Our paper considers the potentialities of the term ‘emergent’ when applied to how young children come to name their world. Using a term such as ‘emergent’ is clearly not a neutral process. ‘Knowing our place’ in the debates and knowledges requires recognition that we are where we are only because of those who have come before and those who are yet to emerge. In this paper we first trace some ways in which emergence has been used to frame young children as almost ready to represent their worlds. We trace the histories of ourselves as a group of researchers of literacies and sustainability, and consider how we we bring these histories of using emergence together in particular ways. Genealogies of the use of the term ‘emergence’ in developmental psychology, progressive literacy theorists (see for example Hiebert & Papierz, 1990; Sulzby & Teale, 1991), multimodality (Kress, 1997) and new literacy studies (Gillen and Hall, 2003) remind us that young children’s representations of the world are made in a diverse range of communicative forms., and in more recent times research has foregrounded the possibilities that arise when materiality and place are considered (see for example, Leander and Boldt, 2013). Posthumanism has the potential to build on these existing interests in place, body, and materials within literacy studies. Decentring the human within thinking about emergence, however, highlights a world in emergence, not just a child (Somerville et al, 2011). This more expansive concept of systems of emergence, which may or may not include people, requires a degree of randomness and autonomy, not control, to function and to continue evolution of ordered complexity (Sellar, 2009). We argue weaving together different interpretations of the word ‘emergent’ can act as an heuristic for thinking about how posthuman early childhood education would depart from what has gone before and what this might offer our understandings of literacies and sustainability.

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