Chapter 3 Interview with Bronwyn Davies Bronwyn Davies, Claudia Diaz-Diaz and Paulina Semenec The challenge, in my view, is not to abandon the insights gained from poststructuralist work, but to open thought up to the liveliness of matter, and the ways in which matter matters. We had many questions for Bronwyn Davies, as we have been followers of her work for a long time. Her influential books Frogs and Snails and Feminist Tales (1989) and Life in the classroom and playground (1982) as well as her more recent book Listening to Children (2014a) (among many other works), inspired our thinking and research practices, particularly in relation to gender. In Bronwyn’s more recent work, she explores a diffractive methodology, a concept inspired by the work of Karen Barad. In her interview, Bronwyn traces the continuities and discontinuities that posthuman and new materialist perspectives have with poststructural perspectives by looking at gender. She examines for example how these perspectives have addressed the difficult work of challenging the male/female binary. Importantly for Bronwyn, the challenge is not to “abandon the insights gained from poststructuralist work, but to open thought up to the liveliness of matter, and the ways in which matter matters.” In this way, Bronwyn’s interview provides a wonderful contextual “overview” of how we got “here”—to the place of posthuman and new materialisms, but also how poststructural theorizing enabled this “here”. Readers who may be new to these approaches will find this interview not only helpful for tracing some of this scholarship, but also engaging in the perspectives and insights that Bronwyn offers. As an independent scholar, Bronwyn also shares some insights about doing research within a neoliberal B. Davies (B ) Western Sydney University, Sydney, Australia e-mail: daviesb@unimelb.edu.au C. Diaz-Diaz · P. Semenec University of British Columbia, Vancouver, BC, Canada e-mail: claudia.diaz@alumni.ubc.ca P. Semenec e-mail: paulina.semenec@ubc.ca © Springer Nature Singapore Pte Ltd. 2020 C. Diaz-Diaz and P. Semenec, Posthumanist and New Materialist Methodologies, Children: Global Posthumanist Perspectives and Materialist Theories, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-981-15-2708-1_3 21