Articles by Nikki Fairchild
Teaching in Higher Education
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Practice, 2021
There has been a re-politicisation of the professional identity of English Early Childhood Educat... more There has been a re-politicisation of the professional identity of English Early Childhood Education and Care (ECEC) teachers following revisions to the Early Years Foundation Stage curriculum. This move from play-based to more adult-directed teaching has been challenged by the sector. In an attempt to bring back the embodied nature of teaching this article turns to posthumanist and feminist materialist scholarship to articulate how place and space influence ECEC teachers' perceptions of practice. It explores a field trip with ECEC student teachers to a nature reserve on the South Coast of England. We 'walked-with' each other to reimagine philosophical and policy expectations for teachers and children. During this trip we attended to the materialisation of place-space considering how social, cultural, and historical narratives entangle with, and impact on, perceptions of childhoods. These left 'impressions' on teachers' bodies helping them reconsider their pedagogy with young children. The walkers developed their own understanding of the impact of place-space which, although materialised in the moment of the trip, resonated and connected to contemporary perspectives of young children. These moments provide sites to challenge existing policy and professional knowledge allowing for a more expansive view of posthuman post-professional ethical response-able practice.
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Qualitative Research , 2021
For centuries the autopsy has been a key technology in Western culture for generating clinical/ m... more For centuries the autopsy has been a key technology in Western culture for generating clinical/ medical as well as cultural knowledge about bodies. This article hails the anato-medical autopsy as a generative trope and apparatus in reconfiguring Western humanist knowledge of bodies and bodies of knowledge and takes up the possibilities of working with the concept of autopsy in disrupting qualitative research methodology. In doing so, the article outlines and returns (to) a series of research-creation experiments assembled at an academic conference, which engaged with the challenges for social science knowledge laid out by Law's (2004) After Method book. Our research-creation experiments centred autopsy as a theoretical-methodological gaze and
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Gender, Work & Organization
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Cultural Studies ↔ Critical Methodologies
This article attempts to reconfigure hegemonic framings of “the academic conference” and thereby ... more This article attempts to reconfigure hegemonic framings of “the academic conference” and thereby offer a means to (re-)encounter the spatial, temporal, and affective forces that conferences generate, differently. We are a geographically dispersed but multiply entangled group of academic researchers united by theoretical fault lines within our work that seek to ask what if and what else. This “what if” and “what else” thinking has manifested in experimental and subversive doings otherwise at a series of academic conferences. The storying practices presented in this article were made possible by the vital materialism of a shared google.doc. It was within this virtual environment that we attempted to weave diffractive accounts of what conferencing otherwise produces. This writing experiment offers a series of speculative provocations and counter-provocations to ask what else does conferencing make possible. This article is an invitation to the reader to plunge in and wallow within the ...
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Early Years Educator, 2020
Nikki Fairchild outlines how the Early Childhood Studies Degree Network is helping early years st... more Nikki Fairchild outlines how the Early Childhood Studies Degree Network is helping early years students navigate the new requirements of the reformed EYFS and develop an inclusive, critical and holistic approach to practice. As graduates they will become well placed to lead practice.
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Reconceptualizing Educational Research Methodology, 2019
This article explores a series of tentacular troublings inspired by Donna Haraway's (01) concept ... more This article explores a series of tentacular troublings inspired by Donna Haraway's (01) concept of String Figuring (SF). We consider these troublings as relational entanglements which produce perturbations of our gender, positioning, recognition, and respectability as feminist academics in Higher Education. We activate tentacular troublings as a refrain for contemplating differences/ings in our academic lives and as a critique of contemporary neo-liberal academia which ossifies, fixes, and freezes feminist flows. The article makes two contributions. The first is to deploy string figuring as a proposition for feminist thinking which troubles the notion of fixed positions in favour of position(ings)-plural in motion. The second is to enact string figuring as a mode of ecriture feminine (Cixous, 1976) in which connections are made, dropped, and picked up in tentacular relays and patterns of entangled encounters, thereby perturbing normative modes of writing and troubling traditional modes of knowledge making. Feeling Medusa helps us with this work. Medusa, as powerful woman, Amazon goddess and gorgon, and vilified proto-feminist whose glance turns men to stone is knotted into our perturbations and troublings; her presence informs and inspires our SF-ing.
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Global Education Review, 2020
Technocratic accountability, which is impacting ECEC practices in England, is where the governmen... more Technocratic accountability, which is impacting ECEC practices in England, is where the government favors evidence-based knowledge to work with children. As a result, the emotional aspect of ECEC work and emotional labor have become increasingly complex and are sometimes unrecognized. In this paper we highlight the importance of more relational, connected, and embodied ways to work with young children. Analyzing qualitative semi-structured interview data from two projects, we focus on emotional labor using poststructuralist and posthuman affect theory. We use data from the first project to analyze narratives from ECEC practitioners, highlighting the relationship between government policies and dominant discourses. The second project notes entanglements with human and other-than-human bodies enacted with affect theory, which reveals embodied other-than-human productions of emotional labor generating alternative ways to explore ECEC work. By engaging with these two theoretical and conceptual positions, we offer a different perspective to consider ECEC professional knowledge(s) and reveal the ways these can shed an alternative light on professional practice. The resultant analysis allows us to reconsider knowledge-making practices in ECEC and challenge existing Cartesian dualistic thinking which separates “care” and “education.”
