Dr Karen Barr PhD, FHEA, PGCert, EYPS, BA (Hons)
Senior Lecturer
Summary
I have taught across a range of courses relating to early childhood and education at Sheffield Hallam since 2008. Prior to this I worked with children in schools, nurseries and out-of-school provision around Yorkshire. I am especially interested in creative pedagogical research methodologies that attend to how learning takes shape in emergent, situated, nonlinear ways.
About
I have taught at Sheffield Hallam University on various courses relating to education and childhood. Prior to teaching in Higher Education, I worked in a range of early childhood contexts, including schools, nurseries and out of school play provision around Yorkshire. I have a special interest in situated learning encounters, and much of my research focuses on how insights emerge through relationally entangled human-nonhuman worlds.
My research takes up posthuman theory and my modes of inquiry contest assumptions of human exceptionalism and separateness from the world. I experiment with creative research practices that attune to affective flows, rhythms, and momentary intensities in learning events, and explore how learning can be valued in non-traditional ways as a means of challenging performativity-driven measurement technologies.
Teaching
Sheffield Institute of Education
College of Social Sciences and Arts
Subject area
Education and Childhood
Courses taught
Early Childhood Studies
Children and Childhoods
Education
Research
Some of my current writing projects focus on insights emerging through my recent doctoral study. For my PhD, I conceptualised placements on Early Childhood Studies degrees as dynamic, contingent, and emergent assemblages of more-than-human forces and precarious multispecies relational entanglements. I explored how affective forces in placement contexts influence learning experiences, and how learning emerges through relationships between matter and meaning, which are mutually implicated.
I am also engaged in research and writing projects with colleagues from other universities, which experiment with arts-based and feminist materialist modes of knowledge-making.
Recent publications and projects can be found at my Research Gate and Orcid pages at the websites below.
Publications
Journal articles
Taylor, C.A., Hogarth, H., Cranham, J., Hewlett, S.-.J., Bastos, E., Barratt Hacking, E., & Barr, K. (2023). Concept-ing with the gift: Walking method/ologies in posthumanist research. Journal of Posthumanism, 3 (1), 13-31. http://doi.org/10.33182/joph.v3i1.2715
Hogarth, H., Taylor, C.A., Hewlett, S., Cranham, J., Barr, K., Bastos, E., & Barratt Hacking, E. (2022). The Joy of Sprawly Mess Unknowing: Volcanic Data Eruptions and Irruptions. Qualitative Inquiry. http://doi.org/10.1177/10778004221142814
Bath, C., Barr, K., & Haynes, M. (2014). Building a community of enquiry with students on a foundation degree in early years. Journal of Vocational Education & Training, 66 (2), 249-262. http://doi.org/10.1080/13636820.2014.894935
Barr, K.E. (n.d.). Posthumanism and Higher Education - Reimagining Pedagogy, Practice and Research Edited by CA Taylor and A Bayley. Journal of Posthumanism, 1 (1). http://doi.org/10.33182/jp.v1i1.1368
Book chapters
Cranham, J., Hewlett, S., Taylor, C.A., Hogarth, H., Barratt Hacking, E., Bastos, E., & Barr, K.E. (2024). Not Mine, Not Yours, But Ours Collaborative writing simultaneously together-apart. In Ulmer, J.B., Hughes, C., Salazar Pérez, M., & Taylor, C.A. (Eds.) The Routledge International Handbook of Transdisciplinary Feminist Research and Methodological Praxis. Routledge
Cranham, J., Hewlett, S., Taylor, C.A., Hogarth, H., Barratt Hacking, E., Bastos, E., & Barr, K.E. (2024). Not Mine, Not Yours, But Ours Collaborative writing simultaneously together-apart. In Ulmer, J.B., Hughes, C., Salazar Pérez, M., & Taylor, C.A. (Eds.) The Routledge International Handbook of Transdisciplinary Feminist Research and Methodological Praxis. Routledge
Barr, K., & Taylor, C. (2024). Doing interpretation differently with posthumanism and new materialism: Reconceptualizing what data does in postqualitative research. In Koro, M., & Murris, K. (Eds.) Reconfiguring Interpretation in (Post) Qualitative Research. Routledge
Barr, K., & Seat, H. (2023). Possibilities for Knowing Differently with a More-than-human Ladybird-pedagogue. In Varga, B., Monreal, T., & Christ, R.C. (Eds.) Toward a Stranger and More Posthuman Social Studies. Teachers College Press
Barr, K. (2019). Becoming a professional: entanglements with identity and practice. In Fitzgerald, D., & Maconochie, H. (Eds.) Early Childhood Studies: a student's guide. Sage
Barr, K., & Borkett, P. (2015). Play with children from diverse cultures. In Moyles, J. (Ed.) The Excellence of Play. (4th). Routledge
Barr, K., & Truelove, L. (2015). Play and the Achievement of Potential. In Moyles, J. (Ed.) The Excellence of Play. Routledge