imaginary of activisms and revolts that result from current tensions and challenges in education and research. The imaginary does not predict the future but offers a critical lens through which to make sense of this present and the possible futures tied to it. In so doing, we suggest potentialities of practices like elevating decolonised ways of knowing and engaging geographical, human and nonhuman diversities in campuses across urban and remote areas. Traversing twenty years from now, the chapter speculates on higher education, spanning virtual and physical spaces for re-connection of research, learning and assessment with, in and through assemblies of diverse beings, human and otherwise. The chapter concludes with a codetta, which leaves the reader with a brief account of a speculative encounter with Socrabots as they prepare to enter the teaching profession in the 2040s.

This text is an exploration of collaborative thinking and writing through theories, methods, and experiences on the topic of the child, children, and childhood. It is a collaborative written text (with 32 authors) that sprang out of the experimental workshop Child Studies Multiple. The workshop and this text are about daring to stay with mess, “un-closure” , and uncertainty in order to investigate the (e)motions and complexities of being either a child or a researcher. The theoretical and methodological processes presented here offer an opportunity to shake the ground on which individual researchers stand by raising questions about scientific inspiration, theoretical and methodological productivity, and thinking through focusing on process, play, and collaboration. The effect of this is a questioning of the singular academic ‘I’ by exploring and showing what a plural ‘I’ can look like. It is about what the multiplicity of voice can offer research in a highly individualistic time. The article allows the reader to follow and watch the unconventional trial-and-error path of the ongoing-ness of exploring theories and methods together as a research community via methods of drama, palimpsest, and fictionary.

The complex and fluid nature of knowledge is a key dimension of the early childhood curriculum and of early childhood teaching and learning. Such complexity adds to the already complex and dynamic work of an early childhood teacher. With a dynamic view of knowledge in mind, this article reports on research with a team of early childhood teachers to explore the ways in which knowledge is experienced for the teaching team. We explore formulations and debates on knowledge that engage with the complexity of knowledge relationships in an early childhood teaching team. The data provides an insight into the importance of leadership and interpersonal relationships in determining how knowledge moves within the ecology of a teaching team. The benefits of critical dialogue are explored in terms of supporting the work, and well-being, of early childhood teachers and teaching teams.

Revolt is a vital and transformative process of evolution and re-negotiation, Kristeva says, and, in the face of global/local, political, worldly and ecological crises, it is critical. This paper utilises the notion of revolt as an ongoing imperative to re-imagine activism through a human–posthuman framing. It conceptualises the university as a living, throbbing assemblage of beings, policies and practices that are closely and often indiscernibly entangled. In this assemblage COVID-19 is posited as an illustration of human and more-than-human life and uncertainty to provoke re-readings and reorientations towards policies and practices. Using revolt to refocus activisms in the university, the paper argues, blurs not only the human and nonhuman but also the policy–practice boundaries.

Infanticides is the third article in a collective writing project that includes ‘Infantologies’ and ‘Infantasies’. It is designed to develop a philosophy of the infant, which is not tied to either ...

We are about to publish in the Routledge Editor’s Choice series a collection called The Philosophy, Methodology and Pedagogy of Collective Writing. This collection of collections represents the dev...

Problematic policy constructions of the purpose of education implicate professional identities and working conditions of professionals working with the youngest children. This paper builds on our earlier writing, to contest teacher professional identities in Australia, Ireland, Denmark and the United States of America, to illustrate the crucial importance of contextualised policy landscapes in early childhood education and care. It uses prevailing policy constructions, power imbalances and tensions in defining teacher identities, to ask crucial questions, such as what has become of the professional ‘self’. It questions the fundamental ethics of care and encounter, and of worthy wage and other campaigns focused on the well-being of teachers when faced with a world-wide crisis. The cross-national conversations culminate in a contemporary confrontation of teacher identity and imperatives in increasingly uncertain times as evolving in light of the COVID-19 pandemic.

This diffractive disruption of care in early years settings and pedagogies opens up to a provocation that perhaps we don’t know care at all. Driven by Puig de la Bellacasa’s questioning of the notion of care as not solely a human-only matter and applying that in relation to the early years, it explores what it might mean when we cannot know all that cares or is cared for when we include more-than-human elements and factors, and when what is care remains to a large extent uncertain. Explicating the complexity of care in the early years assemblage, the paper uses a philosophical diffractive reading as a method of turning and re-turning to emphasise the non-linearity and fluidity between the doing, receiving and thinking about care in a human and more-than-human world. It urges a push beyond expected understandings of care and thus also pedagogies, culminating in potentialities that re-view a world in which things and beings are increasingly recognised as crucial, influential and potentially care-ing.

