Moving-With

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

Abstract

Drawing on an ongoing multisensory and multispecies ethnography of children’s relations with the more-than-human, this paper shows how moving-with activates new agents in walking methodologies. Like more traditional walking methodologies, moving-with does include embodied, sensory, and place-based practices, but it also does more. Stephanie Springgay and Sarah Truman’s (forthcoming) recent scholarship on walking methodologies provides theoretical inspiration for doing more. For example, they use feminist new materialism, affect theory, and Indigenous theories of land to consider walking in relation to an ethics of the more-than-human. They propose transcorporeality, affect, and Land as three agents for expanding walking methodologies to provoke ethical and political actions. I take up their proposition by bringing together these three agents (transcorporeality, affect, Land) through a moving-with method.

Moving-with involves practices of connecting, rather than separating; considering all matter as agential; and paying attention to politics and materiality while researching children’s relations with the more-than-human. I work through a moving-with moment, eucalyptus tree-girl child, to examine the gendered, racialized, and queer politics of more-than-human relations and what becomes possible when enacting a moving-with method.

Author

• Mindy Blaise, Edith Cowan University