Abstract
Theorising Posthuman Childhood Studies, by Karen Malone, Marek Tesar and Sonja Arndt, is a comprehensive study of how posthuman and new materialist perspectives are being activated in childhood studies to disrupt dominant developmental, social constructivist and theoretical conceptualisations of children and childhoods. However, rather than discarding these frames altogether, the book works to create a ‘critical bridge’ between historical and contemporary configurations of children and their childhoods, examining the ways in which these configurations inform one another.
The sixth title in the Springer series Children: Global Posthumanist Perspectives and Materialist Theories, Theorising Posthuman Childhood Studies examines materiality (with artefacts, toys, homes, educational settings, landscapes, animals, food, popular culture, the air, the weather, bodies, relations, identities and sexualities as given examples) in the ordinary moments of children’s daily lives, giving special consideration to Māori, Pasifika, Australasian and Global South views of children and childhoods. By highlighting Global South childhoods and making under-represented perspectives in childhood studies visible, the book challenges universalising discourses in childhood studies and shows the need for more complex understandings of the mundane everyday relationships in children’s lives. In the tradition of James et al.’s (1998) Theorizing Childhood, Malone et al.’s Theorising Posthuman Childhood Studies engages with the sociology of childhoods, effectively reconceptualising this framework for the shifting and uneven conditions of the Anthropocene.
The introductory chapter maps the lines of relation between childhood studies, philosophy and education. The authors acknowledge that contemporary configurations of childhood are grounded in the ideas of predominantly white-male European philosophers. However, they argue that all philosophy holds implications for the philosophy of children and childhoods. The book argues that although ‘children’ and ‘childhoods’ are widely contested terms, they offer a conceptual lens that can be generative when approached through diverse and non-linear perspectives. In philosophy, it has been argued that childhood is a modern invention for which there was no conceptualisation in medieval times. From this perspective, ‘childhoods’ is a modern construct that has been created to serve the values and functions of adults and societies at large. Given the historical role of children as labourers with very little protection from abuse by adults, the United Nations Convention on the Rights of the Child was created to provide protection and provision to children by way of governance (Office of the High Commissioner, 1989). As this chapter points out, this landmark document frames our contemporary understandings of ‘the child’ as a person in need of protection. The first chapter also addresses histories of childhood education and considers the influence of the globalisation of childhoods and the philosophy of education. Chapter 1 concludes with the turn towards postmodern and post-structuralist philosophies of childhood.
Chapter 2 moves from the philosophy of children and childhoods to a rethinking of these conceptualisations through the new sociology of childhoods. In this chapter, the authors recognise education as a historically humanising process. They go on to activate the new sociology of childhoods to problematise presumptions of universal childhoods and the linear, culturally biased developmental frameworks that emerge from this presumption. Additionally, chapter 2 offers a comprehensive overview of post-developmental challenges to the universal child, introducing posthuman and new materialist perspectives of childhood that reconfigure childhoods as one aspect of the ecological collective of non-human/human worlds (Tesar and Jukes, 2018).
In chapter 3, the authors enact a ‘thinking with theories’ approach (see Jackson and Mazzei, 2012) to complexify various child constructs, beginning with the ‘new metaphysics’ (Dolphijn and Van der Tuin, 2012: 13) as represented by the work of scholars such as Bruno Latour, Rosi Braidotti, Manuel DeLanda, Karen Barad, Quentin Meillassoux, Donna Haraway and Jane Bennett. They go on to consider Child as vibrant becoming, Child as hybrid assemblage, Child as body, and Child as other-than and more-than-human. The chapter concludes with a discussion of Michel Foucault, whose theorisations guide us towards the proposal of a multiplicity of child constructs.
Chapter 4 surveys the concept of agency across multiple theoretical landscapes, such as posthumanism and the new materialisms, ultimately offering a conceptualisation of children as one agentic entity in a shifting, complex and ecological collective of human and non-human worlds. The authors point out that the entangled agentic assemblages that make up our world are not fully knowable, and therefore knowledge might be regarded as more of a sense than a certainty.
