This book is a genealogical foregrounding and performance of conceptions of children and their childhoods over time. We acknowledge that children’s lives are embedded in worlds both inside and outside of structured schooling or institutional settings, and that this relationality informs how we think about what it means to be a child living and experiencing childhood. The book maps the field by taking up a cross-disciplinary, genealogical niche to offer both an introduction to theoretical underpinnings of emerging theories and concepts, and to provide hands-on examples of how they might play out. This book positions children and their everyday lived childhoods in the Anthropocene and focuses on the interface of children’s being in the everyday spaces and places of contemporary communities and societies. In particular this book examines how the shift towards posthuman and new materialist perspectives continues to challenge dominant developmental, social constructivist and structuralist theoretical approaches in diverse ways, to help us to understand contemporary constructions of childhoods. It recognises that while such dominant approaches have long been shown to limit the complexity of what it means to be a child living in the contemporary world, the traditions of many Eurocentric theories have not addressed the diversity of children’s lives in the majority of countries or in the Global South.
Author(s): Karen Malone, Marek Tesar, Sonja Arndt
Series: Children: Global Posthumanist Perspectives and Materialist Theories
Publisher: Springer Singapore
Year: 2020
Language: English
Pages: 241
City: Singapore
Posthuman Childhood Studies: An Introduction
Aims and Intentions
Book Overview
Contents
1 History and Philosophy of Children and Childhoods
Children and Childhoods
The Evil, Rational and Free Child
Philosophy of Childhoods
Histories of Childhood Education
Classical and Early Modern Philosophies of Childhoods
Dewey and Childhood
Analytic Philosophy of Education, Radical Tradition and Childhoods
Postmodernism and Poststructuralism in Philosophy of Childhood
Philosophy of Childhood in Action
Biopolitics and the Governing of Childhoods
Toy Story 3: Childhood and Imagination
Towards the Posthuman Child
References
2 Reconfiguring Childhoods and Theories
Child as not Fully Human
Child Bodies Under Scientific Scrutiny
Children as Social Beings
Limiting Views of Childhoods
Disrupting the Dominant Framework with the New Sociology of Childhoods
Postdevelopmental Challenges of Childhoods
Postdevelopmental Theories as a Plurality of Childhoods
Viewing Children and Childhoods Differently
Children as Ontologically Complete
Social Constructivist Theories of Childhoods
Challenging Ideas on Structures and Agency
Reconfiguring Childhood Studies
References
3 Cartographies of Materialism: Thinking with Child(hood) Theories
Interrogating Child as a Construct
Child as a Vibrant Becoming
Child as a Hybrid Assemblage
Child as a Body
Child as Other and More-Than-Human Subject
Multiplicities of Child-Constructs
References
4 Rethinking Childhoods and Agency
Agency in Contemporary Times
Socio-cultural Agency
Unequal Childhoods/Unequal Agency
Complicating Agency Through a Posthuman Lens
Rethinking Agency
Thing-Power Agency
Back to Clementine
“Deep History” and Shared Agency
Freedom and Shared Agency
Political Agency
Concluding Comments
References
5 Posthuman Pedagogies in Childhoodnature
Time and Temporalities of Childhood(s)nature
Childhoodnature Disconnect
Posthuman Pedagogies
Sensorial as Pedagogy
Encounters as Pedagogy
Relations as Pedagogy
Response-Ability
Learning with Childhoodnatures
Concluding Comments
References
6 Entangling Childhoods, Materials, Curriculum and Objects
Introduction
Why Curriculum?
Understanding Te Whāriki’s Posthuman Potential
Contextualising Te Whāriki’s Influence
A Posthuman Childhood Studies Lens
Posthuman Curriculum
Child ↔ Materialities ↔ Curriculum
Rethinking Curricular Relationalities
Case Study #1: Children’s Entanglement with Materials
Case Study #2: Children’s Entanglement with Objects
Concluding Entanglements
References
7 Children’s Worlding of/in Learning Environments
Introduction
Learning Environments as Precarious
Learning Assemblages: Meaning, Power and Circumstances
Questioning Linear Expectations
Hierarchical Power
Picture Books and Learning Environments
Learning Environments as Relational Encounters
Patty’s Learning Environment
Reconfiguring Learning Environments
References
8 Performing the Posthuman
Introduction: Matters and Worlds
Children’s Posthuman Performance
Cosmopolitics
Performance as Productive and Dynamic
Performing Nature
Becoming-With
Time and Place
Learning from Indigenous Perspectives
Performing ‘Thing-Hoods’
Performing Art
Performing Technology
Performing with Digital Technologies
IPad Encounters
Affecting Performance Assemblages
Ethics and Protection
Concluding Comments
References
9 Re-searching with Children in Posthuman Worlds
Introduction
Shifting Childhoods and Research Objectives
Thinking Philosophically in Posthuman Research
Children as Knowledge-Able Posthuman Researchers
Rethinking Data and Rethinking Posthuman Research
Complex Posthuman Data Relations
Children in Posthuman Worlds
Conclusion
References
10 Glossary Key Posthuman Childhood Studies Concepts
Introduction
Actant
Affect
Agency
Agential Realism
Anthropocene
Assemblage
Binaries
Childhood Studies
Conatus
Cognitive Developmental and Behaviourists Theories of Childhood
Deterritorialization
Developmental Theories
Dichotomy
Diffraction
Dualisms
Entanglement
Haecceity
Human Exceptionalism
Intra-action
Intra-relationality
Kin
Mutualism
Natureculture
New Materialism
New Metaphysics
New Sociology of Childhood
Onto-Ethico-epistemology
Ontology
Paideia
Participation
Performativity
Plasticity
Postdevelopmental Theories
Posthuman
Posthumanism(s)
Post-anthropocentrism
Porosity
Posthumanist Theories of Childhood
Postqualitative Research
Power
Representation
Re-territorialization
Rhizome
Sensorial
Social Constructivism
Socialisation Theory of Childhood
Spacetimemattering
Structure
Temporality
Vital Materiality
Walking-with Methodology
References
