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Abstract
This article explores quality in early childhood education by de-elevating the importance of the human subject and experience, and heightening instead a focus on and tensions with the post-human. The argument traces the intricate web of ‘qualities’ woven throughout entanglements of subjects, objects and things that constitute what is referred to as ‘the early years sector’. The strike through the social in this post-human condition exposes critical concerns about the ‘problem’ of quality, and foregrounds the urgency of rupturing the status quo. Dislodged from the perceived comfort and safety of human control and determination, quality in the speculative state of the more-than-social movement can expect no conclusion. Instead, the (re)configuration of the early years sector as a more-than-social movement compels a rethinking of the dominance of human-centric philosophies. By repositioning Kristeva’s semiotic subject-in-process and Havel’s subject positionings within automatisms, this analysis inserts ‘non-human-being’ and ‘multiple beings-times’ into the ‘problem with quality’. In the early childhood sector, these ruptures create generative possibilities of quality entanglements with and beyond the human.
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Author biographies
Sonja Arndt is a Lecturer in Early Childhood Education, an Associate of the Centre for Global Studies in Education and a member of the Early Years Research Centre at the University of Waikato. Her research deals with formations and conceptualisations of foreignness and treatments of Otherness in the human and more-than-human realm, using philosophy as a method and as its conceptual-analytical framework.
Marek Tesar is a Senior Lecturer in Childhood Studies and Early Childhood Education at the University of Auckland. His current research focuses on subject–object relations in childhood places and spaces, and thinking and working with philosophy as a method. Marek’s research and scholarship are underpinned by notions of a fair and democratic society in which creative thinking and disciplines shape professional practice, and where the child’s voice and participation are taken seriously.
