Thinking posthuman with mud: and children of the Anthropocene

Educational Philosophy and Theory ISSN: 0013-1857 (Print) 1469-5812 (Online) Journal homepage: http://www.tandfonline.com/loi/rept20 Thinking posthuman with mud: and children of the Anthropocene Margaret Somerville & Sarah J. Powell To cite this article: Margaret Somerville & Sarah J. Powell (2018): Thinking posthuman with mud: and children of the Anthropocene, Educational Philosophy and Theory, DOI: 10.1080/00131857.2018.1516138 To link to this article: https://doi.org/10.1080/00131857.2018.1516138 Published online: 01 Oct 2018. Submit your article to this journal Article views: 17 View Crossmark data Full Terms & Conditions of access and use can be found at http://www.tandfonline.com/action/journalInformation?journalCode=rept20 EDUCATIONAL PHILOSOPHY AND THEORY https://doi.org/10.1080/00131857.2018.1516138 Thinking posthuman with mud: and children of the Anthropocene Margaret Somervillea and Sarah J. Powellb a Western Sydney University, Australia, Penrith, NSW; bMacquarie University, Australia, Macquarie Park, NSW ABSTRACT ARTICLE HISTORY This article addresses the problem of writing the posthuman in educational research. Confronted by our own failures as educational researchers within posthuman and new materialist approaches, it seeks a more radical opening to Lather and St Pierre’s question: ‘If we give up “human” as separate from non-human, how do we exist? … Are we willing to take on this question that is so hard to think but that might enable different lives?’ We do this to enable different lives for the planet in all of its manifestations, including its children of the Anthropocene. We begin with the insistent presence of mud in our deep hanging out in an early learning site and ask: what is mud, what does it do, where can mud lead us in its oozing at Grey Gums Preschool. From these explorations we include a scripted dialogue that was performed at a conference against a background of rolling images of the proliferation of mud’s play with children. We consider this scripted dialogue, and its performance, as data read in relation to the recent special issue of Educational Philosophy and Theory on ‘Educational epistemologies in a more than human world’ (2017). Received 20 August 2018 Accepted 20 August 2018 KEYWORDS Posthuman; Anthropocene; mud’s play; early learning Introduction This article draws on Naming the world, an international project involving early learning sites in three Australian states, in Oulu, Finland, and a collective that has grown to include other researchers and practitioners in England and Scotland. The project is designed as an open-ended exploration of how the world is asking to be named in the context of the age of the Anthropocene. Its emergent, collective nature is crucial to its aims, with dialogical exchange between continents and hemispheres about the very local, intimate and embodied encounters with young children and their learning. The methodology that has evolved within this collective formation is informed by Donna Haraway’s (2015) account of Vinciane Despret’s ‘curious practice’. Deep hanging out and curious practice as methodology Our methodology of deep hanging out differs from that of Geertz, (1998) in our posthuman orientation, informed by Despret’s ‘curious practice’. Haraway (2015) describes Despret’s curious practice as ‘thinking-with’ other beings, animate and inanimate. Everything, especially the very mundane and every day, is regarded as fascinating and thought provoking. In twelve months of CONTACT Margaret Somerville Margaret.Somerville@westernsydney.edu.au Penrith South, NSW, 2750 Australia. ß 2018 Philosophy of Education Society of Australasia Western Sydney University, P.O Box 1797, 2 M. SOMERVILLE AND S. J. POWELL what we have come to call deep hanging out once a fortnight with beings, both animate and inanimate in two early learning sites, we have been fundamentally unraveled and remade, our experiences documented in short videos, still images, and brief notes on our iPhones. After each visit we return to our shared project office, often accompanied by matter such as sand, leaves, mud, and grass that has clung to our changing researcher bodies and selves. We talk through our experiences and wonderings, at the very limits of language, in our struggle to find words to attach to what this might mean in, and for, the world. We each write different extended ‘fieldnotes’ from these talks and from our different embodied experiences. The imperative of our regular presentations to our collaborating practitioners, however, brings a sharper reality to the fore. For our final presentations to the staff in each centre we code 12 months of notes, videos, still images, and extended dialogic fieldnotes in order to communicate how our presence in their early learning sites might be understood. While the staff have been deeply engaged in our micro attunement to animate and inanimate