Video - Liminal Relationalities: On collaborative writing with/in and against race in the study of early childhood
This presentation was presented for the European Congress of Qualitative Inquiry 2022 by myself and Simon Bateson in advance of a forthcoming paper of the same title.
Abstract
Collaborative writing is well established in the humanities. However, the process of coming to do research is an experience that typically happens without comment. As such, questions about the power and relational dynamics at play - especially among Black and “white” (sic) authors writing about race within collaborative-autoethnographies - tend to go unacknowledged or be seen as peripheral. Drawing from the Deleuzian concept of becomings and Bakhtin’s dialogic imagination, this paper provides a collaborative-autoethnographic account of the authors coming-together in order to write about race in the context of early learning and childcare. We provide an account that describes our personal journey towards collaboration and the imbalanced tensions and vulnerabilities that are present for each of us.
As part of our methodology, we utilise a multi-column narrative that facilitates both our opening up to and reflections on the prism of our identifications. Mapping our authorial, individual, and liminal subjectivities with this technique enables us to experiment with the boundaries of our individual selves and practice new modes of collaborative engagement. In tentatively decentring colonial tropes of individualism and separation in favour of ‘staying with the trouble’ of identity and race, this paper illuminates the ways in which writing relaionships comes into being as the process entangles with our categories of race. We argue that such an account contributes toward the broader field of scholarship concerned with racial identities, inequality, and social justice. Within this arc we also begin to explore how similar questions and discourses of identification shape young children’s self -perceptions in the contested political, social and technological spaces of early learning and chi ldcare in Scotland, and refract this into an emerging ethics for our future research.
Keywords: collaborative inquiry, early childhood, race, Deleuze, Bakhtin