Bodies of Difference: Amplifying young children's nonlingual ways of being through speculative methodologies and experiments in movement

Churchill Dower, Ruth (2025) Bodies of Difference: Amplifying young children's nonlingual ways of being through speculative methodologies and experiments in movement. Doctoral thesis (PhD), Manchester Metropolitan University.

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Abstract

For some nonlingual young children, for whom speaking is only possible within familiar environments, their bodyminds take on the mantle of a non-speaking identity, that is, an identity conferred on them by a society that values words above all else as a marker of knowledge and being in the world. Language, as a measure of normativity, seems to dominate ecologies of early childhood practice and ways of relating. This is especially true of the education and health domains which promote language as an autonomous mode of expression, as if words exist on their own without recourse to the myriad nonlingual expressions that happen within and across human-nonhuman bodies. As a result, nonlingual ways of being are often considered ‘abnormal’, or ‘lacking’ the qualities of the ‘ideal’ human and, therefore, ‘in need’ of rescue. A growing body of sensory and sensing practices in the arts and early childhood domains, specifically within movement (e.g. Olsson, 2009), craft (e.g. Kind, 2020), art (e.g. Kind, 2023a; Trafí-Prats & Schulte, 2022), photography (e.g. Hultman & Lenz Taguchi, 2010) and film (e.g. MacRae, 2019a; Trafí-Prats & Caton, 2020) are helping to reconfigure these reductive narratives and open possibilities for valuing otherwise expressions. These practices are founded in posthuman, feminist new materialist theories that foreground relations across human-nonhuman matter using speculative approaches to attune to what becomes possible through divergent relations. Thinkingwith this scholarship and diffracting it through Barad’s (2014) agential realism, Haraway’s (2016) oddkin relations and Manning’s (2020a) concept of bodying, this research focusses on what nonlingual ways of being make possible and how attuning to their vital forces and flows might allow a different kind of listening to their divergent expressions. In this thesis, I argue that nonlingual expressions can be mobilised generatively through movement; that movement is of the world, existing in more-than-bodies as they relate; and that nonlingual ways of being matter. Putting synaesthetic sensing practices to work, I attend to nonlingual bodyings as part of a rich web of more-than-human connections and possibilities that nourish, compel, disrupt and reframe different ways of being and knowing. Using speculative methods of research-creation, including contact improvisation, ZoomTM, GoProTM video and Electrodermal Activity (EDA) bio-sensors, I explore how gestural, haptic, synaesthetic and affective knowledges might foreground different ways of knowing within an ethics of care. In doing so, this research seeks to reconceptualise alternative, transdisciplinary narratives, challenge pathologised tropes and generate new, care-full ecologies of practice around nonlingual ways of being. Keywords: agential realism, diffraction, ethico-onto-epistemology, movement improvisation, nonlingual bodying, speculative fabulation, transcorporeality, young children