This article attempts to reconfigure hegemonic framings of “the academic conference” and thereby offer a means to (re-)encounter the spatial, temporal, and affective forces that conferences generate, differently. We are a geographically dispersed but multiply entangled group of academic researchers united by theoretical fault lines within our work that seek to ask what if and what else. This “what if” and “what else” thinking has manifested in experimental and subversive doings otherwise at a series of academic conferences. The storying practices presented in this article were made possible by the vital materialism of a shared google.doc. It was within this virtual environment that we attempted to weave diffractive accounts of what conferencing otherwise produces. This writing experiment offers a series of speculative provocations and counter-provocations to ask what else does conferencing make possible. This article is an invitation to the reader to plunge in and wallow within the speculative accounts which ensue and to contemplate the possibilities of breaking free from sedimented ways of neoliberal conferencing.

This article's point of departure is practicing an(other) methodology than those that are dominant within educational research in Norway.

In this paper we grapple with the ways in which real-world issues directly impact children’s lives and ask what else gets produced through encounters with children’s global news media, specifically within the contexts of the United Kingdom and Norway. Our aim is to experiment with storytelling and worldling practices as a means to open up generative possibilities to encounter and reconfigure difficult knowledges. We take two contemporary events, the 2017 Grenfell Tower fire tragedy in London and the 2018 Marjory Stoneman Douglas High School shooting massacre in Florida, as a means to attend to ways in which affects are materialised across multiple times and spaces. News reports of these harrowing events, alongside what they produced in terms of child activism, racism and toxic masculinity, provided a catalyst for a feminist new materialist experiment in generating other knowledges through material-affective-embodied encounters. Newspapers, glue, sticky tape, string, torches, bags and a cartridge for a firearm were used in important work within a speculative workshop, where a small number of early childhood researchers came together to be open to multiple and experimental ways of (k)not-knowing to formulate collectively shared problems. Following Manning (2016), we recognise that to avoid getting stuck in familiar ways of thinking and doing we need to undertake research differently. We wondered how the re-materialisation of these events (through objects, artefacts, sounds and images) might shift our thinking about childhood in other directions. We dwell upon the affective work that these high-profile news events perform and how they might become rearticulated through affective encounters with materiality. Attending to how these events worked on us involves staying with the trouble (Haraway, 2016) as it becomes reignited, mutated and amplified across time and in different contexts. Our goal is to generate other possibilities that seek to reconfigure the ‘image of the child’. By resisting comforts of recognition, reflection and identification, we reach beyond what we think we know about how children are in the world and instead argue for their entanglement with difficult knowledges through our and their world-making practices.

Title: A 'resource-oriented approach to linguistic and cultural diversity': Discursive readings of inclucion in early childhood education.Abstract: This article critically questions how contemporary multicultural pedagogical work for inclusion in Norwegian children’s centers is described in government documents. We find in these documents that what is named as a discursive ‘resource-oriented approach to cultural diversity’ is presented as a strategy to understand how to work and analyse multicultural pedagogical issues. As preschool teachers and researchers our interest is to investigate how and why a resource-oriented approach today seems to have become part of preschool teachers’ normative multicultural work for inclusion. By analysing official early childhood documents discursively we question what effects a resource-oriented approach may have on professional multicultural knowledge production.

(Braidotti, 2011(Braidotti, , 2013