This paper theorizes children’s interspecies relation with a classroom canine, utilizing post-humanism, post-structuralism, and new materialism as its methodology. Such an ontological approach has implications for methods with which to acquire new knowledge of this interspecies relationship. How do children communicate their feelings about such a relationship? 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, bringing the virtual and actual together to illuminate new, ‘situated knowledge’. This is explicated and revealed using visual methods with ‘data’ produced by the children and their classroom dog such as photographs and video footage from a GoPro micro camera. In addition, individual drawings, artefacts and paintings completed by the children allow for the animating of Deleuze’s concepts of the rhizome (through pendulum and bubble painting), a BWO (Body-without-Organs) and The Fold (through storyboards); alongside Barad’s materialist onto-epistemology, I theorize the children as being vitalistic and vectors of entanglements (forces of inter-connected energies and intensities) through a child-dog encounter.
Through their intra-action, both child and dog exercise agency, co-produce 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 participant observation and the ‘researcher’s body’ as a tool, the sketching's used “etudes” (drawing exercises) draw forth this embodied experience to reveal multiple lines and entanglements, mapping connections and relations. These connective assemblages afford and enhance social bonding and communication between the children, thereby enhancing wellbeing and resilience.
In seeking to valorise the presence and nomadic explorations of classroom canine ‘Dave’ the concept of childhood wellbeing is provocatively considered to detail all kinds of ‘becoming’ through a Deleuzian-Causey inspired ethnography. Through close attention to children moving through the classroom and spatiality, Ingold’s anthropology of lines complements careful observations, which deconstruct and disrupt assumptions of universalising theory i.e. attaching relationships, to show the multiple ways “desires” can break open alternative pathways to child development within social fields and material culture.