beings, it is not until we present our seven discrete and independent categories in our third presentation that they say the light has switched on and they can now understand that sustainability learning is not about worm farms and veggie gardens when viewed from the perspective of young children’s worlding. Each of the seven elements was presented with multiple examples and video clips: Becoming animal; Elements: Bodily immersion water, sand, mud; Artefacts and imaginative play; Naming bodies, naming self; Drumming, singing, dancing, rhythm; Movement, gesture, mime, performance; Becoming plant. From coding to writing the posthuman world Even this coding, however, is not as confronting as the challenge of writing and publishing these ideas. The act of coding remains embedded and embodied in the dialogic, ongoing and ever shifting space of conversations, actions and beings of the world as it lives in the everyday happenings of early learning sites. Once translated into writing for journal publication it inevitably moves into ‘the machinery of thought-production’ (Pedersen & Pini, 2017, p. 1051). It is this space of failure to enable the world’s presence in our writing for publication that produced the scripted performance about muddy politics (Somerville & Powell, 2017). In the playful performance of our script our bodies occupy the space of the room in the same way as the day of our encounter with mud. Forty rolling images on the screen show multiple encounters of mud’s play with children. The performance’s location within other presentations of the collective disrupts the sense of the individual human researcher, as do the collective bodies of the audience. It is a kind of in between space of the ever shifting embodied experience of the world’s ongoing engagement in fieldwork and the fixed space of writing, that we share with Annette and Noel Gough’s scripted play in the special edition of Educational Philosophy and Theory (Gough & Gough, 2017). Framing the conversation: Educational epistemologies in a more than human world In returning to the space of writing in this article we sought a journal conversation that might confront the same questions. The special issue of Educational Philosophy and Theory on ‘Educational epistemologies and methods in a more than human world’ invited further dialogue, framed within the problem of the human I (Pedersen & Pini, 2017, p. 1052). We have struggled with these articles, however, in the same way that we have struggled with our own failure of the inevitable return to a focus on the human. We read the editors’ framing of the special issue, for example, in the challenges of methodocentrism, the interview and autoethnography, teenage girls in cyber space, the spatiality of classrooms and new learning spaces, even the end of the human species, as intensely human focused. It is not that we think the human should be erased EDUCATIONAL PHILOSOPHY AND THEORY 3 from this entanglement (Barad, 2007)) or that the human is not already nature (Rautio, 2013), but that we need to presence the world in our writing to a far greater degree. The editors’ quote from Michel Serres in John Weaver and Nathan Snaza’s article presents us with the possibilities of a different reading: Listen to those cries and the baying of the dogs, … No, listen now to the great howling of the wolves. / … /No, listen, there, uglier, raw, as though broken, to the chattering jackals. No, there, now, to the whistling of the wind. (Serres, 2012 p. 112; emphasis added) (Pedersen & Pini, 2017, p. 1052). In this quote, the world seems to be insistently present and demanding our response. In urging us to ‘find the rhythms of the world of nonhuman sentient beings and respectfully re-enter it again with sustained attention’ we find the possibility of a different reading of the collection of papers. This diffractive reading provides a way of engaging in an open conversation to push us beyond the limits of our scripted performance into the possibility of writing for publication through our thinking with mud. Muddy politics script [Sarah] We keep being presented with mud playing with children but when we write about these encounters we always seem to privilege the human. So maybe we should begin with mud in our response to the challenge of Patti Lather and Bettie St Pierre’s question, If we give up ‘human’ as separate from non-human, how do we exist? … Are we willing to take on this question that is so hard to think but that might enable different lives? (Lather & St Pierre, 2013, p. 631). [Margaret] So I google mud and find that it has its own websites, definitions, languages, rituals and traditions. Mud is defined as a mixture of water and any combination of different kinds of soil loam, silt and clay. Ceremonial ochres are made of mud and mud provides a home for worms, frogs, snails, clams, crayfish, larva and various insects. The word mud is found in various forms of ancient languages such as Frisian