Caring

• In Event: 34.056 - Doings and Dialogues of Post-Qualitative Experimentations: Transversal Methods and Justice-to-Come in Early Childhood Education

Abstract

This paper explores how caring was put to work as a post-qualitative method to engage with human-and non-human relationality and interdependence in several action research inquiries with young children and early childhood educators. Drawing on feminist science studies, a thickened understanding of care as “an affective state, a material vital doing, and an ethico-political obligation” (Puig de la Bellacasa, 2011, p. 90, see also Haraway, 2008) is used to challenge traditional developmentalist and human-centered approaches to early childhood studies. The paper considers how caring opens up possibilities for research intended to “get at how worlds are made and unmade, in order to participate in the processes, in order to foster some forms of life and not others” (Haraway, 1994, p. 65).
The paper begins by situating my research and my conceptualization of caring. Then, thinking with traces of car, textile, and doll moments from my research, I discuss caring as method leaning on three integral concepts: (a) Puig de la Bellacasa’s (2011) extension of Latour’s (2004) notion of matters of concern to matters of care, (b) caring as always already an act of dis/connection (see Barad, 2010, 2011; Puig de la Bellacasa, 2012), and (c) caring as “becoming subject to the unsettling obligation of curiosity” (Haraway, 2008, p. 36). Through my research examples, I offer a material feminist caring as an imaginary for doing post-qualitative early childhood research in the present that is responsible to/for that which we have inherited (Haraway, 2008) and for flourishing yet-to-come (Haraway, 2012).

Author

• Denise Hodgins, University of Victoria