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.

Care is a human trouble, but this does not make of care a human-only matter (Puig de la Bellacasa, 2017: 2).

Introduction: Care

In recent times the idea of care is repeatedly pushed to the forefront of our minds, headlines, and emergency departments. We’re asked to care for ourselves, for our neighbours, for those who are more vulnerable, for minorities, and for those who are deeply affected in this striking time of Covid-19 lockdowns, outbreaks and its aftermath. We assume responsibilities to care, and we assume that we know what it means to care. We assume that we know what all of the implications of care are for those involved in early years settings and pedagogies and accept the need to care as noted in the policies that govern them. Furthermore, we attribute particular features to what care might look or feel like, and we imagine who or what it is that cares. This paper rethinks the notion of care as not solely a human-only matter, as Puig de la Bellacasa (2017) states in the opening quote, and what this might already be or add to early years pedagogies. 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 unknown and uncertain. This exploration takes as a conceptual springboard Tronto and Fischer’s seminal thinking about care (Tronto, 1993) which Puig de la Bellacasa (2017) describes as “everything that we do to maintain, continue and repair “our world” so that we can live in it as well as possible” (p. 3, emphasis in the original). ‘We’ in this exploration, can be read as all of us who have any relationship at all with early years pedagogical practices and the settings in which they occur, and who at various points are implicated by them.

In what follows, the rethinking of care as not only a human matter is loosely framed in the ideas of ‘everything that we do’, what we see as ‘our world’ and what ‘as well as possible’ might mean in relation to care in early years pedagogical contexts. In other words, it explicates the complexity of what it means to ‘do’ care, what we consider to be the ‘world’ of early years settings, and what kinds of maintenance, continuation or repair we expect or imagine as necessary, to keep that world and what is in it in as good a condition as possible. It recognises that recent research on care in the early years already engages in the complexities of critical viewpoints on care through, for example, critical feminist perspectives (for example in a recent collection edited by Langford, 2019), as an already strong foundation that supports the shift beyond dominant, often Euro-male-centric perspectives. The exploration uses philosophy as a method of inquiry to diffractively read and emphasise the non-linearity and fluidity between the doing, receiving and thinking about care. Throughout, the exploration unsettles expected understandings, of what is seen as care and how it might be pedagogical, when viewed as a complex and fraught concept of not only a human but also a more-than-human nature. It culminates in positing potentialities of what some of these “tensions and contradictions” (Puig de la Bellacasa, 2017: 5) might lead to, as they sometimes work in tangent, complementing each other, and sometimes don’t. First, to reconceptualise care as not only a human trouble calls for a reconceptualisation also of the methodological approach used to do so.

Reconceptualising methodology

Methodologically the rethinking of care calls for an ontological and epistemological reconceptualisation. That is, it calls us into a process of orientation and thought, of what we believe and how we think about what we believe. In keeping with its aim to reconceptualise care as a more-than-human, relationally complex notion, the methodological thinking used is similarly positioned towards the human and more-than-human confluence in our world. It recognises that as humans we inhabit our “ineluctably material world” (Coole and Frost, 2010: 1) alongside matters, energies, things and non or more-than-human influences. Using a philosophical method of inquiry and critical thinking (Arndt, 2017; Cam, 2006), its aim is to provoke philosophical questioning that creates “movement and diversity” as they “blend and interact continuously, seamlessly, and axiologically” (Tesar, 2020: 2). In doing so the thinking process already blends human and more-than-human elements, where what we think about the ethics and values of care may be inexplicable in words and perhaps not even something that we can – or even should – conceive of, on a human level.

Poststructuralist philosophers offer a useful bridge to rethinking and dismantling discourses through a human-centric focus on linguistic representations (Kristeva, 1977/1986). They reflect the dominant conventions in which “[l]anguage matters. Discourse matters. Culture matters” (Barad, 2003: 801) but where the matter of matter itself is absent. To re-think care beyond a level of the human leads into the post-anthropocentric argument for overcoming human (and Euro-centric) exceptionalisms, which St. Pierre (2020) says

[t]o a great extent, . . . simply repeats a familiar, recognizable, and dogmatic history of ideas and . . . concepts which weigh us down and obscure the new that is unrecognizable but everywhere, awaiting creation (p. 1).