mudde, Middle Dutch mode, middle low German Mudd, Finnish muta and northern Sami moddi. The term mud map is an old Australian bush saying from when outback travellers drew maps in the dirt or in the mud after it had rained. [Sarah] Mud seems to endlessly engage children in play. Our deep hanging out collaborates with mud and children through ‘curious practice’. It is not that we look for mud’s play with children but rather it seems that in our deep hanging out we are seen as operating below the radar of surveillance. Once children are used to our presence it’s not possible to avoid mud. I remember that particular day at Grey Gums Preschool … I am sitting on a garden seat near the cubby house and you are right down the back, in the opposite corner of the yard, behind the main building, near the mud pit. A teacher tells us that since they made the mud pit for the children to legitimately play with mud, the kids now make mud everywhere. [Margaret] Down at my corner of the yard the children are not playing in the mud pit, a neat structure of timber sides filled with soil, but are making mud in the real adult sized kitchen set up with benches and sinks, bowls and kitchen implements. On the other side of that section of the yard 4 M. SOMERVILLE AND S. J. POWELL two large well-meaning teachers stand beside a perfect tea-set on a tiny child sized table and chairs with small plastic teapot, cups and saucers for well-orchestrated water play. There are no children there. They seem to be playing out of view in the very back corner where another hose allows them to make their own mud. I wander down behind the bushes to the hidden place where mud and children play. [Sarah] Up at the cubby house, I just want to watch the children but two boys invite me in by talking to me as I take a 25-second video recording of them on my iPhone … I’m not sure of my part in this play. Do I say anything? Do anything? Is it my job simply to be there? Respond as needed? I’m in the scene, drawn in, but I’m still on the outer somehow, simultaneously belonging and not belonging. One boy—tap boy—adds water to a red and yellow, plastic wheelbarrow, filled with mud. He stands on a push-down tap, steadying himself with the top of the post. Behind him I can see long-leafed plants following the line of the tall, barred fence. Blue boy runs over to tap boy and the wheelbarrow. He wears blue shorts, blue shirt, blue shoes, he carries a blue shovel and he wears a green hat! He stirs the mud-water with great excitement and purpose. Has the mud somehow called him over? [Margaret] I feel like an intruder but am fascinated by snippets of conversations and stories, gaol, a policeman, cooking food for prisoners. Various mud concoctions are being stirred in fixed sinks, with children running back and forth bringing dirt to add to the mixture. Some of the mud slurry is being dipped into portable containers and carried precariously to the gaol, a small stand of tall straight bushes nearby, where other children are stationed. The complete absorption and intensity of the mud play fascinates. I’m thinking about how sometimes I’m overtaken by pressure to participate, a body memory of a day in the sandpit when very young children rain sand on me, sit on me, climb on my shoulders, fill my hair, clothes and shoes with sand. Today I feel like the wrong sort of body (Rautio, 2014). I make myself invisible sitting behind a lattice screen and take some small videos and still photos. [Sarah] It’s not until we look at our videos later that we start to have a sense of the full implications of mud. Need to mix it … Blue boy says. The shovel clunks on the wheelbarrow as the water continues to trickle. In the background I can hear the sounds of kids playing, singing, shouting and talking. That’s how we’re gonna lift it, says Tap boy. He’s talking to me now. Ooh, I say. That looks great! Blue boy moves over to the dirt in front of the cubby and starts digging. He bends his body and places his feet wide to anchor his stooping stance. His arms and shovel move together in a repetitive slicing action. The shovel crashes into the ground with every swing. The movement is rhythmic and concentrated; focused and graceful. Now Tap boy has jumped off the tap. Water still drips. We’re making it look so awesome, he says to me. So awesome … I reply. Blue boy looks at the camera, and, leaning on his shovel, says to me, We have to break up the path. EDUCATIONAL PHILOSOPHY AND THEORY 5 Still unsure of my part in this, I respond with, Good … yes … pretty hard work. He has already gone back to digging. [Margaret] The image at the start of my video shows a white basin splattered with mud, a square black plastic tub and a silver bowl lined up along wooden bench. An arm with muddy spoon turned down towards muddy white basin, a boy leaning towards basin, a girl faces direction of gaol, a small clump of trees, striated lines of straight trunks, leafy dark green shade. As video swings into