Abstract
Amid fields - postdevelopmental early childhood pedagogies and radical child and youth care - that resist the image of the rational, individualized subject grounded in humanism and endemic of anthropocentrism, we take the intersections of autonomy, movement, sport, physical education, and identity as a space of collective experimentation toward living well together with young people. Children and youth are re-creating body narratives and curricula beyond the bounded self, cracking the individualist legacies of autonomy. In our ongoing research, we take seriously how children and youth are inventing immersive acts of moving as identity and world-building. Within Nicole’s project, a collaborative action research project with toddlers and preschoolers in an early childhood education classroom, we ask “how do we get to know moving” and find that moving unfolds alongside identity, where to move is an activity that produces situated moving cultures that demand localized pedagogical responses. In Shemine’s community-engaged research project with immigrants and refugees, we further our understanding of how community leaders lean on recreational pursuits to overcome systemic oppression, pre- and post- migration trauma, and in-between identities. Taken together, our research grapples with questions of autonomy and movement amid education and recreation contexts, following how identity becomes intertwined with moving and sporting cultures anchored in a commons that disrupts inherited conceptions of individualized human autonomy, and draws us toward rethinking identity amid the rich ethical and political swirls that animate movement and bodies.
Presenters
Nicole LandAssistant Professor, Early Childhood Studies, Toronto Metropolitan University, Ontario, Canada Shemine Gulamhusein
Assistant Professor, Child and Youth Care, MacEwan University, Canada
Details
Presentation Type
Paper Presentation in a Themed Session
Theme
2022 Special Focus—Whose Body Is it? Sport and the Problem of Autonomy
KEYWORDS
Early Childhood Education, Child and Youth Care, Movement, Identity
