My PhD began with a question that still runs through my work: how do young children come to form a sense of self through the worlds they inhabit?

The study took place at Wood Fire, a fully outdoor early childhood setting in Scotland. I followed the ordinary encounters through which children’s subjectivities took form: gathering around a tyre hill, dwelling in mud and puddles, moving in waterproofs, competing for dumper trucks, making friendships, and encountering weather, animals, sounds, bodily postures and spatial arrangements.

These encounters affected what children could do, how they related to one another and which desires gathered force. The thesis explores experimental puddle-body subjectivities, the prestige attached to particular materials, the production of masculinity, the affective force of friendship and the care cultivated through relations with the more-than-human world.

The child is understood as continually produced within social and material, natural and cultural assemblages. Subjectivity emerges through encounters among bodies, things, affects, spaces and inherited social expectations. Wood Fire generated distinctive possibilities for movement, relation and becoming, while wider social and cultural determinacies continued to orient children’s desires. Pink waterproofs, superhero figures, construction sounds and dumper trucks all participated in the formation of gendered subjectivities.

I developed the term affective sociomaterialisation to name this process: the continual production of subjectivity through social and material assemblages that affectively augment or diminish capacities to act. The concept approaches identity as always in-formation, shaped through the felt and relational force of encounters before settling into recognisable forms.

My doctoral research continues to inform how I approach early childhood practice, social justice and environments. Spaces, materials, routines and expectations participate in what becomes possible for children. The thesis moves towards knowing-otherwise: resisting the urge to know in advance what children, materials and environments can do, and developing greater response-ability towards the relations through which children become.

The thesis advances a sociomaterial metaphysics for understanding children’s subjectivity in-formation within fully outdoor early childhood provision. Its conceptual framework is assembled through Spinozist monism, process philosophy, Deleuze and Guattari’s concepts of assemblage and affect, and Barad’s posthuman performativity. Subjectivity is approached as processual, relational and ontogenetic, produced through social and material, natural and cultural assemblages and never given fully in advance.

Affective sociomaterialisation names the process through which these assemblages augment or diminish capacities to act and affectively orient desire. The concept places epistemological knowledges alongside ontological and ontogenetic forces, expanding inquiry beyond human-centred accounts grounded primarily in cognition, language, discourse or representation. Social and cultural determinacies remain active within this framework, feeding back into encounters and habituating bodies in recognisable ways.

The fieldwork traces these processes through encounters including mud-child-waterproof assemblages, plank-child-wind-air assemblages and dumper-truck-boy assemblages. It examines experimental puddle-body subjectivities, the affective prestige of particular materials, the sociomaterial production of masculinity, the spatial formation of friendship and the possibility of becoming-with the world. Fully outdoor provision generated novel material and spatial relations while remaining caught within normative gendered and cultural tendencies.

Methodologically, the thesis develops a multisensory sociomaterial ethnography informed partly by postqualitative inquiry. Textual, visual and cinematic research-creation were used to decentre spoken language, trouble the separation of researcher and researched, and attend to subjectivity across bodies, things, spaces, sound, movement and duration. The assemblage becomes the unit of analysis, allowing agency to be understood as distributed and relational.

The thesis contributes an expanded account of how outdoor environments participate in children’s subjectivity in-formation. Wood Fire afforded experimental, care-full and more-than-human ways of becoming, alongside the continuing force of social and cultural determinacies. Its practical orientation is towards knowing-otherwise and an affirmative commitment to not knowing in advance the capacities of the child. This unsettles developmentalist curricula that tether children to ages, stages and predefined outcomes, opening early childhood practice towards indeterminacy, the use-less and the not-yet-known.

Description text goes hereMy thesis, Affective Sociomaterialisation: An Inquiry into Early Childhood Subjectivities within Outdoor Early Childhood Provision in Scotland, UK, was completed at the University of the West of Scotland between 2018 and 2022, in collaboration with Early Years Scotland.

It is available to download from the British Library and ResearchGate.

Please get in touch directly if you are unable to access the thesis.

For academic citation

Tembo, S. (2022) Affective Sociomaterialisation: An Inquiry into Early Childhood Subjectivities within Outdoor Early Childhood Provision in Scotland, UK. PhD thesis. University of the West of Scotland.