Nicole Land

Speaking of the uncertain work of returning to pedagogical inquiry work, we asked in our last blog – posted almost one year ago – questions of how to pick pedagogical inquiry research back up from within the mess of the COVID pandemic, where however we make choices to proceed, these choices implicate us in viral worlds; worlds that either yearn for a return to the status quo, spaces that refuse a reiteration of what was and seek the otherwise, or moments that sit in the muck between then and now, between what was and what might happen. We asked: what might we do with the stories, histories, experiments, speculations, reflections, and moments that animated our pre-pandemic work in the face of COVID? And more importantly – how? How do we pay attention to the concepts COVID riddles, where the act of returning is one of answering and care? How do we tune to and move with ethics and politics differently, in dialogue with the enduring traces COVID continues to etch on (our, other, children’s, more-than-human) bodies?

We return now with a ‘new’ (as in unfamiliar, as in grounded in these times here and now – not new as in never engaged before, nor new in the sense that it is made of purely inventive energy) project that we are calling Crafting Pedagogies with(in) Suspension: Viral Pedagogies in COVID times in Early Childhood Education. We will continue to blog about this project here, with Moving Pedagogies, because we want to build an active archive of all the iterations of our work together. All of our work particular to the Viral Pedagogies project will be categorized as such, should a reader want to focus more on this work than Moving Pedagogies, although we will take no pains to separate the two projects that share a bloodline, that have bodies and spaces and worlds in common.