Introducing Common Worlding Methods

• In Event: Common Worlding Methods: Enacting Empirical Postqualitative Educational Research

Abstract

The purpose of this introductory presentation is to familiarise the participants with the range of common worlding methods that the presenters have used in their early childhood common worlds research.
The presentation will draw upon the presenters’ ‘common world childhoods’ theoretical framework (Taylor & Blaise, 2014; Taylor, 2013; Taylor & Pacini-Ketchabaw, 2015) that repositions children within their immediate more-than-human common worlds. Common worlds is a term used by Latour (2005) to describe the process of actively reassembling all of the constituents of our worlds—including nonhuman life forms, forces, and entities—within a radically expanded conceptualisation of the social. This active reassembling process is central to common worlding methods and requires researchers to resist the temptation to separate the social world and social subjects off from the natural world and nonhuman subjects. The implication of applying this framework to research with children is that the children are no longer the sole research subjects, agency is no longer seen as an exclusive human capacity, and children’s natural as well as their social environments are simultaneously considered to be making and shaping their worlds.
This introductory presentation will showcase a selection of common worlding methods that the presenters have been applying in their early childhood research over the past 4 years. They will outline how they have traced entangled multispecies relations while undertaking their common world ethnographies in Canada, Hong and Australia, and explain the modes through which they have sought to engage animals (such as dogs, kangaroos and racoons) as active research subjects. They will describe how the researchers, educators and children involved in their research projects have been learning how to be affected by the plants, animals and materials that they encounter in their everyday common worlds. They will also explain how they have been experimenting with thinking collectively in the presence of nonhuman others (Stengers, 2005), during their regular walks with children in their immediate common world environments.
Rather than collecting and analysing data, common worlding research is based upon re-assembling the heterogenous collectives that make up children’s common worlds and attending to the ways in which the relations within these worlds are mutually constitutive. Over the last 4 years, this applied common world childhoods research has generated information about three sets of relations: children’s relations with other species; children’s relations with materials; and children’s relations with place.
Findings from this common worlds research have been widely published in a series of books, journal articles, book chapters, and special journal issues that have been variously authored, co-authored and co-edited by the presenters. Information about these publications is available on the Common World Childhoods Research Collective website (2015).
The scholarly significance of this research is that through seeking congruence between its posthumanist theoretical frameworks and its applied more-than-human ‘fieldwork’ practice, it has trialled a range of experimental methods, a number of which are new to the field of education. These common worlding methods offer post-qualitative educational researchers new ways of bridging the posthumanist theory/practice divide.

Authors

• Affrica Taylor, University of Canberra

• Veronica Pacini-Ketchabaw, University of Victoria

• Mindy Blaise, Victoria University - Melbourne