action, spoon dips into muddy water, scoops out muddy debris from white basin and empties into black tub as other spoon simultaneously scoops out muddy water from basin tapping, scooping moving from black plastic tub to white basin and back again. Sounds of water splashing/running swishing of mud back and forward. Mud kitchen girl says: Go to gaol, escaped. Put it in gaol NOW. Addie gotta start putting it in gaol, Addie gotta start putting it in gaol. Mud kitchen boy responds, How do I do that? Don’t put that in. [Sarah] I am struck by the intense engagement of these boys. This video captures just a glimpse of a very long period of play. Other videos show the boys negotiating with each other—where to pour the ‘concrete’, where to dig next, they push the heavy wheelbarrow to the designated spot, they swing and dig some more. Their play is sustained, all-consuming, involving their entire body and being. They run and stomp; balance and push; swing and stoop; stir and scrape. Bodies and movements, mud and objects coalesce to form an intricate, choreography of mudchild play … even I am part of the mix. Materials, bodies, objects and elements becoming something new. Has this been mediated by mud, induced by mud, inspired, provoked, suggested by mud? [Margaret] I can still feel in my body the ways that this small corner is being shaped by mud play, the commanding presence of the educators on the other side of the bushes. The way mud co-opts all of the objects, dripping down the sides, spilling, splashing and producing children’s bodies as they bend slightly and move slowly with precariously balanced bowls full of mud. The striations of the trees, like the bars of a gaol and my surreptitious presence behind the lattice screen. The surprise that [Sarah] is similarly engrossed in mud play in the opposite corner of the yard when I am running to follow a small boy with red bucket trying, but failing, to capture his movement on video as he runs to get water from the last tap available at the end of the session. We are all implicated in mud’s curriculum of the day. It is a spatial event, mud’s deterritorialising of the spaces of the early learning site and its curriculum. [Sarah] As with much of our deep hanging out in this research, the role of mud seems to call for Deleuze. Deleuze and Guattari (1987) said that the interesting part is the middle of things, the middle of worlds. So as we think about mud, let’s start in the middle … Forget everything we know … accept Deleuze’s offer to experiment with concepts and ideas … embrace Barad’s (2007) belief that theorising is material practice … and start where we find ourselves—in the middle of mud. Mud þ child—intra-active and inseparable—exists in relation, rather than in opposition, to what else is going on in the preschool, and yet, at times mud seems to subvert 6 M. SOMERVILLE AND S. J. POWELL the intentions of some early learning spaces. It seems obvious that mud is deterritorialising the regulatory practices of the preschool so we read Deleuze and Guatarri through mud. [Margaret] Deleuze and Guattari’s (1987) notion of territorialisation explains the way that life (mud as life) creates spaces or territories and, in doing so, it also creates the opposite, deterritorialising spaces or connections (Colebrook, 2002; Deleuze and Guattari, 1987). In other words, ‘the very connective forces that allow any form of life to become what it is (territorialise) can also allow it to become what it is not (deterritorialise)’ (Colebrook, 2002, p. xxiii). In our data, we see toys and the discursive spaces of preschool deterritorialised by the intra-active and imaginative (mis)use of toys and designated play areas. Early learning centres have ‘inherited a history’, one that gives children access to modes or types of play in part influenced by the toys and materials made available to them and the fabricated spaces such as the ‘toy corner’, ‘cubby house’ or ‘mud kitchen’ (Fleer, 2003). Our experience of deep hanging out opens a world that is constantly in a process of de- and re-territorialisation as children and world intra-act. [Sarah] The boys’ mud-path is a good example of the way mud’s intra-action with children deterritorialises the spaces and objects of the early learning centre. They are digging with a coloured, plastic, child-sized spade; they are mixing their bark-dirt-water ‘cement’ in a red, plastic, undersized wheelbarrow. Spade and wheelbarrow have been taken from the sandpit where they are meant to be used. Here, we see them deterritorialise sand pit toys and cubbyhouse purpose and reterritorialise to form a new territory, instigated by mud. Mud þ child has disturbed the original purpose of these items. The power of intra-action is such that mud, child and other have ceased to be discrete entities. Each is now constructed, affected, and brought into being by the other, generating a new and disruptive energy. [Margaret] The concept of gaol itself can be