Those of you who have been following my PhD journey have asked to see the research proposal. So here it is. Bear in mind it is written in a particular language to reflect the philosophical frame I will be engaging with (posthumanism and new materialism) and yes, it does stretch the mind! But it is also the most authentic framework I have found for researching how children are.
This is one of the most exciting journeys I have been on. It is changing my perspective on how we ‘view’ children and childhood, strengthening my beliefs and values in who we are and what is possible, and giving me a wonderful insight into children’s many kinds of voices. I can thoroughly recommend this journey to others. We are never too old!
Spaces of Difference – using immersive dance to explore wordless encounters with children who don’t speak
Overview
This research will involve young children who do not talk or move freely in unfamiliar environments as a result of situational distress when expected to speak, sometimes diagnosed as selective mutism (SM) (see example in Appendix 1). To consider how immobilised silence could be experienced otherwise, I intend to create spaces of difference, allowing children and adults alike to step outside of their expected roles and listen differently - through dance and sensory attunement - to expressions of each other and the world around them.
I will problematise the question of why children don’t speak in certain spaces by asking instead what generative forces, relations and spaces make distributed agency, power and expression possible without words. I will ask how different spaces, which suspend the belief of what cannot be achieved, might generate important insights in to relational/communicative possibilities. In doing so, I will critically interrogate the ethics underpinning SM and challenge the medical, social and educational perspectives of the silent child in need of remediation by reconceptualising not-speaking as an aspect of complex competence.
Words appear to be the most privileged channel through which to teach, facilitate and measure the potential and progress of young children. Huge investment is made into developing a narrow range of speech, language and communication skills which are word-dominant and do not reflect the range and complexity of children’s relational and communicative encounters. Educators, parents and carers are encouraged to prioritise this ‘normative’ state from birth, to fulfil a global, ‘evidence-based’ narrative of the ‘ideal’ child (Manning, 2016). For children who don’t speak, for whatever reason, this ecology places them in an already reductive position, seen as a problem, lacking agency, visibility, expression, ability and knowledge. Their identity becomes fixed around biological or social flaws such as vulnerability, incompetence and dependence, with an implicit responsibility on them to get better and on more powerful agents to cure, empower, transform or rescue them. However well intentioned, the concern is that this serves to homogenise cultural diversity risking increased invisibility for children’s differences and highly problematised social integration.
Using immersive dance as a force for bio-sensory engagement and exploration, combined with video reflection and electro-dermal activity (EDA) bio-sensors, this research seeks to experiment with new data analysis methodologies that go beyond partial stories based on numbers and facts about who children might be. It seeks ways of modulating affect rather than behaviour and of translating this research-creation to reconfigure collaborative and generative early childhood and health practices.
Aims
explore the potential of immersive dance to listen differently and open possibilities for attunement, intimacy and intra-action between young children and their adults.
develop new, embodied methodologies that might offer affective opportunities for sensory mutualilty, using slow-motion video, EDA biosensors and dance.
reconceptualise interdisciplinary discourses across the neuroscientific, educational, health and arts-based fields to foreground bio-sensory ways of knowing with speech, language and communication disabilities.
Research Questions
How might young children (and their adults) read and sense each other differently in a dance-based environment and what possibilities might open-up for attunement using sensory correspondence?
What nourishes, directs, compels, disrupts or restricts the flows of correspondence in the explorations of contact-based dance?
How could dance, slow-motion video and EDA bio-sensors further the interdisciplinary discourses and generate new ecologies of practice apropos the communicative child?
Theoretical context
Drawing on what Barad (2007) terms an ethico-onto-epistem-ology, this research proposes ways of knowing, being and caring that are intertwined and intra-dependent in young children’s encounters of the world. Qu(e)erying cartesian thinking around embodiment which can reduce relations to sense-data or mind/body-defined faculties, I will attend to the virtual, indeterminate, unanticipated encounters of attunement and difference, and our strengths of connection (Sheets-Johnstone, 2011). I will argue that immersive dance can intensify sensation by generating vibratory waves across the somatosensory, musculoskeletal and nervous systems, connecting with imperceptible forces in the world (Deleuze and Guattari, 2004) that generate relational power and agency beyond words.
