In following children’s relations with materials, our research challenges the deeply rooted cultural oppositions such as animate versus inanimate and active versus passive that lead us to think of humans as animate agents who act upon passive, inanimate materials. It draws upon frameworks and methodologies that acknowledge that our lives are inextricably entangled with materials. These include new material feminisms, visual and sensory ethnographies, and Deleuze-inspired art-based methodologies that open up new modes of thinking and being in the world. Much of this research responds to the legacies of capitalism, the rampant accumulation of materials as well as massive amounts of trashed materials that are poisoning the planet. It seeks new ways of developing sustainable caring relations that acknowledge nonhuman entities as co-actors and co-shapers of the world.
MICROBLOGS
- How does intensifying plastics’ presence in the classroom invite children to practice curiosity and disrupt indifference?
- How can the act of removing shoes open us to a practice of nourishment?
- How might the openings proposed by an event be sustained as a way of inhabiting possibility for difference?
- Why is it so challenging to understand the agency of the material world and other beings?
- How does the ways in which we converse with colour re-inform our memories of walking?
- How do you reawake a river mill?
- How is solidarity not solid?
- How might we connect master students with agential stories through material intra-actions?
- How might close encounters with bubble-wrap in an early childhood classroom trouble governing binaries of safe/unsafe and care/careless?
- Which lifeways are lost when a building is demolished?
PROJECTS
Encounters with Materials
Experimenting with Fat(s), Muscle(s), Movement, and Physiologies in Early Childhood Education
Thinking with Tape
Child-Doll and Child-Car Encounters
Unsustainable Waste Futures: Recuperative Common World Textile-Child Pedagogies
Children who Carry Stones in their Pockets
