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In the last 30 years we have increasingly, as humans, been individualised and set in competition with each other in the quest for ever increasing productivity. Neoliberalism has exacerbated those very liberal humanist features that feminist poststructuralist theory set out to dismantle with its critique of binary thought and the ascendance of white, male, elite, western consciousness. While transferring the responsibility for individual survival to the individual, away from the social, it weakened our responsibility, our response-ability, to each other and to the earth and our earth others. In this paper I tease my way, through stories, and through new materialist concepts, to a sense of self as emergent, as process rather than (id)entity, as response-able and responsible in the mattering of the world.

In this article, I explore a range of concepts that enable those of us who work with children to break free from some of those enunciative regularities that function to hold the way things are, in place. The term "enunciative regularities" comes from Foucault, who advocated breaking open words and propositions to find what work they do, what systems they perpetuate. The way we speak the world into existence, and the ways we interpret that mode of speaking, can be taken for granted, by us, as the unquestionable truth of the world and of ourselves. We are, in general, not very accomplished at turning our reflexive gaze on the words and propositions that we are enmeshed in, and thus are not readily able to break them open. Turning our critical gaze on those enunciative regularities is vital, I suggest, if we want to bring about change in the way we order the world—and the ways the world orders us. The work of philosophy, in developing new concepts, enables us to look and to listen differently, and to creatively evolve beyond some of our unquestioned enunciative entrapments. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Early childhood schoolbooks designed to teach children to read, have been shown not only to shape gendered identities in a limiting, binary format, but to lend the written word the appearance of unquestionable, and restrictive truth about the way the world is. Texts written for adults, too, may similarly limit what can be known, reining in the world's emergent efflorescence. Extending the concept of emergent listening, this paper develops the concept of emergent reading, a form of reading that is intimately and diffractively related to emergent listening and emergent writing. Emergent reading is relational, intra-acting with the emergent efflorescence of written words and with the materiality of the human and more-than-human world. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Drawing on memory stories told in a collective biography workshop about children's encounters with schooling, this paper experiments with re-imagining the child-student-subject as an 'emergent intracorporeal multiplicity' [Fritsch, K. 2015. "Desiring Disability Differently: Neoliberalism, Heterotopic Imagination and Intra-Corporeal Configurations." "Foucault Studies" 19: 43-66, 51]. From the feminist new materialist perspective that the authors work with, the child is configured not as an entity prior to, or separate from, encounters with education systems, but emergent with-in them. This paper focuses on difference in human relations, and in particular on the intersections of disability and gender. It does so not in terms of essential characteristics of individuals, but as emergent, in-the-moment, with others. In focussing on the detail of lives-in-their-making, the authors ask, with Barad [2007. "Meeting the Universe Halfway: Quantum Physics and the Entanglement of Matter and Meaning." Durham: Duke University Press], if we are interested in justice, how we are to 'understand our role in helping constitute who and what come to matter?'

The movement towards inclusion comes together with a neoliberal audit mentality whereby individuals are held responsible for the transformations. The Special Educational Needs Coordinators (SENCOs) are seen as 'change agents' whose task it is, to support teachers in adapting their approach to optimise the chances for children with special needs in regular schools. In this paper, we want to problematise the 'responsibility-blame discourse' and look differently at agency. By using a diffractive methodology based on collaborative work, in which we have used material images of the workplace of the SENCO, and read-the-data-while-thinking-with-theory, we deconstruct the individualisation of agency. The SENCOs are no longer seen as separate individual humanist subjects where agency is solely lodged in the body of an individual agent [Barad, K. 2007. "Meeting the Universe Halfway: Quantum Physics and the Entanglement of Matter and Meaning." Durham: Duke University Press] but the SENCOs are part of the intra-active entanglement of multiple agencies, of an assemblage. This re-conceptualisation of agency leads to a different approach to inclusion, in which the participants in any encounter can work as part of the assemblage to develop communities capable of re-thinking practice and transforming it into a place where children with special needs become legitimate members of the school.

This paper explores the relation between poststructuralist theorising and new materialism with a particular focus on the work of Barad. Tracing the lines of thought, particularly as they relate to ethics, through the works of Foucault, Butler, Cixous and Deleuze the paper finds a range of concepts that anticipate and link directly with Barad's work. Barad's emphasis on the agency of matter, and on how matter is made to matter, is found to be new. The different analytic work that can be done with these various philosophers is explored through three intra-active entanglements; first, among preschool children and a rock, second, between a girl and a chimp raised as her twin, and third, between humans and cows.