Plugging into the Umbra: Creative experimentation (in)(on) the boundaries of knowledge production in ECEC research

Nikki Fairchild

doi:10.7577/rerm.1823

Abstract

Research into Early Childhood Education and Care (ECEC) policy and practice in the UK is subject to the demand that such research be measurable and achieve impact to provide the basis for evidence-based professional practice. New and creative experimental ways of knowing/thinking/doing ECEC research have been proposed in resistance to this quantified and instrumentalised agenda. Here I focus on posthumanist theorising, which proposes research that does not privilege the human subject but rather opens conditions of possibility for an entanglement with non-human and more-than-human bodies within and between assemblages. This engagement with complexity is a new ethical and political project aiming at re-conceptualising ontology beyond the limits of the human. Posthumanist research does not only challenge quantitative research, but also engages creative ways to challenge the limits of qualitative inquiry. Drawing on my research experience, I explore this de-centring of the human-as-researcher through the notion of the ‘methodological umbra’. This shadow space is one in which traditional thoughts on research open out these new forms of inquiry into thinking-in-movement. My analysis uses my own diary entries as sites in which this ‘umbra’ becomes evident under the pressure of creating new forms of a ‘living’ methodology. This is analysed through the contrast between smooth and striated space proposed by Deleuze and Guattari (1987) to explore what form of life might emerge in the smooth space of the umbra.

Highlights

We are in a period of continuous change and uncertainty within the field of Early Childhood Education and Care (ECEC), as successive Governments consider the value of quality ECEC as a precursor to formal compulsory education
This is exemplified in England with a plethora of policy changes which frames the child and the Early Years Teacher (DfE, 2013) as central to economic regeneration, where introducing rigour into curricula frameworks (DfE, 2014) and teacher training are hailed as the panacea for wider social issues (Waldfogel, 2004; Bertram and Pascal, 2014)
It is within this context that the conceptualisation of ECEC research takes a number of, what Deleuze and Guattari (1987) would call, striated forms where processes and normalised ideas of research practice can set limits of the purpose and value of research and researchers modulate their practice to fit Reconceptualizing Educational Research Methodology 2016, 7(1)

Summary

Introduction

We are in a period of continuous change and uncertainty within the field of Early Childhood Education and Care (ECEC), as successive Governments consider the value of quality ECEC as a precursor to formal compulsory education. Using the concepts of smooth and striated space from Deleuze and Guattari (1987), which contrast the striated space of organisation and order to an anarchic smooth space, I suggest that this umbra is the shadow of a smooth space that disrupts the striations of conventional research, quantitative and qualitative It is out of this shadowy zone that new forms of vitality and interconnection emerge, positing a new form of posthuman inquiry. Deleuze and Guattari warn that smooth and striated spaces are not binary opposites but are positions, which reflect the vital nature of relational entanglements with bodies They are interested in http://journals.hioa.no/index.php/rerm the tensions between smooth and striated space when they consider ‘how the forces at work within the space continually striate it, and how in the course of its striation it develops other forces and emits new smooth spaces’ (Deleuze and Guattari, 1987: 581). When connecting affect and methodology, we might ask ‘How might a methodology live?’, and it is to this question that I turn

In the Shadows

Fluid methodological spaces and vital inquiry