seen as a metaphor for the ways high fences, commanding teachers, and the order of objects, spaces and curriculum regulate children’s everyday lives in ways that mud circumvents. Trees have joined force/s to create the restraining bars of prison where children co-opted by mud create a new territory. Saucepans, spoons, sink, bowls and mud are complicit in disrupting the striated spaces of the early learning curriculum that is primarily spatial in its modes of organisation. The intra-active mud þ child brings this into being again and again. Both examples demonstrate the deterritorialisation of the spaces of early learning in their two separate locations, joined in the end by the boy running for water with a red bucket. [Sarah] Being immersed in elements of water, sand and mud is just one of seven categories where literacy and sustainability merge to enhance children’s learning in our deep hanging out. When our educator collaborators asked us to develop a summary document for the second pedagogical phase of the study, we created a document that set out the larger thinking behind this playful work: [Margaret]  Our project is set in the context of human induced changes to the earth’s climate and the recognition that humans are now entangled in the fate of the planet earth. EDUCATIONAL PHILOSOPHY AND THEORY       7 We believe that this requires us to think differently about learning as including the rights of the planet earth and all living things and children’s right to be part of the world. Children of the Anthropocene will grow into a different world than we knew and we need to learn with them and from them. In learning from the children through 12 months of ‘deep hanging out’ we have come to understand sustainability learning as sustained engagement in activities that connect children to their bodies, to the matter of the planet, and to its living creatures. The signs of this sustained engagement are excitement, intensity, vitality, where the senses and the child’s body are fully immersed in what they are doing. In the process of this sustained engagement children are ‘naming their worlds’ in many different ways including speaking and mark making as more conventional aspects of literacy, but also bodily movements, gestures, sounds, music/rhythm. We believe that further enhancing this sustained engagement in combined sustainability and literacy learning has the potential to change our worlds. Postscript In our script with its spatial, visual and embodied performance, mud moves us as an element of the world to consider what mud does, how mud does, and the entanglement of mud and children. The life of mud is an ongoing ontological force in its play. We began our scripted performance with the ontological question of the posthuman ‘I’ posed by Patti Lather and Bettie St Pierre in the introduction to the special issue of the International Journal of Qualitative Studies in Education on postqualitative research: If we give up “human” as separate from non-human, how do we exist? Can there be an instituting “I” left to inquire, to know? Dare we give up that “I,” that fiction – the doer before the deed? How are we anyway in entanglement? How might we become in becoming? Isn’t this question affirmative? Experimental? Ethical? Insistent? Are we willing to take on this question that is so hard to think but that might enable different lives? (Lather & St Pierre, 2013, p. 631). In retrospect this beginning point still remains attached to the fundamentally human(ist) orientation of how and what the human will become (in qualitative inquiry). We ended the scripted performance with the world, planet earth and human entanglement in the fate of the planet, referencing the concluding remarks of an early publication about the proposed new geological age of the Anthropocene: However, these debates will unfold, the Anthropocene represents a new phase in the history of both humankind and of the Earth, when natural forces and human forces became intertwined, so that the fate of one determines the fate of the other. Geologically, this is a remarkable episode in the history of this planet (Zalasiewicz, Williams, Steffen & Crutzen, 2010, p. 2231). The beginning and ending of our script, as almost polar opposite positions, represent the paradox of the Anthropocene, the simultaneous recognition of the power of the human species over the planet, and the power of the planet to determine the ultimate fate of the human species. The concept of the new geological age of Anthropocene positions us in the between of this paradox, making it so difficult to think and write. It requires us to explore how to do human differently, to remove the human as the centre of attention in ways that fundamentally change what it means to be human and what it means to think (Colebrook, 2010). A collective conversation In search of pushing the limits of our thinking with mud we open up a conversation with papers from the special issue on ‘Educational