Hillevi Lenz Taguchi

Challenging anthropocentric analysis of visual data: a relational materialist methodological approach to educational research

The purpose of this paper is to challenge the habitual anthropocentric gaze we use when analysing educational data, which takes human beings as the starting point and centre, and gives humans a self‐evident higher position above other matter in reality. By enacting analysis of photographic images from a preschool playground, using a relational materialist methodological approach, we put to work concepts that open up possibilities to understand the child as emergent in a relational field, where non‐human forces are equally at play in constituting childrens becomings. In the second part of the paper, we discuss how the decentring of the child may also be applied to researchers as producers of knowledge. Such a decentring, where the data itself is considered to have a constitutive force and be working upon the researcher as much as the researcher works upon the data, has both methodological and ethical consequences for research.

Going Beyond the Theory/Practice Divide in Early Childhood Education : Introducing an Intra-Active Pedagogy

Going Beyond the Theory/Practice Divide in Early Childhood Education : Introducing an intra-active pedagogy

Becoming schoolgirls: the ambivalent project of subjectification

In this article, the authors examine the concept and practices of subjectification; that is, the processes through which we are subjected, and actively take up as our own the terms of our subjection. They use Judith Butlers theorising of subjection both as a starting point for working with their own memories of being subjected in school settings, and as the theoretical basis of their analysis of subjectification. Their method of working, which they refer to as collective biography, is derived from Haug et al. s methods developed in Female Sexualization . Their memories focus on aspects of the achievement of the individual, appropriate(d) schoolgirl subject who simultaneously constitutes herself and is constituted through discourse. They analyse the illusion of autonomy through which modern subjects are made possible, and the inevitable ambivalence that is experienced as schoolgirls take themselves up appropriately within the possibilities made available to them. Through re-membering their own pasts, and the embodied and emotional detail through which we became (and go on becoming) subjects, they open up for inspection the contradictory ground of the humanist subject, and in particular the feminine humanist subject, as it is achieved in educational settings.

A diffractive and Deleuzian approach to analysing interview data

This article explores the possibilities of considering how ‘matter and meaning are mutually constituted’ in the production of knowledge (Barad, 2007: 152) through presenting a diffractive analysis of a piece of interview data with a six-year-old boy in a preschool class. Inspired by Donna Haraway’s (1997) and Karen Barad’s (2007) theorising, I understand diffractive analysis as an embodied engagement with the materiality of research data: a becoming-with the data as researcher. Understanding the body as a space of transit, a series of open-ended systems in interaction with the material-discursive ‘environment’, diffractive analyses constitute transcorporeal engagements with data. Stacy Alaimo’s (2010) theorisation of the transcorporeal is put to work diffractively with Gilles Deleuze and Felix Guattari’s (1987) thinking on the process of becoming minor or minoritarian. This implies a reconceptualisation of the very act of thinking as a transcorporeal process of engagement, going beyond the idea of reflexivity and interpretation as inner mental activities taking place in the mind of the researcher understood as separated from the data. Through my example, I argue that diffractive analysis can make visible new kinds of material-discursive realities that can have transformative and political consequences.

Images of thinking in feminist materialisms: ontological divergences and the production of researcher subjectivities

Qualitative feminist studies are much challenged by the contemporary critique of social constructionist postmodernism, as well as the renewed search for the body and materiality. The result is (at least) two diverging research accounts: a renewed feminist materialism, relying on some foundational ontologies and what has been called a new materialist feminist account that constitutes radical ontological rewritings. The aim of this paper is to investigate what kind of researcher subjectivities these different accounts produce for qualitative inquiry. This investigation will be unfolded using an example from a collaborative research process involving 10 PhD students. The example is woven into Deleuze and Guattari’s discussions on the Image of Thought and the three images of thinking outlined in A Thousand Plateaus. The investigation shows that although the aim of our collaborative process was to resist the assumed Cogito/“I” of philosophy and qualitative inquiry, we still got caught up in taken-for-granted i...Qualitative feminist studies are much challenged by the contemporary critique of social constructionist postmodernism, as well as the renewed search for the body and materiality. The result is (at least) two diverging research accounts: a renewed feminist materialism, relying on some foundational ontologies and what has been called a new materialist feminist account that constitutes radical ontological rewritings. The aim of this paper is to investigate what kind of researcher subjectivities these different accounts produce for qualitative inquiry. This investigation will be unfolded using an example from a collaborative research process involving 10 PhD students. The example is woven into Deleuze and Guattari’s discussions on the Image of Thought and the three images of thinking outlined in A Thousand Plateaus. The investigation shows that although the aim of our collaborative process was to resist the assumed Cogito/“I” of philosophy and qualitative inquiry, we still got caught up in taken-for-granted images of thinking and doing analysis. A deterritorializing of habits of thinking and practicing in order for new and other researcher subjectivities to emerge required collaborative efforts that put to work a rhizomatic image of thinking and operated from within an ontology of difference.

Getting Personal: How Early Childhood Teacher Education Troubles Students' and Teacher Educators' Identities Regarding Subjectivity and Feminism.

