Working with childhoods and energies: critical reflections on specifying and locating the intangible

ABSTRACT

This paper critically reflects upon the work of collaboratories in researching childhoods and energies (‘childhoods-energies’). It compares divergent approaches to thinking with energy, children and young people in Canada and the UK. Although we begin from common conceptual foundations - inspired by feminist, new materialist, posthumanist and Common Worlds perspectives - we focus on tensions, incommensurabilities and differences in our thinkings and doings with energy. Our principal reasons for doing so, are twofold. First, energy is a difficult, slippery, multifaceted phenomenon that cannot be pinned down as readily as the material artefacts or companion species with which childhood scholars are often preoccupied. Moreover, energy - and energy education with children - often attempts to specify and objectify energy by conferring upon its intangibility measurements and acts of commodification. We disrupt these imperatives in diverse ways by examining how other energies emerged in our collaboratories: kinaesthetic, emotional, embodied, spiritual, and more. Second, despite commonalities, we have all been deeply attuned to the particularities of place - in London (Ontario) and Birmingham (UK). We offer vignettes from our collaboratories that elaborate the related-but-divergent forms of doing, knowing, thinking, moving and feeling that emerge from taking energy as a focus for childhood research.

KEYWORDS:

• Childhoods
• materialities
• environmental education
• research relations
• race
• natural elements

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author(s).

Notes

1 The term ‘collaboratory’ deliberately combines and questions the ideas of ‘collaboration’ and ‘laboratory’, to emphasise the co-production of experimental ways of producing research ‘data’ through engaged practices involving academics, practitioners and children. Please see the Introduction to the Special Issue (to be fully referenced at publication) for a more general discussion of collaboratories; the methodology section of this paper provides details and examples of how the collaboratories in our projects were constituted.

2 A pedagogist is a role in Ontario and British Columbia, Canada. Pedagogists work alongside educators and children to ‘envision pedagogical connections and projects to provoke educational processes that, through interdisciplinary and provocative questions, ideas, theories, materials, relationships … deepen and complexify strong, situated pedagogical work in early childhood contexts.’ (Land, et al., 2020, p. 2).

3 Other than the references to St Paul’s Community Development Trust, all names of childcare/learning centres, educators, and children are pseudonyms.

Additional information

Funding

This work was supported by Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council of Canada: [Grant Number 890-2016-0007].