epistemologies and methods in a more than human world’ (2017). In order to engage in this collective onto-epistemological conversation, we have 8 M. SOMERVILLE AND S. J. POWELL arbitrarily, and with some difficulty, divided our thoughts into the three following sections of dialogical exchange: The world; The child; and Spaces and territories. In each of these arbitrary categories we engage in a diffractive reading of our own and other’s work, as the categories themselves serve to both order and simultaneously disrupt our thinking with mud. The world (and its entanglements) Presencing the world Michel Serres’ concept of Biogea, in Weaver and Snaza’s (2017) paper, emerges as the first articulation of the world and its entanglements in the special issue of the journal. For the editors, the reference to Serres is a response to the pervasive I, I, I, ‘a call for collective subjectivity and a condition for knowing in being in a more-than-human world’ (Pedersen & Pini, 2017, p. 1051). Through the references to collective subjectivity and the onto-epistemological stance of beingin-knowing the editors open the notion of human listening to involve a search for ‘the rhythms of the world of nonhuman sentient beings and [to] respectfully re-enter it again with sustained attention’ (p. 1051). From this they propose the provocative question: ‘What conditions can compose a subject-assemblage capable of [this sort of] listening?’ (p. 1052). The human act of listening is extended differently in the article itself where Weaver and Snaza, quoting Serres, offer listening as ‘a more sharing, open, connected way of knowing, in which he who knows participates in the things he knows is reborn from them, tries to speak their language, listens to their voices, respects their habitat … is enchanted by their narratives, limits finally, through them and for them, his power and his politics’ (Serres, 2012 cited in Weaver & Snaza, 2017, p. 1056). Wondering, still unconvinced by the reduction of the sensorium to listening, we turn to Michel Serres’ book searching for the world in his concept of Biogea: Now, here today we have other neighbors, constituents of the Biogea: the sea, my lover; our mother, the Earth, become our daughter; this beautiful breeze which inspires the spirit, a spiritual mistress; our light friends, the fresh and flowing waters; and our brothers, the living things … are henceforth no longer objects (Serres, 2012, pp. 31–32). Serres’ method of combining philosophic and poetic inquiry offers a very different notion of the conversation between world and its respondent, as he sings in praise of earth and life. Listening might be understood as a whole body immersion in a world made up not only of other living organisms but of rivers that can be alive or dead, the sea, the earth, the breeze, fresh and flowing waters. Each of these elements is understood in terms of the human relations the world produces, turning upside down the way that world and humans are usually positioned. The sea becomes lover, the earth mother becoming-daughter, the breeze a spiritual mistress, the fresh and flowing waters, light friends. The human is displaced as secondary to relations with the elements of the world, liberated by the method of poetic inquiry, an alternative relation between language and world. Mud, as a living element of the world, can be understood in the same context as the sea, earth mother, the breeze, and fresh and flowing waters. This aspect of the collective conversation extends our notion of mud as an element from our deep hanging out with young children of the Anthropocene. Mud enables language, story, makings and other processes of representation in children’s play. Through mud’s play they experience the world in its oozing, mobile, sticky, sensory liveliness. Mud’s play invites children to respond to ‘the rhythms of the world of nonhuman sentient beings and respectfully re-enter it again with sustained attention’ (Pedersen & Pini, 2017, p. 1052). Mud becomes part of the worlding, one of the ways in which the world becomes actively present for young children in their everyday lives and learning. EDUCATIONAL PHILOSOPHY AND THEORY 9 A language of all bodies on planes and surfaces Bettie St Pierre in her paper ‘Deleuze and Guattari’s language for new empirical inquiry’ (2017), understands the conversation between the world and its respondents differently through her reading of Deleuze. Following Deleuze and Guattari, language as the act of naming, does not originate from individual beings but from a collective subject (St Pierre, 2017, p. 1081). The collective subject can be understood as fully imbricated in the becoming of the world through the plane of consistency composed of haeccities, ‘a mode of individuation that is … neither a subject nor a thing, a word nor a body, you have the individuality of a day, a season, a year a climate, a fog, a swarm, a pack’ (St Pierre, 2017, p. 1087). According to St