Childing and (Co-)Laboring: Intra-Acting With Diffraction

• In Event: 67.057 - Common Worlding Methods: (Im)Possibilities of Post-Qualitative Research

Abstract

In this poster presentation we enact a mode of intra-acting with diffraction to show how a diffractive reading of two concepts, childing and (co)labouring, works to unsettle individualized subjectivity and to decenter the human (lecturer/teacher student/learner) in early childhood and teacher education contexts. We share two stories - one in a South African teacher education classroom, the other in a West Coast Canadian children’s centre - generated by our de/colonizing (self, child, teacher, education) practices to provoke a disruption of power producing binaries and to propose a different relationality in education.

Troubling age, development, and progress, childing is a forceful and intense experience of being in time, usually associated with childhood, but as a new verb (Kennedy & Kohan, 2008) it disrupts the usual, more hierarchical relationship between educator and learner. (Co)labouring is a mode of being with others, human and more than human, in a lively (re)search that is always vibrant and unpredictable - flowing toward something that might emerge when it is not yet recognizable as such. We adopt a diffractive methodology (Barad, 2007; Haraway, 1992) to pay attention to the differences that matter without creating oppositions, wherein new patterns of thought, interference and “superpositions” are created - a “cutting together-apart” as one move (Barad, 2014).

In one story, a diffractive methodology is central in showing how students’ journal documentation provokes childing, which expresses a notion of posthuman identity that is in/determinate, porous, with no fixed boundaries (Braidotti, 2013). The other story draws on Negarestani’s (2008) “positive degenerating process” and moments of exposure within acts of (co)labouring between a pedagogista and educators and between two lecturers/colleagues. (Co)labouring is to be exposed in the everyday messiness of making a life through (de)generating efforts to materially and discursively compose conditions of possibility for alternative relational logics. We understand such moments as intra-active openings in our common lived-liveliness with the world.

In one story data is drawn from diffractive photos of a lecturer created by a student to express posthuman subjectivity and trouble hierarchical teacher/student relationality. The other draws from pedagogista practice and moments of radical dialogue between two lecturers. We engage with intra-actions between the material and the discursive to experiment with language as a way to push the familiar boundaries of (humanist) meaning and we use textual layering - weaving practice-provoked events to generate (co)laborings that put in motion subjective processes that resist late capital discourses of autonomy and supremacy.

Experimenting by reading the concepts diffractively through one another produces an imaginary of how postdevelopmental pedagogies offer “a new starting place” (Barad, 2007, p. 137) for theorizing how children, teachers and the more-than-human (co)labour and bring a different ontological and epistemological sense of and in their practices. By engaging diffractively with childing and (co)labouring we are proposing pedagogical processes that engage with small everyday acts of labouring alternative relational logics. In this way, childing and (co)labouring as “action” verbs are potent decolonizing strategies in early childhood education.

Authors

• Karin Saskia Murris, University of Cape Town

• Cristina Delgado Vintimilla, York University

• Iris Berger, The University of British Columbia