Papers by Ann Merete Otterstad
Early childhood is still a fairly 'young' research field in Norway, and remains dominated by spec... more Early childhood is still a fairly 'young' research field in Norway, and remains dominated by specific knowledge ideals for research. This thesis finds support and inspiration in (new)empirical studies and a posthuman process-ontology. Such a standpoint aims to decentre knowledge production by challenging established dichotomised constructions. Posthuman and new-material theories open possibilities for thinking and doing qualitative research differently, by searching for research elements, which might produce complex assemblages. This dissertation's aim is to critically explore research methodology with a relational onto-epistemology, entangling knowledge and ontology, discourses and matter in togetherness with the researcher and what is researched. Process ontology challenges dualism as nature/culture, human/non-human, subject/object-and of the human in a central position. This thesis argues and questions a subject as a new social-material becomings (Deleuze & Guattari, 1987). Concepts I think with are connected to philosophy of difference, nomads, lines flight, rhizome, haptic, intensities, becoming, affect and diffraction. These concepts appear as/with different data creations through experimenting with what data might be/become. It is not a simple answer as to how feminist new-materialist studies are directed, as a process ontology does not give any clear answers or procedures. To think with philosophical concepts as a departure from empirical data, is among several options, created from how the data materials are working. This also challenges early childhood research projects, and more particularly the political demands of 'what works' that underpin them. This study is explorative, searching for data as sensorial, surprising and provocative; as something that might generate something new and not yet thought of as postqualitative new/empirical studies. Because posthuman and new-material theories encourage thinking and affirmative critique, performative experimenting replaces the interpreting of studies. The seven articles in the thesis are not presented as short resumes to the reader, but are put together as an assemblage to give the reader other lines and passages to think with. Diffraction and affective concepts open the possibility of reading the articles differently, as interferes-patterns for 'what more' might be and become. The research project is situated within an affirmative critique, which is searching for movements created in-between (in the middle). The movement brings fractions, shifts, rhythms, tempo, cracks, and leakages into the work. To hold onto a processontological standpoint is always a challenging enterprise, located within politics, marginalization and efficiecy, and calls for measurements and results. As such, the contribution of this thesis is to resist and to trouble by looking for 'what more' data can be/become in early childhood research.
Reconceptualizing Educational Research Methodology
This paper emerged from the forces of a pandemic that invited us to wrestle with what ‘virusing-w... more This paper emerged from the forces of a pandemic that invited us to wrestle with what ‘virusing-with’ might potentiate in educational research-creation (Manning, 2016a). We sense the Coronavirus perform its agency on childhood in the Capitalocene in new, troubling, and sometimes hopeful ways. Research-creation has compelled us to dwell upon how virusing-with makes attuning differently to the world possible. We contemplate how virusing-with as concept and method holds the potential to disrupt and reformulate ways to undertake research and ways to conceptualise the child. Inspired by Manning’s (2020) recent work in relation to the child of the wanderline, we explore how multiple wanderlines take shape and interweave through research processes. Through the curation of three threshold events we think-do qualitative research in ways that push ideas and practices about childhood in directions that attend to agentic relationalities between the human, non-human and more-than-human. We argu...
Nordisk Barnehageforskning, Dec 22, 2022
I boka Lyttende pedagogikk trekker Ann Åberg og Hillevi Lenz Taguchi (2006) hørestyrke fram som e... more I boka Lyttende pedagogikk trekker Ann Åberg og Hillevi Lenz Taguchi (2006) hørestyrke fram som en del av en lyttende pedagogikk. I boka refereres det til Filip som omtaler hørestyrke som å høre nøye etter. Vi er inspirert av Filip og hans ide om hørestyrke for å undersøke tettere hva barns språk kan romme. Vi prøver ut «å gjøre hørestyrke» og spør hva det kan vaere. Vi er interessert i hva, hvor og hvordan «å gjøre hørestyrke» kan åpne for å lytte til hele kroppen, rytmer, tramp og lette bevegelser. I prosessen med å utforske potensial av hva «å gjøre hørestyrke» kan handle om, har vårt empiriske materiale vaert en mobilfilm av et barn som utforsker en kjøkkentrapp ute, samt utvalgte stillbilder, samlet inn via en mobiltelefon. Med spesiell interesse for hvordan kropper, vitalitet, bevegelser, lyd og rytme kommer fram gjennom mobilfilmen, bruker vi begrepene til Deleuze og Guattari; et mindre språk, maskineri og territorier (1994) som analyseverktøy. Begrepene brukes som mulige inspirasjoner til å undersøke det «å gjøre hørestyrke». Et av potensialene til «å gjøre hørestyrke» kan vaere «emergent lytting» (Davies, 2014) der også taushet og det mer-enn-menneskelige fenomenet gis verdi. Drøftingen kommer fram innunder overskriftene territorium, fellesskap som vitalitetskraft og det stille tause.
Our chapter invites you/them/us to think the notion of possible worlds in line(s) with Gilles Del... more Our chapter invites you/them/us to think the notion of possible worlds in line(s) with Gilles Deleuze’s writings about dividing worldly signs into different encounters. We are developing artistic encounters, as worldly signs in an attempt to ontologically infiltrate cartographies of child/ren/hood(s) in early childhood locations. And doing that through producing expanded posthuman artistic-assemblages by asking for difference. When Deleuze writes about difference this is a difference different from our own, which for us invites to do artwork as invention and creativity. Everything which happens and everything which appears is correlated with orders of differences: ‘differences of level, temperature, pressure, tension, potential, difference of intensity’. Difference goes beyond logics of meaning-making, reason, objectivity, knowledge and truth. Art allows and calls for other worlds than repeating and reproducing more of the same. Hence, an irreducible difference becomes a thinking-an...
