Children and Materialities

This book makes the case for young children as both keenly materially aware of and highly dependent on sets of interrelated material-discursive circumstances. It argues that long-term engagement with children around the topic of meaning-matter relations upends many taken-for-granted notions of consumption, self-regulation, knowledge production, and what constitutes quality of life within a school setting.The book provides complex accounts of agency on multiple scales - the capability of children to shape and share research, the force of objects, stuff, and things to impact the "social" workings of a classroom, and the impact of nonhuman animals on the trajectory of the ways in which children relate to each other.This work makes a significant contribution to both theoretical conceptions and practical enactments of childhoods, productively addressing the many contradictions inherent in a posthuman and participatory approach to researching with young children. It also offers insights into how the everyday materialities of children’s classrooms (and their complex representations) are capable of disrupting the common-sense order of things.

Casey Y. Myers an Assistant Professor of Early Childhood Education at Kent State University, Ohio, where she teaches courses focusing on the integration of social studies and expressive arts, the relational elements of teacher practice, theories of child/hoods and the role of the humanities in early years classrooms.  She also serves as the Coordinator of Studio and Research Arts for the Child Development Center, an early years laboratory school on the Kent campus.  Her research interests revolve around the everyday materialities of young children’s school lives and the complexities of inquiring into and representing those relations.  She was the inaugural recipient of the Jeanette Rhedding-Jones outstanding dissertation award from the International Reconceptualizing Early Childhood Education organization in 2015. She currently lives in Northeastern Ohio with her husband, son, and various animal companions.