Merleau-Ponty’s ‘wild Being’: Tangling with the entanglements of research with the very young

This article draws on a study of infant participation in research, and work in philosophical-empirical inquiry, to illuminate some of the inexhaustible entanglements constituting the collective relational landscape of educational research of particular encounters, which have been called moments of wonder. Working with Merleau-Ponty’s philosophical notions of wild Being and flesh, I look closely at one such ‘moment’, as lived as an entanglement of embodied self, worldly things, and other selves, that collectively comes into being whilst opening onto time and space. I see this account as demonstrating the value of learning to see the ‘collective’, wherein individualities are engendered, for developing new understandings of ECE relational landscapes, specifically in relation to ‘participatory’ research with very young children—and educational research more generally.