Thinking metabolically with shivering, sweating and feminist science studies in early childhood education

Abstract

Thinking alongside feminist science studies scholars, in this article I contend with how early childhood education pedagogies do metabolisms. To conceptualize metabolisms as an activity is to centre the ethical and political practices, relations, knowledges, and vulnerabilities that flood bodies in contemporary times. I ask: What possibilities for doing bodies with children might we open toward if we take metabolism as a postdevelopmental pedagogical question in early childhood education? Utilizing examples from pedagogical inquiry research with children, shivering and sweating are engaged as modes of “doing” metabolisms. I propose doing metabolisms as a practice for thinking postdevelopmental pedagogies with the body, tracing how we might engage metabolic bodies beyond a developmentalist frame.