Infantologies is a collective writing project designed to express and summarise important ideas, approaches and forms of advocacy in a short and condensed method, in order to present a network of d...

Sonja Arndt, Michael Peters, Marek Tesar Introspection is a key concept in epistemology, since introspective knowledge is often thought to be particularly secure, maybe even immune to skeptical dou...

A collection of 84 author's testimonies and workspace photographs between 18 March and 5 May 2020

We might say that children’s play is the foundation of all learning. Often play is recognized as integral to childhood, but children’s abilities to engage in play are complex and these complexities can be easily overlooked. This paper elevates children’s play as critical for their learning, particularly in support of their sense of belonging. The paper argues for an openness to the complexities of children’s play as a crucial practice of their cultural identity, through a critical conceptualization of some of the nuances and uncertainties of children’s subject formation. Drawing on concerns of cultural difference in early childhood education, Julia Kristeva’s foreigner lens and her theory on the subject in process are used to theorise children’s play as an ongoing process of belonging. Through the notions of the semiotic, abjection, love and revolt, the notion of the subject in process is elaborated to reconceptualize play as also in-process and ongoing. Rethinking play as a vital process within the sometimes difficult, often unpredictable experiences of becoming part of a centre community is elevated as crucial for a sense of belonging in early childhood education.

Michael Peters, Sonja Arndt & Marek TesarThis is a collective writing experiment of PESA members, including its Executive Committee, asking questions of the Philosophy of Education in a New Key. Co...

In this article we explore the ways in which ‘the story must change’, according to Donna Haraway (2016) . We utilize the in-between space between Haraway's suggestion that we are in a time of Great Dithering, of ‘ineffective and widespread anxiety’, and Julia Kristeva's (2014) notion of revolt, to argue for a shift in orientations towards cultural otherness in higher education. Using a philosophical method of inquiry, we examine our somatechnical experiences and revelations in higher education settings, in the aftermath of the Christchurch mosque massacres of 15 March 2019. We address Haraway's warning and Kristeva's lament of a lack of revolt in contemporary society, through an argument for an onto-epistemological shift and increasing sense of comfort with the discomfort of the awkwardness of cultural otherness. The article presents an active framework for revolt, for questioning and re-questioning dominant educational concerns with cultural otherness, where dithering becomes a technique of revolt, for thinking and rethinking the somatechnical complexities of this day and those that followed.

Curricula and policy documents in Australia and elsewhere commonly call for early childhood teachers to nurture cultural belonging for young children and their families. Meanwhile, there remains a critical gap in addressing teachers’ cultural belonging. In this article, the authors consider early childhood teachers’ culture stories and identities, drawing on an exploratory project involving four teachers from early childhood settings in Melbourne. They use Julia Kristeva's philosophy on subject formation and the Other to explore teachers’ identities as never fully knowable, even to themselves. Reflecting on teachers’ stories through Kristeva's philosophical approach to the subject in process (through the elements of the semiotic, love, abjection and revolt) offers the potential for increasingly nuanced insights into intercultural relations within teaching teams. Thinking through these culture stories creates a space for teachers’ identity constructions to strengthen cultural well-being, belonging and intercultural understanding in early childhood teaching teams and communities.

In this article we consider historical and contemporary ideologies of childhood in China and critically examine notions of ‘child’ and ‘childhood’ in Chinese children’s literature. We analyse the themes and knowledge that relate to relevant historical and contemporary political events and policies, and how these contribute to the production of childhoods. We focus on three images of childhoods in China: the Confucian child, the Modern child and the Maoist child. Each of the images reflects a way of seeing, a perspective about what a child ought to be and become, and what their childhood should look like. Everyday media are reflected in the texts and stories examined and portray both ‘imagined’ and ‘real-life’ narratives of children and their childhoods. The stories, and the connected power relations, represent an important link between the politics of childhood and the pedagogy associated with these politics, including large-scale state investment in the production of desired, ideal and perfect childhoods. Through such an examination of contemporary and historical children’s literature and media in China we also explore the ways in which contemporary media revitalise particular notions of child agency.