Contemporary Issues in Early Childhood
In this article, the authors experiment with data-ing as a methodology, and wonder how three rese... more In this article, the authors experiment with data-ing as a methodology, and wonder how three researchers—two in Oslo (Norway) and one in Melbourne (Australia)—can come closer to-with the research material by following and buggy-walking a young wayfarer in urban spaces and places. The ideas of not knowing and experimenting, making-with urban landscapes, transportation, materials, sounds, surfaces, bodily movements, minor gestures, and haptic engagement, transform their thinking about data-ing as research-creation while traveling and walking the city with a buggy and a young wayfarer's adventure. Their experimental method uses smartphones and digital technology, and the methodological contours in this article are attuned to and engage in and with multiple surfaces of an urban city landscape. Lines and threads transform into traces and create surfaces, and lines transforming into threads dissolve surfaces. The authors create city maps and investigate what digital tools, social medi...
Discourse: Studies in the Cultural Politics of Education, 2015
The Early Childhood Educator
Contemporary Issues in Early Childhood
In this article, the authors experiment with data-ing as a methodology, and wonder how three rese... more In this article, the authors experiment with data-ing as a methodology, and wonder how three researchers—two in Oslo (Norway) and one in Melbourne (Australia)—can come closer to-with the research material by following and buggy-walking a young wayfarer in urban spaces and places. The ideas of not knowing and experimenting, making-with urban landscapes, transportation, materials, sounds, surfaces, bodily movements, minor gestures, and haptic engagement, transform their thinking about data-ing as research-creation while traveling and walking the city with a buggy and a young wayfarer's adventure. Their experimental method uses smartphones and digital technology, and the methodological contours in this article are attuned to and engage in and with multiple surfaces of an urban city landscape. Lines and threads transform into traces and create surfaces, and lines transforming into threads dissolve surfaces. The authors create city maps and investigate what digital tools, social medi...
Principles of Transversality in Globalization and Education, 2018
In this chapter, we textually enact Guattari’s transversality by charting the affects and intensi... more In this chapter, we textually enact Guattari’s transversality by charting the affects and intensities of a curated tea party performed at an educational research conference through a series of data events. We embrace (k)not-knowing, complexity, chaos, and desiring nonsense as depicted by Lewis Carroll’s Adventures of Alice in Wonderland. We experiment with Alice’s cartographies, temporalities, geographies, and bodies to generate spaces for more-than/other-than-human child/hoods. In doing so, we embrace and embody curious transversals in an attempt to rupture understandings of how early childhood education and care might relate to solidarity in a globalized time.
The SAGE Handbook of Global Childhoods
Reconceptualizing Educational Research Methodology, 2017
Principles of Transversality in Globalization and Education, 2018
In this chapter, we textually enact Guattari’s transversality by charting the affects and intensi... more In this chapter, we textually enact Guattari’s transversality by charting the affects and intensities of a curated tea party performed at an educational research conference through a series of data events. We embrace (k)not-knowing, complexity, chaos, and desiring nonsense as depicted by Lewis Carroll’s Adventures of Alice in Wonderland. We experiment with Alice’s cartographies, temporalities, geographies, and bodies to generate spaces for more-than/other-than-human child/hoods. In doing so, we embrace and embody curious transversals in an attempt to rupture understandings of how early childhood education and care might relate to solidarity in a globalized time.
Policy Futures in Education, 2014
This is a collaborative writing story in which songs and poems invite us into complexities of liv... more This is a collaborative writing story in which songs and poems invite us into complexities of living the ideals and calling for new ways of making the world visible. I need to show you who I am. You need to show me who you are. They are never completed, always open to self and social reflection, and hopefully capable of pushing boundaries of both our personal and collective imaginations and struggles against injustice and xenophobia, wherever they might be, further. We have a focus on becomings rather than belongings. Poems, music, pictures and lyrics, layout and stream-of-thought writing blend with materialist and social science discourses: we need ‘noise’ and ‘pulse’ in our systems to make them function. Noise is creative. Noise is difficult, but not necessarily a threat.
Tidsskrift for Nordisk Barnehageforskning, 2012
Title: A 'resource-oriented approach to linguistic and cultural diversity': Discursive re... more Title: A 'resource-oriented approach to linguistic and cultural diversity': Discursive readings of inclucion in early childhood education.: This article critically questions how contemporary multicultural pedagogical work for inclusion in Norwegian children’s centers is described in government documents. We find in these documents that what is named as a discursive ‘resource-oriented approach to cultural diversity’ is presented as a strategy to understand how to work and analyse multicultural pedagogical issues. As preschool teachers and researchers our interest is to investigate how and why a resource-oriented approach today seems to have become part of preschool teachers’ normative multicultural work for inclusion. By analysing official early childhood documents discursively we question what effects a resource-oriented approach may have on professional multicultural knowledge production.
Qualitative Inquiry, 2013
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Papers by Ann Merete Otterstad