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Gender Work Organization, 2021
This paper discusses society’s lack of recognition of the Early Childhood Education and Care (ECE... more This paper discusses society’s lack of recognition of the Early Childhood Education and Care (ECEC) workforce as professionals, and its emotional impact that this deficit has on them. The concerns are that the role of the ECEC worker has been mainly conceptualised as maternal, where emotional labour is taken for granted and needing to be suppressed or harnessed as part of the caring role. This is at odds with successive government policy agenda which has focused on professionalising the workforce. In this paper we engage with qualitative data gathered from twenty‐four experienced ECEC workers to explore the impact that ‘affect’ has upon them. In this respect we build on the theorisations of Massumi and Stewart, which connect affect theory with the emotional labour; we argue that affect theory offers different ways to consider how objects, spaces, material and discursive entities and bodies impact ECEC workers emotions and emotional labour
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Ethnography and Education, 2020
This article makes the case for Posthumanist Institutional Ethnography (PIE). In doing so, it bui... more This article makes the case for Posthumanist Institutional Ethnography (PIE). In doing so, it builds on and diverges from Dorothy E. Smith’s post-structural work on Institutional Ethnography (IE), and speaks into recent discussions on the contested nature of ethnography. Drawing on the work of Donna Haraway, Karen Barad and Jane Bennet, and on empirical data from two recent projects, the article argues that PIE, in contesting
human exceptionalism, places the human in relation to other-than-human objects, bodies and materialities, and thereby radically recasts ontology, epistemology, and ethics. Six features of PIE are identified. These features are put to work via an analysis of material moments which illuminate how gendered inequalities are produced, enacted and materialised in complex institutional ecologies. The article’s theoretical and methodological contributions provide new insights into the fluid, ephemeral and affective materialisation of gendered politics in institutions.
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Somatechnics, 2020
Education has increasingly been consumed by neoliberal expectations that result in the need for d... more Education has increasingly been consumed by neoliberal expectations that result in the need for data to be collected to justify regulative, pedagogical, curricular, and teaching practices. The marketisation of higher education requires more quantitative measurement of student attainment and progress which impacts on pedagogy and provision. Working with Karen Barad’s theorisations of spacetimemattering, agential cuts, intra-action, and diffractive analysis, I draw on research with Early Childhood Education and Care (ECEC) teachers who were
working and concurrently studying on a degree programme. Empirical data was generated from a focus group discussing the influences of data recording software on the teachers and their professional practice, the devices used as part of the recording process, and the curricular expectations during children’s assessment. Scholars have argued that the need to ensure children meet developmentally appropriate milestones in ECEC can lead to performative, technicist teacher practices driven by data and that these practices may result in datafication and ‘dividual’ subjectivities (Deleuze 1992). Entangling with material-discursive productions between ECEC teachers and ‘data’ provides a new contribution to understanding the influence of
other-than-human bodies on the process of dividualisation and its impact on professional practice. Although focussing on ECEC teachers and their assessment practices, the outcomes of the analysis are connected to higher education, which is facing similar pressures for student progress. In line with the theme of this issue of Somatechnics, I discuss how putting to work Barad’s agential realism can articulate and
rethink both human and other-than-human matterings by revealing how some ‘agential cuts’ reinforce deficit dividual discourse. In turn, this can help us move beyond datafication and dividual practice.
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Zarabadi, S., Taylor, C. A., Fairchild, N., & Moxnes, A. R. (2019). Feeling Medusa: Tentacular Troubling of Academic Positionality, Recognition and Respectability. Reconceptualizing Educational Research Methodology, 10(2-3), 87-111. Reconceptualizing Educational Research Methodology, 2019
This article explores a series of tentacular troublings inspired by Donna Haraway's (2016) concep... more This article explores a series of tentacular troublings inspired by Donna Haraway's (2016) concept of String Figuring (SF). We consider these troublings as relational entanglements which produce perturbations of our gender, positioning, recognition, and respectability as feminist academics in Higher Education. We activate tentacular troublings as a refrain for contemplating differences/ings in our academic lives and as a critique of contemporary neo-liberal academia which ossifies, fixes, and freezes feminist flows. The article makes two contributions. The first is to deploy string figuring as a proposition for feminist thinking which troubles the notion of fixed positions in favour of position(ings)-plural in motion. The second is to enact string figuring as a mode of ecriture feminine (Cixous, 1976) in which connections are made, dropped, and picked up in tentacular relays and patterns of entangled encounters, thereby perturbing normative modes of writing and troubling traditional modes of knowledge making. Feeling Medusa helps us with this work. Medusa, as powerful woman, Amazon goddess and gorgon, and vilified proto-feminist whose glance turns men to stone is knotted into our perturbations and troublings; her presence informs and inspires our SF-ing.
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Engaging with posthuman theorising, this article puts to work a number of concepts to produce
gen... more Engaging with posthuman theorising, this article puts to work a number of concepts to produce
generative reimaginings of early years leadership. In 1992, Deleuze argued that we are witnessing a
transition from societies of confinement to ‘societies of control’. In societies of control, power operates
through neo-liberal corporate worlds via a process of ‘continuous modulation’, which encourages
a regime of perpetual flows of change, revealing new productions of a more posthuman agency.
