- 10:00: Trial lecture
- 12:00: Public defence
The title of the trial lecture: details in Norwegian version of the event.
The title of the thesis is "When Toddlers, Surfaces, and an Early Childhood Researcher Co-act. A Methodological Study."
The ordinary opponents are:
- First opponent: Professor Lars Frers, Department of Culture, Religion and Social Studies, Faculty of Humanities, Sports and Educational Science, University of South-Eastern Norway
- Second opponent: Senior Lecturer Lena O. Magnusson, University of Gävle
- Chair of the committee: Professor Torill Vist, Department of Early Childhood Education, OsloMet
- The leader of the public defense is Vice-Dean for Research and Development, Faculty of Education and International Studies, OsloMet
The main supervisor is Professor Anne Beate Reinertsen, Østfold University College. The co-supervisor is Professor Ann Merete Otterstad, Department of Early Childhood Education, OsloMet.
Thesis abstract
"When Toddlers, Surfaces, and an Early Childhood Researcher Co-act. A Methodological Study" by Hanne Berit Myrvold is situated within what can be described as post-qualitative early childhood education research. Inspired by affective, research-creation approaches and the process philosophy of Gilles Deleuze and Félix Guattari, Myrvold conducts a study that seeks to broaden perspectives on researching with and among the youngest children in preschool. The fieldwork was carried out in two toddler units in a single preschool over a period of three months.
With an open approach, in which children’s encounters with their surroundings served as the springboard, the preschool’s toddlers have shown Myrvold the way through the project, both regarding the study’s research questions and its methodological approaches. In the toddlers’ sensorial encounters with entirely ordinary surfaces (Ingold, 2017), the study’s material has emerged and seized Myrvold’s research attention.
With an affective and creative methodological approach and its associated conceptual apparatus, Myrvold moves into and through various positionings as a researcher. She conducts research down at floor level and thus acts as a floor-leveling researcher (Osgood, 2023; Reinertsen, 2016). She photographs, films, and poeticizes, and the data material is created processually in continuous encounters between toddlers, surfaces, and the early childhood researcher.
In engaging with the study’s project archive and poetic compositions, Myrvold operates as an anarchiver (Manning, 2020; Murphie, 2016)—an anarchiver who experiments with, rummages in, creates, and turns the project’s archive upside down to investigate what else (Manning, 2016) might emerge in the events. Between the chapters of the dissertation, five events are anarchived. The anarchiving connect the events to concepts such as affect (Deleuze & Guattari, 1987, 1994; Massumi, 2002, 2010; Stewart, 2007), touch, the more-than-human, and the imperceptible (Braidotti, 2006; Deleuze & Guattari, 1987). The imperceptible is linked to sensuous events between toddlers and surfaces—events that may risk being overlooked (Manning, 2017, 2020).
With this study, Myrvold seeks to contribute to a rhizomatic field of knowledge that opens alternative ways of researching among the youngest children in preschool everyday life, and thereby to offer pluriverse, complex, and alternative narratives about toddlers’ lives within a more-than-human world.
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