This paper is based on an ongoing empirical journey into the materiality of children's everyday life environments. The theoretical framework relies on post-humanism relational/new materialism as influenced by Deleuze and Guattari. An inherently rewarding practice, often undertaken by children as if by default -the carrying of stones -is discussed as blurring the unfortunate and artificially produced nature-culture divide.
Aim/Purpose: The primary aim of this study was to better understand the individual variations in supervisory and researcher community support among doctoral students by analyzing the social support profiles of Finnish doctoral students. The differences among the profiles, in terms of satisfaction with supervision, experienced burnout, time to candidacy and disciplinary background were also examined.
Background: This study explores social support profiles and their association with the experienced burnout, satisfaction with supervision, drop-out intentions, disciplinary background, and form of dissertation among doctoral students by employing a person-oriented approach.
Methodology: In total, 402 doctoral students from a Finnish university completed a Doctoral Experience survey. Latent Profile Analysis (LPA) was used to group doctoral students according to social support from supervisors and the researcher community.
Contribution: The present study is among the first quantitative studies to explore doctoral student social support profiles and their association with burnout, drop-out intentions, and time to candidacy. It brings into focus the importance of supervisory and researcher community support as one of the most crucial assets of doctoral education in researcher communities.
Findings: Two social support profiles, a) sufficient support from supervisor and researched community, and b) insufficient support from both of these, were identified. Further investigation suggested that the doctoral students who received sufficient support were less likely to suffer from burnout and were less likely to develop drop-out intentions than students who received insufficient support from their supervisor and the researcher community.
Recommendations for Practitioners: A recommendation deriving from this research is to identify students at risk as early as possible and assist them with sufficient support.
Child-matter relations are often approached teleologically: as serving a distinct purpose often related to socialization and/or development as maturation. Unless these approaches are diversified, children's relations to their material surroundings are reduced to instrumental activity the significance of which is predetermined and known by adults. This article is based on a study with 12 Finnish children of ages four to seven, exemplifying a new materialist and posthumanist approach to child-matter relations as intra-active. Children's engagement with 'things' is considered intrinsically relevant: as an end in itself. The questions asked are: How do children and their material surroundings intra-act? What is produced in this intra-action? Two characteristics of child-matter intra-action are identified as mingling and imitating. What the intra-action is seen to produce are spaces of open-ended and de-individualized knowing and being.
This paper makes a case for a view of young children's meaning-making in which human actants are not separate from, but deeply entwined in, a more-than-human world. In order to interrogate the more-than-human processes through which multimodal meaning-making emerges, we focus on meaning-making through running and rolling that we have observed in early childhood settings in Finland and the UK. In doing so, we rethink the process of bringing-into-relation that underpin multimodal literacy practices. Ingold's notion of correspondence is offered as a generative way to conceptualize the interplay between human and nonhuman elements as they 'make themselves intelligible to each other' (p.97). We show how posthuman theory offers the possibility for reconceptualising emergence and intentionality, within young children's meaning-making.
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