Thinking metabolically with shivering, sweating, and feminist science studies in early childhood education

Abstract

Thinking alongside feminist science studies scholars, in this article I contend with how early childhood education pedagogies do metabolisms. To conceptualize metabolisms as an activity is to centre the ethical and political practices, relations, knowledges, and vulnerabilities that flood bodies in contemporary times. I ask: What possibilities for doing bodies with children might we open toward if we take metabolism as a postdevelopmental pedagogical question in early childhood education? Utilizing examples from pedagogical inquiry research with children, shivering and sweating are engaged as modes of “doing” metabolisms. I propose doing metabolisms as a practice for thinking postdevelopmental pedagogies with the body, tracing how we might engage metabolic bodies beyond a developmentalist frame.

Keywords:

• Early childhood education
• metabolism
• pedagogical commitments
• bodied relations
• feminist science studies

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author.

Additional information

Notes on contributors

Nicole Land

Nicole Land is an assistant professor in the School of Early Childhood Studies at Toronto Metropolitan University. Thinking with early childhood educators and children, she is curious about the inherited and inventive relations we might create with fats, muscles, and movement. Nicole and collaborators share questions and provocations from their work at Moving Pedagogies Blog (movingpedagogies.blog.ryerson.ca).