Circuits of sympathy: Posthuman child, vibrant forces, things and places

Abstract

New materialism has the potential to deepen critical engagement between vibrant things, everyday places and intra-actions between humans and non-humans in early childhood education. This article explores Australian pre-service teachers’ understandings of children and childhood when encountering the vibrant forces of things and places. The authors explore Jane Bennett's ‘circuits of sympathy’ to analyse the atmospheric forces encountered in pre-service teachers’ engagement with new materialism in their final year of study. Their research is guided by the following question: What happens when pre-service teachers conceptualise the posthuman child, things and places as related through circuits of sympathy? The authors suggest that sympathy, considered as a transformative agentic force, can generate connectivity across ideas, matter and practices, and adds depth and new perspectives to understandings of the posthuman child, with the result that new figurations of childhood emerge in this investigation. They conclude by discussing the implications of their study for posthuman research and how circuits of sympathy bring new atmospheric forces to childhood. The posthuman child, embedded in circuits of sympathy, is neither individualised nor collectivised but immersed in, and produced by, the circuit and its flows and disruptions. The modes and qualities of sympathy in the circuit shape what happens next: encounters that are sympathetically charged, are set to create new circuits of sympathy in their next encounters.