Down on the ground: the material memoir of the posthuman childhood researcher

Where (else) might the residues of observation take our enquires? This chapter proposes taking a confederate and speculative approach to ‘observation’ that traces the bodily immersion of the researcher within broader power structures that underline the material affects of ‘what counts’ when research is reconfigured. Observation in childhood research is typically associated with what can be seen and registered and so privileges a visual optics - of what can be immediately witnessed with the eyes (or camera lens). Researchers have become accustomed to making sense of what is seen; what observations can tell us about the child, in the moment, against some narrow imaginary. This chapter wonders what might happen when, and if, observation in early childhood contexts is mobilised in ways that elevate other optics – that allow observation to become sensed, haptic, bodily encounters whereby memories and hauntings (Tsing et al, 2017) of life in the Anthropocene are agitated and invite us to follow the tendrils. By working with Alaimo’s (2010, 2016) concept of transcorporeality this chapter deliberately asserts that human bodies (both the young child and adult researcher) are porous and materially-discursively altered by the landscapes in which they are shaped, and in turn shape. The ‘material memoir’ provides a means for the early childhood researcher to trace transcorporeality and so rupture ordinary knowledge practices by observing the material, entangled reality of ‘self’. Such memoirs involve negotiating ‘hazardous landscapes’ of risk and toxicity (Alaimo, 2010, p.17) in order to disrupt and enlarge ideas about what (else) ‘observation’ might become and make possible.