Abstract
This chapter reflects on a study with babies aged six to eighteen months old and undergraduate early childhood studies students in the UK. The study explored the intra-active relationships between bodies, places, and spaces centring on touch as a way to re-figure care through the prism of Feminist New Materialist theory. The chapter engages with the tensions and prickliness of touch when narratives from the study are juxtaposed with UK early childhood policies. By reconceptualizing the intricacies and relational activities, assemblages and commotions, micro-politics, and intimate events of human, nonhuman, and more-than-human touching, the chapter aims to dislocate and open up what might touch do in early childhood settings, even when it is considered “out-of-place.” Overall, this chapter contributes to rethinking ways in which materiality and affect are entangled with questions of touch and care (Barad, Differences, 23(3), 206–223, 2012), opening a more nuanced understanding of an ecology of care within early childhood spaces and places.