Pierre, Deleuze and Guattari create a minor language within the major language we are comfortable with; they make language stutter and stammer (St Pierre, 2017, p. 1087). It is a language of bodies, where all bodies (humans, animals, language, revenge, dreams, the weather, green) exist in an ontology of planes and surfaces. Neither language nor the subject is separated or separable, individual or agentive, primary or secondary—they are mixed on the surface with everything else (St Pierre, 2017, p. 1087). St Pierre’s article extends our understanding of naming the world through the notion that it is not the children who are doing the naming in their entanglements with mud but a collective production of multiple representations in which the bodies of children and mud, words, stories, actions, and other forms of expression are produced simultaneously. In this sense, it is the assemblage of children’s bodies, toys, other objects and equipment, cubby house, trees and so on that produce the actions and stories of making a new path, or food for the residents of the nearby gaol. The child (and its worldly entanglements) The figure of the (posthuman) child appears in the special edition of the journal, in previous editions of Educational Philosophy and Theory. There seems to be something about the very young child that has been particularly generative for posthuman and new materialist approaches to educational research (Somerville, 2018). In this section, we examine the diffractive possibilities of the child in these various iterations. The figure of the child In their paper, Intra-generational education Haynes and Murris (2017) identify four categories in the figure of the child: homelessness, agelessness, playfulness and wakefulness. Homelessness is about the indeterminacy of a nomadic posthuman subjectivity, the child as a being who is incomplete, always on the way to becoming something other. This incompleteness is explained through the intra-active entanglement of all human and non-human phenomena. Agelessness disrupts the developmental temporality of the child before the adult, the re-membering of our earlier selves understood as ‘a continuous and life-long folding, layering, shifting and refolding of experiences—an ever more complicated enmeshing of past and present’ (Haynes & Murris, 2017, p. 976). Playfulness is the quality of being in the moment, time as Deleuze’s aeon, released from its confinement to childhood and valued as expressing many forms of creative, diverse, inventive, free flowing, absorbing activities (p. 979). Finally, wakefulness is a form of attunement to the world that these qualities bring, making us aware of ‘the current state of globalised education policy’ (p. 980). The quality of homelessness extends our understanding of the ongoing becoming of mud’s play with children as ‘the intra-active entanglement of all human and non-human phenomena’ (Haynes & Murris, 2017, 974). In their full immersion in the qualities and properties of mud children are in a process of becoming other to themselves through mud, an ongoing becomingwith an element of the world. The quality of playfulness captures the children in this play as being of the moment, the time of aeon, fully immersed with mud and its evocative and sensory 10 M. SOMERVILLE AND S. J. POWELL qualities. The quality of agelessness engages a conversation with our own researcher subjectivities as immersed with mud and children in their play through our own sensory awareness and memories. Wakefulness brings into conversation the sense of liveliness, energy, excitement and immediacy emerging through mud’s play with children. Spaces and territories The two papers that focus on innovative learning environments aim to render conceptions of space and territory beyond limited humanist understandings (Charteris, Smardon, & Nelson, 2017; Mulcahy, & Morrison, 2017). They draw on different onto-epistemological formations. Innovative learning environments (Charteris et al., 2017) refuses a utilitarian conception of objects and physical spaces, to conceptualise classrooms as assemblages of bodies, chairs, tables, lights and space media that interconnect and form transversal bonds (p. 811). In their understanding spaces and territories are the embodiment of the disciplinary/control society conjuncture where objects, humans, ideas and discourses meet and collide. ‘Re/assembling ‘innovative’ learning environments’ (Mulcahy & Morrison, 2017) is concerned with how these spaces function as assemblages of relations and most particularly, affective relations. Assemblages are produced by affects that emerge through embodied encounters between subject and object, person and world. Such assemblages afford attention to how intensities of feeling can gather around and be provoked by objects as evidenced in the empirical material where walls that serve to either open or close learning spaces are shown to activate affect. Researchers are advised to take