Diffracting relationalities in early years pedagogies of care

Abstract

This diffractive disruption of care in early years settings and pedagogies opens up to a provocation that perhaps we don’t know care at all. Driven by Puig de la Bellacasa’s questioning of the notion of care as not solely a human-only matter and applying that in relation to the early years, it explores what it might mean when we cannot know all that cares or is cared for when we include more-than-human elements and factors, and when what is care remains to a large extent uncertain. Explicating the complexity of care in the early years assemblage, the paper uses a philosophical diffractive reading as a method of turning and re-turning to emphasise the non-linearity and fluidity between the doing, receiving and thinking about care in a human and more-than-human world. It urges a push beyond expected understandings of care and thus also pedagogies, culminating in potentialities that re-view a world in which things and beings are increasingly recognised as crucial, influential and potentially care-ing.