This article suggests a theoretical lens of “mundane abjection” as a new conceptualization of liminality as a methodologically and humanistically transformative concept. Thinking with Julia Kristeva’s post-structural conception of the subject as “always in-process,” this article traverses the inherent and transformative element of abjection in relation to the perceived ontological challenges of methodological liminalities. It posits liminality as a potentiating conceptual space for new ontologies in relation to the human “I.” Throughout, the performance, that is the occurrence, of mundane abjection is illustrated as a critical, revelatory and necessary process within this ontological transformation of methodology and the human “I.”

A discussion on the findings of a study with 22 teachers . Using time use diaries they wrote down their activities of a given day. A taxonomy developed by Charles Sturt University in Australia was used to code and analyse the activities. This is a report on the initial pilot with the next step to use a mobile app on a wider group of teachers in Aotearoa New Zealand.

Editorial: Affect, embodiment and interrelationships : Reconceptualising educational policy through encounters with learning spaces and places

Following involvement in several academic collectively written articles, the authors question traditional notions of the ‘lone’ individualist author model as the expected standard in the humanities as opposed to large research teams in physical sciences. They use Barthes and Foucault to question the function and the concept of the author and assumed notions of subjectivity. Recent collective writing as a form of peer production and publishing is an attempt to reinvent the concepts of authorship, the author subject and author subjectivity. These bring to the fore the processes of peer review, questions of ownership (for example, of what remains in a revision, whose contribution becomes revised and by whom), and blurr the boundaries around author/collective voice and are discussed in this paper. Its transversality is proving as complex as the term suggests, in terms of developing new ways of connecting, thinking, examining and working, in ways that have not been the norm at least in the field of philosophy of education. Contemporary questions of the potential social, philosophical, legal, epistemological and ethical implications for and of authorship and subjectivity have barely been touched on to date, but this article begins to broach this gap.

Early childhood education settings are arguably places of community, togetherness and belonging. But what if they are not? What if individuals’ senses of identity, place or reality clash, do not fit or, worse, repel or offend? This article picks up on the largely under-researched area of teachers’ belonging and sense of cultural identity in early childhood settings. It argues for the critical importance of elevating and paying attention to teachers’ subject formation and identity. Drawing on some of the concerns and common conceptions of cultural Otherness in early childhood education, the article uses Kristeva’s foreigner lens and her theory on the subject in process to argue that teachers’ sense of belonging, of their own cultural identity and place, in their teaching team and in their early childhood setting is critical for an overall sense of openness and belonging throughout the setting. Teachers are commonly called on to nurture children’s and their families’ cultural identities. The sense of belonging intended through such practices depends on teacher attitudes and orientations to cultural Otherness that go beyond the surface – that allow for the difficult, complicated, unpredictable processes of becoming part of a centre community. This article offers a challenge to rethink teacher Otherness, for the (re-)elevation of their own sense of belonging in early childhood settings and teaching teams.

Archival research can be described as preoccupied with the ontology of data formation and collection in relation to the speaking and writing subject. From its outset, it can be located in the human...

The aim of this paper is to challenge the physical and conceptual boundaries of educational places and spaces with the use of metaphor: the story of Professor Kirke’s magic wardrobe in The Lion, the Witch and the Wardrobe, the first book in The Chronicles of Narnia by CS Lewis (1950) . By explicating and theorising the concerns that arise, we provoke diverse ways of thinking about the complexities of shifting, expanding, constantly evolving educational spaces and places. In our theorisations, we draw on the philosophy of the life-world through Maurice Merleau-Ponty, on a post-structural approach through Julia Kristeva’s work, and on the new-materialist perspective of Gilles Deleuze. As these three philosophical perspectives draw upon different basic assumptions about humans and the world, they also illuminate different aspects of a variety of phenomena and concepts, which we elaborate on in this paper to reach a more comprehensive understanding of educational spaces and places. Our argument arises from philosophical engagements with the story of the Pevensie siblings’ transformation – and transportation – to Narnia through the wardrobe, with notions of educational openings and opportunities, to explore possibilities for reimagining the conceptions and realities of places and spaces in education. To conclude, citizens of today, including children, students, teachers, politicians and researchers, need to discuss basic assumptions for education and policy to reimagine the entangled complexities of educational spaces and places.

