New and Innovative Ways of Engaging Data: A Review of Davies' Listening to Children: Being and Becoming

Davies (2014) situates her book Listening to Children: Being and Becoming in a number of interwoven narratives that describe her encounters with children in Swedish Reggio-Emilia-inspired preschools and in her community of Sydney, Australia. By using a series of vignettes, Davies captures the dynamic and emergent nature of her encounters with children and the research process. Her stories take us to places like the playground of a Swedish preschool; music class where children, adults, and instruments interact; her apartment creating art with her young friend, Clementine; and memories from her own childhood experiences.Listening to Children is a scholarly text intended for an academic audience. The book is dense with theoretical and philosophical concepts and is an excellent resource for anyone interested in exploring new materialist approaches to research. The data for this book were gleaned from Davies' encounters with children and used methods of informal interviewing, participant observations, and field notes. In her writing, Davies makes sense of abstract concepts by situating them in practical lived experiences. She embeds her stories into a larger theoretical framework and skillfully oscillates from theory to personal experience. This is one of the most valuable aspects of this book. By sharing her years of experience as a child researcher, Davies demonstrates a new way of engaging children and the research process.The book begins by orienting the readers to the guiding theoretical and methodological framework. Located within the new materialist tradition, Davies used principles of Barad's (2007) approach to new materialism. Applying concepts of quantum physics, Barad captures the unique onto-epistemological considerations of new materialism where matters and meaning are fused together. Barad points out,Matter and meaning are not separate elements. They are inextricably fused together, and no event, no matter how energetic, can tear them asunder. [...] Perhaps this is why contemporary physics makes the inescapable entanglement of matters of being, knowing, and doing, of ontology, epistemology, and ethics, of fact and value, or tangible, so poignant. (p. 3)Barad's approach to new materialism underscores the implicit role of matter in our everyday sense making. She describes a type of knowing and understanding that cannot be deduced from utterance and enunciation; rather, one that emerges from a dynamic entanglement of the matters affecting our thoughts and actions. Davies explains, "the ways in which we affect each other, and are affected, cannot be separated from thought any more than it can be separated from bodies. Thought and action are mutually entangled, just as individual beings, who know and who act, are mutually entangled" (p. 11). Through the use of Barad's work, Davies captures how the research process shapes and is shaped by contextual factors surrounding the research encounter.Specifically, Davies draws on principles of intra-action, entanglement, and the diffractive methodology. These concepts bring about unique ethical and methodological considerations. By using the diffractive methodology as a guiding framework Davies was able to illustrate how understanding is dynamic and emergent within the diffractive design. She notes,The concept of diffraction replaces the more usual concept and practice in qualitative research of reflexivity. [...] Diffraction does not reflect an image of what is already there, but is actually involved in its ongoing production. [...] Whereas reflection and reflexivity might document difference, diffraction is itself the process where difference is made. (p. 2)From a diffractive methodology, the research process is viewed as emergent and intra-active where we (researchers and participants) are "produced through intra-actions; we are multiplicities, always in the process of becoming other than what we were before" (p. 9). This approach acknowledges the dynamic nature of the research process and is open to new ontological and epistemological ways of viewing the world. …