Weaving/Knotting

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

Abstract

Drawing on my multispecies, multisensory and affect-focused ethnographic research in an early childhood education centre, this paper weaves and knots data and concepts to craft new methodological relations. After discussing the common world methods of weaving and knotting, the first part of the paper explains the challenges of doing research using methods that emphasize the hyper-separation of the world. Drawing on scholarship in feminism and the environmental humanities that argues for a world that requires new thinking, new languages, new ethical logics, and new practices, I suggest that weaving and knotting, common world methods, might spark innovative responses for inheriting damaged places and openings for response-able recuperation in early childhood education. Using actual examples from my research, I argue that weaving and knotting involves (a) refocussing on interactions, entanglements, and co-shapings, (b) engaging with the actual, messy, unequal, and imperfect worlds real children inherit and co-inhabit along with other human and nonhuman beings and entities, and (c) responding to colonial and ecological legacies.

Author

• Veronica Pacini-Ketchabaw, University of Western Ontario