Articles and book chapters by Camilla Eline Andersen
This paper attempts to reconfigure hegemonic framings of 'the academic conference' and thereby of... more This paper attempts to reconfigure hegemonic framings of 'the academic conference' and thereby offer a means to (re-)encounter the spatial, temporal and affective forces that conferences generate, differently. We are a geographically dispersed but multiply entangled group of academic researchers united by theoretical fault lines within our work that seek to ask what if (Haraway, 2016) and what else (Manning, 2016). This 'what if' and 'what else' thinking has manifested in experimental and subversive doings otherwise at a series of academic conferences. The storying practices presented in this paper were made possible by the vital materialism (Bennett, 2010) of a shared google.doc. It was within this virtual environment that we attempted to weave diffractive accounts of what conferencing otherwise produces. This writing experiment offers a series of speculative provocations and counter-provocations to ask what else does conferencing make possible. This article is an invitation to the reader to plunge in and wallow (Taylor, 2016) within the speculative accounts which ensue and to contemplate the possibilities of breaking free from sedimented ways of neoliberal conferencing. Introduction We are a collective of academics committed to pushing against the normative parameters and expectations of the neo-liberal conference. The twelve of us have, on various occasions and in different permutations, facilitated workshops, given performances, organised events and hosted conferences that have sought to disrupt and offer a means to 'conference otherwise'. We do this because conferences are difficult spaces in which academics are required to undertake considerable emotional, physical and academic labour in attempts to 'fit in' and perform the unspoken rules of the conferencing game which tends to privilege the white, western, middle-class unencumbered male academic. Together our work has been shaped by a range of philosophers and theorists including Haraway, Barad, Bennett and Deleuze & Guattari amongst others. We recognise that drawing upon concepts and practices that are broadly defined as post-humanist or new materialist presents tensions and incongruences; however, our aim is to work with the potential that theoretical pluralism can bring to our shared project of 'conferencing otherwise'. Collectively, we are committed to a new materialism that is feminist (Osgood, 2019; Taylor, 2019), and our project is a political one that seeks to expose, problematise and challenge injustices, inequalities and prejudices that are embedded within and routinely play out in conferencing.
Transversality in Globalisation and Education
In this chapter we textually enact Guattari's transversality by charting the affects and intensit... 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.
Contemporary Issues in Early Childhood, 2019
In this paper we grapple with the ways in which real-world issues directly impact children’s live... more In this paper we grapple with the ways in which real-world issues directly impact children’s lives and ask what else gets produced through encounters with children’s global news media, specifically within the contexts of the United Kingdom and Norway. Our aim is to experiment with storytelling and worldling practices as a means to open up generative possibilities to encounter and reconfigure difficult knowledges. We take two contemporary events, the 2017 Grenfell Tower fire tragedy in London and the 2018 Marjory Stoneman Douglas High School shooting massacre in Florida, as a means to attend to ways in which affects are materialised across multiple times and spaces. News reports of these harrowing events, alongside what they produced in terms of child activism, racism and toxic masculinity, provided a catalyst for a feminist new materialist experiment in generating other knowledges through material-affective-embodied encounters. Newspapers, glue, sticky tape, string, torches, bags and a cartridge for a firearm were used in important work within a speculative workshop, where a small number of early childhood researchers came together to be open to multiple and experimental ways of (k)not-knowing to formulate collectively shared problems. Following Manning (2016), we recognise that to avoid getting stuck in familiar ways of thinking and doing we need to undertake research differently. We wondered how the re-materialisation of these events (through objects, artefacts, sounds and images) might shift our thinking about childhood in other directions. We dwell upon the affective work that these high-profile news events perform and how they might become rearticulated through affective encounters with materiality. Attending to how these events worked on us involves staying with the trouble (Haraway, 2016) as it becomes reignited, mutated and amplified across time and in different contexts. Our goal is to generate other possibilities that seek to reconfigure the ‘image of the child’. By resisting comforts of recognition, reflection and identification, we reach beyond what we think we know about how children are in the world and instead argue for their entanglement with difficult knowledges through our and their world-making practices.
Reconceptualizing Educational Research Methodologies, 2018
The focus of this article is affirmative critique, its ontological grounding, and a record of an ... more The focus of this article is affirmative critique, its ontological grounding, and a record of an attempt to perform an affirmative critical analysis with documented strange race-things. It is inspired by the debate on limitations of Enlightened critical practice, and writings on a proposed alternative; affirmative critique (Braidotti, 2011, 2013). Grounded in an ontology of difference, affirmative critique suggests to affirm and create other ways of speaking and living to 'push power a little' (Bunz, Kaiser, & Thiele, 2017a, p. 16). Further, it is argued that this might be a more transformative mode than the traditional Enlightened critique informing decades of multitudes of politics, perspectives and practices offered to work against how race is stubbornly becoming in unjust ways. The affirmative critical analysis performed is an experimentation with a print of a photographic image; an art-ing with data.
