Documenting data-ghosts: Visualising non-human life and death through what is undocumented in early childhood education

Jo Albin-Clark

doi:10.33182/joph.v3i1.2851

Authors

Jo Albin-Clark Edge Hill University https://orcid.org/0000-0002-6247-8363

DOI:

https://doi.org/10.33182/joph.v3i1.2851

Keywords:

Ethical response-ability, early childhood education, documentation practices, data-ghosts, posthuman praxis

Abstract

What happens with ethical response-abilities that linger in early childhood education documentation practices? Thinking-with research-creation, I problematise the human focus of three and four-year old children caring for eggs in a classroom hatchery. Foregrounding non-human life (and death) brings an ethical disquiet that sticks around. Instead, the past-present-future becomes blurred with ghostly matters. What is particularly haunting is the disposability of non-human life after human educational events are over. Haunting data that is not easy to think with and irritates through time is conceptualised as a data-ghost. Through methodological creative experiments inspired by digital visualisations of non-human data-ghosts, I ponder with the minor of what is unthought, half-said and non-documented when chicks are returned to commercial hatcheries. Posthuman praxis leads me to trouble the human-centric focus of documentation practices and wonder what new questions are generated for multi-species flourishing when the foreground slips and flips to the non-human.

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Author Biography

Jo Albin-Clark, Edge Hill University

Dr. Jo Albin-Clark is a senior lecturer in early education at Edge Hill University. Following a teaching career in nursery and primary schools, Jo has undertaken roles in teaching, advising and research in early childhood education. She completed a doctorate at the University of Sheffield in 2019 exploring documentation practices through posthuman and feminist materialist theories in early childhood education.

Her research interests include observation and documentation practices and methodological collaboration and research-creation through posthuman lenses. She is a keen research collaborator and part of ever-evolving research collectives (e.g. BagLady, Wunderkammern and Non-human kinship collaborations). Throughout her work, teachers'and researchers’ embodied senses of resistances and subversions to dominant discourses have been a central thread.

https://orcid.org/0000-0002-6247-8363
https://research.edgehill.ac.uk/en/persons/joanne-albin-clark
jo.albin-clark@edgehill.ac.uk
@JoAlbinClark