Doing curious research to cultivate tentacular becomings

Abstract

Referring to Haraway’s concept of tentacularity, this article embarks on a curious research practice-inspired speculative journey to think with material tentacular becomings in an Australian kindergarten. Some of the questions that guided our curious research practice asked: How does curious practice as a postqualitative methodology enable us, as researchers, to cultivate a presence that creates the conditions for these research encounters and events to be perceived? What becomes possible for generative relational diverse learning with matter-energies if we accept that there is no rational explanation at hand? What worlds come into being if we speculate instead of rationalize? How do children animate, and are animated relationally, in particular worlds and not in others? How do we, as researchers, become entangled within children’s ways of perceiving and naming encounters? We experimented with Haraway’s notion of tentacularity as our navigational tool to map four entangled territories in this article.