Drawing on the work of Deleuze and Guattari, the author notes how the concept of assemblage
can be employed to explore leadership. She argues that early years leadership in England is part of a
wider set of connections and relations which include human and non-human ‘bodies’. The assemblage
connects and collects bodies, and is not defined by its individual components but by what is produced
as these bodies interact. These interactions can be striated, which explores certain forms of leadership.
However, smoother spaces can also be produced, which empirically reveals the situational ethics and
micropolitics of four early years leaders who are entangled with children, policy, neo-liberal framing,
quality, curriculum, and social and material worlds in their settings and schools. This article broadens
current views on early years leadership by taking a more-than-human view of relations between
human and non-human bodies as a distributed subjectivity which reworks notions of solely human
agency. This production allows the author to question how posthuman leadership and the ethics and
micropolitics of connectivity might function in this new form of more-than-human relationality.
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There has been extensive research and analysis of the professionalization of early childhood educ... more There has been extensive research and analysis of the professionalization of early childhood educators/teachers. The recent promotion of a teacher-led workforce in England has further focused discussions on the modelling of early years teachers as professionals. In this article, the author develops an alternative analysis using the concepts of Gilles Deleuze and Félix Guattari to explore professionalization as a process of becoming. English policy focus has been on constituting early years teachers as reflective and rational subjects, and moving towards a narrower view of professional identity where school-ready discourses are prevalent. The author’s research
with early years teachers reveals a complex negotiation and interchange with the demands of professional identity. This is analysed through Deleuze and Guattari’s concepts of segmentation to refer to the forms of power which order early years teachers’ professional identity, and
stuttering to develop the forms of resistance and negotiation that suggest a more fluid model of becoming. In particular, the analysis focuses on how stuttering opens up beyond the limits of a discourse analysis to suggest embodied and material forms of practice that are central to early years teaching. This methodology allows a move beyond the binary nature of humanist thought which posits mind-matter and culture-nature, towards a politics of possibility in which emerging
early years teachers are engaged with an embodied and material world.
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Research into Early Childhood Education and Care (ECEC) policy and practice in the UK is subject ... more Research into Early Childhood Education and Care (ECEC) policy and practice in the UK is subject to the demand that such research be measurable and achieve impact to provide the basis for evidence-based professional practice. New and creative experimental ways of knowing/thinking/doing ECEC research have been proposed in resistance to this quantified and instrumentalised agenda. Here I focus on posthumanist theorising, which proposes research that does not privilege the human subject but rather opens conditions of possibility for an entanglement with non-human and more-than-human bodies within and between assemblages. This engagement with complexity is a new ethical and political project aiming at re-conceptualising ontology beyond the limits of the human. Posthumanist research does not only challenge quantitative research, but also engages creative ways to challenge the limits of qualitative inquiry. Drawing on my research experience, I explore this de-centring of the human-as-researcher through the notion of the 'methodological umbra'. This shadow space is one in which traditional thoughts on research open out these new forms of inquiry into thinking-in-movement. My analysis uses my own diary entries as sites in which this 'umbra' becomes evident under the pressure of creating new forms of a 'living' methodology. This is analysed through the contrast between smooth and striated space proposed by Deleuze and Guattari (1987) to explore what form of life might emerge in the smooth space of the umbra.
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Conference Presentations by Nikki Fairchild
British Educational Research Association (BERA) Annual Conference, 13-15 September 2016, University of Leeds., 2016
Voice is an umbrella term to consider speech acts of participants (Herman, et al., 2005). Regardl... more Voice is an umbrella term to consider speech acts of participants (Herman, et al., 2005). Regardless of theoretical positioning voice is a primary consideration, as one debates whose voice is heard and how it might impact the subjectivity or objectivity of the research (Lincoln, et al., 2011). Critical researchers consider the relationship between voice and power and how this might be lived and problematised (Jackson and Mazzei, (2009). More recent debates focus on whether voice is a purely human attribute and whether researchers privilege the voice of the rational thinking, speaking subject (St. Pierre, 2009). The research area of Early Childhood Education and Care (ECEC) is relatively new in the UK, and could itself be conceived as an emerging voice within Social and Educational research (Osgood, 2012). This innovation session presents a multidisciplinary research approach to build on
existing theorisations of voice. It will explore different ways of thinking and conceptualising voice drawing upon a range of qualitative research methodologies within the ECEC field of inquiry. We are a group of researchers at the University of Chichester working in the Early Childhood department, all of whom have been exploring different concepts of voice within our individual research. Here, collectively, we draw together voices of students and professionals who are negotiating a changing and challenging ECEC landscape that includes professional recognition and ‘becoming’.
Nikki Fairchild is applying Posthumanist theorising to consider the voice of material participants within her work with Early Years Teachers.
Sandra Lyndon is exploring the co-construction of voice and the connection between early year practitioners’ personal and collective narratives of
child poverty.
Rob Abbott applied action research to investigate how the voice of the learner (future professionals) in Early Childhood Studies can
be heard in learning environments.
Eva Mikuska is seeking to reach an understanding the construction of ‘good’ through deconstructing the ‘voice’ of a range of actors working in the field of ECEC.
The content of the session is significant for education policy, practice and theory as it engages with a range of contemporary professional and student debates. We will invite the audience to work collaboratively and participate in unearthing whether voice can ever be seen as an unproblematic concept within qualitative research.
