What do posthuman and feminist materialist theories offer researchers transgressing in-between theory/practice spaces in early childhood education?

Young children’s playful learning is associated with a resource and material rich learning environment, organised to encourage learning through child agency and sociability. The creative and respectful exploration of materiality and aesthetics has a rich history in practices such as Reggio Emilia in Northern Italy (Boucher, 2019), but posthuman and feminist materialist theories enable pedagogical practice to attend to the performativity of matter as a material-discursive phenomena (Lenz Taguchi, 2010). Such theories can illuminate new ways of seeing bodies-in-relation according to Taylor (2021) yet putting them to work is recognised as complex in practice (Lenz Taguchi and Eriksson, 2021). In our paper we draw from our recent enquiries to share how theoretical frames have broadened our gaze but troubled our thinking as researchers about how posthuman theory and play discourses intersect (Albin-Clark, 2021; Cranham, et al. 2022). From this vantage point we ponder what opportunities and tensions are illuminated when we transgress in-between theory and practice.