ABSTRACT
This chapter is an attempt to portray a way of engaging in pedagogical scholarship and practice in early childhood education settings without theorising or through systematic conceptualisation. It will take as a point of departure posthumanist movements in early childhood education research that emphasise materiality, relationality, and embodiment, in life. Looking particularly at Karin Murris’s book The Posthuman Child I will demonstrate the limitations of those concepts when put in a theoretical frame. By reading Tove Jansson’s The Book about Moomin, Mymble and Little My I will portray (not show or demonstrate) an alternative to posthumanist theorising by letting a focus on body, matter, relation, and life, emerge in a narrative about reading. That portrayal is also meant to exemplify how literature and art can be part of the education of the early childhood pedagogue as much as other forms of research.
