The Posthuman Child: Educational Transformation through Philosophy with Picturebooks (original) (raw)
Related papers
Risking erasure? Posthumanist research practices and figurations of (the) child
Our shared motivation for this special issue was in response to the apparent explosion in posthumanist childhood studies in recent years; the deep scepticism and distrust it generates in certain quarters; and, crucially, our concern with detectable formulas that have emerged in such research. As with any 'new' paradigm shift, the readiness with which scholars seek to enact the complex approach can undermine or dilute its philosophical underpinnings. Therefore, this special issue was intended to slow down and pause, to return to the philosophical potential of posthumanism to transform the questions and open-ended enquiries it enables. Posthumanism deserves recognition for the important opportunities it has created, the exciting possibilities for fresh ways of thinking about and be(coming) with 'child'. There is little doubt that 'new' approaches to research with, for and about child/hood are needed in our ever more complex multispecies, more-than-(Adult)human existence, shaped by the growing threat of planetary destruction as a human habitat. There is an urgent need for childhood scholars to reappraise our relationships to each other and to 'the' world, which posthumanism insists must be carefully attuned and attended to. The urgency with which a different relationality that disrupts western binary logic and unilinear temporalities is needed to find ways to live (and die) well together (Barad, 2007; Haraway, 2016; Tsing, 2015) makes particular demands of childhood scholars. We face an imperative to tune into life in the Anthropocene in more ethical and responsible waysways that might best be informed and shaped by childlike figurations (Osgood, 2022, in press) and diffractive childlike methodologies (Murris, 2022: 69-93). To that end, this special issue seeks to elevate 'child' and 'childing' practices in research (Murris & Borcherds, 2019) so that 'the' world can be encountered by troubling human-centred optics and space as an empty container that can be filled (Barad, 2007). The ontological shift from Newtonian physics and Cartesian dualist notions of the self completely changes (or at the very least shakes) the foundations upon which knowledge and knowing get produced.
2019
This article emerges from a broader ethnographic study exploring how young children aged five and six years, and their educators, construct ‘race’ identities in a culturally diverse early childhood education setting in post-apartheid South Africa. Historically, systems of educational inequality and injustice have had a profound impact on how subjects have come to be ‘raced’ in the South African context. Drawing on a poststructural framework that problematizes the notion of identity, ‘race’, and young children’s discursive understandings of ‘race’, this article traces the complex ways in which young children and educators (re)construct, negotiate, resist and subvert subject formation processes in the school environment. Notions of performativity and embodiment provide important analytical tools through which ethnographic data is analysed. Such a framework moves discussion regarding young children and identity beyond more conventional psychological theories that postulate that the sel...
right under our noses: the postponement of children's political equality and the NOW
childhood & philosophy, 2021
Responding to the invitation of this special issue of Childhood and Philosophy this paper considers the ethos of facilitation in philosophical enquiry with children, and the spatial-temporal order of the community of enquiry. Within the Philosophy with Children movement, there are differences of thinking and practice on ‘facilitation’ in communities of philosophical enquiry, and we suggest that these have profound implications for the political agency of children. Facilitation can be enacted as a chronological practice of progress and development that works against child, in terms of political agency. This paper theorises practices of facilitation grounded in philosophies of childhood that assume listening to child/ren as equals, as already able to philosophise, and against sameness. We explore the political and ethical implications of the radical posthumanist reconfiguration of the ‘zipped’ body in the light of including the disciplinary, imaginative and enabling energies of chrono...