the risk of attuning to the bodies, encounters, networks, and affects that have always already made the world what it is, in the full knowledge that ‘the physical world and the human world do not exist in fundamentally discrete ontological registers. It is the social, material and affective negotiations that together constitute the ontological multiplicity of learning spaces’ (pp. 756–757). The child with the red bucket at the end of our fieldwork session with mud and children connected our two separate experiences of intimate local encounters to produce an understanding of the ways that mud’s play might be considered to disrupt the smooth spaces of the early learning setting. While these two papers are concerned with particular designs of school classrooms they heighten our understanding of learning spaces in general to consider the ways that subjects are not only produced by those spaces but that the spaces themselves and the objects within them are productive. It becomes abundantly apparent when considering mud’s play with children that ‘the physical world and the human world do not exist in fundamentally discrete ontological registers’ (Mulcahy & Morrison, 2017, p. 757) and that mud and children can be understood as an assemblage emerging through ‘embodied encounters between subject and object, person and world’ (p. 756). Similarly to Charteris et al. (2017), spaces and territories are the embodiment of the disciplinary/control society conjuncture where objects, humans, ideas and discourses meet and collide. As the authors observe in relation to the design of open plan classrooms, the assemblage of mud and children gathers intensities of feeling and produces its own accounts of the spaces and territories of the early learning centre. The gaol, for example, in the children’s play represented by lines of tree trunks that mimic the fence, offers a strident affirmation of our sense of mud’s play with children as deterritorialising the regulatory practices of the spaces and territories of the early learning setting. The muddy politics of mud’s play with children temporarily disrupts the control and order of the spaces and territories of the early learning centre. In-conclusion In exploring the challenge of writing the posthuman in educational research, we have focused on our emergent experiences with mud’s play with children in an early learning setting. We EDUCATIONAL PHILOSOPHY AND THEORY 11 began with a scripted performance that hovered in the space between the mobile swirling chaos of the world (Grosz, 2008), and the processes of representation that render that world fixed or simply absent. In order to disrupt ‘the machinery of thought-production’ and open a collective conversation we offered a diffractive reading of the special issue of Educational Philosophy and Theory. Our diffractive reading yielded a categorisation of ideas into The world, The child and Spaces and Territories. In each of these categories different possibilities are offered for rethinking the relations between world and human. Through this diffractive reading we suggest the need: to presence the world in writing the posthuman, to become immersed in the emergent worlds of young children’s play, and to understand the ways in which seemingly fixed spaces and territories of learning are constantly being territorialised and deterritorialised through this emergent play. Such alternative modes of writing and inquiry are fundamental to re-thinking the meaning of the category of human and of thought as demanded of a post-Anthropocene world. Acknowledgement We acknowledge Naming the World collective whose ideas have shaped our work. Disclosure statement No potential conflict of interest was reported by the authors. Notes on contributors Margaret Somerville is a Professor of Education at Western Sydney University. She is interested in alternative and creative approaches to research and writing, with a focus on our relationship to place and planetary wellbeing. She is leader of an international ARC funded study, Naming the world, involving collaboration with very young children and their extraordinary capacities in world naming in NSW, Queensland and Victoria, Australia, and in Oulu, Finland. Sarah is Lecturer in Creative Arts (Music & Dance) in the Department of Educational Studies at Macquarie University, Sydney. She studied Music Education at the Sydney Conservatorium of Music and has taught music across school and tertiary settings. Sarah has recently collaborated on the research project, Naming the World, and is interested in the way children engage with music and the world, the embodied nature of music, and its integral part in all aspects of our lives. Funding Naming the world: Enhancing literacy and sustainability in early years learning, was funded by the Australian Research Council (ARC) Discovery Scheme. ARC Project ID: DP160101008. HREC Approval Number: H11590. 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