Ann Merete Otterstad

Travelling inscriptions of neo-liberalism in Nordic early childhood: Repositioning professionals for teaching and learnability:

This article traces the travelling of neo-liberal learning discourses through and between international and local political documents and practices. It does so by focusing on professionalism in Norway’s Early Childhood Education and Care. The investigation explores how particular discourses are taken up, merged and transformed in relation to the Norwegian tradition of child-centred pedagogy. Here, neo-liberal discourses can be seen as travelling through political and economic policies, as identified in documents and white papers produced locally and centrally. This travelling is further traced through the discursive positioning of professional pedagogues, as they talk about children’s transition from ‘barnehage1’ (kindergarten) to school. The analysis shows how neo-liberal learning discourses appropriate and merge with traditional Nordic discourses of self-responsibility and independence, regulating spaces for professional positions in new, largely unnoticed ways in Norway.

Beyond regimes of signs: making art/istic portrayals of haptic moments/movements with child/ren/hood

ABSTRACT In this paper, we try to move beyond fixed narratives of child/ren and childhoods, a fixity that comes, in part, as a consequence of the adult/child dyad. We undertake a cutting together-apart of childhood photographs which allows us to explore the complex machinery that produces the categories of child/ren as human beings that are, variously, de(scribed) as not only ‘natural’, ‘innocent’ and ‘romantic’, but also ‘uncanny’ and ‘sexual’, tropes that find meaning and depiction through child/hood bodies and faces. Inspired by non-representational ethnography, we want to generate pictorial acts that move beyond the face – ‘as regimes of signs’ so that body and language can interrelate where ‘the configuration of the face is inextricably tied to the evolution of the voice’. In undertaking a form of schizoanalysis, we undo images of child/ren/hood from ‘the inside’ by connecting to haptic thinking as well as cutting together-apart, processes that allow us to think otherwise about our own and other childhood(s). Additionally, we want to liberate child/ren/hoods through artistic photograph sensing, and doings may be seen as a political act, a way to break down boundaries of power through art as events.

Researching the assemblage of cultural diversity in Norway. Challenging simplistic research approaches

This articles point of departure is practicing an(other) methodology than those that are dominant within educational research in Norway. Dominant research can ‘rely on the authority and normativity of methods to produce knowledge devoid of critical reflection and contextual consideration’ (Koro-Ljungberg & Mazzei, 2012, p. 728). Koro-Lungberg (2012) calls this the politics of simplification (p. 809), which is powerful through its control of qualitative research. The authors try to poke holes in this scheme of representation regarding cultural diversity by installing themselves in agentic realist positions with a piece of data – a snapshot of an Internet Web page. To think otherwise about cultural diversity, the authors ‘thinkfeel’ (Lenz Taguchi & Palmer, in press) and are on the ‘lookout’ (Boutang, 2011) for events and transformative moments (Deleuze & Guattari, 1987) around the folding of the assemblage of cultural diversity in Norway. Inspired by Lather (2012), we try ‘to live’ the data in new ways.

. . . anything but synchronized swimming/methodologies . . . artistic movements in/with unknown inventions

In a entangled collective assemblage, we create and invent data, we perform the data, and we become data through our engagement in materialities/charcoals/movements/rhythms/sounds . . . We challenge written language, by bodily surfacing haptic technology that interfaces through vibrations and sensations in with us/them/you. Our experimentation invites to think and do research differently by unfolding the conditions of what is not yet thought of to come in research.

The Inefficiency of Knowledge and the Limits of Explanations; the Necessity of Critique

July 22nd 2011 Norway experienced the deadliest terror attack in the country since World War II. One man, Anders Behring Breivik, ABB (33), blew up the Governmental Headquarters in our capital Oslo, killing eight people. Later that day he shot and killed, one by one, 69 youths attending a summer camp at Utøya, and wounded many others. His target was the Norwegian Labour Party, its most prominent and influential members, and those who one day might be. His country is dying he says, because of multiculturalism. He is a commander and knight—future leader and even king. His actions were political , compulsory—necessary. . . he says. He regrets nothing.

