Conference Program

We write within a geopolitical moment characterized by resurgent authoritarianisms, extractive capitalism, ecological precarity, and forms of disaster nationalism that mobilize crisis to consolidate power (Seymour, 2024). These formations reorganize life through overt political regimes and infrastructures that standardize and dominate in the name of protection and stability. Early childhood education (ECE) is one of the first institutional sites where such logics are introduced and rehearsed. In response, we propose three minor infrastructures—archive, mycelium, and cordage—as ethical conditions for shared world-making in ECE.

While Manning (2016) theorizes the minor gesture as a virtual and processual force, we extend the minor into the domain of infrastructure, rethinking it beyond state-led “major” systems tied to territorial consolidation, developmental logics, and social standardization. This reorientation brings into focus subtle and often overlooked networks of solidarity that sustain life in humble yet transformative ways. Following Murphy (2013), infrastructures are understood as constellations of relations that draw human and more-than-human worlds together into “patterned conjectures” (p. 10), distributing capacities for action, obligation, and care. In contrast to major infrastructures, minor infrastructures cultivate conditions that hold space for the unruly, emergent, and affective (Deleuze & Guattari, 1987).

The archive, drawing on Povinelli (2011), is approached as both a site of memory and an ongoing process of world-making. Beyond institutional repositories, the archive becomes a living pedagogical practice that transmits histories of struggle and survival and delineates the contours of collective imagination. As a minor infrastructure, it unsettles nationalist mythologies and re-situates children within contested histories, opening ethical relation as a “continual variation on experience” (Manning, 2016).

The mycelial figure names subterranean infrastructures of exchange, entanglement, and decomposition. Thinking with fungal networks interrupts ethical frameworks that privilege coherence, scalability, and control by attending to the infrastructures through which ideas become perceptible, knowable, and actionable. Following Yusoff’s (2013) account of the “politics of sense,” this infrastructure invites ethical relations that remain contingent and accountable to the more-than-human worlds children already inhabit.

Finally, cordage materializes solidarity as a doing: a process of twisting and binding. Cordage names the slow, repetitive, collective labour through which fragile strands become tensile structures. Drawing on Hunt-Hendrix and Taylor’s (2024) account of solidarity as a world-changing practice that must continually be built and rebuilt, cordage foregrounds how collective capacity emerges through tension, care, and repetition in ECE. Such practices cultivate forms of shared endurance that exceed individualized models of responsibility.

In the larger paper, we develop archive, mycelium, and cordage as minor infrastructures that reframe ethics as an infrastructural practice grounded in the relational labour through which shared worlds are sustained and remade (Benjamin, 2024; Berlant, 2016; Maynard & Simpson, 2022). Given the constraints of a conference presentation, this talk focuses on the archive, tracing how living pedagogical practices of memory and story in ECE participate in making world-sustaining—or world-ending—ethical relations at the intersection of the pedagogical and the political.