In this article for TIESA Educational Futures, I introduce New-Hermetic Materialism as a conceptual and ethical orientation for tracing how patterns move through educational spaces, relationships and practice.
In this article, published through Educational Futures, I explore how New-Hermetic Materialism emerged through my doctoral research in early childhood education. Drawing on feminist posthumanism, New Materialism and Hermetic philosophy, the paper considers how educational encounters take shape through relations between children, practitioners, materials, environments, histories and institutional expectations. Rather than treating classrooms as neutral backdrops, it asks what becomes visible when spaces and matter are understood as active participants in educational life.
Tracing Patterns and Possibilities for Change
New-Hermetic Materialism brings together entanglement, correspondence and transformation. It offers a way of noticing how familiar patterns endure and echo across contexts, from cultural narratives and practitioner biographies to classroom design and everyday interactions. These patterns are not presented as fixed or inevitable. Once recognised, they may become available for ethical reflection and reshaping.
The article also reframes reflexivity as more than an individual researcher looking inward. It invites researchers and practitioners to trace how their decisions are entangled with environments, histories, materials and wider institutional structures. In doing so, New-Hermetic Materialism offers a language for attending to complexity without separating people from the worlds through which they become.
The paper presents New-Hermetic Materialism as a situated and evolving proposition rather than a finished theory, opening space for further dialogue about how educational research might recognise patterns, remain accountable to entanglement and create possibilities for transformation.