ABSTRACT
This paper examines the formation of children’s subjectivities, related to the metaphysical conditions of being and becoming a subject, within outdoor early childhood provision in Scotland. It applies a sociomaterial metaphysical framework to propose an alternative way of understanding how subjectivities come to form in early childhood environments, bringing together Spinozist monism in relation to Deleuze and Guattari’s concepts of assemblage and affect. Methodologically, an ethnographic approach inspired partly by the postqualitative field of scholarship is employed to gather data on children’s subjectivities at Wood Fire, a primarily outdoor early childhood setting. The data produced in this study affords an opportunity to understand the materiality and relationality of primarily outdoor early childhood provision through which subjectivities are in-formed. Thus, they demonstrate a more expanded understanding of how we, humans, are produced as individuals in specific encounters through processes of ‘affective sociomaterialisation’. Practically, this carries implications for how researchers might attune to the child’s sense of self on more expansive terms through processes of affective sociomaterialisation.
Acknowledgements
Thanks to the children at Wood Fire, who demonstrated a way of being and becoming with the world that I hope to have brought to life within this article.
Disclosure statement
No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author(s).
Correction Statement
This article was originally published with errors, which have now been corrected in the online version. Please see Correction (https://doi.org/10.1080/14733285.2024.2354092)