Ecologies of Touch: Rethinking Relations in Early Childhood Spaces (Children: Global Posthumanist Perspectives and Materialist Theories)

This book explores how literal notions of touching as well as being touched figuratively can be put to work through thinking-with-touch in early childhood and early childhood studies. Specifically, it examines the stains of developmental psychology and Early Childhood (EC) trajectories that haunt such contexts. In order to explore how students’ bodies flow through their studies of early childhood, it also considers how babies and students become-with the Higher Education (HE) classroom, baby-room and worldly materiality; the visible and invisible boundaries that maternal deprivation and attachment theories produce; how developmental theories of psychology are anchored in the policies and practices of EC; and how all that is the discursive, affects–proposing that these explorations have the potential to open bodies towards the precarious landscapes’ pedagogues navigate with HE students and the possibility of new ways of being. This book troubles the 'conventional conceptions for how we understand and research' the 'human child in early childhood contexts' through a deep immersion in feminist thinking and the neologisms of spacetimemattering, mothersick, Bowlb(arbar)ian and (gh)host(ile)(ly).

Dr. Lindsay Schofield is Director of the Early Childhood Centers, Assistant Professor, and Program Coordinator of Early Childhood Education in the College of Education at Florida Gulf Coast University, United States of America. She brings extensive professional experience spanning early childhood care and education as well as midwifery across the United Kingdom, the United Arab Emirates, and the United States of America.

Her research and pedagogy are informed by feminist new materialisms, through which she collaborates with communities and engages in speculative, performative inquiry. These approaches critically orient her work around matters of motherhood, babyhood, and childhood, while foregrounding the urgency to rethink and reconceptualize early childhood education in ways that sustain culturally responsive programs for marginalized families and young children.

Dr. Schofield’s research and scholarship address historical and contemporary constructions of motherhood, babyhood, and early childhood, as well as early childhood policy reform, teacher education, and post-qualitative methodologies.