Making a bricolage: An immanent process of experimentation

Abstract

This article draws on a new materialist paradigm to explore bricolaging data from an early childhood research project through an immanent ethical lens. This lens enables the researcher to stretch towards non-hierarchical relationships in between subjects and objects, thinking and doing. A bricoleur explores and builds different knowledge-production pathways, allowing experimentation with a wide range of methods and theoretical perspectives. The argument presented here is that bricolaging data could be a non-hierarchical tool through which the researcher considers materiality and artefacts as intra-active participators. Empirical matter – such as videos, photographs, dialogue transcripts, scribblings, sounds, vibrations, bodies and recycled materials – becomes visible through several reviews and rereadings. Here, the bricoleur explores how various data can be read by bricolaging it together, resulting in several narratives that may disrupt and challenge dominant discourses and present alternative perspectives in early childhood pedagogy.