This article constitutes an attempt to investigate how student teachers and teacher educators in the context of Swedish early childhood teacher education are invented and reinvented by practices that are inspired by feminist and post-structural thinking. I give examples of practice that explicitly make use of different aspects of the personal, such as subjectivities, voice and experience. These are theorized, problematized and troubled in relation to concepts of power, resistance and emancipation. The article questions the possibility of ‘getting outside’ of the regulatory regimes of power production through practices of ‘getting personal’, and asks just how much freedom is possible, even given overtly ‘emancipist’ teaching.

Investigating Learning, Participation and Becoming in Early Childhood Practices with a Relational Materialist Approach

Schooling is a significant feature of social experience for children in many countries around the world. However, despite the massive technological, social, economic, environmental and political changes that have occurred during the past few decades, pedagogic approaches in many educational systems appear to have changed relatively little over time. There has been much criticism of traditional schooling practices which have remained constant and unchanging in these times of unprecedented changes. Scholars of education have posed questions about the relevance of long-standing practices to children who live in global economies in the twenty-first century, querying why such practices continue to be replicated without due consideration of the diversity of cultural and social conditions that exist in these new situations, and asking whether alternative pedagogic models and schooling practices might be more relevant to the lives of millennial children living globalized lives. In this article I both welcome and critique two increasingly popular pedagogic approaches – the learning study approach and the Reggio Emilia approach – that have been taken up in schools and classrooms in a range of countries, arguing that these two approaches reproduce dominant binaries associated with modern liberal humanist education. Finally, I consider how a relational materialist approach might offer an alternative approach that attends more seriously to the interdependencies, responsibilities and potentialities that characterize global childhoods.

“The Concept as Method”: Tracing-and-mapping the Problem of the Neuro(n) in the Field of Education

For this article, I ask how it might be possible to study the encounter between the practices that involve the concept of the Neuro(n) and educational practices of teaching and learning. The article aims to experiment by thinking “the concept as method.” This entails the doubled and entangled movement of tracing-and-mapping the concept of—in this case—the Neuro(n). I suggest that the contemporary obsession with the Neuro(n) in the field of education emerges from the desire to know more about the learning subject, knowledge, and the problem of how something new comes into the world.For this article, I ask how it might be possible to study the encounter between the practices that involve the concept of the Neuro(n) and educational practices of teaching and learning. The articl...

Reading a Deleuzio-Guattarian Cartography of Young Girls' School-Related Ill-/Well-Being

This article puts to work a Deleuzio-Guattarian methodology of cartography using data from a pilot study of young schoolgirls’ “school-related” ill-health and well-being. Doing a cartography means setting up a “map” of various kinds of data produced by a multiplicity of desiring agents in various power-producing fields such as medicine, psychology, popular science, media, as well as narrative data from young girls and the two researchers themselves. Together, these data make up a wider machinic assemblage of Public Health in Sweden. As researchers, we understand ourselves as co-productive of this machinic assemblage that, in turn, is productive of a multiplicity of different Bodies without Organs (BwOs) that young schoolgirls fabricate for themselves. The analysis will show the specific types of BwOs that are fabricated, how they are fabricated, the modes of desire that come to pass on them, and thus what kinds of subjectivities of schoolgirls might be produced.

‘Becoming molecular girl’: transforming subjectivities in collaborative doctoral research studies as micro-politics in the academy

In the context of Swedish reforms of postgraduate and doctoral education in a global knowledge economy, this article aims to theorize on the documented processes of doing collaborative analysis during elective graduate course-work on deconstructive methodologies in the social sciences, with ten doctoral students over a period of seven months. I reengage with the documentations of our collaborative processes six years later, to read and analyse them diffractively with Gilles Deleuze and Felix Guattari’s philosophy, and with feminist postconstructivist theories, such as Rosi Braidotti, Claire Colebrook, Elisabeth Grosz, and Patti Lather. In the course-work we actively aimed – by engaging in different collaborative strategies of deconstructive writing and talking, sharing and re-analysing each others’ research data and analyses – to resist “doing philosophy” as an independent, intellectual, disembodied, and masculine-coded endeavour. This process made us aware of the tactile embodiment of collaborative deconstructive research strategies, and how they came to transform our subjectivities as researchers. I suggest the “molecular girl” as a metaphor for this transformation as researchers, and claim that the practices we developed constitute a “micro-politics” that contest contemporary transnational trends in knowledge economies, but which might also be understood to work in alignment with such trends.In the context of Swedish reforms of postgraduate and doctoral education in a global knowledge economy, this article aims to theorise on the documented processes of doing collaborative analysis during elective graduate course-work on deconstructive methodologies in the social sciences, with 10 doctoral students over a period of seven months. I re-engage with the documentations of our collaborative processes six years later, to read and analyse them diffractively with Gilles Deleuze and Felix Guattari’s philosophy, and with feminist post-constructivist theories, such as Rosi Braidotti, Claire Colebrook, Elisabeth Grosz and Patti Lather. In the course-work, we actively aimed – by engaging in different collaborative strategies of deconstructive writing and talking, sharing and re-analysing each other’s research data and analyses – to resist “doing philosophy” as an independent, intellectual, disembodied and masculine-coded endeavour. This process made us aware of the tactile embodiment of collaborative deconstructive research strategies, and how they came to transform our subjectivities as researchers. I suggest the “molecular girl” as a metaphor for this transformation as researchers, and claim that the practices we developed constitute a “micro-politics” that contests contemporary transnational trends in knowledge economies, but which might also be understood to work in alignment with such trends.