New materialism has the potential to deepen critical engagement between vibrant things, everyday places and intra-actions between humans and non-humans in early childhood education. This article explores Australian pre-service teachers' understandings of children and childhood when encountering the vibrant forces of things and places. The authors…

The authors take up the guest editors' invitation to address the difference that posthumanist and feminist 'new' materialist theories make and why this matters politically and ethically. Alongside events from an early childhood (kindergarten) classroom, the authors engage with current conversations which build on and extend Kimberlé Crenshaw's…

This article feeds on new materialisms, especially the work of Barad, while re-turning and exploring child/LEGO/pedagogue/(re)searcher intra-actions in kindergarten and drawing attention to both human and non-human organisms as agentic forces that produce diffractions, affects and effects when they clash. The article places a special focus on one…

This article critically examines how the policy of funded nursery places for 'disadvantaged' two-year-olds in England opens up economic and political spaces in readiness for increased governance. The government introduced funded nursery places in September 2013, which aimed to promote disadvantaged children's educational outcomes, narrow the…

The aim of this article is to illustrate the potential of 'atmosphere' in order to consider more inventive ways of developing the language of young Norwegian ethnic minority children. The article draws on ethnographic data that emerged from doctoral studies. The analysis of the data draws on aspects of Arendt's philosophical work and Bakhtin's…

This article examines the learning trajectory of the emerging professionalism of Finnish early childhood education and care student teachers, focusing in particular on their professionalism in early childhood education and care world-view education in the context of cultural and world-view superdiversity. Of specific interest here is what students…

Children's well-being has received extensive research attention and has a central role in early childhood policy and curricular guidelines. However, the well-being of early childhood educators has received fragmentary research attention and is unacknowledged in policy and curricular documents. Given the seemingly self-evident links between…

In this article, an evaluation of the English early childhood education context reveals children constructed as data. The complex, chaotic and unpredictable nature of the child is reconstituted in numerical form -- a form which can be measured, compared and manipulated. Children are reconceptualised as data doppelgängers, ghostly apparitions which…

Engaging with posthuman theorising, this article puts to work a number of concepts to produce generative reimaginings of early years leadership. In 1992, Deleuze argued that we are witnessing a transition from societies of confinement to 'societies of control'. In societies of control, power operates through neo-liberal corporate worlds via a…

Swedish preschool teachers must systematically document activities in the preschool in order to evaluate the quality of these activities. Pedagogical documentation is one form of documentation that is proposed. The aim of this article is to discuss and create knowledge of structures and tools based on different communicative aspects of pedagogical…

This article discusses the merits of vitalism theory in practice. It suggests a more creative and ecological approach to vitalism theory in the field of child health and development as a way of unlocking childhood potential and research innovation. By using an example from the author's doctoral research concept (based on Deleuzian ideas) for…

The provision of early childhood development services is expanding in developing countries. The rationale behind this expansion is rooted in developmental psychology, socio-economic and human rights narratives. However, there are some limitations to this rationale, which are in particular related to the implicit universalism it assumes. This…

This article documents the pedagogical and practical struggles of a sample of early educators in a large urban school district in the USA who engaged in a professional development course which offered them alternative conceptions of teaching that critically questioned the norms and practices of their high-stakes neo-liberal early education system.…

The article, by one of the authors of the book "Beyond Quality in Early Childhood Education and Care," has three goals. The first is to recap the "problem with quality," the starting point for the book. The second is to summarise the argument in "Beyond Quality" for problematising the concept of quality, and why,…

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…