The methodological push beyond familiar and historical ideas on care here is inspired by Barad’s (2014) process of diffraction. It turns and re-turns things and beings which are already present but often disregarded, in the ‘ineluctably material world’ that Coole and Frost (2010) remind us of. Barad (2014) explains that diffraction is a process, that operates

by re-turning – not by returning as in reflecting on or going back to a past that was, but re-turning as in turning it over and over again – iteratively intra-acting, re-diffracting, diffracting anew, in the making of new temporalities (spacetimematterings), new diffraction patterns (p. 168).

To diffract the concept of care requires a pulling apart, then, of

re-turning as a multiplicity of processes, such as the kinds earthworms revel in while helping to make compost or otherwise being busy at work and at play: turning the soil over and over – ingesting and excreting it, tunnelling through it, burrowing, all means of aerating the soil, allowing oxygen in, opening it up and breathing new life into it (p. 168).

This diffractive exploration that follows is merely a snippet of what is likely to be an ongoing re-turning to and of the concept of care. It turns the idea of care over and over, burrowing into it, loosely framed around the three key points of ‘everything that we do’, what we see as ‘our world’ and what is ‘as well as possible’ with respect to early years pedagogies. It draws on the more-than-human ways of thinking that have arisen in Braidotti’s (2013) work on the posthuman, and the new or vital materialisms of Bennett’s (2010), Haraway’s (2016) and Barad’s (2014) disruptions of humanist cultural theory and binaries. The framing in these three key points is necessarily loose, since these aspects cannot be delineated, separated or removed, one from the other, nor traced in any linear or logical way to any particular end point, strategies or practices. Conceptualising care by burrowing into how we see care itself, and also how we see what or who is involved in care re-views care as spacetimematterings. It has to do with particular views, the questions we ask, the thoughts we think, and the ways in which we continue to be and become as-in-relation to care. By digging and moving beyond the human this exploration evokes ethical and political confluences where space, time and matter become elevated and no longer separable, as iterative and re-iterative spacetimematterings. It begins with diffracting ideas on ‘everything that we do’ in-as care.

Everything that we do

What counts as care, care giving and receiving has been the concern, in various ways, in recent scholarship in the early years. Critical feminist research focuses on care as an integral aspect of relationships that shape practices and philosophies, and the interrelationships and dependencies between teachers, young children and families in their settings. Care here, for example, is variously seen as maternalism, as reflecting a kind of teacherly love (Aslanian, 2015; Barnes, 2019; Langford and White, 2019; Moss, 2010), and as fundamental to shaping influential pedagogical movements (Campbell and Speldewinde, 2019; Knight, 2011; Moss, 2016; Wasmuth, 2020). The notion of care is frequently conceptualised as an ethics of care (Noddings, 2003) with moral implications, and as a form of labour, where it raises questions of equity, power and social responsibility (Rosen, 2019).

Theorised in these diverse ways, ‘everything that we do’ as care reflects particular ways of acting and of feeling. This might be reflected in caring behaviours, for instance by teachers, by children, or others involved in the early years settings (the cook perhaps, visiting therapists, or community elders, for example). At a more removed level a particular way of enacting care might also be seen as what researchers, policy makers and regulatory bodies do, as they initiate projects, reforms or guidelines. At the same time, it might be seen as the concern for, or worry about a particular issue, that drives acts of care. Through a linguistic definition of what it means to care “feeling or showing concern for or kindness to others” (Merriam-Webster Dictionary, n.d.), for example, expresses an underlying intentional, affective and relational drive for and consideration of human care. These ontological and epistemological underpinnings could be seen as present when viewing care as labour, as affect, and as ethical and political obligations and implications (Puig de la Bellacasa, 2017). They frame human care as acts and attitudes that play out in defined relational interactions in and with others in our world, and often reflect or respond to cultural domination (Tesar and Arndt, 2017), or the colonising effect of ontology itself (Todd, 2016).

Using a process of diffraction, continually breathing new life into thinking, acting, orienting, helps to elevate care beyond these strictures. That is, it brings to the fore the crucial contributions of the things and beings that are not human within the environment, highlighting equity considerations, and that ethical, moral, justice considerations are not just social, but also vital, material, more-than-human considerations (Bennet, 2010). Re-turning around the idea of care, compels a further consideration then of political and pedagogical aspirations and expectations, by unsettling care from any point of certainty. It reminds us that care is always political (Dahlberg and Moss, 2007), as it pushes us to unknow care not only beyond our own cultural knowledges (Tesar and Arndt, 2017, 2019; Todd, 2016) but beyond ‘feelings’, ‘concern’ or ‘kindness’. What, for example, might be care when it is enacted by non or other than human things and beings? In what ways would feelings, concern or kindness play out? Further, when might such care, if it is care, be seen as pedagogical, or political, affecting policy interpretations, representations, time or space allocations?