International Review of Qualitative Research, 2017
This article considers what to do with a political questioning of how to perform qualitative rese... more This article considers what to do with a political questioning of how to perform qualitative research when engaging with stuck bodily happenings. It does so inspired by philosophical-theoretical-methodological flows in the field of qualitative research where working against colonial ways of knowing and justice-oriented knowledge creation is of importance. The article's storying evolves from a reality-and philosophy-driven curiosity of race in relation to professionalism in early childhood education in a Nordic landscape. As a way of thinking through how to perform critical qualitative inquiry when positioned in a monist materialist thinking and within a philos
I denne teksten engasjerer jeg meg i metodologiske utfordringer og virkelige muligheter som kan o... more I denne teksten engasjerer jeg meg i metodologiske utfordringer og virkelige muligheter som kan oppstå om vi tar filosofene Deleuze og Guattari på alvor når de foreslår eksperimentering som en form for empirisme og politikk. "Installer deg på et stratum og eksperimenter med mulighetene det tilbyr", skriver de i et av sine samarbeidsprosjekter. Et utsagn som, om vi er villig til å la oss senke ned i virkelighetsforståelsen den er uttrykt innenfor, kan "dytte på" konvensjonell tenkning i relasjon til kvalitativ forskning. Eksperimentasjon, i Deleuzeoguattarisk tenkning, innebærer enkelt sagt å prøve ut nye handlinger, metoder, teknikker og kombinasjoner, uten et spesifikt mål. Inspirert av dette forstår jeg eksperimentasjon i relasjon til metodologi som en åpen kunnskapsproduserende prosess,som utforsker hva som er nytt, og hva som oppstår, framfor det som allerede er erfart og kjent. Og i det tenker jeg det ligger en åpenhet for hva vi ikke kan vite før vi faktisk støter sammen, på eksperimentelle måter, med empirien vi vil tenke med.
This article's point of departure is practicing an(other) methodology than those that are dominan... more This article's point of departure is practicing an(other) methodology than those that are dominant within educational research in Norway.
Books and reports by Camilla Eline Andersen
This PhD-thesis deals with professionalism in early childhood education in relation to «race» and... more This PhD-thesis deals with professionalism in early childhood education in relation to «race» and whiteness in primarily a Norwegian landscape. The overall aim of the study is to investigate how sociomaterial «race»-events can be understood as part of processes where preschool teachers’ subjectivity and professionalism are constituted. The thesis is a theoretical experimentation with strong ties to problems in a real social landscape. One of the main problems that the study evolves around, and which can be read as a finding to work from and upon, is that «race» is silenced in the dominant discourse/language aiming at contributing to how preschool teachers can create socially just and indiscriminating pedagogical practices in a current Norwegian «multicultural society». And also how this is in stark contrast with how «race» in complex ways is real for many people in the Nordic region today. Hence, there seem to be a lack of tools for preschool teachers to think through how «race» might be part of their pedagogical practice in preschools, and how «race» is an important issue to address when working with how to perform pedagogy ethically and politically. The study is highly inspired by scholars who suggest exploring how «white» subjectivities are racialized as ways of working against racial discrimination in society. However, another main problem seems to be that most «whites», including «white» preschool teachers, have never learned to think of themselves as racialized. As a way of narrowing how to investigate these two problems, the study more specifically and in a philosophical-theoretical manner, explores «white» preschool teachers’ relation to «race». Through this it addresses how the constitution of professionalism is intertwined with the constitution of racial subjectivity.
The philosophical-theoretical-methodological conceptual toolbox used in the study is mainly constructed from concepts in the philosophical work of Gilles Deleuze and Félix Guattari (1977, 1987). E.g. machinic assemblage, stratification, Body without Organs, nomadic subject, affect, individuation, micropolitics, becoming, actual/virtual and event. The methodological approach was from the beginning highly inspired by decolonizing-, feminist poststructural- and critical methodologies, which insist on the importance of personal experience in research that aims for a political outcome. However, immersed with Deleuze and Guattaris philosophy of desire, what started out as a poststructural autoethnography transformed into a cartography of «my own» racial becomings in/with an early childhood landscape. The study shows how subjectivity, when understood as produced through sociomaterial «race»-events, offers another understanding of doing professionalism. Further, it offers an alternative understanding of how to create more socially just and indiscriminating pedagogical practices in early childhood education.
Papers by Camilla Eline Andersen
Reconceptualizing educational research methodology, Nov 17, 2022
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 argue that practices of virusing-with in portal time provides space for coming-into-relations of differences (Manning, 2016a, p.11) as an ecology of practice that shapes how educational research might be conceptualised and practiced.
Contemporary Issues in Early Childhood, Dec 1, 2019
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Articles and book chapters by Camilla Eline Andersen
Books and reports by Camilla Eline Andersen
The philosophical-theoretical-methodological conceptual toolbox used in the study is mainly constructed from concepts in the philosophical work of Gilles Deleuze and Félix Guattari (1977, 1987). E.g. machinic assemblage, stratification, Body without Organs, nomadic subject, affect, individuation, micropolitics, becoming, actual/virtual and event. The methodological approach was from the beginning highly inspired by decolonizing-, feminist poststructural- and critical methodologies, which insist on the importance of personal experience in research that aims for a political outcome. However, immersed with Deleuze and Guattaris philosophy of desire, what started out as a poststructural autoethnography transformed into a cartography of «my own» racial becomings in/with an early childhood landscape. The study shows how subjectivity, when understood as produced through sociomaterial «race»-events, offers another understanding of doing professionalism. Further, it offers an alternative understanding of how to create more socially just and indiscriminating pedagogical practices in early childhood education.
Papers by Camilla Eline Andersen
The philosophical-theoretical-methodological conceptual toolbox used in the study is mainly constructed from concepts in the philosophical work of Gilles Deleuze and Félix Guattari (1977, 1987). E.g. machinic assemblage, stratification, Body without Organs, nomadic subject, affect, individuation, micropolitics, becoming, actual/virtual and event. The methodological approach was from the beginning highly inspired by decolonizing-, feminist poststructural- and critical methodologies, which insist on the importance of personal experience in research that aims for a political outcome. However, immersed with Deleuze and Guattaris philosophy of desire, what started out as a poststructural autoethnography transformed into a cartography of «my own» racial becomings in/with an early childhood landscape. The study shows how subjectivity, when understood as produced through sociomaterial «race»-events, offers another understanding of doing professionalism. Further, it offers an alternative understanding of how to create more socially just and indiscriminating pedagogical practices in early childhood education.