Liminal relationalities: on collaborative writing with/in and against race in the study of early childhood

Collaborative writing is well established in the humanities, but with little focus on how the writing relationship comes into being, including the power and relational dynamics at play. This is especially pertinent both when Black and “white” (sic) authors collaborate in writing about race, and in the process of writing collaborative autoethnographies. In this article the authors narrate, or rather “enact”, the movements of their coming together in order to write about race in the context of early learning and childcare. Linking their collaboration to the Deleuzian theory of becoming and Bakhtin’s dialogic imagination, they present a manifesto for anti-racist inquiry which decentres colonial tropes of individuation in favour of ‘staying with the trouble’ of identity and race. Throughout, they connect the inception of their research relationship to the politics of childhood and early years education in Scotland today.