From a regulatory perspective, dominant understandings of care are laden with expectations of ‘what we do’. Care is expected to be pedagogical, as well as politically and economically beneficial. Policies, guidelines and curricula shape attitudes and practices of caring including who and what is cared for and how, through human-centric norms and control mechanisms. As an example, Belonging, Being and Becoming, The Australian Early Years Learning Framework (Department of Education and Training [DET], 2009) refers to care as aiming both to foster children’s “care, empathy and respect” (p. 24), and to develop “a sense of belonging” by receiving care, “when they feel accepted, develop attachments and trust those that care for them” (p. 23). While some areas could be read as relating to caring for things and beings other than those that are human, such as points that mention children learning to care for their environment and that they become “connected with and contribute to their world” (p. 32), including “natural and constructed environments” (p. 32), the document remains primarily focused on the human experience. The regulatory shaping, guiding and orientations towards an ethics and politics of care, towards children’s “strong sense of wellbeing” (DET, 2009: 35), offer a human stepping stone from and in which to consider what care might be, look, or feel like when seen from beyond a human conceptualisation and politics.

Tensions and contradictions arise already on the human level, when we examine in more depth what we understand in representations of care. When we ask who or what cares, giving consideration not only to the predominantly human, but to other things, beings, entities or energies it becomes difficult to represent care, in a way that we humans can know it. By shifting to the interconnectedness of temporalities in spacetimematterings, does who or what cares affect what caring is? What does care look like when it is ‘done’ by humans (teachers, let us say), as opposed to when it is ‘done’ by other beings (animals, perhaps), or things (such as plants, for example)? Braidotti (2018) amongst others reminds us of the concern with using as the measure of all things what it means to ‘Man’, that is, to human beings (and to male dominated theories and policy).

Human exceptionalism is demonstrated in considering human care as more important than care exhibited by other things or forces within the environment. While care might be imagined when it can be related to human care for other beings and things (feeding, petting, walking animals or watering, potting and positioning plants), it falls outside of dominant anthropocentric conceptions to consider care when it is done by non-humans. Is it care when water seeps into building structures over time, causing them to rot, caring perhaps for the growth of the rot, but not for the wood, or the well-being of the humans dwelling in moisture-ridden buildings? Or is it care when living things, termites perhaps, make their way into wooden structures, caring for their own survival and colonies and not for the children in the now precarious building structures? If we re-turn meanings of care into such non- or other-than-human considerations, what spaces do or can be made for their doing, in early years policy and pedagogies? Engaging in a diffractive overturning means re-considering life, affect, and the materialities of other things within the setting as agentic, vibrant and having ethical and political consequences (Bennett, 2010). It posits all matter and beings as not only interrelated, but as intra-related within the early years setting.

Re-considering care relationships as intra-relationships, helps to frame what and who cares in a more speculative way. Ceder (2019) explains the usefulness of intra-relationality as “a critique of individualistic approaches that focuses on the entities of the relations” (p. 8). Instead of individualising each entity (person, thing or being), then, it “proposes a view where the relationality is the point of the departure . . .” where a “subject is always seen as a component of relationality and never as an entity with inherent qualities”. In other words, he suggests, “[i]ntra-relationality should be seen in contrast to cognitive, constructivist, and neo-liberal individualistic ideas based on separation or difference” (p. 8). What care is and how it is ‘done’ as an intra-relational confluence of all where there is not a delineation of entities necessarily blurs boundaries and certainties. It raises questions such as what becomes of an ethic of care when it is no longer founded on a humanly normative “set of . . . moral obligations” (Puig de la Bellacasa, 2017: 6), but when it is rather about a “thick, impure, involvement in a world where the question of how to care needs to be posed” (p. 6)? Posing that question of care as an intra-relational speculation disturbs what and who might be seen as caring, cared for, and therefore also what we see as ‘everything that we do’ as care. It pushes us to turn and re-turn to the ‘world’ of early years settings, as an assemblage.

