Lace-making epistemology; becoming a bobbin to weave knowledge with gaps in response to the agency of chairs and doors

Abstract This article borrows from Ahmed’s ‘queer phenomenology’ together with postqualitative inquiry to reflect on how the agency of things frustrated and changed the researcher’s positionality in researching early childhood educators (ECEs). Making use of subversive feminist ideas arising from women’s textile work it is constructed as a piece of Honiton lace (bobbin lace) with the researcher as bobbin, crossing threads of thought and experience to follow an idea. This allows for reflection on the researcher’s inability to become an ‘insider’ with ECEs. Two threads that are crossed are that of the ‘visitor’s chair’ welcoming non-insiders, and the door code which gave limited insider status, both examples of Deleuze and Guattari’s notions of haecceity . The resultant gaps in knowledge based on being positioned as a researcher, not an insider, are another such haecceity, an assemblage of happenings that have resonance and produce affect. This assemblage of gaps is considered through lace-making epistemology, seeing the knowable as the threads making up the assemblage of gaps, of things that cannot be known or recorded. Such gaps might contribute to the way the work of ECEs, and the challenges of their work continue to be undervalued, with educators experiencing low pay and constraining conditions. Thinking of educational research as lace, with the gaps an intrinsic part of the weave, could point to a need for less rigid control over practice, in recognition that it is not possible for researchers or policy experts to see the conditions of educators’ work from the inside.