Conference Agenda

This presentation introduces childing as a post-age methodology through a choreographed video drawn from the research project Small Matters: An Educational Community Project about Multispecies Death and Dying (2023–2026), funded by the Research Council of Finland. The project brings together ‘small matters’ - young children, viruses, insects, microbes, plastics, and digital trace - as political agents in spaces where they are usually excluded from conversations about death and dying.

While the example comes from this project, childing methodologies are post-age. Like the ‘post’ in posthumanism, post-age is not about leaving childhood behind, but about troubling developmental and chronological conceptions of time. Childhood here is not a stage of becoming but a mode of being-with, a relational, intensive orientation ‘to’ the world. The referent of this performative practice is not ‘the’ child: there is no individualised, developing subject en route to maturity. Childing decentres the (adult) human and opens material-discursive possibilities for research by reconfiguring how knowledge, time, and agency are produced.

As a childing methodology, performative videography treats video not as a representational tool but as an intra-active participant in the enquiry - an apparatus that co-creates knowledge through movement, rhythm, and affect. Aligned with the conference theme, it engages the intricate interplay between human and more-than-human forces. In our example, video editing techniques such as slow motion, repetition, and reverse cuts enact the temporal complexity of children’s philosophical play about death and dying. Rather than documenting, performative videography thinks-with material, sound, and gesture - inviting the viewer to experience the entanglement of image, body, and thought beyond the boundaries of the human subject.

Music therapy is the clinical and evidence-based use of music to achieve individualized goals. Using music therapy in early childhood addresses social/emotional development, language and literacy, cognition, and perceptual motor and physical development. This convergent parallel study consisted of a series of investigations, some qualitative and some quantitative over different time periods. Results concluded that music therapy improved externalizing behaviors, internalizing behaviors, and adaptive skills. In conclusion, an environment rooted in respect for children’s right to participate in music associated with their culture drives our clinical decision-making as we design and implement session plans to support all learners. From these results, the research team designed an online learning center for professional development training including courses on trauma-informed practices, holistic approaches to development, differentiated instruction, the use of verbal skills in working with early childhood, supporting early childhood with musical elements, and supporting early childhood with musical elements.

This paper offers a methodological reflection on conducting ethnographic research with children in superdiverse schools: sites where global flows, institutional norms, and children’s everyday practices intersect. Drawing on a prestudy using participant observation in the least-adult role, I consider the challenges and possibilities of researching children’s school experiences. I begin from a critical reading of the dominant concepts of “sense of school belonging” and “homophily,” which risk reducing belonging to subjective feeling and reify the supposed centrality of similarity, rather than attending to how children actively navigate the familiar and unfamiliar.

Foregrounding methodological experiences and claims, I discuss how moving between different modes of ethnographic engagement — from participative to more detached observation, from focal-child to event-focused strategies, and from open to structured techniques — shaped what could be seen and known. I also reflect on the tensions of occupying shifting positions between least-adult participation, observation, and interviewing. These methodological choices not only structured the data I could generate but also revealed how my presence was negotiated by children and inflected their own practices and experiences.

Through this reflexive engagement, I argue that qualitative inquiry with children in superdiverse contexts requires attentiveness both to researcher positionality and to the institutional conditions in which belonging and intergroup relations are enacted. Ethnography can illuminate how children rework categories of difference and belonging, but only if theoretical and methodological frameworks remain open to being unsettled by the field itself. By critically interrogating belonging and homophily, and reflecting on the situated dynamics of ethnographic practice, this paper contributes to broader conversations on how qualitative research can respond to interconnectedness and shared vulnerabilities while sustaining dialogical and collaborative engagements with participants.

Early Childhood Education (ECE), and indeed education more broadly, has long been dominated by a neoliberal narrative that commodifies every aspect of life. As several scholars have noted, the current polycrisis reveals how this narrative is not only reductive and narrowing, but also unable to address challenges symptomatic of its own logic (Sousa & Moss, 2024). In troubling times, however, alternatives might find terrain to be formed, but as Sousa and Moss notes, alternative ideas and narratives are not enough. Accordingly, this paper aims to problematize and experiment with educational evaluation practices in ECE — not merely as an effort to re-think or re-conceptualize such practices, but to re-make them, experimenting with alternative modes of evaluation and, in doing so, engaging with the question of valuing differently.

In this paper the notion and practice of evaluation in ECE is explored by drawing on affirmative critique, moving beyond criticism as a distant, retrospective, and negative approach (see Staunæs, 2016). Engaging with affirmative critique—grounded in a critical perspective and informed by feminist new materialism (Barad, 2007; Haraway, 2016)—I investigate and problematize evaluation practices from within the same practice where they are enacted, collaborating with preschool professionals from two different preschool settings. Together, we affirmatively problematize existing evaluation practices in each setting, pointing to what could be otherwise, and creatively experiment with alternative ways of doing evaluation — thus both imagining and enacting possible 'elsewheres', humbly borrowing the term from Haraway (1992, singular in original). In the presentation, I outline the genealogy of thought underpinning the paper and present some tentative results from the ongoing analysis.

This presentation draws on methodological insights that emerged from my master’s thesis in social work, which explored meanings cosntructed by Israeli parents of their gay or lesbian child’s coming-out. As a gay man, an insider to the researched phenomena, I will present the methodological challenges of interviewing parents as someone who is, in many ways, their child.

This unique positioning raised pressing questions of power and voice: Whose voice am I trying to hear, and whose voice do I ultimately amplify? How do I listen authentically when I also long to hear something very specific? At times, I longed for acceptance, while parents offered confusion or silence. This revealed not only the gap between fantasy and reality, but also the methodological complexity of being both insider and outsider in the field.

A recurring experience was what I conceptualized as parents’ movement from shattered reality to new reality. Parents described the collapse of imagined life scripts, while I too faced the shattering of my fantasy–that they would say what I longed to hear from my own parents. In this parallel process, I found myself learning to accept the parents as they were, just as I once hoped my parents would accept myself and those like me, and perhaps as I wished these parents would accept their own children.

This research highlights qualitative inquiry as a dialogical and collaborative practice. The interviews and analysis process became spaces of connection across differences, where flows of meaning moved between researcher and participants, shaped by vulnerability, expectation, and context. In times of tension, such encounters show how reflexivity and positionality generate challenges and possibilities for dialogue and transformation.

By situating the researcher explicitly within the field of collaborative meaning-making, this presentation corresponds with broader methodological conversations on qualitative research as dialogical, and ethically complex.