Donna Haraway (1988), in Situated Knowledges: The Science Question in Feminism and the Privilege of Partial Perspective, critiques what she calls the “God-Trick.” This is the idea that researchers can “see everything from nowhere”—that they can occupy a position of pure objectivity, as if detached, neutral observers of the field. Haraway reminds us that objectivity is unevenly distributed: some bodies are granted the illusion of impartiality, while others are made to carry the burden of bias, their research questioned as if always already suspect.
Haraway’s critique builds through an embodiment of vision. Objectivity, she argues, has too often been imagined as requiring a gaze that exists outside the body—a “conquering gaze from nowhere”—which likens to an all-seeing, totalizing eye. Such a gaze smooths over the shadows, ruptures, and partial perspectives that are in fact necessary to see clearly. Against this, Haraway insists that it is precisely our embodied, partial visions—our situatedness—that can generate accountable knowledge.
How might I contest and deconstruct my own eye: how might I resist seeing as if from nowhere, and instead stay with the partial, entangled perspectives that shape this site of research?
She calls for a practice of situated knowledges: one that privileges contestation, deconstruction, passionate construction, webbed connections, and the hope of transformation. Because the God-Trick has become so deeply entangled with scientific and technological research, Haraway challenges us to continually ask: how do we recognize and account for the ways we are implicated? How do we situate ourselves within the conditions of a place? These are questions I must hold as I think about how I enter this research—remaining partial, and accountable, yet never innocent.
What must be contested?
As this research begins, I know I am seeking to contest what is already taken for granted as a “child-friendly city” (Bartlett, 1999; Gleeson & Sipe, 2006; Valentine, 1996). To take up contestation is to recognize education itself as a project of ethical and political implication, not simply a service. The Contesting Early Childhood series reminds me this. As I look back at the Interview with Peter Moss, that inaugurated exposures in the province of Ontario that what must be contested in education is precisely what it means to treat it as an ethical–political practice (Pacini-Ketchabaw & Moss, 2020). Finally, I contest the assumption that I arrive as the expert who will help, for this would be to enact what Haraway (1988) critiques as the “God-Trick”—imposing best practices from nowhere rather than entering into the specific relations and subjectivities of this site of research.
What must be deconstructed?
I do not yet know if deconstruction can begin right away. What I anticipate, however, is that the participatory data—the walks we will take, the conversations we will have, and the art that will be made—will create opportunities to question and unsettle what is under contestation. I find myself asking: why this activity? What does it allow, and what does it disallow? What do seemingly benign structures—scavenger hunts, circle times, transitions—shape what counts as participation and what kinds of relations are possible. Deconstruction here is not about knocking down what exists, but about opening such practices to inquiry as if inspecting the bathwater we are all splashing around in (Burman, 2008)—so that pathways of thinking and making otherwise might emerge.
What must be constructed with passion?
As a researcher-educator, I begin by attending carefully to encounters ( Pacini-Ketchabaw et al., 2016). Even within the context of a Public pedagogies program, education unfolds through encounters, and these encounters are world-making. I turn to St. Pierre (2018), Lather (2013), and Barad (2007) for propositions of speculative construction—where construction happens alongside critique, through productive confusion, and through intra-actions that are themselves world-making processes.
What connections can be webbed?
From the outset, I know connections will be webbed between my positionality as a participant-researcher, the lives of children, and the subjectivities of educators. Here I hold closely Haraway’s (2016) notion of sympoiesis, Tsing’s (2015) account of assemblages, and Taylor and Giugni’s (2012) concept of common worlding as ways of thinking with the knots of relation that may emerge.
References
Barad, K. M. (2007). Meeting the universe halfway: quantum physics and the entanglement of matter and meaning. Duke University Press. https://doi.org/10.1515/9780822388128
Bartlett, S. (1999). Children’s experience of the physical environment in poor urban settlements and the implications for policy, planning and practice. Environment & Urbanization, 11(2), 63–74. https://doi.org/10.1177/095624789901100207
Burman, E. (2008). Deconstructing developmental psychology (2nd ed.). Routledge.
Gleeson, B., & Sipe, N. (Eds.). (2006). Creating Child Friendly Cities: New Perspectives and Prospects. Routledge. https://doi.org/10.4324/9780203087176
Haraway, D. (1988). Situated Knowledges: The Science Question in Feminism and the Privilege of Partial Perspective. Feminist Studies, 14(3), 575–599. https://doi.org/10.2307/3178066
Haraway, D. J. (2016). Staying with the trouble: making kin in the Chthulucene. Duke University Press.
Lather, P., & St. Pierre, E. A. (2013). Post-qualitative research. International Journal of Qualitative Studies in Education, 26(6), 629–633. https://doi.org/10.1080/09518398.2013.788752
Pacini-Ketchabaw, V., Kind, S., & Kocher, L. L. M. (2016). Encounters With Materials in Early Childhood Education. Routledge. https://doi.org/10.4324/9781315743257
Pacini-Ketchabaw, V., & Moss, P. (2020). Early Childhood Pedagogy: Veronica Pacini- Ketchabaw Interviews Peter Moss. Journal of Childhood Studies, 45(2), 98–111. https://doi.org/10.18357/jcs452202019742
St. Pierre, E. A. (2018). Writing Post Qualitative Inquiry. Qualitative Inquiry, 24(9), 603–608. https://doi.org/10.1177/1077800417734567
Taylor, A., & Giugni, M. (2012). Common Worlds: Reconceptualising Inclusion in Early Childhood Communities. Contemporary Issues in Early Childhood, 13(2), 108–119. https://doi.org/10.2304/ciec.2012.13.2.108
Tsing, A. L. (2015). The mushroom at the end of the world: on the possibility of life in capitalist ruins. University Press.
Valentine, G. (1996). Children Should Be Seen and Not Heard: The Production and Transgression of Adults’ Public Space. Urban Geography, 17(3), 205–220. https://doi.org/10.2747/0272-3638.17.3.205