New considerations of more than human influences on children’s outdoor play are gaining traction in the literature with an increasing focus on materialities and affect during analysis and discussion phases. As Barad (2003) points out, ‘Nature is neither a passive surface awaiting the mark of culture nor the end product of cultural performances’(p. 827). Researchers of children’s outdoor play engaged in planning and design of future projects must now think about ways to collect and interpret data that are no longer anthropocentric.
De-centring human actors and moving beyond nature as benefit to humans (Malone & Truong, 2017) we are beginning to recognise that it is ‘increasingly important to allow matter its due as an active participant in the world’s becoming…’(Barad, 2003, p. 803).
Harraway (2008) explores the complexities of human/non-human relational spaces and signals a need to move beyond anthropocentric data collection methods such as observations and interviews and this research project is my way of exploring post human epistemologies and ontologies.
I put to work Deleuzo-Guattarian concepts which empower us to think differently about the analytic and historical preconditions for new forms of materialist and complex subjectivity (Braidotti, 2011, p. 213). Barad asks us to think of ‘social’ and ‘scientific’ together in illuminating ways (Barad, 2003, p. 803) so I begin my research, working as a nomad who has a territory and follows customary paths, going from one point to another, always intermezzo, where things that occur to me don’t come from the root up (like a tree) but from somewhere in the middle (Deleuze & Guattari, 1987).
My research site is a Bush Kinder, an Australian interpretation of the forest preschools of Scandinavia. As always, it is through reading/writing/thinking in endless cycles that my understandings shift and this entanglement of progress moves along as I seek the complex intra-active affects of materialities within the children’s play.