Theorising Posthuman Childhood Studies

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.

This open access book provides a critical, thought-provoking, and stimulating overview of theories applied worldwide to conceptualise collaborations between early childhood education and children's families. The book starts with a critical reflection on the colonial undertones of parental involvement (PI) and acknowledges a strong political will to improve this aspect of early childhood education and care. The chapters in the book describe and discuss various theories, including the cultural historical wholeness approach, Bronfenbrenner's ecology of human development, the theory of social capital, the theory of collaboration, family-school partnership models proposed by Epstein and Hornby, Bourdieu's social theory, the theory of practice architectures, the discourse/narrative theory, and posthumanism. By proposing the concept of more-than-parents, the authors aim to embrace both the diversity of intergenerational family configurations and the agency of materiality, artifacts, and the involvement of more-than-human actors.

The Posthuman Child combats institutionalised ageist practices in primary, early childhood and teacher education. Grounded in a critical posthumanist perspective on the purpose of education, it provides a genealogy of psychology, sociology and philosophy of childhood in which dominant figurations of child and childhood are exposed as positioning child as epistemically and ontologically inferior. Entangled throughout this book are practical and theorised examples of philosophical work with student teachers, teachers, other practitioners and children (aged 3-11) from South Africa and Britain. These engage arguments about how children are routinely marginalised, discriminated against and denied, especially when the child is also female, black, lives in poverty and whose home language is not English. The book makes a distinctive contribution to the decolonisation of childhood discourses. Underpinned by good quality picturebooks and other striking images, the book's radical proposal for transformation is to reconfigure the child as rich, resourceful and resilient through relationships with (non) human others, and explores the implications for literary and literacy education, teacher education, curriculum construction, implementation and assessment. It is essential reading for all who research, work and live with children.

This book features interviews with 19 scholars who do research with children in a variety of contexts. It examines how these key scholars address research 'after the child’ by exploring the opportunities and challenges of drawing on posthumanist and materialist methodologies that unsettle humanist research practices. The book reflects on how posthumanist and materialist approaches have informed research in relation to de-centering the child, re-thinking methodological concepts of voice, agency, data, analysis and representation. It also explores what the future of research after the child might entail and offers suggestions to new and emerging scholars involved in research with children. Reviewing how posthumanist and materialist approaches have informed authors’ thinking about children, research and knowledge production, the book will appeal to graduate students and emerging scholars in the field of childhood studies who wish to experiment with posthumanist methodologies and materialist approaches.

The book provides an advanced, accessible text for childhood studies, which is suitable and challenging for those coming from practice, different parts of the world and from a range of disciplines. Key ideas within childhood studies are introduced, from agency to intersectionality to children's rights. Addressing children and young people under the age of 18, the book combines concepts from seminal texts with challenging, critical views and alternatives, to stimulate readers to develop their own analysis and apply the results to their own interests. It reveals how childhood studies draws on a rich and diverse range of perspectives from child development, educational studies, history, human rights, media studies, philosophy, public health, race and ethnicity studies, to social anthropology. The book is organised around five sections: Foundations of Childhood Studies Childhood Studies Meets Other Disciplines Childhood Studies Meets Children's Rights Studies Intersectional Perspectives on Childhood Childhood Studies in Practice Each section includes commentaries from international experts based in Australia (Amanda Third), Brazil (Irene Rizzini), the UK (Erica Burman), the USA (Sarada Balagopalan) and Zimbabwe (Tendai Charity Nhenga). The book has a range of pedagogical features including guiding questions and challenge tasks, quotes from students and other experts, and a glossary of terms. The book has a companion website with videos from authors, students and those working in practice and policy, interactive tasks and other resources.

Those who are younger continue to be objects of injustice and inequity; those who are younger, people of color, females, and human beings living in poverty have never been included in equitable performances of justice, care, respect, and fairness. The authors in this international volume use existing social values and institutions--and the strengths of these varied perspectives--to address justice in ways that have not previously been considered. The aim is to create more just worlds for those who are young--as well as for the rest of us. The first set of chapters, Bodies, Beings, and Relations in More Just Worlds, place at the forefront the lives of those who are younger who are commonly situated in positions of invisibility, disqualification, and even erasure. In the second section, Performances of Care and Education for More Just Worlds, the authors acknowledge that needed (re)conceptualizations of those who are younger, along with appreciation for human diversity and entanglements between the so-called human and nonhuman worlds, are the foundations for more just care and education environments. From the critique of neoliberal reform discourses to reconceptualizing human relations with nonhuman animal and material worlds, care and learning environments are rethought. The set of chapters in the final section, Stir of Echoes: 20th Century Childhoods in the 21st, take-up the 20th century critical concerns with constructions of “child” that have dominated and continue to govern perspectives imposed on those who are younger. Suggestions for becoming-with those who are younger through resources like reconceptualist scholarship, Black and Indigenous Studies, and various posthuman perspectives are provided throughout. Whatever the emphasis or focus of a section or chapter, throughout the volume is the recognition that dominant discourses (e.g. neoliberal capitalism, conservativism, progressivism, human exceptionalism) and the policies they create (and that facilitate them), influence possibilities for, and limitations to, more just childhood worlds. Therefore, each section includes chapters that address these complex discourses and policy issues. The reader is invited to engage with these complexities, to become-with the various texts, and to generate unthought possibilities for childhoods in more just worlds. Perfect for courses such as: Curriculum Theory │ Multicultural Education │ Cultural Knowledge of Teachers and Teaching │ Sociocultural Foundations │ Anthropology of Education │ Identity, Agency, and Education │ Race and Ethnic Relations in Schools │ Philosophical Foundations of Education │ Educational Epistemologies │ Theorizing and Researching Teaching and Learning │ Qualitative Research in Education: Paradigms, Theories, and Exemplars │ Epistemologies and Theories in Multicultural and Equity Studies │ Curricular Approaches to Multicultural and Equity Studies in Education │ Culturally Relevant Pedagogy (3) │ Multicultural and Global Perspectives in Teaching and Learning │ Teaching for Social Justice │ Diversity and Equity in Education │ 21st Century Childhood Curriculum │ Childhood and Globalization

This book mobilizes the theoretical resources offered by theories of little publics and posthuman civics to consider what it means to be a child in the Anthropocene.

This book argues that developmental approaches to observation in childhood pedagogy are limiting, that there is an urgent need to unsettle and reimagine observation, proposing new postdevelopmental theories and modes of inquiry for educators. Written by leading scholars based in Australia, Canada, Finland, New Zealand, the UK and the USA, the chapters consider observation as it is enacted in the home, nursery or classroom. Drawing on a range of theories including feminist new materialism, social semiotics, and sociocultural and multimodal approaches to early childhood the chapters cover a range of areas from early childhood art and observational literacy tools to intergenerational research, and using photography and video in observations.