Benjamin Bradley

Infants in Groups: a paradigm for the study of early social experience

This paper reports on a two-stage, case-based analysis of infant sociability in infant-only trios to illustrate how findings made using this approach extend our theoretical understanding of early intersubjectivity. Studying infant groups allows us to address three kinds of emerging theoretical argument: (1) that babies are born with a ‘general relational capacity’ which complements or even founds the more specific ‘dyadic program’ that generates attachments; (2) that infants’ communication with peers is the best route to understanding the shared meanings that inform language acquisition, and (3) that the reconceptualisation of ‘nonbasic’ emotions requires we discover whether babies are communicatively competent to elaborate context-specific meanings over time. The materials we use to illustrate this two-stage approach show infants manifest core characteristics of group-communication in the second six months of life, in particular the capacity to be involved with more than one person at a time and for relational encounters to shift behavioral significances for the infants as a product of group interactions.

Infants as Others: uncertainties, difficulties and (im)possibilities in researching infants’ lives

Increasingly, researchers are trying to understand what daily life is like for infants in non-parental care from the perspectives of the infants themselves. In this article, we argue that it is profoundly difficult, if not impossible, to know how infants experience their worlds with any certainty and, indeed, whether they do or do not possess well-worked out ‘perspectives’ on their experiences. Three key difficulties are discussed: firstly, the difficulty of interpreting non-verbal expressions and behaviour; secondly, the difficulty of knowing whether researchers’ constructions of the ‘infant’s perspective’ align with the infant’s experiences of their world; and, thirdly, the difficulty of providing opportunities for infants to disrupt researchers’ predetermined categories of understanding, meanings and expectations. Because of these difficulties, we argue that research endeavours to understand infants’ experiences in non-parental care should be seen as sites of ethical rather than epistemological practice.

The ‘Voices’ Project: Capacity-Building in Community Development for Youth at Risk

We report three cycles of an ‘action research’ project aimed at increasing the capacities of young people at risk in a rural Australian town. Drawing on an ‘experience-based’ approach to risk assessment and the concept of collective efficacy, we aimed to provide a group of 10 young people with a safe and uncensored space within which to voice their own concerns about the risks and problems confronting them. Their stories were then made public through theatrical performance. The purpose of the article is to demonstrate the dynamics of capacity-building in marginalized communities as a means of producing the political changes required for improving health outcomes in a setting previously opposed to such a strategy.

Baby events: Assembling descriptions of infants in family day care

The idea that research on infants should ‘voice’ their ‘perspectives’, their experiences, what they are ‘really saying,’ is a central feature of current moves toward participatory research. While embracing the ethos of participation, this article steps away from the binary logic of identity that implicitly underpins such approaches — self—other, adult—infant, subject—object. Instead, it demonstrates the generativity of concepts of ‘assemblage,’ ‘event,’ ‘line of flight,’ in rethinking what should form the focus for the theorising, pedagogy and practices surrounding infants and toddlers. To that end, it assembles a description of mealtime, a common segment of the lives of four young children in an Australian Family Day Care home. The assemblage connects a variety of heterogeneous elements, human and non-human, animate and inanimate, including highchairs, bottles, researchers, technologies, ideas, regulations, food, gravity and our own attempts to enunciate and engage with mealtime. It is concluded that, through the relations afforded by and made between these diverse elements, the descriptions of mealtime show how highchairs and their allies may afford a new infant-world symbiosis that entails not just a time and place to eat, but access to unanticipated relations of power, opportunities for connection, and ways of becoming. Such is the ‘what’ that should inform theorising, practice and pedagogy involving very young children.

Creating Space for Infants to Influence ECEC Practice: The encounter, écart, reversibility and ethical reflection

Abstract The idea that infant participation in research is achievable by researchers ‘voicing’ infants’ experiences and ‘perspectives’ is a central feature of current moves towards participatory research. In this article we offer an alternative. Specifically, we suggest a different point of reference than infants’ own experiences and ‘perspectives’; namely, the encounter between researcher and infant as it unfolds in practice. Drawing from a large-scale study of infants in family day care, and Merleau-Ponty’s notions of écart and reversibility, we articulate the possibility that infants’ participation in research encounters may be felt by researchers in the ways that infants evoke embodied responses. Drawing on Dillon’s ethics of particularity, which builds upon écart and reversibility, we discuss the idea that researchers’ embodied responses to infants provoke possibilities for ethical reflection, which can afford new ways of ‘going on’. We propose that space may be created for infants to influence ECEC practice when researchers attend to their own embodied responses to infants during the research encounter; and to the factors that may diminish infants’ capacities to affect such responses.