Chapter 5 situates children and childhoods in relation with nature and the non-human world. In this chapter, the authors present the Anthropocene as a rupturing force to legacies of humanist, separatist and exceptionalist ontologies. Further, they offer posthumanism as an apparatus for dismantling the racism and speciesism engendered by the exclusionary concept of the human. The chapter closes with a hopeful gaze towards the implications of relationality for contemporary childhoods and childhood studies.
In chapter 6, the authors propose a diffractive posthumanist reading of New Zealand’s renowned curriculum document Te Whāriki, highlighting its relational and reciprocal approach to children and their relationships with/in the world. They continue by providing examples of entangled childhoods through varied investigations of children’s intra-relationships with materials and objects – the people, places and things that constitute their lived experiences.
Chapter 7 furthers the discussion of children’s relationships with people, places and things by enacting a posthumanist and new materialist reading of children’s learning environments. The chapter advances Māori Professor Wally Penetito’s three-strand approach to place-based education, which attends to the nuances of contemporary learning environments (Te Kete Ipurangi, n.d.). The three strands are (1) the place we stand; (2) the place we practise; and (3) the world we take for granted. The chapter goes on to illuminate the three strands through picture books that unsettle, enliven or otherwise traverse children’s conceptualisations of place.
Picking up on the presentation of children’s learning environments in chapter 7, chapter 8 continues thinking with posthumanism to consider children’s posthuman performativity. First, the authors discuss the ways in which children’s affective relationships with/in temporal, physical and geographical elements lend themselves to performances of their everyday childhoods. They propose that these performances can be seen as a responding-to and becoming-with the people, places and things with which children are enmeshed. In this performance, children do not adhere to false human-made boundaries such as ‘nature’ and (child) ‘culture’. Rather, as Taylor (2013) argues, children thrive in a natureculture where the borders of this false binary, among many others, are blurred. Indigenous perspectives are called on to complexify our understandings about the temporal entanglement in the place–human–thing relationalities in children’s lives. Also to be considered are the ways that places, histories and things themselves are affected by temporality, children and more-than-human influences.
Chapter 9 opens with Haraway’s (2011) reminder that stories matter. The chapter presents a story about the history of research with children, who were viewed as not quite human and researched as such. The authors argue that the revelations regarding the posthuman child as a knowledge producer with/in their shifting and complex web of relations have required new ways of researching. Philosophy and decolonising and Indigenous research are proposed as approaches to the challenge of putting posthuman paradigms to work with children and contemporary childhoods. Research with and by children is highlighted as a method to create new stories – stories of rich potentialities with our more-than-human relations. The final chapter of the book, chapter 10, is a comprehensive glossary of the key posthuman childhood studies concepts used in the book.
Theorising Posthuman Childhood Studies presents a rhizomatic timeline of childhood studies in its trajectory towards posthuman and new materialist scholarship. Stories are told throughout the text that bring the concepts addressed to life. The result is a sophisticated and dynamic portrait of the field that leaves an opening for the reader to imagine what might be next for childhood studies research.
I feel that this book has successfully provided an extensive overview of theoretical considerations for childhood studies without narrowing or simplifying the discussion. Throughout the book, the authors thread conventional understandings of children, childhoods and childhood research, showing how these understandings are challenged and complexified by post-developmental and posthumanist theories. Additionally, the authors skilfully illustrate philosophy’s contributions to conceptualisations of children and show how philosophy has been employed to render children as (1) less than human and (2) separate from the world in which they live. This nuanced mapping is important, as it offers a launching point for students of early childhood studying at university who may be presented with dominant discourses of early childhood. Thus, Theorising Posthuman Childhood Studies will be a valuable resource for teachers and students of childhood studies and education, as well as childhood studies scholars seeking unconventional approaches to research. I highly recommend the book to any reader who is interested in a broader understanding of children and their everyday lived childhoods in complex and diverse contexts.