Re-positioning ways in which we see children’s entangled realities with and in the world, this chapter places a posthuman lens on children’s lives and their affective relationships with human and non-human entities and things. Throughout the chapter, we provoke the posthuman thinking which we have built up throughout the book by conceptualising how not only language, discourse and culture matter, but how matter itself matters. We rethink children’s performance of their lives as, and intra-relating with, beings and worlds, using scenarios and theorisations as illustrations of the shifts provoked throughout the book. Exploring various ways for moving beyond the discursive, beyond our linguistic thought, this chapter considers the question of whether or not language has been granted too much power. It offers ways of thinking of children and their childhoods that bypass the dominance of language, which continues to illustrate the strong reliance on social constructivist views. The chapter offers a posthuman performance of social, cultural, humanly inhabited and experienced community, built, natural and human reality, and world.

The glossary outlines some of the ways in which we have used key concepts throughout this book. Its intention is to be a useful guide, and by no means a conclusive or complete representation of the meanings of any of the terms listed. The glossary gives insights into particular meanings as they relate to the topics of this book and to our collective approach to conceptualising children and childhoods through a posthuman and new materialist lens. Where relevant, we allude to contemporary thinkers who inspire us in a particular use of the concepts in the ongoing evolution of our thinking on and treatment of children and childhoods.

Beyond knowledge, critical thinking, new ideas, rigorous science and scholarly development, this chapter argues for the university as a space of life. Through the complexities and incommensurabilities of academic life, and drawing on Julia Kristeva’s notion of revolt, Emmanuel Levinas’ notion of Otherness, and Novalis’ concept of Romantisierung, it makes a philosophical argument for recognizing what might appear as uncomfortable transgressions of the marketable, measurable characteristics of World Class Universities. In various ways, the chapter asks where there is space, in the World Class University, for elements which may not overtly align with the neoliberal clamour for international recognition and esteem. In elevating everyday life in the university, the chapter blurs boundaries of the celebrated, strived for rankings with the spaces of life that are dark and heterotopic, messily entangled with histories, polyphonic human and more than human voice, beings and energies, within the university. Revolt provokes a re-turn to re-question the ethics and boundaries of treatments of ‘world’ and ‘class’ in conceptions of the World Class University. Here, ‘World Class University’ is not necessarily a globally streamlined and internationally bench-marked institution, flexing its socio-economic muscles in the face of the world. Instead, it is an institution that speaks for others who have been made silent and deprived of their own critical voice. It speaks for the suppressed and marginalized, and it speaks for the ones who are no longer with us, or who have not yet arrived. It speaks for the people and the times yet to come.

Exploring possibilities and potentialities arising out of the comprehensive, all-encompassing movements of life and matter in and through children’s learning environments is the focus of this chapter. It brings together the theoretical shifts outlined in Chaps. 1, 2 and 3 with the focus on people, places and things in the curriculum from Chap. 6, into the everyday entanglements of children’s learning environments. The idea of place and what it means in terms of children’s learning environments is central to this engagement as we explore through scenarios and possibilities offered by a posthuman conceptualisation. The examination frames hopeful, ethical ways to live in environmentally, economically and politically challenging times, among, with and as species, places and energies. In this chapter, we unpack some of what such intra-relationships might mean and look like, as they are intra-actively and ongoingly created and recreated by humans and other things and forces.

This chapter explores posthuman pedagogies as relational ontologies in childhoodnature. It situates the reconceptualization of children and childhoods in the Anthropocene, as with nature rather than outside of nature, to present a range of ways to think about humans, and particularly children and their encounters, relations and response-ability with the nonhuman world. The chapter engages with definitions of childhoods and childhood studies as a field to illustrate the blurring of the boundaries between children and nature, to acknowledge that children are nature, that we human/animals are always part of the ecosystem in which we are entangled. This chapter maps out the philosophical and pedagogical notions that underlie these ideas and their implications for a new lens on childhood studies. Using children’s images, texts and relations the chapter illustrates a pedagogical framing of child/nature by children that moves beyond human exceptionalism as a further response to the Anthropocene, and to living childhoods differently in the world.

Rethinking constructions of childhoods, and what it means to be a child, this chapter builds on the foundations developed in the first three chapters of the book. While those chapters challenged the rational, naturalising, social, universal or oppositional, binary constructs of childhood and addressed the concept of childhoods as plural, this chapter begins to resituate childhoods in contemporary times. In this chapter, we debate how children share agency as one among many agentic actors in the ecological collective of human and nonhuman worlds. The chapter further introduces and applies the posthuman and new materialist thinking introduced in Chap. 3, through a focus on agency and childhoods in children’s entangled posthuman worlds. This chapter examines the idea of agency, discussed in earlier chapters and expands this in order to explore what agency might look like when it is shared with a range of human and nonhuman entities and beings.