Two dialogical theorisations of children’s encounters in more-than-human worlds involving metaphor

Abstract

This article generates two dialogical theorisations of young children’s encounters in more-than-human worlds involving metaphor. The first theorisation devises metaphor as an entry point into the dialogues of more-than-humans and includes rare attention to metaphors as multimodal intra-action. The second theorisation provides an alternative to Linell’s view that relation with non-humans would be merely a metaphorical extension of dialogue, ‘as if’ they were human. Instead, a new model recognises the potential for dialogue as a relational engagement with otherness in a more-than-human-centric approach. The theorisations underpin interpretations of a range of early childhood play episodes with protagonists: sand, paper, tissue and plastic. The materials are beyond any assumed instrumental interaction waiting to be acted upon by humans; rather, they can be in social and material worlds, meeting places, of more-than-humans intra-acting. Penny Lawrence has proposed attending to the quality of relation in dialogues. The significance of these theorisations is for more-than-human study of any encounter to take account of the potential for dialogue, and for studies of dialogue to take account of the more-than-human. In particular, the processes of blending in multimodal metaphorical co-constitutive processes offer notable insights into intra-actions within more-than-human dialogues.