Speculative caring collaboratories: mattering research alternatives

ABSTRACT

This paper explores how ‘caring collaboratories’ advance new possibilities for imagining and enlivening early childhood education and research. Thinking with María Puig de la Bellacasa’s (2017) feminist materialist theory of care the authors bring a retrospective analysis to their research experiences within three different climate change focused collaboratories. The paper begins with an overview of their research sites, anlaysis method for this paper, and common worlds orientation. This is followed by a brief introduction to Puig de la Bellacasa’s conceptualization of care and an offering of three research stories to examine what carrying her triptych of care into the collaboratory proposes to researchers and educators committed to human and more-than-human living well together. The paper concludes with speculative considerations for what such caring collaboratories might offer childhood studies with/in the conditions of our times.

KEYWORDS:

• Collaboratory
• care
• climate action
• waste
• early childhood education

Disclosure statement

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

Notes

1 All children’s names used in the paper are pseudonyms. Educators’ first names are used with informed consent.

Additional information

Funding

This work was supported by Social Science Research Council [grant numbers 435-2017-0688, 890-2016-0007].