Sanctuary in the Spill: Milk, Melon, Mess and the Micropolitics of Touch

Reconfiguring Touch in Early Childhood Spaces

Abstract

This paper explores the entanglements of touch, materiality, and affect within early childhood education and care (ECEC), focusing on the baby-room as a site of intra-action between human, non-human, and more-than-human bodies. Drawing on feminist new materialist and post-qualitative inquiry (Barad, 2007; MacLure, 2013), I trace how milk, melon, plastic cups, practitioner gestures, and infant bodies co-constitute learning encounters that challenge traditional developmentalist and anthropocentric understandings of early childhood.

Using diffractive analysis (Barad, 2014), the study examines snack-time rituals in US and UK-based ECEC centers, engaging with how routines structure and constrain infant agency while also opening potentialities for embodied learning. The paper presents a sensory ethnographic account of an infant named Ralph, whose tactile exploration of milk and melon disrupts the normative order of structured mealtimes. Ralph’s acts of tipping, spilling, and smearing milk across the table enact a form of meaning-making that practitioners initially resist—wiping away the ‘mess’ to reassert control. However, through their entanglement with my presence as researcher, practitioners begin to question their own pedagogical practices.

By unsettling the binaries of order/disorder, care/control, and learning/play, the paper advocates for a rethinking of early childhood practice that embraces uncertainty, wonder, and the vibrancy of matter (Bennett, 2010). It argues that recognizing the agency of materials and the affective flows between bodies can foster a more attuned, responsive pedagogy—one that moves beyond disciplinary governance towards a pedagogy of ‘being-with’ (Pacini-Ketchabaw, Taylor, & Blaise, 2016). In attending to the micropolitics of touch—be it the placement of infants on rugs, the containment of bodies at tables, or the policing of milk-play—the study reveals how ECEC spaces function as sites of both constraint and potential liberation.

Through a diffractive reading of ethnographic data, this paper calls for an attunement to the more-than-human forces at play in ECEC settings. It proposes that hope and sanctuary emerge not from rigid structures, but from an openness to the unpredictable, messy, and relational nature of touch. By shifting from a logic of correction to a logic of response-ability (Haraway, 2016), educators can cultivate spaces where infants are not merely socialized into norms but are recognized as active participants in the co-constitution of knowledge and care.

This paper contributes to critical childhood studies by demonstrating how posthumanist perspectives can reconfigure our understandings of touch, materiality, and pedagogy in ECEC. In doing so, it invites early childhood educators to rethink how the everyday encounters of milk, melon, and mess might offer new possibilities for fostering hope and making sanctuary in early childhood spaces.