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European Congress of Qualitative Inquiry, 2018
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Background to the topic
This paper represents explorations at the beginning of my PhD which seeks... more Background to the topic
This paper represents explorations at the beginning of my PhD which seeks to investigate whether democratic practice (Moss 2012) can flourish in the current Early Childhood Education and Care (ECEC) policy environment.
The promotion of ‘quality’ environments was driven by research advocating cross curricula learning through play, a qualified graduate workforce and sustained shared thinking between knowledgeable adults and children (Siraj-Blatchford et al 2002). The election of the Coalition Government in May 2010 saw a significant review of ECEC policy (Tickell 2011, Nutbrown 2012, DfE 2012) with a growing focus on formal learning, outcomes and children in schools from age 2. Much has been written about the impact of neoliberalism on education policy (Ball 1990, 1994, 2005, Ball and Bowe 1992 and Tomlinson 2005) and the market model of ECEC provides an opportunity to examine its impact in Early Years. This paper will consider English ECEC policy frameworks and their impact on practitioners.
Focus of the enquiry
This analysis investigates discursive formations in certain ECEC policies implemented or discussed by the Coalition Government which become ‘common sense’ notions of practice. It explores the development of teacher led ‘school ready’ discourses and reflects on the potential impacts on professional practice. Interpreting policy can provide a lens through which researchers and practitioners can reflect on practice. Policy analysis and unpacking discursive formations allows for exploration of relationships between professional values versus commercial values and collective interests versus competitive relations (Ball 2012).
Research methods and theoretical framework
A systematic literature review was conducted using key words and defined dates. The search included online policy documents, books and journals. The resultant documents sourced allowed for further refinement with six texts selected for analysis. The texts were analysed using Foucauldian discourse analysis employing Grahams (2011) method of description, recognition and classification. Foucault’s notions of regimes of truth, power relations and governmentality were applied during the analysis.
Research findings and/or contribution to knowledge
Previous research (Miller 2008, Simpson 2010) considered the activist tendencies and resistance to performativity (Osgood 2006) of ECEC practitioners. These findings detail how current policy frameworks represent a neoliberalism reframing of educational imperatives for young children. There is a move away from a social pedagogic model of holistic development to to an outcome related discourse of performativity. Future research will investigate whether the ECEC practitioners can negotiate an alternative professional stance which privileges the centrality of children and families.
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In 1992 Gilles Deleuze argued, in a brief essay, that we are witnessing a transition from societi... more In 1992 Gilles Deleuze argued, in a brief essay, that we are witnessing a transition from societies of confinement to 'societies of control'. In societies of control power operates through a process of 'continuous modulation': a regime of 'perpetual training' and assessment. The focus of my doctoral research is to use Posthumanist theorising to explore how Early Years Teachers modulate their practice within their organizations following the introduction of the Teacher Standards (Early Years) (DfE, 2013) in England. This will allow me to provide an alternative lens on the understanding of professional identity formation and (re)imagine professional becomings (Fairchild, 2015) as a means of charting affective flows in and between Early Years Teacher assemblages.
Drawing on St. Pierre (2011:613) my productive engagement with the work of Deleuze and Guattari has allowed me to consider a ‘reimagination of social science inquiry’. I have been grappling with how to creatively embrace a Posthuman onto-epistemology of difference and have been working in the umbra (shadows) as I challenge the traditional views of qualitative research practice. Early Years Teachers work in human and material organizational contexts as they engage with children, policy, practice, the nursery/school environment and spaces for play and teaching. Posthumanism allows for an attention to materiality and affectivity and gives a new articulation of the concept of identity leading to the individual emerging as an assemblage. The assemblage as methodology provides the vehicle to explore the affective flows and their relations to Early Years Teacher assemblages. Additionally the assemblage as methodology provides a ‘commitment to thinking with materials and incorporating them as forceful agents in the formation of the social world’ (Meiches, 2015: 479).
In charting affective flows I will explore and be entangled within machinic assemblages at a number of levels - material, affective, embodied, corporeal, political and neoliberal. Being part of the research assemblage my methodology is (re)emerging and I currently am enmeshed in a series of rhizoaffective multidimensional events which have (re)(e)volved around my desire to engage with the perceptual, experiential and sensory nature of affective flows. This engagement has led me to question what data will be revealed, what it might want and how might I move away from representation to mapping and charting and reconfiguring and reimaging data (Koro-Ljungberg, 2016). This paper will present the affective flows of five Early Years Teachers as I consider their experiences both spatially and temporally. Data will be revealed using a range of methods including discursive (interviews), visual, material, and political. There will be visits to Early Years Teachers in their workplace and we will engage in an ongoing co-constructed multidimensional dialogue about their experiences, their affects and percepts (Deleuze, 1995) as they fold and unfold. In this way I can attend to social justice by decentring the role of the Early Years Teachers within their organization as I critically analyse materiality and affect within the new regime of modulation. The resultant data analysis is, as yet, unknown – an immanent methodology becoming.
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The aim of this paper is to build on the current conceptions of professional identity formation w... more The aim of this paper is to build on the current conceptions of professional identity formation which require a new way to view the subject and subjectivities (St. Pierre, 2004) and to provide an alternative lens on the formation of professional identities of Early Years Teachers. The application of Posthumanist theory (Deleuze and Guattari, 1987; Braidotti, 2011, Coleman and Ringrose, 2013; Jones and Holmes, 2014; Osgood, 2014) allows for a wider exploration of the complexity of the social world and can provide a new theoretical perspective on the experiences of Early Years Teachers as they negotiate a new professional identity which has been defined via the Teachers’ Standards (Early Years) as stipulated by the Department for Education.
