Ben Bradley

This paper reports on a two-stage, case-based analysis of infant sociability in infant-only trios to illustrate how findings made using this approach extend our theoretical understanding of early intersubjectivity. Studying infant groups allows us to address three kinds of emerging theoretical argument: (1) that babies are born with a ‘general relational capacity’ which complements or even founds the more specific ‘dyadic program’ that generates attachments; (2) that infants’ communication with peers is the best route to understanding the shared meanings that inform language acquisition, and (3) that the reconceptualisation of ‘nonbasic’ emotions requires we discover whether babies are communicatively competent to elaborate context-specific meanings over time. The materials we use to illustrate this two-stage approach show infants manifest core characteristics of group-communication in the second six months of life, in particular the capacity to be involved with more than one person at a time and for relational encounters to shift behavioral significances for the infants as a product of group interactions.

The idea that research on infants should ‘voice’ their ‘perspectives’, their experiences, what they are ‘really saying,’ is a central feature of current moves toward participatory research. While embracing the ethos of participation, this article steps away from the binary logic of identity that implicitly underpins such approaches – self–other, adult–infant, subject–object. Instead, it demonstrates the generativity of concepts of ‘assemblage,’ ‘event,’ ‘line of flight,’ in rethinking what should form the focus for the theorising, pedagogy and practices surrounding infants and toddlers. To that end, it
assembles a description of mealtime, a common segment of the lives of four young children in an Australian Family Day Care home. The assemblage connects a variety of heterogeneous elements,
human and non-human, animate and inanimate, including highchairs, bottles, researchers, technologies, ideas, regulations, food, gravity and our own attempts to enunciate and engage with mealtime. It is concluded that, through the relations afforded by and made between these diverse elements, the descriptions of mealtime show how highchairs and their allies may afford a new infantworld
symbiosis that entails not just a time and place to eat, but access to unanticipated relations of power, opportunities for connection, and ways of becoming. Such is the ‘what’ that should inform theorising, practice and pedagogy involving very young children.

A two-year collaborative project by Deakin, RMIT and Charles Sturt universities aims to build in each institution, the academic and professional staff capacities for developing and using a form of online, goal-based, role-play simulation (eSimulation/eSim). While the project ...