In this final section, I critically reflect on the work, tracing the challenges, tensions, and insights that emerged from my methodological and theoretical choices. I then conclude with broader reflections that bring together the key insights of this study.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
Artistic research offers an opportunity to research artistic practices from within them. This approach highlights the methodological plurality, experimentation, and singularity of each study. As such, artistic research does not offer pre-set methodological frameworks to follow in the process (Gröndahl 2023<\/a>). The approach opens up possibilities but is also highly demanding. I have experienced joy in the freedom in my process of exploratory learning through iterative engagements, and the possibility of navigating the research first and foremost through my embodied experiences and reflections, without the need to adhere to step-by-step guidelines. As a result, the research process has come to resemble dance improvisation rather than pre-planned choreography. However, this improvisatory orientation has made the process unexpectedly time-consuming and challenging to navigate, as there has been a tension between making progress and finding ways to enable it. On the other hand, this approach has developed into an in-depth and long-term research process, allowing me to undergo a significant transformation as a dancer–pedagogue–researcher.<\/p>\n\n\n\n My inability to complete the doctoral process within a conventional timeframe has gradually become an acceptance of slowness (Millei and Rautio 2017<\/a>) as a methodological strength. Throughout this project, I engaged with numerous meaningful encounters and agencies, far more than could be included in this commentary. I have chosen to focus on those entanglements that are most significant in shaping pedagogical realities and processes of knowledge creation (Jusslin and Østern 2020<\/a>). I do not claim that the project achieved complete ethical coherence. Rather, I understand ethicality as a continual and evolving practice, which is dynamic, situated, and always in the process of becoming (Myers 2019<\/a>). My guiding principle has been to act with care and response-ability, engaging in the research process with attentiveness and a genuine commitment to fairness—even in moments when no ideal options were available, only the imperative to choose the least harmful path.<\/p>\n\n\n\n My approach to the concept of knowledge, emphasising embodied aspects, has guided me to foreground embodied aspects of knowing. This view led me to choose not to conduct interviews with my participants, which would have given readers more direct access to their voices. As a result, readers access the research mainly through my interpretations, creating an indirect, inevitably partial pathway to new insights and knowledge. However, such partiality is a recognised stance within both posthuman theories and postqualitative inquiry (e.g., Diaz-Diaz and Semenec 2020<\/a>; Koro-Ljungberg 2015<\/a>), thereby justifying this approach.<\/p>\n\n\n\n What I find most powerful in an artistic research methodology is its openness to developing context-responsive methods, shaped by the study’s specific aims and circumstances, which can produce context-specific methods and deep knowledge. Through this process, new and valuable approaches have emerged—such as Hunting-Gathering with Embodied Listening and the Storyboard Method—which move fluidly between research and practice, expanding the ways knowledge can be generated in this field.<\/p>\n\n\n\n At the outset of this study, I recognised the need to conceptualise interaction in dance improvisation within a broader, more inclusive framework. The intra-active approach initially appeared to offer a fruitful theoretical lens. However, the intra-active theoretical framework, situated within a wider posthuman and new materialist paradigm, required a far more profound shift than the lens metaphor suggests. As I discussed in the first section of this thesis, relational ontologies entail a deep philosophical reorientation. Thus, I have come to describe this as an orientation rather than an alternative lens. Relational ontology and posthuman theories provide a rich and complex terrain for reconceptualising educational thought and practice. For me, engaging with these theoretical concepts has often felt like inhabiting a child-like state of not quite ‘getting it’ or of not yet fully understanding the thinking.<\/p>\n\n\n\n Intra-active theory has enabled a valuable transformation in my thinking, but it has also generated several points of tension and friction. I have had to learn to accept that, at some points, I can only make a partial shift towards this theoretical framework in my practical dance pedagogical and research work. For instance, the posthuman idea of decentring the child\/human appeared neither possible nor feasible from the outset of my project. Yet this seemingly impossible task guided my thinking towards what I was actually searching for, showing me a way to articulate that I am enacting a movement of making space rather than simply decentring.