What Might a Feminist Relational New Materialist and Affirmative Critique Generate in/With Early Childhood Research?

Abstract

Feminist new material theories and affirmative critique is the returning point in this article. In early childhood education and research, critique and critical perspectives are given an important emphasis and might be taken for granted. Critic, criticism, critical perspectives, negation, opposite tactics, interpretation, explanation, reflection, and judgments have in education, according to Bunz, Kaiser, and Thiele, continued as analytical “tools” since Kant. Searching for complicity and rhizomatic entanglements with/in pedagogical and philosophical thinking practice might open for critical distinctions beyond subject/object, mind/body, knower/known, theory/practice, and nature/culture beyond Kant. The complicity and coemergence of any knowledge or critical assessment with what is known and with whoever knows is always already of perspectival, situated, and entangling nature. The interest of this article is complex and multifaceted. I want to elaborate on the politics of critique as well as experiment with matters of methodology. To critically address critique, I use seven previously copublished articles 1 as data material. Being affectively attracted to intra-actions of what all matter offers—ways of looking and cutting together-apart—I wonder what an articleassemblage might generate inventively and relationally, also as critique. Resisting an idea of (re)presenting a summary of the articles, my wish is in line with feminist materialist diffractionists (Barad, Haraway)—experimenting with what the concept symbiogenesis might offer together with critical affirmative thinking. Sympoiesis is making-with, and according to Haraway—nothing is making itself, which invites to think of evolution as coevolution opening for intra-entangling and becoming-with potentiality and change.

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