The notion of professional identity is used to define how a professional should act and behave. Hickey-Moody and Malins (2007) argue that the politics of identity, although enabling important socio-political change, have their limitations. Deleuze and Guattari (1987) described identity as a way society makes sense of a changing world. When bodies are stratified the stable sense of self allows for the production of ‘the thinking, speaking political subject’ (Hickey-Moody and Malins, 2007: 5). The politics of identity can have a limiting effect as they can promote the reproduction of a negative view of difference – the self, versus the ‘other’. However, Deleuze (1994) argued difference is positive and productive and allows for an exploration of new ways of becoming. The development of the Early Years Teacher could be viewed as top down State mandated professionalism leading to a dominant view of professional practice which takes a molar form defining normative practice (Ringrose, 2012). Coupled with dominant discourses from policy as to how children should be taught and become school ready the view of suitable professional practice can take the form of a molar machine (Jackson, 2013) which attempts to dominate, territorialize and stabilise professional identity.
This paper draws on qualitative semi-structured interview data collected from Early Years Teachers in training. The data was (re)viewed using Posthuman concepts of the assemblage, the nomad and becoming (Delueze and Guattari, 1987). Charting becomings allowed for the opening up of possibilities ‘a radical possibility of the unfinalised’ (Jackson, 2013: 123) and provided an alternative conceptualisation of professional identity formation.
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Articles by Nikki Fairchild
human exceptionalism, places the human in relation to other-than-human objects, bodies and materialities, and thereby radically recasts ontology, epistemology, and ethics. Six features of PIE are identified. These features are put to work via an analysis of material moments which illuminate how gendered inequalities are produced, enacted and materialised in complex institutional ecologies. The article’s theoretical and methodological contributions provide new insights into the fluid, ephemeral and affective materialisation of gendered politics in institutions.
working and concurrently studying on a degree programme. Empirical data was generated from a focus group discussing the influences of data recording software on the teachers and their professional practice, the devices used as part of the recording process, and the curricular expectations during children’s assessment. Scholars have argued that the need to ensure children meet developmentally appropriate milestones in ECEC can lead to performative, technicist teacher practices driven by data and that these practices may result in datafication and ‘dividual’ subjectivities (Deleuze 1992). Entangling with material-discursive productions between ECEC teachers and ‘data’ provides a new contribution to understanding the influence of
other-than-human bodies on the process of dividualisation and its impact on professional practice. Although focussing on ECEC teachers and their assessment practices, the outcomes of the analysis are connected to higher education, which is facing similar pressures for student progress. In line with the theme of this issue of Somatechnics, I discuss how putting to work Barad’s agential realism can articulate and
rethink both human and other-than-human matterings by revealing how some ‘agential cuts’ reinforce deficit dividual discourse. In turn, this can help us move beyond datafication and dividual practice.
generative reimaginings of early years leadership. In 1992, Deleuze argued that we are witnessing a
transition from societies of confinement to ‘societies of control’. In societies of control, power operates
through neo-liberal corporate worlds via a process of ‘continuous modulation’, which encourages
a regime of perpetual flows of change, revealing new productions of a more posthuman agency.
Drawing on the work of Deleuze and Guattari, the author notes how the concept of assemblage
can be employed to explore leadership. She argues that early years leadership in England is part of a
wider set of connections and relations which include human and non-human ‘bodies’. The assemblage
connects and collects bodies, and is not defined by its individual components but by what is produced
as these bodies interact. These interactions can be striated, which explores certain forms of leadership.
However, smoother spaces can also be produced, which empirically reveals the situational ethics and
micropolitics of four early years leaders who are entangled with children, policy, neo-liberal framing,
quality, curriculum, and social and material worlds in their settings and schools. This article broadens
current views on early years leadership by taking a more-than-human view of relations between
human and non-human bodies as a distributed subjectivity which reworks notions of solely human
agency. This production allows the author to question how posthuman leadership and the ethics and
micropolitics of connectivity might function in this new form of more-than-human relationality.
with early years teachers reveals a complex negotiation and interchange with the demands of professional identity. This is analysed through Deleuze and Guattari’s concepts of segmentation to refer to the forms of power which order early years teachers’ professional identity, and
stuttering to develop the forms of resistance and negotiation that suggest a more fluid model of becoming. In particular, the analysis focuses on how stuttering opens up beyond the limits of a discourse analysis to suggest embodied and material forms of practice that are central to early years teaching. This methodology allows a move beyond the binary nature of humanist thought which posits mind-matter and culture-nature, towards a politics of possibility in which emerging
early years teachers are engaged with an embodied and material world.
Conference Presentations by Nikki Fairchild
existing theorisations of voice. It will explore different ways of thinking and conceptualising voice drawing upon a range of qualitative research methodologies within the ECEC field of inquiry. We are a group of researchers at the University of Chichester working in the Early Childhood department, all of whom have been exploring different concepts of voice within our individual research. Here, collectively, we draw together voices of students and professionals who are negotiating a changing and challenging ECEC landscape that includes professional recognition and ‘becoming’.
