Listening through the Eyes of Children: An Entangled Mosaic approach to Gender Expression in the Early Years

Dudley, Kate (2026) Listening through the Eyes of Children: An Entangled Mosaic approach to Gender Expression in the Early Years. Doctoral thesis, Liverpool Hope University.

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Abstract

This thesis explores the vibrant and deeply entangled ways young children express gender within early years settings, challenging assumptions that gender is a fixed identity possessed by the child. Instead, it embraces gender as a dynamic process emerging through continuous intra-actions between children, practitioners, materials, and environments, shaped in-with-through the relational forces of the social, physical, and metaphysical world. Woven through a New-Hermetic Materialism framework, it threads the relational, interconnected view of Matter found in new materialism (Braidotti, 2019) with Hermetic understandings (Atkinson, 1908) that see all becoming, human, material, or cosmic, as deeply connected, each mirroring and influencing the other. Building on this foundation, the research adopts a mosaic listening approach (Clark & Moss, 2006), gathering data through practitioner interviews, observations, and creative child-led methods including photography and drawing. The resulting mosaic is read through three affect modulators (Snaza, 2020): reflective practice, early years resources, and enabling environments, tracing how gender expression unfolded across human and more-than-human entanglements.

The discoveries reveal the importance of diffractive praxis (Barad, 2007), where practitioners reflect on their own entanglements with gender, recognising how their intra-actions shape what becomes possible for children’s expressions. Simultaneously, the Thing-Power (Bennett, 2010) of classroom materials comes to life, evidencing that resources are not passive but actively shape children’s meaning-making and gender expression. The final discovery reveals that the physical spaces of the early years environment act as a powerful force (Drake, 2019), shaping how freely children move between expressions of masculinity and femininity, and influencing how identities are embraced, stretched, or subtly steered by everyday practices and expectations. Rather than offering a tidy conclusion, this thesis extends an invitation, through its entangled mosaic, to listen differently, dance in the cracks, and co-create early years spaces where every child’s becoming is met with care, curiosity, and freedom to express themselves through gender-flexible pedagogy (Warin, 2023).

Item Type:	Thesis (Doctoral)
Additional Information and Comments:	Copyright © The Author 2026. Original content in this thesis is licensed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial 4.0 International (CC BY-NC 4.0) Licence (https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc/4.0/). A copy can be downloaded for personal non-commercial research or study, without prior permission or charge. Any third-party copyright material present remains the property of its respective owner(s) and is licensed under its existing terms. Access may initially be restricted at the author’s request.
Faculty / Department:	Faculty of Education and Social Sciences > School of Education
Depositing User:	Matthew Adams
Date Deposited:	10 Jun 2026 14:05
Last Modified:	10 Jun 2026 14:05
URI:	https://hira.hope.ac.uk/id/eprint/4938

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