Reimagining infant and toddler agency via a new materialist and posthumanist lens

Abstract

This thesis investigates infant and toddler agency via an ongoing relationship with a former colleague who became my research participant. The other intent of the inquiry was to reimagine duoethnography via a postqualitative lens. The aim was to decentre the human and illuminate an intra-active entanglement between infants and toddlers, their teachers and non-human matter in the world at large. The research contests the normative and positivist understandings of agency found in developmental and sociocultural theory and seeks to reimagine agency via a posthuman and new materialist lens. To do this, a mash-up of duoethnographic and postqualitative attention to the new and different occurred. The research expanded beyond a dialogue between researcher and participant towards a new conceptualisation of the mundane matter found in an infant–toddler room. A series of four vignettes focusing on a table, a sleepsuit, a projector and a mealtime problematise the agency narratives in an infant and toddler room in Tāmaki Makaurau. By experimenting with matter in several tactile ways, it was reimagined from an empowering more-than-human lens. The thesis is a subjective and speculative experiment, exploring thought-provoking concepts close to the heart of the author in this moment of existence. The reimagining process creates potentialities for transformation in which agency becomes porous; by mashing up a sensory approach to data, the concept of agency extended beyond a human narrative, and a constant state of being and becoming occurred. Agency was no longer individualised. Instead, it is continually in between entangled matter, places, spaces, the infants and toddlers, and their teachers.