Posthumanist performativity in the classroom: A material-discursive analysis of children’s intra-actions

Karen Barad’s agential realism proposes a way of analysing the relations of human and non-human agents in the field of early childhood education (3–6 years) and helps researchers to question colonialising practices in childhood. The performative agency of time and space offers a different way of perceiving children’s relationships with school. The diffractions carried out in this paper reflect the analysis of a vignette occurring in an early childhood school in Spain. Our analysis highlights the non/silenced bodies of the children and their passivity/activity in the de/control of the space-time of the school. This study underlines the ephemeral, non-linear and unpredictable nature of the material-discursive intra-actions in the classroom. The resulting narrative of knowledge building in childhood leads to a posthumanist performativity that compels educators to rethink the processes of de/colonisation that should take place in childhood education involving the material relationality of time, space and children’s bodies.