Listening through the Eyes of Children

My doctoral thesis titled: Listening through the Eyes of Children: An Entangled Mosaic approach to Gender Expresion in the Early Years explores how enabling environments in Early Years settings shape children’s gender expression. Grounded in posthumanist and new materialist thought, the study develops a distinctive theoretical orientation termed New-Hermetic Materialism to examine how space, Matter and relational histories participate in children’s becoming.

My thesis moves beyond binary accounts of gender and instead considers how identity emerges through entanglements between bodies, objects, practitioners, routines and spatial arrangements. Drawing on post-qualitative and diffractive methodologies, I examine how environments are not neutral backdrops but active participants in shaping what forms of expression become possible.

Attention is given to how indoor and outdoor spaces, material resources, practitioner expectations and institutional rhythms configure children’s experiences of gender. The research resists individualised explanations and instead situates gender expression within patterned relational fields.
Through this lens, enabling environments are understood as ethically charged and politically significant.

The thesis introduces New-Hermetic Materialism as an ontological and ethical orientation that extends new materialist accounts of entanglement through correspondence, pattern and transformation. Rather than separating the social from the material, this framework recognises their inseparability and explores how subtle shifts in environment can interrupt inherited patterns.

My doctoral research contributes to Early Childhood Studies, gender theory and post-qualitative methodology. It offers both conceptual innovation and practice-facing insight, inviting educators to consider how space, Matter and relational responsibility shape who children are able to become.

Read my thesis