Towards Toddlerhood is an AHRC funded, newly established network that will hold six workshops across South Yorkshire, Manchester and North London, bringing together:
1) arts practice
2) interdisciplinary research from humanities and social science and
3) the voices of children, families and practitioners.
The aim is;
to ignite new conversations between arts practice, academics and practitioners working with toddlers, interrogating why and how development can exclude and marginalise.
The project will inform practice and policy by making visible alternative approaches for supporting families and communities, within for example, education, health, and community engagement.
Who we are
Abi Hackett is a Professor of Childhood and Education at the Sheffield Institute of Education, Sheffield Hallam University. She is interested in the role of place, materiality and bodies in young children’s and families’ lives. She researches mostly in community spaces, in collaboration with children and families, employing ethnographic and post-qualitative methods. She is the author of More-than-Human Literacies in Early Childhood, published with Bloomsbury and lead editor of Language, place and the body in childhood literacies, published with Routledge.
Rachel Holmes is Professor of Cultural Studies of Childhood at Manchester Metropolitan University. She co-leads the Post-foundational Philosophies and Methodologies in Childhood and Education Research Group in the School of Education. Her research interests focus on interdisciplinary practice-based research, particularly methodologies of artistic research in formal and informal educational contexts. Her current projects include Things of the Least (AHRC, 2023 – 26) with partners from Manchester Art Gallery, Birmingham City University and Sure Start; Odd: feeling different in the world of education (AHEC, 2018 – 2021); and Towards Toddlerhood (AHRC, 2025 – 2026).
Seo Hye Lee is a Somerset based South Korean deaf artist. Drawing on her personal experience of hearing loss and of being a cochlear implant user, Seo Hye explores a world of sound and silence through the mediums of drawing, moving image, and multi-sensory installation. Recent works include her moving image piece Portland Forecast, which examines the use of captions in different access modes, Many Shapes of Volume, which explores the physical nature of sound, and How Loud Is Too Loud?, which investigates the use of AI in hearing technology. In her work, Seo Hye aims to promote the use of accessibility and collaboration, frequently finding inspiration in the collective and individual experience of sound.
Ruth Levene is an artist, convener, constructor, conceptualiser & digger who lives in Sheffield, UK. Her practice takes a deep dive into the current infrastructures and systems we live by & see through, such as farming, water governance, schooling & policy. Researching alongside people ‘in the know’, she creates spaces & moments to collectively pause, listen & reflect. Recent projects include ‘Re-imagining Schooling for the End of What We Know’ in which she worked with civil servants in the Department for Education, UK Government to re-imagine schooling in a time of climate & ecological collapse.
Anna Macdonald is a Reader in Movement based at UAL: Central Saint Martins. As a dance artist/scholar, she focuses on the relationship between the body, time, and affect and uses film to expose the resonance of simple movements, such as moving from ‘here to there’, ‘holding’ or ‘getting slower’. Her work is regularly exhibited in both festival and gallery settings and has generated interdisciplinary findings in the fields of health, science, and law, within large-scale projects funded by AHRC, Arts Council England, and Wellcome Trust.
Christina MacRae is a Visiting Research Fellow at Manchester Metropolitan University and a former nursery school teacher. Her research centres on early childhood, with a particular interest in sense, affect, and movement in children’s world-making practices. She has contributed to studies of young children’s learning across diverse settings, including classrooms, museums, galleries, and outdoor public spaces. She is also interested in the ways the arts can enrich and inform early years pedagogies.
Jayne Osgood is Professor of Childhood Studies based at the Centre for Education Research & Scholarship, Middlesex University, London (UK). Her present methodologies and research practices are framed by critical feminist posthumanities. Her work foregrounds worldly justice by working directly with children and early childhood communities; and through critical engagements with early childhood policy, curricular frameworks and pedagogical approaches.
Jill Pluquailec is a Senior Lecturer in Autism in the Sheffield Institute of Education. Her work centres on marginalised children and young people’s everyday lives with a particular focus on the embodied, space-related experiences of disabled children’s childhoods. She has a keen interest in ethnographic storying and the ethical intricacies of working with children whose voices and bodily practices are often sidelined or excluded from research. Her monograph, Dis/orientating Autism, Childhood, and Dis/ability develops new theoretical insights in dis/orientating from pathologising narratives of disabled children’s childhoods.
Victoria de Rijke is Emerita Professor of Arts & Education at Middlesex University in London and Co-Chief Editor of Children’s Literature in Education Journal. Her research and publication is transdisciplinary, across the fields of literature and the arts, children’s literature, play and animal studies through the associations of metaphor, such asThe Nose Book, or The Untimely Art of Scribble.
Kitty Winter is a theatrical movement practitioner specialising in interdisciplinary performance for young audiences, bridging the spaces between dance, theatre and clowning. She is a lecturer in dance research at Rambert School of Ballet and Contemporary Dance. Kitty has recently completed her PhD at De Montfort University, researching the meeting points of contemporary dance and theatrical clowning. She is exploring ways of working that disrupt harmful perfectionist tendencies in dancers with play, pleasure and laughter.
