In mainstream early childhood education in Canada, how we get to know bodies with children is largely ensnared with prevailing educational paradigms that frame early childhood education as a service that provides custodial care and prepares children to participate in neoliberal capitalism (Nxumalo et al., 2018; Pacini-Ketchabaw & Taylor, 2015; Vintimilla, 2018). We – as co-researchers studying how we get to know bodies with children – constantly meet with, are implicated in, and work to interrupt or reconfigure how these dominant discourses and structures delimit possibilities for early childhood education. We get to know bodies with children; we are, as Shotwell (2016) describes, “compromised and we have made compromises, and this will continue to be the way we craft the worlds to come, whatever they might turn out to be” (p. 5).

We returned often to a frustratingly tangible puzzle: amid an assertive, powerful array of structures/systems/disciplines that know, predict, and elaborate bodies with a confidence that precludes and nullifies any need to get to know the body differently, we encountered everyday moments with the children where these existing ‘best’ knowledges were utterly inadequate for understanding the complexities of doing bodies with children.  We noted how bioscientific methods, including developmental sciences premised in universalism and normativity (Burman, 2016; Lees et al., 2023; Nxumalo, 2020), loudly name the ‘best’ approaches to understanding children’s bodies (health, normativity, growth, size/composition, skill acquisition) and advance the practices that sustain and are sustained by these dominant methods for knowing bodies (assessment, intervention, predictability, expertise, diagnosis, futurity/deferral) (Nociti & Blaise, 2023; Land et al., 2022; Pacini-Ketchabaw & Blaise, 2023). From colloquialisms like ‘fat children become fat adults’ or ‘eat your vegetables so you grow to be big and strong’, to narratives of linear growth that ceases in adulthood (‘that person is a grown-up’), and through a taken-for-granted bodied vocabulary that felt hollow (‘you have strong arms’ or ‘you are very tall’) when held up against what felt meaningful about bodies, we continually encountered relations with bodies, muscles, and fat that dominant discourses could not know (Berry et al., 2022; Fincham & Fellner, 2023; Fontanella-Nothom, 2024). More importantly, we refused to concede these relations with bodies, muscles, and fat to these existing knowledges; it is, for us, ethically and politically untenable to forget or ignore the lively bodied experiences that exceed bioscientific paradigms (Lenz Taguchi & Bodén, 2025; Pollitt et al., 2021).

Giving up on bioscientific knowledges posed, for us, a similarly dishonest and unethical reductionism – bodies are made knowable in interesting and important ways through bioscientific inquiry (Aronsson, 2020; Aronsson & Lenz Taguchi, 2018). Muscle fibres, disease processes, hormonal and neurotransmitter variations, mineral transport, nerve function, and oxygenation (and the many, many other structures and relations that keep bodies alive) matter to how we get to know bodies with children (Lenz Taguchi, 2016; Lenz Taguchi & Bodén, 2025). Immunity, broken bones, pain and discomfort, disability, hydration, nutrition, and learning to wash your hands correctly matter to how we get to know bodies with children. Substituting one bundle of knowledges for a ‘better’ collection of logics would, we knew, entail similar delimiting moves to extant structures that centre only/primarily bioscientific paradigms. Building on Fullagar and Taylor’s (2021) discussion of the body, we wanted to think with the children about how “bodies are experienced, circulated, objectifed, mediatised, habituated and profoundly intra-active as a more-than-human phenomenon implicated in biology (our biomes are 80 percent nonhuman organisms), animals (companion species, agribusiness, endangered wild-life habitat) and objects (technological consumption that generates pollution and planetary health problems)” (p. 38). We each held different but interwoven concerns about how gender, race, culture, ability, anti-fat discrimination, socioeconomic status, and high density urban living in a city facing a housing crisis,  – and other intersectional dimensions of childhood – are pathologized or ignored by prevailing Euro-Western valuations of the desirable (white) child body whereby “ethnic-minority groups, women, people in poverty, and people with disabilities are defined as bodies with deficiencies or bodies-at-risk – collectively, as a “problem” to be fixed” (Harrison Jr, Azzarito, & Hodge, 2021, p. 229). Our own complex relations with our bodies fed our refusal to neutralize bodies with the children through overly simplistic stories of self-love or self-acceptance that assign an imperative for achieving self-acceptance onto individual children while negating very real difficult, shifting, or uncertain body relations.

If how we get to know bodies is constantly shaped and re-shaped within situated constellations of multiple shifting intersectional dynamics and lived conditions, studying how and why bodies are made knowable (and unknowable) becomes an ethical and political project. Prevailing bodied relations and knowledges are created within and sustain dominant power structures that strategically commodify how and why various bodies are ascribed different value in existing bodily economies (Evans & Rich, 2011; Leahy, 2014; Rich et al., 2020). How we get to know bodies is, therefore, a question of equity, justice, and living well together: the messy webs of body logics and relations we are implicated in – and that we intentionally or quietly perpetuate or refuse – have uneven tangible, lived, fleshed consequences (Andersen & Nordström, 2022; Coffey et al., 2024; Herndon, 2023).  Asking how we get to know bodies is an avowal of the non-innocence and imperfection of body logics and relations (Jette et al., 2016; Pausé, 2019; Powell, 2019). That we ‘do’ bodies means that existing frameworks, relations, and practices for knowing bodies can be unsettled (Friedman, 2021; Rice et al., 2018; Rice et al., 2021): we can get to know bodies otherwise.