Our world: Early years assemblages

Viewed as intra-relational early years settings become subsumed as a part of a much larger assemblage. Shifting the ‘world’ of early years settings beyond the human necessitates a turning and re-turning of the concept of space and place beyond what can be legislated and planned for, as the size of the space required for each child, for example, or who may enter this space. Intra-relational temporalities and spacetimematterings render as far more complex the idea of what the space or the world of the setting might be, when considering compliance issues, questions of belonging, visibility or surveillance, aesthetics and their influence on care. Reading diffractively what the early years world is further exacerbates the uncertainty already created by rethinking the ways that care could be ‘done’. It creates an openness to things and energies of which we may previously not have thought, compounding the vital agential materiality of all elements within the assemblage as intra-acting with and affecting each other, in ways that humans may or may not be conscious of. It shifts human encounters with the ‘world’, de-anthropomorphising the call to “ecologies, flora, fauna, climate, elements, things, and interconnections” and in addition, to “who and what has the capacity to know” (Ulmer, 2017: 1). Imagined in this way the world in which early years care occurs situates the rethinking of care within more-than-human assemblages imbued with their own complex relationships of power (Buchanan, 2015).

Seeing early years settings as an assemblage iteratively draws the notion of intra-relationality back to the fore. Interpretations of how the term ‘assemblage’ is translated from Deleuze and Guattari’s original French agencement vary. Buchanan (2015) states that “in practice, the assemblage is the productive intersection of a form of content (actions, bodies and things) and a form of expression (affects, words and ideas)” (p. 390), which could be understood as the things and beings in the early years environment and how pedagogies, orientations and care practices affect them. Bennett (2010) describes the concept of assemblages as:

ad hoc groupings of diverse elements, of vibrant materials of all sorts. Assemblages are living, throbbing confederations that are able to function despite the persistent presence of energies that confound them from within (pp. 23–24).

These interpretations push us to accept influences beyond what we can know, as ongoingly influencing early years settings and the unpredictability of care. Viewed as an assemblage, early years environments are and encompass multiple aspects, elements, things and forces variously exerting their energies, placings, effects and affects on each other. Some of these are the things that we can see and over which we may think that the humans in the setting have control, placing dividing walls to separate areas of play, strategic arrangements of bookshelves, hanging of mobiles, eradication of intrusive insects, are just some examples. When we consider that all such things are constantly reciprocally intra-related in ‘living, throbbing confederations’, human control, knowing or understanding of what they are and how they affect the assemblage as a whole becomes not only called into question, but potentially wholly insignificant. While we may imagine that all of the things and beings that are purposefully placed within the environment are simultaneously dependent on and cause the throbbing of the assemblage, for example by affecting the flow of foot traffic through the early years setting, which resources are accessible to children, how the light flows into particular areas, and so on, the affective vibrancy to which Bennett (2010) and others draw our attention that operates on the intra-relational level subverts expectations of human certainty and control. When we diffract, overturn, re-think and re-turn what might be occurring within the intra-relationalities in early years settings, we may become aware of the idea that particular materialities intra-act with each other, shaping, forming or re-forming other matters and energies, but we may also not. . .

Perhaps it is difficult to gain insights into how plants or termites or other living things care and thus shape the early years – or any other – world. Maybe it is even more difficult to imagine gaining insights into care in relation to perceived non-living items in the environment, such as rubbish, pots, soil, and so on. Re-turning notions of matters, energies and forces in the early years assemblage causes further upheaval in relation to the ethical and political intra-relationalities, where instead of thinking that “qualities such as attentiveness, responsiveness and responsibility ‘can inform our practices as citizens’”. (Dahlberg and Moss, 2005: 123) more-than-human elements call into question who or what is or are citizens in who or what this early years world assemblage is at any given time. Reorienting ourselves towards a more-than-human sense of care thus dislodges and creates new openings for what ‘attentiveness’, ‘responsiveness’ and ‘responsibility’ might feel and look like, in the sites within which care is rethought. Care, then, might be emphasised as indelibly entrenched in ‘our early years world’ as intra-relating the humans, other beings, living, non-living or formerly living things, matters, forces, and energies, living and throbbing, between and amongst all of these – spacetimematterings conflating care in a potentially care-full world. Emphasising ourselves in such a way as merely, not exceptionally human, thus also changes what it means, to care ‘as well as possible’.

