International Journal of Early Years Education

Sound as a Phenomenon and a Force in Early Childhood

Context and Rationale for the Special Issue 

Sound studies is a generative interdisciplinary area of inquiry, where sound is understood as an artistic companion, an intra-active, affective and expressive force, one with the “capacity to traverse the boundaries of the material” (Doughty & Drozdzewski, 2022, p. 1). Sound calls us into relation and invites wandering-with the complexities of places, ecologies, materials, technologies, the more-than-human world, bodies, and more (Gallagher, 2016; Gershon & Applebaum, 2019; Springay & Truman, 2018; Wheatley & Clements, 2022). This special issue seeks to build on a small but growing body of research on the intersections of sound as a phenomenon in early childhood education (Gallagher et al., 2019; Powell & Somerville, 2020). While much of the existing research focuses on sound-as-literacies, we wonder how emergent research might attune to the sounds of early childhood as always-already political, in dialogue with the complexities of children’s common worlds (Merewether et al., 2022) and gesturing towards what Salomé Voegelin (2021) names sonic possible worlds.

The Aim and Scope of the Special Issue  

This special issue explores the entanglements of childhoods and sound as companion forces, where children make, are made by, respond to, and are in relation with sound as a speculative, agentic and affective presence. We invite submissions from activists, artists, educators, and scholars whose work focuses on sound as a co-agentic phenomenon and/or socio-ecological force in early childhood education. In keeping with our ethical commitments to children and sound, we are particularly interested in contributions that conceptualize young people and the sonic as complex, emergent, and not entirely knowable or discoverable. Within this wealth of possibilities, we are interested in how theories and methodologies frame contributors’ processes, their attentions and intentions, as well as chosen modalities of expression. To these ends, this special issue welcomes a variety of formats, including, but not limited to, articles from research, audio essays, pedagogical documentation, performative research documentation, and literature reviews.