A new-materialist methodology will guide my attention to the attunement of bodies, materials, forces of flow and affect (Manning, 2016) through response-able, agential intra-action where ‘to be entangled is not simply to be intertwined with another, as in the joining of separate entities, but to lack an independent self-contained existence’ (Barad, 2007:ix).
In practice, I intend to create spaces for vitality and movement where children who don’t speak and adults can perceive and que(e)ry the world differently, inviting wonder beyond representational boundaries (MacLure, 2013; Manning, 2016), and experiencing a more distributed agency. These attentive methods will serve to minimise the ‘major registers’ that frame selective mutism, and privilege the ‘minor gestures’ of attunement, described as ‘a force that courses through it, unmooring its structural integrity, problematizing its normative standards’ (Manning, 2016:x)
Methodology and Method
Engaging a thinking-with-dance methodology (using contact improv), I will explore the changed states that occur during non-speaking experiences. I will focus on what enables and constricts flow in communication and foster improvised, spontaneous dance-play with a view to generating new modes of correspondence since, ‘Encounters between [research and practice] marked by collective, intense and unpredictable experimentation might be capable of letting new things be born’ (Olsson, 2009:104).
I will begin the fieldwork with a 2-month period of ethnographic immersion to become attuned to the affective flows of routine nursery encounters whilst gaining insights into the experience of a silent child and how educational or social factors might impact on them. Ideas for the dance experiences will emerge here so, following this, I intend to run three week-long workshops (over two terms) where a class of 3-4 year-old children, their carers, educators and clinicians will be invited to become absorbed in wordless, dance-based activities and installations. This will involve experimentation with materials, partners and spaces that encourage deep listening, intimacy, sharing sensations and experiencing the forces of magnetism, animation, chemistry, electricity, tangible and imperceptible affect.
Through sensory and kinaesthetic interaction, in ways that are neither intrusive nor invasive, and with no expectation for speech or remediation, we will listen, read and attune to each other’s vibrations, rhythms, imbalances, minor gestures, ‘virtual movements’ and ephemeral intensities (Manning, 2016; Springgay and Truman, 2018). This is a space where the matters of fact about who we are (or are not) are foregrounded by the matters of concern for what interests us, drives us, creates possibilities, creativity and potential.
Participants will be invited to reflect on how communicative and relational power might feel different in embracing silence, the flows and disruptions of immersive dance as a force for interaction and subsequent impacts on situational anxiety. We will feel and sense how this might reverberate back in the spaces and situations where children don’t speak, how it might influence the word-dominant approaches in many teaching, learning and health pedagogies as well as reconfiguring concepts of SM as a disability.
Analysis
Rather than contain movement by capturing and measuring the meaning of gestures, this speculative analysis opens data up to processual events of chance and improvisation – to live, reflect, analyse and respond inside the event. In so doing, I aim to resist the ‘normalising’ reasoning of the traditional method that ‘stops potential on its way, cutting into the process before it has had a chance to fully engage with the complex relational fields that process itself calls forth’ (Manning, 2016:33). This indeterminate state needs innovative ways of being accessed or known, since conventional data-mining might not recognise that ‘relata do not preceed relations’ (Barad, 2007:334), hence using slow-motion-video clips to amplify some of the intimate, animate moments of relata.
By removing the video-voyeur position I will decentre disability and refuse to ‘package sensation using biomarkers of disability’ (de Freitas, 2018:13). Instead I will focus on biomarkers of relationality, with a view to exploring how agency might be entangled, displaced, shared and relocated.
Similarly, EDA sensors will offer insights into how bodies create and reverberate certain stimuli during glow moments (MacLure, 2013) that cannot be understood through conventional practices. Playing live bio-data on a screen during the workshops will reveal the flows, peaks and troughs of participants’ corporeal and incorporeal traces, offering insights into the intra-dependency of human and non-human elements whilst resisting interpretivist expectations of performativity.
