This postqualitative inquiry explores the processes that occurred when a group of early childhood education (ECE) students and I engaged with and in pedagogical narrations over one academic term as we attempted to make visible and disrupt the hegemonic images of children and childhood we held. I worked with Foucault’s notion of power in this study to attend to those moments when competing material-discursive practices created tensions, anxiety, and contradictions in our thinking as the students and I explored new understandings of children and childhood. Barad’s theory of agential realism provided a framework for considering how pedagogical narrations function as an apparatus, that is, as an instrument that intraacts with organisms and matter, within a learning activity to produce disruptions and change in order for generative knowledges to be produced. Positioned within the reconceptualization of early childhood education (RECE), this research is significant in that it extends the reconceptualization focus beyond the early childhood classroom into the education of early childhood educators. Further, the project challenges education from an anthropocentric and logocentric understanding whereby the knower and the known are considered distinct entities in a pedagogical context. / Graduate / kkummen@capilanou.ca

Indiana University-Purdue University Indianapolis (IUPUI) / New materialist scholars argue that schools are important material-discursive entanglements for engendering, racializing, and subjectivizing human subjects. Despite this claim, there is a dearth of research that examines the perceptions that students have of the messages they are sent from schools about how to perform their gendered subjectivities in schools, particularly from a material feminist framework. This study used native photography through a post qualitative methodological framework to explore the messages that students’ receive from their school related to subjectivity and gender. This study took seriously both the voices and perceptions of the participants and the significance of the material environment of the school. Within the course of the research study, students both resisted and conformed to messages the school sent them about their subjectivities. Students conformed to many of the dominant ideas about gender, including privileging maleness. Students resisted the school’s control of their bodies, as well as the school’s attempts at rendering the student population homogenous. The students, though aware that there were differences in the way the school treated them based in gender and other identity markers, struggled to articulate those differences because the school sent a false message of equality. This false message of equality performed an erasure of their experiences of differences and denied them the language they needed to discuss the inequities they experienced. The results of the analysis contribute to conversations about the ways in which school environments contribute to narratives about identity, particularly as it relates to gender. Additionally, the way in which this post qualitative study unfolded has implications for research, including the importance of emergent design. Finally, the tensions that exist in using the new materialisms as a framework when studying schools led me to question the benefits of choosing to decenter humans in this type of research.

Integrity, a significant concept in western ethics, emphasises the idea of the Self being an integrated whole, consistent with itself and moral obligations. Contemporary frameworks such as the Inner Development Goals (IDG, 2019) reflect the importance of integrity in promoting sustainability. While the humanistic understanding of integrity has become widely accepted, its traditional notion presents challenges in managing sustainability both theoretically and practically. This research attempts to discover how it might be possible to conceptualise personal integrity differently. I explore how the perception, comprehension, and experience of integrity is transforming within the realm of sustainability together with sustainability professionals working in Sweden and Denmark and posthumanist thinkers with the help of postqualitative inquiry. The concept of integrity is examined within organisational dynamics, specifically concerning the relations between professionals and their organisations. Drawing inspiration from Donna Haraway's concepts of ‘staying with the trouble’ and ‘tentacular thinking’, as well as the posthuman notion of care, I delve into the complex moral experience of my interlocutors who find themselves closely aligned with the posthuman paradigm. At the same time, organisations mainly approach the organisational roles of sustainability professionals within the conventional business-as-usual narrative.