‘It’s not cardboard, it’s a house’: cartographies of agentic assemblage in the early childhood classroom

ABSTRACTThe concept of assemblage, drawing on the posthuman theorisations of Deleuze and Guattari, delineates a dynamic and new materialist approach to an event. In this approach, desires, material agency and (de)(re)territorialisation emerge as key concepts, and open ways to understand the school classroom in early childhood as a territory where lines of flight challenge the boundaries of normative education. This paper focuses on a classroom assemblage and aims to cartography the material relations between human and non-human bodies, where (de)(re)territorialisation forces are constant. We draw on diffractive ethnography in order to think-with-theory, making use of a vignette and a diagram containing its material relations. Our analysis highlights the agentic relations of matter in the assemblage, the role of desire as a dynamic force and the ever-changing flow of (de)(re)territorialisations that emerge in it. This study shows the complexity of material experience in early childhood, where desire and deterritorialisation frame creative and unexpected processes that defy the idea of education and classroom activities as linear processes controlled by adults. On the contrary, the cartography depicted in this research supports an idea of education as a space for the emergence of creative lines of flight, material relations and non-linear meaning-making.KEYWORDS: Early childhoodcartographyDeleuzeassemblagedeterritorialisation AcknowledgmentsSpecial recognition to Universidad Loyola Andalucía, in gratitude for the Research Assistant grant that made possible this research. We thank the children, parents and teachers who have taken part in this research, for their collaboration and trust, and Dr Hilary McQueen for her careful review of the text.Disclosure statementNo potential conflict of interest was reported by the author(s).Additional informationFundingThe authors disclosed receipt of the following financial support for the research, authorship and/or publication of this article: Research project PID2019-104557GB-I00, funded by MCIN/AEI/10.13039/501100011033/, and the European Union ‘NextGenerationEU’ funds, through the Recovery, Transformation and Resilience Plan and the Ministry of Universities, within the framework of the Support for the Requalification of the Spanish University 2021-2023.