(Thanks to Tim Mossholder for the photo)
Written for CREC (Children for Research in Early Childhood) in December 2024, this academic blog introduces the concept of Mosaic Listening as part of my conference work on ethical entanglement in Early Years research. The piece was written ahead of a paper presentation at the BECRA (British Educational Research Association) conference. It reflects on how listening in research is never neutral but shaped by relationships, histories and material conditions.
Written for CREC (Children for Research in Early Childhood) in December 2024, this academic blog introduces the concept of Mosaic Listening as part of my conference work on ethical entanglement in Early Years research. The piece was written ahead of a paper presentation at the BECRA (British Educational Research Association) conference. It reflects on how listening in research is never neutral but shaped by relationships, histories and material conditions.
Ethical Entanglement in Research Practice
Drawing on post-qualitative and diffractive approaches, I call on a New-Hermetic Materialism approach to exploring how researchers do not simply gather children’s voices but become entangled within the research encounter. Mosaic Listening extends traditional participatory methods by attending not only to what is said, but to atmosphere, gesture, silence and the relational spaces in between.
The blog invites readers to consider listening as an ethical act. Rather than extracting meaning, the researcher remains responsive to how knowledge is co-produced across bodies, materials and environments. Diffractive practice, inspired by Karen Barad’s work, becomes a methodological orientation that reads insights through one another rather than against fixed categories.
Through accessible reflection, the article demonstrates how research with children requires attentiveness to complexity without collapsing it into simplification. Ethical entanglement is framed not as a problem to eliminate but as a condition to acknowledge and work within responsibly.
This blog contributes to conversations in Early Years research, post-qualitative inquiry and participatory methodology. It offers practitioners and researchers a way of thinking about listening that honours relational depth and resists the temptation to treat children’s contributions as isolated data points.