This paper draws on my doctoral research to understand and problematize how binary thinking operates as an onto-epistemic framework in early childhood teacher education in Chile, shaping what counts as legitimate knowledge, appropriate professional identities, and possible forms of pedagogical action. Grounded in feminist posthumanism and new materialisms (Barad, 2007; Taylor, 2013; Lenz-Taguchi, 2016), the study conceptualizes binary thinking not as a set of individual beliefs but as a material-discursive practice that organizes educational realities through hierarchical oppositions such as reason/emotion, theory/practice, mind/body, and normal/abnormal. Here, “onto-epistemic” signals that binaries are not only ways of knowing but also ways of being and doing: they configure which bodies, affects, and pedagogical actions become thinkable and legitimate within teacher education assemblages.

The central research question guiding this inquiry is: What are the operations of binary thinking as an onto-epistemic framework in the initial training of early childhood educators in Chile? The main aim is to trace its operations through institutional arrangements, conceptual circulations, and material–affective configurations. This question becomes particularly salient in early childhood teacher education because this level exhibits a distinctive convergence: extreme feminization (Subsecretaría Educación Parvularia, 2022), marked material precariousness (CNED, 2022), and a strong reliance on developmental psychology and early childhood neuroscience discourses that present themselves as neutral and universal (Fox, Levitt, & Nelson, 2010). These dynamics tend to reinforce each other as an assemblage in which regimes of normality become naturalized and binary thinking is stabilized as pedagogical common sense.

The inquiry is situated in a politically contested field (Falabella et al., 2024), where professionalism, vocation, affect, care, and developmentalist/neurocognitive discourses are positioned through hierarchical separations (e.g., reason/emotion; science/care; objective/subjective; mind/body) (Burman, 2008; Nielsen et al., 2017). Feminist philosophy and science studies have shown that such divisions are not neutral descriptors but epistemic and political technologies that sustain unequal distributions of authority and credibility (Grosz, 1994). From this perspective, binaries do not simply “represent” reality; they participate in producing it through classificatory and evaluative practices.

One mechanism sustaining binary thinking is its naturalization through hegemonic scientific traditions that dominate biomedical, psychological, and neuroscientific knowledge production (Sanz, 2017; Hyde et al., 2019). Por example, in the case of gender, the biologization of sexual difference has justified hierarchies as outcomes of supposedly fixed bodily traits (Fausto-Sterling, 2000; Sanz, 2017), reinforcing binary and essentialist understandings (Hyde et al., 2019).

Conceptually, the paper mobilizes feminist new materialisms and posthumanist approaches to treat teacher education as a material–discursive assemblage rather than a bounded institutional site (Coole & Frost, 2010; Fox & Alldred, 2015; Taylor, 2013). In agential realist terms, binaries are analyzed as cuts and apparatuses that enact particular realities—stabilizing some categories while foreclosing others (Barad, 2007). This enables an analysis of how binary gender norms intersect with regimes of measurement, accountability, and professional formation, including the production of “datafied” subjects (Dixon-Román, 2017; Riberi & Matus, 2025).

This is not a nationally bounded issue: the binaries traced here are sustained through transnational regimes of expertise—developmental science, accountability, and data infrastructures—that circulate across education systems (Dahlberg et al., 2013). By working from a Chilean case, the paper contributes a Global South intervention into international debates on gender, epistemic authority, and the disrupted relation between knowledge and action, asking what research can make possible when binaries are treated as onto-epistemic infrastructures rather than attitudes or beliefs.

At the time of submission, this doctoral study is still in the design and set-up stage; the corpus and protocols are being finalized alongside ethics approval and institutional access. Methodologically, it adopts a post-qualitative approach rooted in feminist posthumanism and new materialisms. This choice is an epistemological commitment: if the project seeks to challenge binary thinking as a naturalized epistemic framework, it would be inconsistent to reproduce representational paradigms that presume an external observer who “collects” and “represents” data (MacLure, 2013; St. Pierre, 2018). Instead, the study traces binary operations in their tangible materializations across documents, narratives, encounters, and objects (Taylor, 2013). To remain coherent with this onto-epistemological stance, the design uses terms such as entries (rather than linear phases), data production (rather than collection), activation (rather than application), and devices (rather than instruments), emphasizing the research-assemblage and distributed agency (Fox & Alldred, 2015; Kuby et al., 2017). The research will be conducted—at least for now—at Pontificia Universidad Católica de Chile, due to several converging reasons: (i) access conditions that enable a situated longitudinal follow-up of conceptual circulations; (ii) post-qualitative coherence that emphasizes situated depth over representativeness, acknowledging that each institution co-produces specific forms of pedagogical knowledge. This allows tracking concrete mechanisms of binary operation in specific contexts, rather than aiming for abstract generalizations (Lather, 2013). The study unfolds over approximately twelve to fifteen months through three interconnected methodological entries that operate non-sequentially and mutually reshape one another. The first entry examines institutional data infrastructures and documentation related to early childhood teacher education (e.g., enrolment/degree databases, administrative and accreditation records, syllabus, and selected national/international surveys). Selection is guided by preliminary criteria and a symptomatic reading attentive to how binary categories are embedded, operationalized, and rendered consequential in classification, measurement, and decision-making. The second entry follows conceptual circulations through conversational interviews and situated engagements with students and teacher educators, using open prompts designed to elicit how binaries become intelligible, contested, or taken for granted in everyday pedagogical life. The third entry consists of creative-artistic workshops (Delantal Inverso) that activate materialities (e.g., aprons, archived artefacts) as epistemic agents, not neutral stimuli, attending to what such objects do and make possible. Analysis proceeds as a diffractive reading across the three entries, tracing zones of interference, hot spots, and agential cuts, rather than treating sources as independent strands to be integrated at the end (Lenz-Taguchi, 2016; Jackson & Mazzei, 2012)

Because this doctoral study is currently in the design and set-up phase, the paper does not claim completed empirical findings. Instead, it articulates binary thinking as an onto-epistemic framework and specifies the methodological conditions through which its operations will be traced, including the project’s dilemmas of onto-epistemological accountability. In a post-qualitative, non-linear design, outcomes are not treated as results extracted from a stable dataset, but as diffractive insights co-produced through the evolving research-assemblage. By the time of the conference, the project is expected to have produced at least initial material from the first and second entries: a first corpus of institutional documentation and data infrastructures and early co-produced data from conversational engagements with students and teacher educators. Even though the entries are not sequential, these materials should already be generating zones of interference across databases, texts, institutional practices, and lived pedagogical experiences. Empirically, the study anticipates identifying recurring binary operations that organize early childhood teacher education and examining how these cuts distribute epistemic authority and professional legitimacy. A second expected outcome is to document points of friction where binaries become unstable or contested, including moments when students’ accounts, institutional classifications, and material pedagogical arrangements do not align. Attending to the effects/affects of analytical cuts and their consequences, the paper foregrounds three dilemmas that structure the project’s accountability. First, visibility and opacity: any analytical cut reveals some relations while leaving others out of frame, requiring explicit responsibility for what becomes visible and what is necessarily excluded. Second, academic clarity and epistemic disruption: while writing within a conventional dissertation form, the project seeks to avoid reinstating binaries by maintaining readability without reducing complexity. Third, positioning and othering: rather than fixing the researcher’s identity, positionality is treated as relational and revisited as the assemblage shifts, to avoid reproducing “us/them” dynamics in knowledge-making.

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