Being Data and Datadream/ing Pedagogies With Pinter: A Dream/Dialogue/Data/Play About Being Ruthlessly Honest About Own Motives Eventually Max Stirner

This is about data dreaming the promise of dialogue in education with Pinter: The dreams and aspirations of the absent. It is a reality check and wishful thinking and about living in the world as if it was a better place. Ruin is a blessing. It always finds ways to rebuild itself. This is a move toward data driven pedagogies and research and away from traditional hypothesis driven activities and ideals. Dreaming with Pinter opens up Deleuzian “aionic” productive intensities/spaces/sensations, possibilizing and/or evoking teachers’ and children’s becomings alike; uncontrollable, indefinable endless. My Ego and My Own . . . counting as data setting things in motion: Data what you make of it (not) ultimately valuation of knowledges processes. My will. Anne and Ann Merete’s becomings with data from own “theorypraxises”: Anne’s research project with High School teachers and Ann Merete’s project in this huge kindergarten; both projects in Norway and about inclusive pedagogies and reform. The text is crafted as a play to honor—as in mourning, come Derrida, Pinter.

Our Little Land and the Urgency of Showing, Not Telling, Our Subjectivities.

This is a collaborative writing story in which songs and poems invite us into complexities of living the ideals and calling for new ways of making the world visible. I need to show you who I am. You need to show me who you are. They are never completed, always open to self and social reflection, and hopefully capable of pushing boundaries of both our personal and collective imaginations and struggles against injustice and xenophobia, wherever they might be, further. We have a focus on becomings rather than belongings. Poems, music, pictures and lyrics, layout and stream-of-thought writing blend with materialist and social science discourses: we need ‘noise’ and ‘pulse’ in our systems to make them function. Noise is creative. Noise is difficult, but not necessarily a threat.

Doing and Unpacking De/Colonising Methodologies: Who is at Risk?

Contemporary research processes might be identified as having neither a beginning nor an end. This article is written as an interruption in the ending of the authors doctoral processes. The project is to critically reflect and examine complexities involving who is at risk when methodology and theory argue for displacements that unpack taken-for-granted norms. These are unequal sociological binaries such as white/black, privileged/non-privileged, the researcher/the researched. By working within the epistemology of differences the author has been inspired by multiple methodologies involving stories, voices and metaphors. From theories of the critical social sciences, feminisms and post-structuralisms, knowledge is reconfigured from static, fixed disciplines towards dynamic fluidity and complexity.

Touchicizing Posthuman Digital-Artistic-Assemblages of Child/ren/hood(s) Exposuring(s) in the Making …

Our chapter invites you/them/us to think the notion of possible worlds in line(s) with Gilles Deleuze’s writings about dividing worldly signs into different encounters. We are developing artistic encounters, as worldly signs in an attempt to ontologically infiltrate cartographies of child/ren/hood(s) in early childhood locations. And doing that through producing expanded posthuman artistic-assemblages by asking for difference. When Deleuze writes about difference this is a difference different from our own, which for us invites to do artwork as invention and creativity. Everything which happens and everything which appears is correlated with orders of differences: ‘differences of level, temperature, pressure, tension, potential, difference of intensity’. Difference goes beyond logics of meaning-making, reason, objectivity, knowledge and truth. Art allows and calls for other worlds than repeating and reproducing more of the same. Hence, an irreducible difference becomes a thinking-and doing-possibility that for us is unfolding the world – through art. Unfolding is like artistic refractive cuts – disturbing and shaking habitual modes of being and cutting-together-apart (Barad, 2012) with aesthetic power forcing, different art images and thoughts to come. Artistic thinkingdoing opens for the unexpected and put difference in motion – which Felix Guattari propose as an ethico- aesthetic – paradigm (1995, see also Springgay, 2011). Such thinking stresses the importance for creative Deleuzeoguttarian thinkingfeelingdoings – embedded in affects, intensities and flows.

Alice’s Adventures: Reconfiguring Solidarity in Early Childhood Education and Care Through Data Events

In this chapter, we textually enact Guattari’s transversality by charting the affects and intensities of a curated tea party performed at an educational research conference through a series of data events. We embrace (k)not-knowing, complexity, chaos, and desiring nonsense as depicted by Lewis Carroll’s Adventures of Alice in Wonderland. We experiment with Alice’s cartographies, temporalities, geographies, and bodies to generate spaces for more-than/other-than-human child/hoods. In doing so, we embrace and embody curious transversals in an attempt to rupture understandings of how early childhood education and care might relate to solidarity in a globalized time.