Deleuze and Guatarri in the Nursery: Ethnographic Mappings of Multisensory Young Gendered Becomings

• In Event: Doing Deleuze: Exploring Qualitative Research Methodologies in Education

Abstract

Objectives
This paper critically explores the ‘fit’ between conventional educational ethnographic methodologies and Deleuze and Guatarri’s notion of ‘transcendental empiricism’ to map the ‘conditions of possibility’ (Foucault 2000) for young gendered subjectivities to emerge, while others are less or not possible.

Theoretical perspectives
The analysis in the paper hinges upon reconceptualising the body as a social-material-semiotic assemblage that is always constituted in relation to other bodies and things. This is a more opened out body-subject, continually permeable to the influence (and imposition) of others, with porous borders and boundaries. From this perspective, agency and desire is relocated away from the ‘individual’ to something that is always in-action, in-movement and in-relation.

A key aim of the paper is to illustrate the ordinary everyday affects that circulate across and through bodies, objects and sound, in the moment and over time, with the political goal of coming to ‘know’ through a multi-sensory mapping of these assemblages, the flows of power in the making of young gendered bodies, becomings and relations in the nursery.

Methods and data sources
The research was carried out over a five month period in 2009 in one state-funded nursery with a wide demographic of urban ‘working-class’ children in South Wales (UK). The team generated ethnographic multi-media data on the social, cultural and material world of the nursery. For the purposes of this paper it is the bodily encounters of two children, Tyler and Sophie that focuses our analytic trails.

Findings
Foregrounding a transcendental field where consciousness is detatched from the essentialised thinking subject is almost a necessity in researching the field of early years (Olsson 2009). Here, language often takes a back seat and articulation emerges primarily as a multi-sensorial bodily experience where there are “only different speeds and slowness and forces and bodies encountering each other”.

The paper illustrates this multi-sensory experience through three body-object-sound assemblages. Each are artificially pulled apart for the purposes of a methodological paper. In so doing, we share some of the complex gender/sexual assemblages and the leaky lines of flights which are often there but missed, lost, silenced or blocked in the researching of gender and power for very young children. This involved capturing the often overlooked (because of the visibility of physical violence) or undermined (through developmental discourses of ‘play’) normative cruelties of gender (Renold and Ringrose 2009).

Scholarly significance
This paper is in dialogue with the ways in which Deleuze and Guatarri’s work has inspired the methodological imagination for educational researchers, offering new ways of seeing, feeling, connecting and engaging with complex socialities in ways that lead to new questions and insights into substantive and political concerns.

REFERENCES
Deleuze, G. and Guattari, F. (2004) A Thousand Plateaus, trans. B. Massumi, London and New York, Continuum.

Olsson, L. M. (2009) Movement and Experimentation in Young Children’s Learning: Deleuze and Guattari in early childhood education, Abingdon and New York, Routledge.

Authors

• Emma Renold, Cardiff University

• David Mellor, Bristol University