“Do you just want to walk around?”

This was the question asked of me when I visited an Early Childhood Education and Care (ECEC) setting. Ten such sites were part of my project ‘Unsettling Early Childhood Education and Care classrooms: Ecological relations, professionals and more-than-human subjectivities’ funded by a Sociological Review Foundation (SRF) Kickstart Grant. In this project I drew on the work of Stephanie Springgay and Sarah E. Truman, who together founded the Walking Lab. They proposed walking-with as a challenge to Eurocentric humanist modes of knowledge production:

With these words in mind I wanted to put into practice some of the affective walking strategies they offered to help me articulate the influence of place, space, and materials on ECEC teachers more-than-human subjectivities. I had been working with, and researching, the posthuman turn in ECEC and was interested in the ways in which teachers are part of relational assemblages with aspects of their non-human and other-than-human environments. Unsettling humanist modes of knowledge production had influenced my doctoral thesis which had explored teachers posthuman experiences in classroom and garden spaces and this was being been extended with the SRF Kickstart grant funding.