With these short clips of relational- and bio-data, I will problematise the boundaries between quantitative and qualitative data and positivist notions of evidence-based research by attending to ‘embodied connections […] that are far more complex than the static connections of coding’ (MacLure, 2013:172). Indeed these methods will challenge the researcher and participants to engage ethical analysis that help us see and sense differently. For instance, time stamps from both EDA and video feedback may reveal overlapping moments of unspoken mutuality whilst immersed in the ‘speculative middles’ (Springgay and Truman, 2018:208) of interactions which defy meaning-making. Coding to reveal only these intertwinings may help to transpose reductive perspectives into ethical dimensions of vitality and encounter and pose further questions about whether sense-data can really be captured and known.
Through this intimate, animate, listening approach, I propose an ethics of care might emerge (Puig de la Bellacasa, 2017), attending not only to interpersonal encounters where bodies register difference but to what matter might matter in each moment, opening new ways of knowing and being-with each other.
This research ploughs a new scientific furrow in exploring how various conditions of communicative possibility could reach beyond pathologising treatments for selective mutism and unfasten parents, professionals and children to find hot-spots; moments, rhythms and networks of attuned communication. Through new, nonverbal lines of communicative flight, I hope to discover how children’s powerful expressions can be re-situated in agential-relation with the ongoing reconfigurings of the world (Barad, 2007).
References
Barad, K. (2007) Meeting the universe halfway: quantum physics and the entanglement of matter and meaning. Durham: Duke University Press.
de Freitas, E. (2018) 'The biosocial subject: sensor technologies and worldly sensibility.' Discourse-studies in the cultural politics of education, 39(2). London: Routeledge.
Deleuze, G. and Guattari, F. l. (2004) A thousand plateaus: capitalism and schizophrenia. London: Continuum.
MacLure, M. (2013) 'Classification or wonder? Coding as an analytic practice in qualitative research.' In Deleuze and research methodologies: Edinburgh University Press.
Manning, E. (2016) The minor gesture. Durham: Duke University Press.
Olsson, L. M. (2009) Movement and experimentation in young children's learning: Deleuze and Guattari in early childhood education. London: Routledge.
Puig de la Bellacasa, M. a. (2017) Matters of care: speculative ethics in more than human worlds. Vol. 41.;41;. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press.
Sheets-Johnstone, M. (2011) The primacy of movement. Expand 2nd ed., Vol. 82. Philadelphia;: John Benjamins Pub. Co.
Springgay, S. and Truman, S. E. (2018) 'On the Need for Methods Beyond Proceduralism: Speculative Middles, (In)Tensions, and Response-Ability in Research.' Qualitative Inquiry, 24(3): Sage.
Appendix 1:
Case Study at a Children’s Centre in Manchester:
When Daniel’s dog died, he showed no outward signs of emotional response to the death of his best friend. Not speaking was de rigueur for this four-year-old. In fact, he tried hard to avoid drawing any attention to his movements or expressions. Until the day our dance artist worked in his nursery. She offered curious provocations with unusual, tactile materials, spent time interacting with the children through movement and carefully chosen music instead of words.
Daniel became gradually engrossed in this music and, donning his favourite ballerina dress and grasping a tambourine, delineated long, graceful lines with his body to the rhythms. He didn’t appear to see or hear anyone else and, even when the music faded out, his body carried on moving, immersed in, and responding to, forces beyond our understanding. At this point he sang a simple song about his dog having died and being happy in heaven, whilst his body continued to make graceful shapes with the tambourine across the space. None of his educators or parents had witnessed this depth and intensity of his bodily and verbal expression before. This, and many similar examples in early years settings, form the contextual backdrop to this research.
By Ruth Churchill Dower - Earlyarts Founder and PhD Student at Manchester Metropolitan University.