Part of Canadian Society for the Study of Education/Société canadienne pour l’étude de l’éducation
2025 PRE-CONFERENCE
WHAT CAN
A QUESTION
DO?
2025 pre-conference
In May 2025, we invited a small group of early childhood researchers into a collective experiment as part of the 2025 Canadian Association for Research in Early Childhood (CAREC) Pre-Conference which, in the spirit of CAREC’s ongoing labour toward inciting and sustaining radicalizing dialogue in early childhood research in Canada, focused on the collective study of questions.
“We offer this invitation as a small, imperfect move in attempting to destabilize the familiarity of questions in early childhood research in Canada. This move – away from a question already asked or understood, toward a question in-the-making – happens in explicit response to colonial politics of recognition that continue to legitimize particular questions over others and restrict conditions for dialogue in our field”
Nancy van Groll, Alex Berry, and Tatiana Zakharova-Goodman On behalf of the CAREC Pre-Conference Committee
In the spirit of rethinking and remaking the questions that guide our research in early childhood, together we insisted on the possibility of dialogue by returning to Dr. Erin Manning’s inaugurating event from the 2024 Pre-Conference and the tentative openings this event proposed for transforming the culture of early childhood research in Canada.
Each participant was mailed: a quote from Dr. Manning’s 2024 inaugurating event, a thread of yarn, and a ‘2 minute’ prompt card. Each was invited to meet these materials alongside the following questions:
How might you re-encounter your research question(s)?
How can a question be made?
WHAT CAN A QUESTION DO?
Each video runs alongside excerpts from Erin Manning’s “What Can a Body Do?” (The Funambulist Podcast, January 20, 2014).
You will note that each of the visual responses offered is precisely 2-minutes long. This move was inspired by Dr. Astrida Neimanis’ reading group practice as a feminist proposition for creating space, whereby 2 minutes of time is held for each response.
"You may respond with a precise 2 minute piece, or with a longer or shorter response – in the case of the former, your piece will be cut (post-production) after 2 minutes; in the case of the latter, the last “still” will remain on screen – in pause – for the remainder of your 2 minutes. Put another way, whether your visual/audio response exceeds or falls short of the given time, 2 minutes of space will be held".