Dr Liz Latto

Teaching Fellow in Childhood Practice

Biography

Background

Liz Latto is a teaching fellow within the Institute for Education, Community and Society (IECS), University of Edinburgh. Prior to this she worked as a primary school and early years teacher within various local authorities in Scotland for 15 years. Liz is currently completing her doctorate investigating what influences practitioners’ perceptions of their professional identities, drawing on posthuman and feminist materialist theories. Her research interests include using posthuman, relational lenses to understand how structures of inequality are embedded and perpetuated within society.

Qualifications

PhD in Education, University of Edinburgh

PGDE (Primary), University of Edinburgh

MPhil Latin American Studies, University of Glasgow

BA (Hons) Applied Consumer Studies (Housing), Queen Margaret College, Edinburgh

Responsibilities & affiliations

Co-convenor SERA Early Years Network, 2019 - present, https://www.sera.ac.uk/networks/early-years/

Member of Centre for Creative-Relational Inquiry, https://www.ed.ac.uk/health/research/current-research/ccri 

Undergraduate teaching

Currently Co-programme  Director for BA Childhood Practice

BA Childhood Practice Children and Childhoods Course Organiser

BA Childhood Practice Children and the Family Course Organiser

BA Childhood Practice Children's Health & Wellbeing Course Organiser

BA Childhood Practice Childhood Practice Research Project Supervisor

Postgraduate teaching

MSc Education (All pathways) Dissertation supervisor

 

Research summary

PhD Thesis:

Becoming~practitioner: exploring the materialities of practice within Early Learning and Childcare (ELC).

 

Binary thinking that separates the human from the more-than-human leads to an impoverished model in contexts such as Early Learning and Childcare (ELC) in Scotland.  With/in ELC contexts, teaching and learning have been scruitinised and subjected to neoliberalist rhetoric, expected to comply with externally imposed metrics of quality (Roberts-Holmes & Moss, 2021; Vandenbroeck, Lehrer & Mitchell, 2023). This model excludes the relational aspect between humans, non-humans and the more-than-human, an approach to research praxis which omits the rich potentialities of participation beyond human and nature divides.  Using a creative (re)conceptualization of Murris’ (2016) proposition of the child as a complex entanglement with Gilligan’s I-poem (2015) and Barad’s diffraction (2007) as research apparatus, this research troubles such binary thinking, highlighting the relationality between the more-than-human and human world.  Diffracting ‘iii-poems’ brings ideas and concepts into generative tensions, enlivening liminalities where creative differences occur (Jackson & Mazzei, 2012). This creates space to consider how matter and materialities intra-act in a continuous becoming (Barad, 2007; Lenz Taguchi, 2012).  This PhD research illuminates both continuities and differences in how structural inequalities have affect and foregrounds the importance of place/space and kinship in coping with the long-term impact of emotional labour on practitioners working with/in ELC.  When collaboration with the more-than-human is brought into view, the sensorial, materiality and affective can reveal the reality of a mainly female, working-class workforce in a continual state of marginalisation.  This brings to light the processes of such marginalisation which might otherwise remain hidden.

 

 

 

 

Current research interests

Using posthuman and feminist materialist theories to examine professional identities within Early Learning and Childcare (ELC) in Scotland and beyond. I am also interested in how posthuman and feminist materialist thinking can help re-imagine research methodology to include materialities, affect and relationalities, working towards a more affirmative, generative and socially just research praxis.

Ovington, J. A., Albin-Clark, J., Latto, L. and Hawxwell, L. (Forthcoming). ‘Disrupting qualitative research. A bag-lady-narrative-methodology’ Routledge Encyclopedia of Research Methods.

Latto, L., Ovington, J., Hawxwell, L. Albin-Clark, J., Isom, P., Smith, S., Ellis, S., Fletcher-Saxon,J. (2022) Diffracting Bag Lady Stories and Kinship:Cartogra-ph-ying and Making-WithOthers in More-Than-Human Affirmative Spaces. Cultural and Pedagogical Inquiry, Summer 2022, 14(1), pp. 152-165

Ovington., J., Albin-Clark, J., Latto, L., and Hawxwell, L. (2022). ‘Matter matters’: Knowledge-ing with kin through collective storytelling. Blog [online]. 10 January. Available from: http://pesn.co.uk/bagladies. 

Albin-Clark, J., Latto, L., Hawxwell, L. and Ovington, J. (2021). ‘Becoming-with response-ability: How does diffracting posthuman ontologies with multi-modal sensory ethnography spark a multiplying femifesta/manifesta of noticing, attentiveness and doings in relation to mundane politics and more-than-human pedagogies of response-ability?’, entanglements, 4(1) pp. 21-31

 

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