Abstract: This paper materialises ‘arboreal methodologies’ as a way to push childhood studies in other directions. The problematic divide between theory and practice in early childhood education has long been recognised (Lenz Taguchi, 2010), it is our intention to pursue ways to ‘go beyond’ this divide by enacting feminist new materialist praxis to actively engage in world-making practices (Haraway, 2008). We consider this to be a generative experiment in bringing practices, philosophies and activisms together in order to (re)imagine childhood studies in other (worldly) ways (Haraway, 2016). The arboreal methodologies we work with are situated, material and affective, they involve metaphorical and material practices of weaving, crafting and entangling strings. We pursue seriously playful questions about how else knowledge gets produced, by whom and with what consequences. We wonder how arboreal methodologies might offer ways to live differently in the world, and to recognise ethical response-abilities in our teaching, research and activism.

Bio:Jayne Osgood is Professor of Childhood Studies at the Centre for Education Research & Scholarship, Middlesex University. Her work addresses issues of social justice through critical engagements with policy, curricular frameworks, and pedagogical approaches in ECEC. She is committed to extending understandings of the workforce, families, gender and sexualities, ‘the child’, and ‘childhood’ in early years contexts. She has published extensively within the postmodernist paradigm with over 100 publications in the form of books, chapters and journal papers, her most recent books include Feminists Researching Gendered Childhoods (Bloomsbury, 2019) and Postdevelopmental Approaches to Childhood Art (Bloomsbury, 2019). She has served on the editorial boards of various journals and is a long-standing board member at Contemporary Issues in Early Childhood. She is currently editor at Gender & Education Journal and Reconceptualising Education Research Methodology Journal. She is also Book Series Editor for Bloomsbury (Feminist Thought in Childhood Research; and Post Developmental Approaches to Childhood) and Springer (Keythinkers in Education). 

Click here to view the paper – Arboreal Methodologies: the promise of getting lost (with feminist new materialism and Indigenous ontologies) for social studies.