Nikki Fairchild is applying Posthumanist theorising to consider the voice of material participants within her work with Early Years Teachers.
Sandra Lyndon is exploring the co-construction of voice and the connection between early year practitioners’ personal and collective narratives of
child poverty.
Rob Abbott applied action research to investigate how the voice of the learner (future professionals) in Early Childhood Studies can
be heard in learning environments.
Eva Mikuska is seeking to reach an understanding the construction of ‘good’ through deconstructing the ‘voice’ of a range of actors working in the field of ECEC.
The content of the session is significant for education policy, practice and theory as it engages with a range of contemporary professional and student debates. We will invite the audience to work collaboratively and participate in unearthing whether voice can ever be seen as an unproblematic concept within qualitative research.
This paper represents explorations at the beginning of my PhD which seeks to investigate whether democratic practice (Moss 2012) can flourish in the current Early Childhood Education and Care (ECEC) policy environment.
The promotion of ‘quality’ environments was driven by research advocating cross curricula learning through play, a qualified graduate workforce and sustained shared thinking between knowledgeable adults and children (Siraj-Blatchford et al 2002). The election of the Coalition Government in May 2010 saw a significant review of ECEC policy (Tickell 2011, Nutbrown 2012, DfE 2012) with a growing focus on formal learning, outcomes and children in schools from age 2. Much has been written about the impact of neoliberalism on education policy (Ball 1990, 1994, 2005, Ball and Bowe 1992 and Tomlinson 2005) and the market model of ECEC provides an opportunity to examine its impact in Early Years. This paper will consider English ECEC policy frameworks and their impact on practitioners.
Focus of the enquiry
This analysis investigates discursive formations in certain ECEC policies implemented or discussed by the Coalition Government which become ‘common sense’ notions of practice. It explores the development of teacher led ‘school ready’ discourses and reflects on the potential impacts on professional practice. Interpreting policy can provide a lens through which researchers and practitioners can reflect on practice. Policy analysis and unpacking discursive formations allows for exploration of relationships between professional values versus commercial values and collective interests versus competitive relations (Ball 2012).
Research methods and theoretical framework
A systematic literature review was conducted using key words and defined dates. The search included online policy documents, books and journals. The resultant documents sourced allowed for further refinement with six texts selected for analysis. The texts were analysed using Foucauldian discourse analysis employing Grahams (2011) method of description, recognition and classification. Foucault’s notions of regimes of truth, power relations and governmentality were applied during the analysis.
Research findings and/or contribution to knowledge
Previous research (Miller 2008, Simpson 2010) considered the activist tendencies and resistance to performativity (Osgood 2006) of ECEC practitioners. These findings detail how current policy frameworks represent a neoliberalism reframing of educational imperatives for young children. There is a move away from a social pedagogic model of holistic development to to an outcome related discourse of performativity. Future research will investigate whether the ECEC practitioners can negotiate an alternative professional stance which privileges the centrality of children and families.
Drawing on St. Pierre (2011:613) my productive engagement with the work of Deleuze and Guattari has allowed me to consider a ‘reimagination of social science inquiry’. I have been grappling with how to creatively embrace a Posthuman onto-epistemology of difference and have been working in the umbra (shadows) as I challenge the traditional views of qualitative research practice. Early Years Teachers work in human and material organizational contexts as they engage with children, policy, practice, the nursery/school environment and spaces for play and teaching. Posthumanism allows for an attention to materiality and affectivity and gives a new articulation of the concept of identity leading to the individual emerging as an assemblage. The assemblage as methodology provides the vehicle to explore the affective flows and their relations to Early Years Teacher assemblages. Additionally the assemblage as methodology provides a ‘commitment to thinking with materials and incorporating them as forceful agents in the formation of the social world’ (Meiches, 2015: 479).
In charting affective flows I will explore and be entangled within machinic assemblages at a number of levels - material, affective, embodied, corporeal, political and neoliberal. Being part of the research assemblage my methodology is (re)emerging and I currently am enmeshed in a series of rhizoaffective multidimensional events which have (re)(e)volved around my desire to engage with the perceptual, experiential and sensory nature of affective flows. This engagement has led me to question what data will be revealed, what it might want and how might I move away from representation to mapping and charting and reconfiguring and reimaging data (Koro-Ljungberg, 2016). This paper will present the affective flows of five Early Years Teachers as I consider their experiences both spatially and temporally. Data will be revealed using a range of methods including discursive (interviews), visual, material, and political. There will be visits to Early Years Teachers in their workplace and we will engage in an ongoing co-constructed multidimensional dialogue about their experiences, their affects and percepts (Deleuze, 1995) as they fold and unfold. In this way I can attend to social justice by decentring the role of the Early Years Teachers within their organization as I critically analyse materiality and affect within the new regime of modulation. The resultant data analysis is, as yet, unknown – an immanent methodology becoming.
The notion of professional identity is used to define how a professional should act and behave. Hickey-Moody and Malins (2007) argue that the politics of identity, although enabling important socio-political change, have their limitations. Deleuze and Guattari (1987) described identity as a way society makes sense of a changing world. When bodies are stratified the stable sense of self allows for the production of ‘the thinking, speaking political subject’ (Hickey-Moody and Malins, 2007: 5). The politics of identity can have a limiting effect as they can promote the reproduction of a negative view of difference – the self, versus the ‘other’. However, Deleuze (1994) argued difference is positive and productive and allows for an exploration of new ways of becoming. The development of the Early Years Teacher could be viewed as top down State mandated professionalism leading to a dominant view of professional practice which takes a molar form defining normative practice (Ringrose, 2012). Coupled with dominant discourses from policy as to how children should be taught and become school ready the view of suitable professional practice can take the form of a molar machine (Jackson, 2013) which attempts to dominate, territorialize and stabilise professional identity.
