Muscling

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

Abstract

Experimenting with a methodology of muscling, this paper details an inquiry with muscles as they interject in pedagogy and matter with movement beyond prevailing Euro-Western materializations of muscles as accessible, anthropocentric, inert, and instrumentalized in early childhood education. I propose muscling as an “epistemologically eclectic mode of engaging with the body” (Pollock, 2015, p. 3) that probes the potentiality of onto-epistemologically vulnerable physiologies for generating different relations with muscles and movement (Rotas, 2015; Roy, 2007). Rooted within material feminisms, feminist science studies, and post-qualitative research practices, muscling is oriented toward “fleshing out post-qualitative research” (Lather, 2013, p. 634), and attends to complex muscle-worlds animated by biochemical actants, educational politics of moving bodies, contractile muscle proteins, discourses of childhood obesity, and inverted children-body bridges crafted of strength and surprise. Through inquiry practices that intentionally foreground the active instability, molecular contingencies, and muscled indeterminacies generative of post-qualitative methodologies (Lather, 2016; Lenz Taguchi, 2016; St. Pierre, Jackson, & Mazzei, 2016), muscling imagines how we might craft transdisciplinary engagements with muscles that thread creativity through physiology, care within tendons, and transcorporeal biochemical intra-actions with motion together, differently.
Taking seriously the impulse that post-qualitative scholars must work to “generate critical theories out of scientific ones” (Roosth & Schrader, 2012, p. 1) as we “find ways of engaging with biological data that are not governed by the demand that one is either for or against it” (Wilson, 2015, p. 35), muscling unapologetically embraces the tensions of thinking (with) physiology as a resource for transversal research creation in early childhood education. Enacting an ethico-methodological “commitment to be in the science” (Barad, 2012, p. 207), muscling brings physiology textbooks into dialogue with toddler toes tracking across tile, into conversation with physical literacy training and exhausted educator biceps, and into contact with pedagogical documentation and furniture-free spaces, as it experiments with the possibilities for relating (with) muscles and motion in early childhood education.

Author

• Nicole Land, University of Victoria