As well as possible

Shifting thinking on what care is and the world in which it might occur, reveals early years assemblages as fraught and unknowable. Similarly, it displaces any certainty about knowing what it could mean to care well, or, indeed, as well as possible. As diverse intra-relationalities and spacetimematterings within the early years settings affect what we (can) think and do about care, this diffraction now turns to the final aspect, to question what ‘as well as possible’ might mean in relation to early years pedagogies. The question of ‘good’ care is further complicated with the question of whether and when care might or might not be pedagogical, and raises additionally whether, if care is seen as pedagogical, this affects the value attached to the care, or to its affective qualities. In light of the above a diffractive reading of the dictionary definition of care referred to earlier, of care as: ‘feeling or showing concern for or kindness to others’ complicates early years settings as living and throbbing things and beings grouped in particular ways. While we may see a purposefully set out environment, where humans, feeling concern for the children in the setting, might group furniture in a particular way that provides quiet spaces in which to rest, placing it in certain configurations, for example, with a blanket here, and a pillow there. In this configuration, the children, furniture and other resources – books, perhaps, and big pillows on which children lounge while reading – live and throb alongside each other, with the dust that accumulates there, maybe a dropped crumb from lunch off a child’s T-shirt, engaging with the vital material, aesthetics, senses, and agency of the stories, place, time and beings.

Elevating the more-than-human entanglements of things and beings, illustrates the complexities of the affective qualities living and throbbing, as they may shape, for example, crumb-pillow intra-relationships. Over time, perhaps, the crumb softens into the pillow, creating a stain, eventually dissolving into a crusty lump on the pillow. We might imagine children’s or teacher’s changing feelings towards a now stained, crusty pillow, no longer smooth to the touch, relaxing, and soothing, but interrupted instead with remnants of lunch-crumb dissolutions into disgust or abhorrence as a mould begins to grow on it. Human feelings and concerns may shift, as might the ethics and politics of who eats what, where, who and what cleans, and of whether any or all of this amounts to pedagogies of care ‘as well as possible’. Any certainty of our ontological and epistemological imaginings of who or what feels, has concern, or kindness becomes challenged, when we consider the affective occurrences intra-relating in and through crumb and pillow, crumb and time, crumb-stain-mould, pillow and smoothness, relaxation, cleaning and story time. Are all of these care, or none?

Any remaining certainty on what care might be is further challenged when we consider feelings, concern or kindness in relation to care as maintaining a world as well as possible. To take another example from an early years environment we could consider a messy pile blown into the corner of the outside deck. The pile consists of leaves, some sawdust from the carpentry table nearby, a few scraps of paper, a discarded hair tie, small plastic toys, and perhaps other items, all ravelled up with each other. The configuration of this entanglement continues to change as the wind turns slightly, some of the leaves move, drawing the hair tie with them, more leaves join the pile, and another toy is blown over from across the wooden deck area, reshaping the pile over and over. Is it conceivable, that care perhaps lives and throbs with and within this pile part of the early years assemblage? If it is, what does ‘as well as possible’ mean for any of the things and beings who are not human – for example, those being shaped, buffeted, seemingly controlled by the wind? In what ways does the ethical, political or aesthetic complexity of the spacetimemattering pile in the corner push us into conceptions of care that we may be aware of, or not? Does the fact that this pile has less obvious health implications than mouldy food remnants on a pillow impact on whether or not care is involved? If it does – or doesn’t – for whom, or what? Either way, maintaining the early years world as well as possible through a more-than-human lens emphasises the importance and contributions of care in and for things and beings that we know and don’t know, asking us to sit with this evolving uncertainty (Haraway, 2016).

What now: Sitting with uncertainty

Sitting with the uncertainty of affects that various materials might be having, on us, on each other, we might say opens up to different stories, of species, things, and intra-relationships, within and amongst themselves, each other and the early years assemblage. In this uncertainty stories of care might fall into notions of embodiments and relations that we can imagine, concern and kindness for example. The importance of stories elevated through such turning and re-turning lead to “more and more openings”, arriving at “no bottom lines” (Haraway, 2016: 29). They offer diffractive opportunities for exploring the “quite definite response-abilities that are strengthened in such stories” crumb to pillow to mould responses, leading to human affective responses, maybe, of disgust, embarrassment, desire, but what occurs beyond that? Such stories illustrate perhaps even beyond what we imagine on a humanly conceivable level, that “details matter” as they “link actual beings to actual response-abilities” (p. 29), pushing us into pedagogical care responses. Knight (2020) also illustrates in her mapping of more-than-human materials the consequences of such stories, as they challenge the politics of singular narratives, of Man, of human, or of singular power and domination and control.

