Walking in rhythm with Deleuze and a dog inside the classroom: an ethnographic emsemble

Carlyle, Donna (2021) Walking in rhythm with Deleuze and a dog inside the classroom: an ethnographic emsemble. Doctoral thesis, Northumbria University.

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Abstract

This thesis-assemblage with plateau places and peaks describes children’s interspecies relation with a classroom canine, a 3-year-old Springer Spaniel in a north of England primary school, (Year 6- 9-10-year olds and Year 4- 7-8-year olds, boys and girls; 60 children in total). The class teachers’ experience of having a canine in class with them is also included. It utilises posthumanism, post structuralism and new materialism perspectives as its research paradigm in synergy with a non-representational, visual-material methodology. Once feelings are cognitised or articulated, their true essence can be lost. Therefore, elucidating moment-to-moment child–dog interactions through the lens of affect theory attempts to materialise the invisible, embodied, ‘unthought’ and non-conscious experience. Through consideration of Deleuzian concepts such as the ‘rhizome’ and ‘Body-Without-Organs’ being enacted it illuminates new, ‘situated knowledge’. This is explicated and revealed using visual methods with ‘data’ produced by both the children and their classroom dog. Photographs and video footage were taken from a GoPro micro camera mounted on the dog’s harness and on the children’s wrists, (‘wrist cam’). In addition, individual drawings, artefacts and paintings completed by the children are profound points in the research process, which are referred to as ‘planomenons’. These then become emergent as a children’s comic book where their relationship with ‘Ted’, their classroom dog, is materialised. Through their interspecies relationship both child and dog exercise agency, co- constitute and transform one another and occupy a space of shared relations and multiple subjectivities. The affectual capacities of both child and dog also co-create an affective atmosphere and emotional spaces. Through ethnographic, participant observation and the ‘researcher’s body’ as a tool, they visually create illustrations through the sketching of ‘etudes’ (drawing exercises) to draw forth this embodied experience to reveal multiple lines and entanglements, mapping a landscape of interconnections and relations. This culminates in a sense of Ted as a ‘petagogy’ and ‘pedadog’, affording the children spaces and places for wellbeing, tactile sensibility, and learning.

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