Walking-with: Toward affective attunement in researching young children

Abstract

This paper explores the potential of walking-with as a critical and affective methodological practice in research with young children, particularly within neighborhoods shaped by gentrification. Grounded in posthumanist inquiry, we draw on assemblage thinking and the concept of the posthuman child to unsettle dominant research practices that typically address research as an opportunity for representational analysis and interpretation. Through vignettes of neighborhood walks with a class of two-year-olds, we examine how children's walking opens up moments where gestures of wonder—the children's, the teachers’, and our own—act to deterritorialize fixed meanings of childhood and research with young children. We conceptualize assemblage thinking as a means to consider research as affectively charged events that entangle researchers, children, and histories of places with research design in terms of what constitutes data and analysis. We consider our research into walking with children as an occasion for us as researchers to attune affectively to research with children. In doing so, we reimagine walking not as a routine pedagogical activity but as an epistemological intervention—one that invites us to know young children and their co-constitutive relations otherwise.