The starting point of this article is that we are constantly engaged in significant relations, not only to other humans, but also to nonhuman matter. I argue that contemporary educational research often do not sufficiently acknowledge how material components matters in the ongoing production of gendered subjectivities. Even though theoretical perspectives such as social constructionism and post structuralism offer a view on the subject as contextual and situational, it is rare that this interest take into considerations the material components and conditions. Most often it is the inter-subjective or interpersonal relations, and the discourses that lay down the conditions or make possible these relations, that are being understood as the context from which the child emerges. Nonhuman matter is most often not mentioned at all. In this article I will explore the relations between children and nonhuman materiality. My empirical material consists of memories from preschools, narrated and put into writing by a group of adult researchers using the methodology of collective biography. By analyzing these stories/memories, with the help of a number of concepts and ideas that can be understood as related to a posthumanist theoretical perspective, I want to show how things that we traditionally consider as passive or dead, as dots on the floor, dolls and furniture, can be regarded as forces that plays an important role as constitutive actors in children’s gendered subjectivities.  

The purpose of this paper is to challenge the habitual anthropocentric gaze we use when analysing educational data, which takes human beings as the starting-point and centre, and gives humans a self-evident higher position above other matter in reality. By enacting analysis of photographic images from a preschool playground, using a relational materialist methodological approach, we put to work concepts that open up possibilities to understand the child as emergent in a relational field, where nonhuman forces are equally at play in constituting children’s learning and becomings. In the second part of the paper, we discuss how the decentring of the child may also be applied to researchers as producers of knowledge. Such a decentring, where the data itself is considered to have a constitutive force and working upon the researcher as much as the researcher works upon the data, has both methodological and ethical consequences for research.

In this article I argue that competent children at all times are co-produced by nonhuman matter. Drawing on a relational materialist perspective I discuss how not only humans but also nonhumans can articulate propositions and partake in an ongoing choreography of the world. I will present a piece of pedagogical documentation of children involved in an investigative project and suggest an analysis of this pedagogical documentation that  takes into consideration how the children are situated in a messy material world or, as Andrew Pickering (1995) puts it; in “a mangle” where heterogeneous actors make agency and action possible. This entails a troubling of a social constructionist perspective that seldom considers the agency of the nonhuman (Prout 2005). However, as I discuss, a relational materialist perspective can also be understood as an intensification of social constructionism, in that that not only humans, but also nonhumans participates as negotiating actors in the ongoing construction of reality.