Re-engaging in the more-than-human vibrancy and multiplicities of care renders obsolete our anthropomorphic conceptions of care as reflected in human-centric definitions. When care becomes an ethical multiplicity beyond cause and effect or binary simplicities, beyond our control and beyond our human imagination, when we no longer consider human care as superior to that of other things, energies and forces in the early years environment, our measure of whether or not it is good care is similarly removed from our control. Aerated, reversed and overturned in this diffractive way, reimagining care through diverse care-stories might re-orient pedagogies of subjugation and marginalisation to infuse diverse ‘carers’ that push the boundaries of openness and acceptance, and of ethics and justice. Increasingly speculative provocations as to what and who may be care-ing and care-ed for, provoke agency, power and self-determining participation into a similarly disrupted and reconceptualising pedagogical realm. The vibrancy of materials and their agentic thing-power (Bennett, 2010; Tesar and Arndt, 2016) that intra-acts with and affects others may not only implicate but reconfigure what care is when it is enacted with pedagogical intent, and especially when the intention is to care ‘as well as possible’.

It is the uncertainty of these more-than-human affective relationalities that make conceptualising what counts as pedagogies of care a mere speculation. For one thing, this paper has barely considered anything but a surface level, so speculations on pedagogical care require far more deep and ongoing shifting and re-turning. In a self-implicating way, what happens next depends on levels of care in particular or more general spaces, times or matters. Further, what happens next in this diffractive process is perhaps illustrated most dramatically in the current presence of a deadly virus, a non-human element that lives and throbs within early years settings and the wider world of parents and communities, affecting bodies, pedagogies, politics and behaviours. Is perhaps its spread a form of care too, for itself? The non-human coronavirus reshapes the politics of care as aligning with a human, often feminine, relational ethics of care (Noddings, 2013), and with concerns, feelings or kindness. When care is taken as comprising dimensions that are entirely outside of human imagination, not in equal part, nor necessarily harmoniously, but nevertheless as importantly intertwined, as this diffractive reading of care has done, it breaks down barriers of homogenisation or normalisations. The day to day impact of such a reading removes marginalisations of forms of care that may be different, for example, to what teachers and all of us are used to.

The world over we live in times like never before. Care is catapulted into tensions and contradictions not seen or experienced in the lifetimes of humans currently living through them, and early years pedagogies of care involve grappling with restrictions and affects arising from human and more-than-human influences and responses. This diffractive reading and rereading, thinking and rethinking of care and pedagogical potentialities raises alignments and misalignments, that have escalated astronomically in recent times. Perhaps the ways in which some of the intra-relational speculations raised above sometimes work in tangent, complementing each other, and sometimes not, show up what has always been the case? Perhaps as humans it is high time that we dethrone ourselves from our pedestal, to humbly admit that we do not and cannot know it all, feel it all, teach or plan it all? Opening up to care as a potential affective pedagogical encounter of life and life experiences, of time, things, and their intra-relational dependencies, is made more precarious by recognising the more-than-human elements that we cannot imagine, know, place or situate. This diffractive reading is a mere beginning of reimagining care in terms of an ethics or pedagogies of care when it emanates and circulates outside of the human realm. Perhaps the non-human virus affecting so many bodies, societies and economies on such a global scale, is a most graphic – albeit an undesirable – illustration of more-than-human care – care for itself – care for its own complicatedly affecting survival, and for that of its mutations?

Concluding comments

This paper takes up an explicit challenge of questioning pedagogies of care beyond the human realm. It provokes questioning, rather than seeking answers, evokes a sense rather of not knowing than of knowing, of opening up, rather than closure, in a diffractive disruption of care in early years settings. It not only contests easy platitudes on everyday care pedagogies in the early years, but it creates a platform for more explicit methodological challenges of easy homogenizations of care, uprooting dominant anthropological conceptions of pedagogies of care as knowable and as human-centric. Its diffractive approach opens up to multiple iterative intra-actions, re-diffractions, and diffracting anew, calling for spacetimematterings that may so far have been unrecognised, but which are everywhere, and for discovering new relationalities, new diffraction patterns. The paper forges on along multiple pathways in the discomfort of uncertainty in which it is not only acceptable but desirable not to know, or to have a clear path forward, to make more nuanced the complexity of an ethics and politics of care in human and more-than-human worlds. This diffractive and reiterative exploration expands conceptualisations of early years settings as living and throbbing entangled assemblages, exposing speculations on relational and uncertain pedagogies and/of care as just a beginning.