This paper draws on qualitative semi-structured interview data collected from Early Years Teachers in training. The data was (re)viewed using Posthuman concepts of the assemblage, the nomad and becoming (Delueze and Guattari, 1987). Charting becomings allowed for the opening up of possibilities ‘a radical possibility of the unfinalised’ (Jackson, 2013: 123) and provided an alternative conceptualisation of professional identity formation.
human exceptionalism, places the human in relation to other-than-human objects, bodies and materialities, and thereby radically recasts ontology, epistemology, and ethics. Six features of PIE are identified. These features are put to work via an analysis of material moments which illuminate how gendered inequalities are produced, enacted and materialised in complex institutional ecologies. The article’s theoretical and methodological contributions provide new insights into the fluid, ephemeral and affective materialisation of gendered politics in institutions.
working and concurrently studying on a degree programme. Empirical data was generated from a focus group discussing the influences of data recording software on the teachers and their professional practice, the devices used as part of the recording process, and the curricular expectations during children’s assessment. Scholars have argued that the need to ensure children meet developmentally appropriate milestones in ECEC can lead to performative, technicist teacher practices driven by data and that these practices may result in datafication and ‘dividual’ subjectivities (Deleuze 1992). Entangling with material-discursive productions between ECEC teachers and ‘data’ provides a new contribution to understanding the influence of
other-than-human bodies on the process of dividualisation and its impact on professional practice. Although focussing on ECEC teachers and their assessment practices, the outcomes of the analysis are connected to higher education, which is facing similar pressures for student progress. In line with the theme of this issue of Somatechnics, I discuss how putting to work Barad’s agential realism can articulate and
rethink both human and other-than-human matterings by revealing how some ‘agential cuts’ reinforce deficit dividual discourse. In turn, this can help us move beyond datafication and dividual practice.
generative reimaginings of early years leadership. In 1992, Deleuze argued that we are witnessing a
transition from societies of confinement to ‘societies of control’. In societies of control, power operates
through neo-liberal corporate worlds via a process of ‘continuous modulation’, which encourages
a regime of perpetual flows of change, revealing new productions of a more posthuman agency.
Drawing on the work of Deleuze and Guattari, the author notes how the concept of assemblage
can be employed to explore leadership. She argues that early years leadership in England is part of a
wider set of connections and relations which include human and non-human ‘bodies’. The assemblage
connects and collects bodies, and is not defined by its individual components but by what is produced
as these bodies interact. These interactions can be striated, which explores certain forms of leadership.
However, smoother spaces can also be produced, which empirically reveals the situational ethics and
micropolitics of four early years leaders who are entangled with children, policy, neo-liberal framing,
quality, curriculum, and social and material worlds in their settings and schools. This article broadens
current views on early years leadership by taking a more-than-human view of relations between
human and non-human bodies as a distributed subjectivity which reworks notions of solely human
agency. This production allows the author to question how posthuman leadership and the ethics and
micropolitics of connectivity might function in this new form of more-than-human relationality.
with early years teachers reveals a complex negotiation and interchange with the demands of professional identity. This is analysed through Deleuze and Guattari’s concepts of segmentation to refer to the forms of power which order early years teachers’ professional identity, and
stuttering to develop the forms of resistance and negotiation that suggest a more fluid model of becoming. In particular, the analysis focuses on how stuttering opens up beyond the limits of a discourse analysis to suggest embodied and material forms of practice that are central to early years teaching. This methodology allows a move beyond the binary nature of humanist thought which posits mind-matter and culture-nature, towards a politics of possibility in which emerging
early years teachers are engaged with an embodied and material world.
existing theorisations of voice. It will explore different ways of thinking and conceptualising voice drawing upon a range of qualitative research methodologies within the ECEC field of inquiry. We are a group of researchers at the University of Chichester working in the Early Childhood department, all of whom have been exploring different concepts of voice within our individual research. Here, collectively, we draw together voices of students and professionals who are negotiating a changing and challenging ECEC landscape that includes professional recognition and ‘becoming’.
Nikki Fairchild is applying Posthumanist theorising to consider the voice of material participants within her work with Early Years Teachers.
Sandra Lyndon is exploring the co-construction of voice and the connection between early year practitioners’ personal and collective narratives of
child poverty.
Rob Abbott applied action research to investigate how the voice of the learner (future professionals) in Early Childhood Studies can
be heard in learning environments.
Eva Mikuska is seeking to reach an understanding the construction of ‘good’ through deconstructing the ‘voice’ of a range of actors working in the field of ECEC.
The content of the session is significant for education policy, practice and theory as it engages with a range of contemporary professional and student debates. We will invite the audience to work collaboratively and participate in unearthing whether voice can ever be seen as an unproblematic concept within qualitative research.
This paper represents explorations at the beginning of my PhD which seeks to investigate whether democratic practice (Moss 2012) can flourish in the current Early Childhood Education and Care (ECEC) policy environment.
