Dean's Lecture Series 2020 Alternative Understandings About How Matter Comes to Matter in the Baby Room. Presented by Dr Jayne Osgood, Professor in Education (Early Years & Gender)
Date: Monday 24 February 2020 Time: 5.15pm – pre-lecture refreshments and registration, 6pm – lecture Venue: Theatre Q230, Level 2, Melbourne Graduate School of Education, Kwong Lee Dow Building, 234 Queensberry St, The University of Melbourne
In this lecture, Dr Jayne Osgood attempts a reconfiguration of ‘diversity’ in early childhood contexts by turning attention to everyday matter(s). Considering data that draws into sharp focus multimodal materials and embodiment to argue for an opened-out view of diversity. The aim of the lecture is to examine how we might move beyond narrow formulations of ‘diversity’ in early childhood and instead attend to the possibilities that arise through thinking deeply and sensing ordinary routines and everyday situations. Inspired by Haraway (2016:35) Dr Osgood tells different stories about childhood diversity than those generated through curriculum frameworks, inspection regimes, and pedagogical practices. Haraway stresses: “It matters what thoughts think thoughts. It matters what knowledges know knowledge. It matters what relations relate relations. It matters what worlds world worlds. It matters what stories tell stories.” In order to generate other stories, this lecture pays attention to how stories come about, how they come to hold currency and the affects that they have. Considering the material-semiotic-discursive and affective entanglements that unfold during the ‘celebration’ of festivals, events and celebrations within an early years setting to try to gain some purchase on understandings about other stories. Particular attention is given to the materialised and embodied celebration of Chinese New Year as it plays out in the baby room. Professor Osgood argues that adopting a feminist new materialist approach demands that the world is viewed differently – as material-discursive and that our human-centric place in the world must be reassessed.
Dr Jayne Osgood, Professor in Education (Early Years & Gender), Middlesex University London.
Dr Jayne Osgood is a Professor of Education (Early Years & Gender) based at the Centre for Education Research & Scholarship, Middlesex University. Her present methodologies and research practices are framed by feminist new materialism. Through her work she seeks to maintain a concern with issues of social justice and to critically engage with early childhood policy, curricular frameworks and pedagogical approaches. Her work extends understandings about the workforce, families, ‘the child’ and ‘childhood’ in early years contexts. She has published extensively within the postmodernist paradigm including Special Issues of the journal Contemporary Issues in Early Childhood (2006, 2016, 2017 and 2019) and Narratives from the Nursery: negotiating professional identities in Early Childhood (Routledge, 2012) and most recently Feminist Thought in Childhood Research (Bloomsbury, 2019) and Post-developmental Approaches to Childhood Art (Bloomsbury, 2019). She is on the editorial boards of several journals including Contemporary Issues in Early Childhood, and is currently Editor of Gender & Education Journal and Editor of Reconceptualising Education Research Methodology.
