New materialisms and children’s outdoor environments: murmurative diffractions

ABSTRACT

This article draws on new materialisms to highlight children’s sensitivity to the agency of nonhuman materials. Working with data fragments from an ongoing project investigating children’s relationship with their outdoor environments, the article uses the figure of murmuration in a diffractive analysis approach to reveal materialdiscursive intra-actions. In doing so, the article highlights an ingrained tendency to focus on the human whilst overlooking the material. Attentiveness to the agency of all matter, human and nonhuman, has significant implications for early childhood geographies, research and pedagogy as it shines a light on the intra-active nature of the world. This offers new possibilities but also calls attention to the relations of responsibilities inherent in a world where all matter is vibrant and agential.

KEYWORDS:

• New materialisms
• intra-action
• outdoors
• diffractive analysis
• murmurative diffraction

Acknowledgements

I am indebted to the children, teachers and families of the Centre for their ongoing commitment to this research. I am also indebted to a number of colleagues for their support and feedback that has challenged and extended my thinking. I am particularly grateful for three anonymous reviewers’ thoughts as they pushed my thinking into new spaces.

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the authors.

ORCID

Jane Merewether http://orcid.org/0000-0001-5860-9255

Notes

1. For now, following Coole and Frost (2010) amongst others, I use the term ‘new materialisms’, as its plurality speaks of multiplicity and the possibility of more to come.

2. In using the word ‘species’ (and ‘multispecies’) I am not limiting myself only to bio-species such as plants and animals. Instead, as discussed by van Dooren, Kirksey, and Münster (2016), I include abiotic liveliness of so-called inorganic matter.

3. I use Haraway’s term ‘becoming with’ to emphasise the infinite interconnectedness of a world in a constant state of change: ‘becoming is always becoming with’ (Haraway 2008, 244, original emphasis).

4. I take what Brinkmann (2014) describes as an ‘abductive approach’ to data where ‘data’ is not only limited to observations, interviews, and field notes, but also includes any material which helps me to think about ‘astonishment, mystery, and breakdowns in one’s understanding’ (722).

5. Here, I follow Gannon (2016, 130) who says: ‘Approaching data as “fragment” – rather than as “set” – suggests instability, singularity and an inclination to fall apart rather than to hold together, and the capacity to come together in different formations with other fragments.’

6. As (Barad 2007, 3) points out, ‘Matter and meaning are not separate elements’. Instead, she explains:

The relationship between the material and the discursive is one of mutual entailment. Neither discursive practices nor material phenomena are ontologically or epistemologically prior. Neither can be explained in terms of the other. Neither is reducible to the other. Neither has privileged status in determining the other. Neither is articulated or articulable in the absence of the other; matter and meaning are mutually articulated. (Barad 2007, 152)

7. Barad (2007) uses the term ‘ethico-onto-epistemology’ to refer to the indivisible relationship between ethics, theories of being (ontology) and theories of knowledge (epistemology).

8. Haraway (2016) draws us away from anthropocentric exceptionalism by eschewing the term ‘posthuman,’ electing instead to call herself a ‘compostist’: ‘we are compost, not posthuman; we inhabit the humusities, not the humanities. Philosophically and materially, I am a compostist, not a posthumanist’ (97).

9. Here, I follow a Deleuzian perspective of assemblage: ‘In assemblages … you find states of things, bodies, various combinations of bodies, hodgepodges; but you also find utterances, modes of expression, and whole regimes of signs’ (Deleuze 2007, 177).