The promotion of ‘quality’ environments was driven by research advocating cross curricula learning through play, a qualified graduate workforce and sustained shared thinking between knowledgeable adults and children (Siraj-Blatchford et al 2002). The election of the Coalition Government in May 2010 saw a significant review of ECEC policy (Tickell 2011, Nutbrown 2012, DfE 2012) with a growing focus on formal learning, outcomes and children in schools from age 2. Much has been written about the impact of neoliberalism on education policy (Ball 1990, 1994, 2005, Ball and Bowe 1992 and Tomlinson 2005) and the market model of ECEC provides an opportunity to examine its impact in Early Years. This paper will consider English ECEC policy frameworks and their impact on practitioners.
Focus of the enquiry
This analysis investigates discursive formations in certain ECEC policies implemented or discussed by the Coalition Government which become ‘common sense’ notions of practice. It explores the development of teacher led ‘school ready’ discourses and reflects on the potential impacts on professional practice. Interpreting policy can provide a lens through which researchers and practitioners can reflect on practice. Policy analysis and unpacking discursive formations allows for exploration of relationships between professional values versus commercial values and collective interests versus competitive relations (Ball 2012).
Research methods and theoretical framework
A systematic literature review was conducted using key words and defined dates. The search included online policy documents, books and journals. The resultant documents sourced allowed for further refinement with six texts selected for analysis. The texts were analysed using Foucauldian discourse analysis employing Grahams (2011) method of description, recognition and classification. Foucault’s notions of regimes of truth, power relations and governmentality were applied during the analysis.
Research findings and/or contribution to knowledge
Previous research (Miller 2008, Simpson 2010) considered the activist tendencies and resistance to performativity (Osgood 2006) of ECEC practitioners. These findings detail how current policy frameworks represent a neoliberalism reframing of educational imperatives for young children. There is a move away from a social pedagogic model of holistic development to to an outcome related discourse of performativity. Future research will investigate whether the ECEC practitioners can negotiate an alternative professional stance which privileges the centrality of children and families.
Drawing on St. Pierre (2011:613) my productive engagement with the work of Deleuze and Guattari has allowed me to consider a ‘reimagination of social science inquiry’. I have been grappling with how to creatively embrace a Posthuman onto-epistemology of difference and have been working in the umbra (shadows) as I challenge the traditional views of qualitative research practice. Early Years Teachers work in human and material organizational contexts as they engage with children, policy, practice, the nursery/school environment and spaces for play and teaching. Posthumanism allows for an attention to materiality and affectivity and gives a new articulation of the concept of identity leading to the individual emerging as an assemblage. The assemblage as methodology provides the vehicle to explore the affective flows and their relations to Early Years Teacher assemblages. Additionally the assemblage as methodology provides a ‘commitment to thinking with materials and incorporating them as forceful agents in the formation of the social world’ (Meiches, 2015: 479).
In charting affective flows I will explore and be entangled within machinic assemblages at a number of levels - material, affective, embodied, corporeal, political and neoliberal. Being part of the research assemblage my methodology is (re)emerging and I currently am enmeshed in a series of rhizoaffective multidimensional events which have (re)(e)volved around my desire to engage with the perceptual, experiential and sensory nature of affective flows. This engagement has led me to question what data will be revealed, what it might want and how might I move away from representation to mapping and charting and reconfiguring and reimaging data (Koro-Ljungberg, 2016). This paper will present the affective flows of five Early Years Teachers as I consider their experiences both spatially and temporally. Data will be revealed using a range of methods including discursive (interviews), visual, material, and political. There will be visits to Early Years Teachers in their workplace and we will engage in an ongoing co-constructed multidimensional dialogue about their experiences, their affects and percepts (Deleuze, 1995) as they fold and unfold. In this way I can attend to social justice by decentring the role of the Early Years Teachers within their organization as I critically analyse materiality and affect within the new regime of modulation. The resultant data analysis is, as yet, unknown – an immanent methodology becoming.
The notion of professional identity is used to define how a professional should act and behave. Hickey-Moody and Malins (2007) argue that the politics of identity, although enabling important socio-political change, have their limitations. Deleuze and Guattari (1987) described identity as a way society makes sense of a changing world. When bodies are stratified the stable sense of self allows for the production of ‘the thinking, speaking political subject’ (Hickey-Moody and Malins, 2007: 5). The politics of identity can have a limiting effect as they can promote the reproduction of a negative view of difference – the self, versus the ‘other’. However, Deleuze (1994) argued difference is positive and productive and allows for an exploration of new ways of becoming. The development of the Early Years Teacher could be viewed as top down State mandated professionalism leading to a dominant view of professional practice which takes a molar form defining normative practice (Ringrose, 2012). Coupled with dominant discourses from policy as to how children should be taught and become school ready the view of suitable professional practice can take the form of a molar machine (Jackson, 2013) which attempts to dominate, territorialize and stabilise professional identity.
This paper draws on qualitative semi-structured interview data collected from Early Years Teachers in training. The data was (re)viewed using Posthuman concepts of the assemblage, the nomad and becoming (Delueze and Guattari, 1987). Charting becomings allowed for the opening up of possibilities ‘a radical possibility of the unfinalised’ (Jackson, 2013: 123) and provided an alternative conceptualisation of professional identity formation.