Babies as Space Makers: Loitering with Babies in a (Post)pandemic World

Boycott-Garnett, Ruth (2025) Babies as Space Makers: Loitering with Babies in a (Post)pandemic World. Doctoral thesis (PhD), Manchester Metropolitan University.

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Abstract

In this thesis I experiment with story-making as a fresh approach to paying attention to babies’ ways of being. In doing so, I make certain elements of public space visible, queering everyday spatial practices. Drawing on feminist new materialist and other postfoundational theories, this research produces empirical work that draws attention to bodies, matter and space in the here and now allowing an ontological shift that honours babies’ non-representational material entanglements with everyday spaces. This orientation resists predetermined paradigms that place the future as ‘set in stone’ and allows a re-imagining of public space. The research took place between the Springs of 2020 and 2022 with 16 babies and their caregivers and emerged from interdisciplinary work between an art gallery and family support services. The research was built around my methodological stance of a ‘tentative ethnography’, which involved spending time with babies during the Covid-19 pandemic through virtual and physical play sessions. Then later, as the pandemic subsided, this ethnographic approach encompassed, evolved, and sat alongside experiences with my own baby as we navigated our changed local area. Inspired by babies’ more-than-verbal and non-representational modes of communication and ways of being, the thesis offers contributions to research in early childhood in two ways. The first contribution is story-making as a way to draw attention to the affective, social, mythical and geographical in babies’ everyday material engagements with their worlds. I re-consider methods and methodologies for researching with the very youngest children. The thesis illustrates how researching with babies, raises crucial questions of ethnography, particularly around participation, ethics and the role of the institution in knowledge-production and ownership. Building on existing representations of babies within research, I propose a speculative practice that accepts adult researchers’ unknowability of babies’ experiences. The second contribution is a shift in attention placed on babies’ everyday lives from private spaces, such as the home, and spaces specifically allocated for babies, such as the nursery, to public spaces, where babies are often made ‘out of place’ by material, social and political threads thrown together across public environments. Taking up the idea of the pandemic as a portal to reimagine new futures (Roy, 2020), I reconfigure public space through babies’ spatial entanglements. Attending to babies’ everyday encounters through story-making practices unsettles notions of speed, productivity and power that play into how space is created within and beyond the neoliberal city. Through a discussion of welcome, wandering and atmosphere I turn to theories of smooth and striated space to elaborate on the tensions and synergies that weave across space creation. This discussion foregrounds how public space is not only constructed through long term urban design and fixed architecture but also created through the everyday material entanglements of families, activists, artists, practitioners and communities. To conclude the thesis, I offer three provocations that consider what conditions are needed for a new type of public space that works with babies’ spatial entanglements and allows for movement, loitering and unpredictability.