ABSTRACT
This chapter examines the posthuman condition of ethics in early childhood literacy in order to challenge reductionist views of the nonhuman. Examples from early childhood settings in New Zealand demonstrate the use of strategies of recognition and representation which fix the nonhuman into (designated) place, restricting its potential contribution to children’s emerging literacy practices. The author puts to work a posthumanist ontological theory which emphasises the interaction between heterogeneous, human and nonhuman, elements and bodies within self-organising assemblages and posits the free association of human and nonhuman elements as the basis of an ethical production of form.
