Tracing patterns in entangled worlds: Developing New-Hermetic Materialism for educational research
Dudley, Kate (2026) Tracing patterns in entangled worlds: Developing New-Hermetic Materialism for educational research. Educational Futures, 17 (1). pp. 60-86. ISSN 1758-2199
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Abstract
This paper proposes New-Hermetic Materialism (NHM) as a conceptual orientation for educational research, emerging from doctoral work in early childhood studies. Developed through engagement with feminist posthumanism and New Materialist scholarship, particularly the work of Karen Barad, Jane Bennett and Donna Haraway, NHM also draws on the relational cosmology found in the late antique Corpus Hermeticum. While New Materialism has reshaped understandings of vibrant matter, entanglement and distributed agency, Hermetic philosophy offers a way of thinking about transformation and correspondence between lived experience and the wider patterns that shape it, extending new materialist accounts of entanglement by foregrounding the tracing, recognition and ethical reshaping of patterned formations. Grounded in empirical research while developing a conceptual contribution, the paper traces how NHM emerged through research concerned with children’s identity, space and material environments, where questions of gender expression, spatial design and practitioner reflexivity revealed the limits of existing conceptual language. NHM is outlined as an ontological and ethical orientation that informed practices of representation, environmental attentiveness and reflexive decision-making. By bringing together entanglement and transformation, the framework offers a way of understanding educational spaces as active participants in children’s becoming rather than neutral backdrops to development. In this way, reflexivity is reframed as entangled with environments, histories and ethical responsibility. The paper’s distinctive contribution lies in extending these approaches through the introduction of correspondence and transformation as concepts for understanding how patterned formations endure, echo across contexts and become available for conscious recognition and change. Positioned as a situated and evolving proposition rather than a fixed theory, New-Hermetic Materialism invites educational researchers to reconsider how matter, entanglement and transformation shape learning environments, professional practice and the possibilities available to children within them.
| Item Type: | Article |
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| Divisions: | School of Education > Early Childhood and Professional Studies |
| Depositing User: | Ms Hazel Barham |
| Date Deposited: | 16 Jul 2026 13:08 |
| Last Modified: | 16 Jul 2026 13:08 |
| URI: | https://newman.repository.guildhe.ac.uk/id/eprint/17412 |
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