Odd Companions

• In Event: 45.057 - Odd Encounters: Other-Than-Conventional Relations in School

Abstract

Objective
By bringing two research projects concerned with aesthetics and the senses into conversation, this paper seeks to mobilize ‘the materialities and motions of ethnographic writing’ (Stewart, 2017) to develop felt understanding of children’s social relationships in early childhood. Experiences of (not) fitting-in, the proximity of bodies in motion, solace and odd companionship are encountered through the prism of “corporeal-kinetic transfers of sense” (Sheets-Johnstone, 2003:418).

Theoretical Framework
We seek to attend to affect as it works autonomously across bodies (both human and non-human) as a “connecting thread of experience” (Massumi, 2002:217). Following Carlye (2017) we set out to explore what a vital materialism (Bennett, 2010) brings to the ‘becoming-child’ (Deleuze and Guatarri, 2004:16) in the institutional context of the nursery school. Concerned with the aesthetics of ethnographic form, we call on the materiality of ethnographic text as a way to carry the ‘beings of one world into another’ (Pandian and McLean, 2017).

Methods
Ravetz, who has a background in aesthetic anthropology, placed herself in the methodologically transgressive and intensive ‘position of child’ in a nursery class for a short period; MacRae, who uses slow motion video in her role of participant observer, has been researcher-in-residence on a weekly basis in two early years settings in the UK for the past two years. By bringing these different situated approaches together we build on the ethnographic advocacy by Corsaro (1993) of the liveliness of peer cultures in nursery school to revitalize thinking about socialization, taking this into realms of sensory intelligence.

Results
We find that companionship produced in the nursery extends beyond human sociality. The standardized routines and rituals of school (Holmes 2012), as well as the play materials, are enmeshed in odd attachments. Children learn through, around and under formal education practice, always in excess of its domesticating tendencies. While the methodological and ethical implications of taking up the “Position of the Child” might suggest rolling it out as a training method for teachers, we resist too literal an interpretation, situating it as a provocative thought experiment, both in terms of pedagogic and ethnographic practice.

Significance
Our research extends Merleau-Ponty’s conception of inter-corporeality as suggested by Hayashi and Tobin (2015), by introducing the notion of trans-corporal forms of companionship between and through non-human and human bodies. In this post-truth era, we seek to model and argue for ethnography as a material practice that can ‘reveal [a] more intractable and encompassing form of truth – that of the fieldwork encounter with an alien reality’ (Daniel and Peck, Culture/Contexture).

Authors

• Amanda Ravetz, Manchester Metropolitan University

• Christina Macrae, Manchester Metropolitan University