Observing infants in groups: the clan revisited

Abstract We illustrate the potential for dialogue between the study of infant sociability and psychoanalytic theories of the young child. In particular we examine Freud (1922) and Bions (1961) proposal that the psychology of the group is the oldest human psychology, using our observations to test its empirical plausibility when describing free-form interactions between trios of babies recorded on video. We find that babies relate to more than one other at a time. This challenges the comprehensiveness of attachment theory as a description of infant sociability. We also find that babies generate context-specific meanings in group-communication. This renders unworkable a priori descriptive techniques that assume one behaviour = one meaning. We conclude that the basic unit of psychological analysis is the clan, a conclusion that has both scientific and ethico-practical repercussions for handling infants.

To criticise the critic: Songs of experience

We contrast two senses of “critique” in psychology. In one, all empirical psychology is critical insofar as it opens the methodology of its findings up to public challenge. Todays “critical psychology” can be seen as extending this methodological reflexiveness to include reflexiveness about the disciplines political and value commitments. In this sense, however, a critical psychology would set out from the diversity of individualised experience. It is by this step, we argue, that it would best fulfil the critical objectives of the discipline as first conceived: as the touchstone of science and the guarantor of social progress. Such a step would have productive consequences for pedagogy, research, theory, and political practice.

Darwin’s Sublime: The Contest Between Reason and Imagination in On the Origin of Species

Recent Darwin scholarship has provided grounds for recognising the Origin as a literary as well as a scientific achievement. While Darwin was an acute observer, a gifted experimentalist and indefatigable theorist, this essay argues that it was also crucial to his impact that the Origin transcended the putative divide between the scientific and the literary. Analysis of Darwin’s development as a writer between his journal-keeping on HMS Beagle and his construction of the Origin argues the latter draws on the pattern of the Romantic or Kantian sublime. The Origin repeatedly uses strategies which challenge the natural-theological appeal to the imagination in conceiving nature. Darwin’s sublime coaches the Origin’s readers into a position from which to envision nature that reduces and contains its otherwise overwhelming complexity. As such, it was Darwin’s literary achievement that enabled him to fashion a new ‘habit of looking at things in a given way’ that is the centrepiece of the scientific revolution bearing his name.

‘Baby Cam’ and Participatory Research with Infants: A Case Study of Critical Reflexivity

Following Bourdieu (1998), Agbenyega (Chap. 3, this volume, p. x) reminds us of the importance of ‘reflexivity, reflectivity and critical mindfulness’ concerning the social worlds that we, as researchers, ‘conjure up’ in our research. Being critically reflexive and mindful requires us to interrogate our epistemological and ontological assumptions, the theoretical and methodological resources that we use, the practices in which we engage and the meanings that we assign. It involves looking beneath the surface, going beyond the commonly accepted, being wary of theoretical and methodological fads and attending to power relations and their effects. It also means recognising that our desires to formulate revolutionary ways of seeing (Agbenyega) may blind us to the limitations of those ways of seeing and lead us, inadvertently, to reproduce the social, theoretical and methodological status quo and in doing so possibly exacerbate the inequities that we may have set out to address. The purpose of this chapter is to provide a case study of critical reflexivity and mindfulness concerning our use of ‘baby cam’ (our term for small head-mounted cameras worn by children aged up to approximately 18 months) in our endeavours to understand babies and toddlers’ experiences of early childhood settings from the perspective of the children themselves. In particular, we consider the extent to which baby cam might be considered a participatory approach to researching with infants, insights it might enable and/or constrain and ethical dilemmas it can create.

Groupness in Preverbal Infants: Proof of Concept

Infant sociability is generally conceived in terms of dyadic capacities and behaviors. Recently, quantitative evidence has been published to support arguments that infants achieve a criterion for groupness: the capacity to interact simultaneously with two others. Such studies equate this capacity with alternating dyadic acts to the two other members of an interacting trio. Here we propose a stricter threefold criterion for infant groupness, of which the crux is whether the social behavior of an infant at time B is shown to be influenced by what two or more group-members were previously doing at time A. We test the viability of this conceptualization: (a) through its justification of the novel laboratory procedure of studying infant sociability in infant–peer quartets (rather than trios); and, (b) in an analysis of a pilot study of gaze-behavior recorded in 5-min interactions among two quartets of infants aged 6–9 months. We call this a ‘proof of concept’ because our aim is to show that infants are capable of groupness, when groupness is conceptualized in a supra-dyadic way—not that all infants will manifest it, nor that all conditions will produce it, nor that it is commonplace in infants’ everyday lives. We found that both quartets did achieve the minimum criterion of groupness that we propose: mutual gaze predicting coordinated gaze (where two babies, A and B, are looking at each other, and B is then looked at by C, and sometimes D) more strongly than the reverse. There was a significant absence of ‘parallel mutual gaze,’ where the four babies pair off. We conclude that, under specific conditions, preverbal infants can manifest supra-dyadic groupness. Infants’ capacities to exhibit groupness by 9 months of age, and the paucity of parallel mutual gaze in our data, run counter to the assumption that infant sociability, when in groups, is always generated by a dyadic program. Our conceptualization and demonstration of groupness in 8-month-olds thus opens a host of empirical, theoretical, and practical questions about the sociability and care of young babies.