This open access book directs its attention to a desire for inter- and transdisciplinary, reciprocal collaborations in studies concerning young children. It focuses on the possibilities and obstacles in collaborative forms of inquiry involving those stakeholders and actors whom the research concerns, specifically the participating children. The backdrop of the discussions and theoretical investigations is the inter- and transdisciplinary project Enhancing Children’s Attention. Within the framework of an evidence-based intervention, this project performed multiple qualitative forms of inquiry, including emergent forms of collaborations with children. The book provides a discussion on how young children’s development, learning, and lives are understood in the developmental sciences, and in the humanities and social sciences. It specifically addresses scholars interested in postdevelopmental, posthumanist, new materialist, and postqualitative approaches. The book proposes a displaced form of postdevelompentalism for future collaborative forms of inquiry with a focus on multiple forms of knowledge and knowing.

COVID-19 amplified the everyday sexisms that academics experience in higher education, including women’s submission of publications. This chapter shows how a creative and transdisciplinary intervention, #FEAS FAKE JOURNAL, made space for feminist academics whose scholarship was affected by the pandemic to take part in a project that privileged “unfinished business”. A creative methodology was used that moved beyond the traditional research narrative that relies on mastery and certainty. Seventeen feminist academics participated in the project by submitting an abstract to a fake journal about an unfinished work. Several creative components were used to solicit and support personal, political, and creative accounts to the pandemic. These accounts show how feminist academics were affected by lockdowns, how they managed, and in some cases how they connected with each other. Findings show how transdisciplinary feminist creative activism made space for participants to reflect on the effects of the pandemic and to consider what is worth finishing. This paper shares a rare glimpse into the behind the scenes of knowledge making and doing as unfinished business. It shows how transdisciplinary feminist art activism can be enacted with care and solidarity with others.

The performance of standardized tests is an ongoing matter of concern for childhood researchers.Standardized tests are often described as neglecting the ethical complexities of doing research withyoung children. However, this critique is primarily presented in general terms, and does not attendto the locality and specificity of particular test situations. With this as a starting point, the aim ofthis article is to challenge a narrow understanding of standardized tests as activities done ‘on’ chil-dren and examine the complexities of emerging relations in test situations performed in Swedishpreschools. Through analysing video recordings made as part of an intervention project, the articlefocuses on the practices that surface in test situations with four- to six-year-olds. Inspired byHaraway and Strathern, the article puts to work a relational approach to analysing the test situa-tions. This approach contributes with an understanding in which the contextual details are takeninto account, which in turn highlights how the atypical and the moving are often the standard instandardized testing. The insights from a relational analysis point to important aspects to considerin the performance of standardized tests: it matters to attune to and problematize a narrow under-standing of standardized tests; it matters to consider the local specificities; and it matters to scru-tinize in new ways the relations between children and researchers.

Relationality has become central to Childhood Studies and even described as its ontological ground. Feminist theories offer articulate theorizing on relationalities, yet feminist ideas of relationality have not had a significant impact on Childhood Studies. Through focusing on feminist notions of corporeal specificity, sexual-temporal difference and asymmetry, and transcorporeality, this paper argues that feminist theorizations open up a space to engage with childhood and children’s lives as not only relational or entangled, but as inevitably imbricated in relations of power.

In this special issue of Reconceptualizing Educational Research Methodology the focus is on posthuman conceptions of change in empirical educational research. In the six included papers, the authors address and challenge different aspects of change in different educational settings –ranging from preschools, to universities and public pedagogies. Through activating posthuman perspectives, the papers invite the reader to a wide range of understandings of the concept of change. A conclusion drawn from the papers is that when working with posthuman change in empirical educational research, change becomes highlighted as a methodological endeavour while simultaneously being engaged with as processes of transformations in the educational practice. What is specifically emphasized is that through posthuman conceptions, change is not something out there to be found, but an emergent phenomenon that unfolds as we explore it.

Genom att introducera en postkvalitativ metodologi tar denna bok ett samlat grepp kring frågor om formulerandet av forskningsproblem, forskningsetiska överväganden samt konstruerandet och analyserandet av empiriskt material. Postkvalitativ metodologi beskrivs utifrån fyra centrala ingångar: posthumanistisk teori; forskning som verklighetsskapande; sammanvävning av diskurs, materialitet och affekt samt en feministisk ansats.

Boken belyser hur postkvalitativ metodologi erbjuder experimenterande tillvägagångssätt och är en prövande berättelse om hur kunskap kan produceras och hur världen kan undersökas med ‘en metodologi i blivande’. Den är således inte någon handbok eller manual för hur forskning ska bedrivas utan ett teoretiskt och metodologiskt erbjudande som bland annat utforskar frågor om ontologi, epistemologi och etik.

Med sin specifika utgångspunkt i postkvalitativ metodologi ger boken vägledning och inspiration inom många olika områden och vetenskapliga discipliner. Den är därför ett sällskap för studenter och forskare att arbeta tillsammans med i genomförandet av ett forskningsprojekt. Boken vänder sig framförallt till studenter på avancerad nivå, forskarstudenter samt forskare som undrar vad det innebär att arbeta och skapa kunskap med posthumanistisk teori.

This book is an introduction to postqualitative methodology. It situates postqualitative methodology in feminist and posthumanist theories, where research is a worlding practice. Through addressing the relationality of inquiry, the book considers knowledge production as both material and discursive and proposes experimenting with research practices.

Rather than offering instructions on how to conduct research, the book invites the reader to explore questions on how to form research problems, address research ethics and construct and analyze empirical material. By focusing on methodological as well as theoretical elaborations it can be inspirational within a range of different research areas, and work as a companion both for students and researchers.

In this article, we elaborate on postqualitative methodology by engaging with two questions: What does postqualitative mean? Why is the postqualitative movement important? The engagement with these questions evokes a conversation, which becomes our methodology. The conversation is an assemblage, always multiple and collective. This allows us to acknowledge the messy and hybrid processes of knowledge production, and it forces us to be responsive to moments and movements, while remaining vague and ambivalent. As such, the postqualitative provides us with nothing. Simultaneously, it offers tools to navigate and can turn into anything. Nonetheless, it implies hope and is therefore everything.