Paper Short Abstract:

Our contribution focuses on the new materialist Common Worlds approach who is just establishing himself in the Social Studies of Childhood. Drawing on aspects of various ethnographic approaches and an empirical example we present challenges and potentials that might inspire anthropology.

Paper Abstract:

The paradigms of childhood studies are subject to change. Transformed are the ways in which children are thought about, but also the status of more-than-humans and materiality in theory and empiricism. Such a shift has been initiated with the establishment of new materialist positions and their adaptation in childhood research (Murris 2016). In some respects, this shift coincides with perspectives of the New Social Studies of Childhood (NSSC). However, a new materialist perspective also arises in distinctions from NSSC (Balzer & Huf 2019) in that the subject is understood as ‘being/becoming-with’ multi-species entanglements. The subject thus is de-centralised while more-than-humans/materiality are revalorised. Notions of multi-species-world-making go hand in hand with an un-writing or rather re-writing of childhood and altered research practices: a new materialist-ethnography (Schadler 2025). The endeavour to de-centralise human subjects in an inevitably human ethnographic practice, to include more-than-humans as well as materiality, and to place relations at the centre is seen as both a challenge (Pacini-Ketchabaw et al. 2016) and an opportunity.

Our contribution is dedicated to the challenges and potentials of an ethnographic research practice that is theoretically grounded in the new materialist Common Worlds approach (Taylor 2013). Using an empirical example from the ethnographic project ‘Negotiating naturechildhoods. A common worlds ethnography in Swiss Kindergartens’ and with reference to considerations from multisensory and multi-species ethnographic debates, we highlight the challenges and potentials arising for ethnographic writing outlined in this way, and asking whether and how this can inform anthropology in its search for new approaches.