Sonja K Arndt

This is the second text in the series collectively written by members of the Editors’ Collective, which comprises a series of individual and collaborative reflections upon the experience of contributing to the previous and first text written by the Editors’ Collective: ‘Towards a Philosophy of Academic Publishing.’ In the article, contributors
reflect upon their experience of collective writing and summarize the main themes and challenges. They show that the act of collective writing disturbs the existing systems of academic knowledge creation, and link these disturbances to the age of the digital reason. They conclude that the collaborative and collective action is a thing of learning-by-doing,
and that collective writing seems to offer a possible way forward from the co-opting of academic activities by economics. Through detaching knowledge creation from economy, collaborative and collective writing address the problem of forming new collective intelligences.

This article examines Slovak early years teachers’ concerns with
conceptions of teacher professionalism. It suggests that there is
a mismatch between understandings of professionalism, policy aspirations and the attitudes of teachers to their own professionalism, and that this mismatch fuels early years teachers’ sense of agency. These tensions between conceptions of professionalism, teaching practice and actual working conditions have led to a groundup approach to self-governance within the early years teacher workforce. We analyse teachers’ discussions in an early years online forum of 12,500 members that was started and remains governed by the teachers themselves. It represents in itself a very particular attitude and response to the need to determine what it means to be a professional teacher. This analysis examines intersections of policy, quality and professionalism, and highlights considerations of power and voice, and the complexities of uncertainty and change. The article concludes with the suggestion that teacher attitudes, power and agency are impacted in unpredictable ways by the policy landscape.

Fairy tales play a substantial role in the shaping of childhoods. Developed into stories and played out in picture books, films and tales, they are powerful instruments that influence conceptions and treatments of the child and childhoods. This article argues that traditional fairy tales and contemporary stories derived from them use complex means to mould the ways that children live and experience their childhoods. This argument is illustrated through representations of childhoods and children in a selection of stories and an analysis of the ways they act on and produce the child subjects and childhoods they convey. The selected stories are examined through different philosophical lenses, utilizing Foucault, Lyotard and Rousseau. By problematizing these selected stories, the article analyses what lies beneath the surface of the obvious meanings of the text and enticing pictures in stories, as published or performed. Finally, this article argues for a careful recognition of the complexities of stories used in early childhood settings and their powerful and multifaceted influences on children and childhoods.

In this article, we explore the “vibrancy of matter” and “things” in early childhood education. We use Bennett’s and
others’ ideas on the political ecology of place in a philosophical examination of vibrant entanglements of “things,” “thinghoods,”
and childhoods. We work with Bennett’s challenge to shift from thinking solely about “think-power” to also
consider “thing-power” and “thing-hood” to take the call for-of things seriously within young children’s place. Matter
has agency that behaves in non-predictable ways, in assemblages, aggregates of powers, and forces and things impacting,
shaping, and molding other matter and things. Children’s daily connectedness with this vibrancy of matter plays out in the
territory of their early years settings as we illustrate through the well-loved stories of Pinocchio and Little Otik. We examine
these dead-alive, wooden-thing-materialities as vibrant thing-hoods with agency and power in a theoretical re-reading
of Foucauldian thought through new materialist philosophies. This article offers an alternative reading of conceptions
of power, discourse, and matter. It provokes further openings and becomings in fresh entanglements, relationships, and
responses by conceptualizing them through particular materialities of childhood stories.

This article explores quality in early childhood education by de-elevating the importance of the human subject and experience, and heightening instead a focus on and tensions with the post-human. The argument traces the intricate web of 'qualities' woven throughout entanglements of subjects, objects and things that constitute what is referred to as 'the early years sector'. The strike through the social in this post-human condition exposes critical concerns about the 'problem' of quality, and foregrounds the urgency of rupturing the status quo. Dislodged from the perceived comfort and safety of human control and determination, quality in the speculative state of the more-than-social movement can expect no conclusion. Instead, the (re)configuration of the early years sector as a more-than-social movement compels a rethinking of the dominance of human-centric philosophies. By repositioning Kristeva's semiotic subject-in-process and Havel's subject positionings within automatisms, this analysis inserts 'non-human-being' and 'multiple beings-times' into the 'problem with quality'. In the early childhood sector, these ruptures create generative possibilities of quality entanglements with and beyond the human.