<\/p>\n\n\n\n Furthermore, the concept of agency, and its entanglement with power relations and educational hierarchies, has posed another persistent challenge that I have had to re-turn iteratively. Sharing agency with children in collaboration has felt inherently right, yet finding generative and supportive modes for this collaboration proved demanding, especially during the ECEC fieldwork. I often felt that the situation called for a more authoritative intervention rather than listening, accepting multiple approaches, and continually offering options and alternatives.<\/p>\n\n\n\n At the same time, I recognised that authoritative practices would not lead me to unknown territories of dance pedagogy and could ultimately harm my research. My goal was to foster reciprocal respect and maintain it within our sessions. The idea of shared agency made it difficult to identify who ‘had’ agency at any given moment or through which actions it was exercised. I began to see it as more important to observe what happens than to determine why it happens. This shift in focus not only improved my understanding of agency but also influenced other aspects of my work.<\/p>\n\n\n\n Rethinking research paradigms by embracing postqualitative and artistic approaches grounded in ethico-onto-epistemological perspectives has revealed the ethical complexities involved in conducting research with children. This shift foregrounds relational ethics and entails an understanding of ethics not solely as matters of consent, but as processes of attunement, response-ability, and intra-active co-emergence. It also invites a reconsideration of who or what counts as a participant and how young children, along with more\/other-than-human agencies, can be recognised as co-constitutive in the ongoing production of knowledge. Within this view, children are not positioned as objects of study. Relational ontologies challenge the image of the child as an individual, developing subject and instead recognise children as relational, affective, and creative agents whose ways of knowing unfold through intercorporeal encounters (Murris 2016<\/a>).<\/p>\n\n\n\n In this research, knowledge production and dance education are understood as situated within specific temporal, spatial, and social contexts (Haraway 2016<\/a>). The study was shaped by my positionality—my personal and professional background, the influence of my research community and supervisors, institutional structures, and the agency of various more\/other-than-human actors encountered throughout the process. Through my entanglement with these agents, I have participated in co-constituting both the methodologies and the narratives that emerged in this study. My work has continually been shaped by shifting assemblages of human and more\/other-than-human influences, as well as by moments of crisis that re\/de\/constructed and transformed my research trajectory.<\/p>\n\n\n\n Engaging in early childhood dance educational research through new materialist and posthumanist theories demanded the translation of abstract philosophical ideas into embodied dance-pedagogical practices. These theoretical frameworks exposed my own blind spots, challenging binary thought and inviting more fluid, processual understandings of teaching and research (Rautio and Winston 2015<\/a>). While my actions did not always fully align with these theoretical perspectives and at times reverted to familiar humanist patterns, I regard such moments not as failures but as sites of critical learning and as spaces where new intra-actions can emerge between the old and the new in my thinking. The difficulty of moving beyond anthropocentric thinking, as also noted by Rautio (2014<\/a>), remained a persistent tension. Yet embodied engagement through dance practices, and extending this expertise to other areas of encounter, opened pathways for knowing through bodily being. These experiences facilitated ways of perceiving beyond the exclusively human, whereby nonverbal forms of being-with created space for dwelling in a state of not-yet-knowing and for suspending the impulse to resolve situations through linear reasoning.<\/em><\/p>\n\n\n\n Drawing on my earlier work with children, I recognised that conventional, language-based interviews often fail to capture the richness of children’s experiences. This observation prompted reflection on how children’s voices can be represented when verbal methods are insufficient. Since my research centres on pedagogical processes that exceed the individual, I positioned myself as part of the research assemblage—acknowledging my bodily and affective participation in the intra-active formation of knowledge. My writing thus aims to articulate reflections informed by collective, situated experiences rather than isolated accounts.<\/p>\n\n\n\n6.4.2 Theoretical Considerations<\/h2>\n\n\n\n
6.4.3 Ethical Aspects<\/h2>\n\n\n\n