Abstract
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 re-turn 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 ways – ways 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.
It is by inviting a sense of serious playfulness that posthumanist child(hood) scholars insist that a reconfiguration of ‘child’ brings other elements, actors, atmospheres and problematics into our research frames. What can Adults learn about researching differently by attuning to the figuration of posthuman child?
Mr Wuffles! (Wiesner, 2013; Figure 1) offers a seriously playful opening for other, non-Anthropocentric, linguistically coded ways to encounter the world. In this original picture book, the audience is presented with ‘a wordless book that is full of dialogue’ but ‘can’t be read’ (Wiesner, n.d.). After coming up with the initial idea, David Wiesner struggled for many years to find a narrative he was happy with. Only after endless drawings, scribbles and doodles central to the initial ideas, and in particular after finding inspiration in Marcel Duchamps’s The Large Glass, he invented a visual secret language for each of his characters: ‘I now had a small amount of human language, a whole lot of alien language, a bunch of bug language, and a bit of cat language’ (Wiesner, n.d.).
With geometric forms and the help of linguist Nathan Sanders, seamstress Emily and Cricket the cat, the ‘fake’ hieroglyphic languages comprise around 30 symbols. These multiple languages are not meant to be understood through signification and by cognitively depicting and referring to things in the world, but, like Duchamps’s artefact, they mean what the author means (and of course this reminds us of Lewis Carrol’s play with language and nonsense in Alice in Wonderland).
The Mr Wuffles! picture book.
The symbols we have created as headings for this introduction are also a playful invention, although not completely random choices. Wiesner wanted his symbols to feel like a language, and their meanings can be inferred from ‘the context of the pictures – action, facial expressions, body language’ (Wiesner, n.d.). Our context is about the multiplicity of languages involved in articulating (the) posthuman child. Through the exclamation and question marks, as well as the other shapes, we articulate wonder, curiosity and urgency around where childhood studies might turn to next in its exploration of what it means to decentre (the) child human. We wonder and we invited the contributing authors also to wonder: Is decentring the same as ‘dissolving’, ‘destructing’, ‘de(con)structing’ or even ‘erasing’? As always with philosophical enquiries, we are left with more questions than answers. It is with those questions that the authors in this special issue have considered complex figurations of ‘posthuman child’ in early childhood research, and the tensions this causes in theorising child subjectivity.
For a posthumanist or new materialist, child is constituted by other human and more-than-human relations, and this articulation of child subjectivity (‘(the) child’) can cause profound philosophical tensions, dilemmas and misunderstandings. Posthuman child as figuration was introduced by Murris (2016) to articulate the empirical fact that child is always already in relation and does not exist prior to these relations. The articles in this special issue are variously inspired by the feminist philosophers Donna Haraway, Rosi Braidotti, Karen Barad, Jane Bennett, Erin Manning, Astrida Neimanis and others to offer figurations of (the) posthuman child that are conceptualised and performed as more than a bounded body – (a) porous self, always connected, embedded and embodied, dynamic and active. ‘Posthuman child’ escapes definition and pinning down as it does not signify a bounded body in the world; it must be understood as constantly being formed through relationalities. This is the reason we put ‘the’ between brackets in ‘(the) posthuman child’. But does decentring (the) child human in this way necessarily mean a ‘flat ontology’ – a flattening of power relations?
Indeed, as some critical voices have argued, ontologies whereby all bodies are equal can push patterns of exploitation and concerns about justice, power and violence into the background (Åsberg & Neimanis, 2013). Lindgren (2020) also insists that, in her figuration of posthuman child, the removal from hierarchical categorisations in a flat ontology should not come with, for example, relinquishing individual rights. As Hackett et al. (2020: 4) put it, by drawing attention to materiality, ‘the micro, the in-the-moment, the contingent and the situated nature of subject positions’, the ‘political, historical, biographical and intersectional elements with which we are all, always, inextricably tangled’ can get lost. Arguing against a ‘flat’ ethics, Tammi (2019: 1326) asks: ‘how do different versions of child and adult emerge from the complex interplay, networking and orchestration of different natural, discursive, collective, and hybrid materials?’ On the other hand, it could be argued that positing a flat ontological plane may be precisely the ethical and political strategy we need to undermine inequities by showing that they are human creations in the first place. After all, Adult humans’ normative epistemologies have introduced the categorisations, binaries and hierarchies that include and exclude. They have created the binary logic that child humans need to learn systematically through their schooling, and posthumanism urges us to unlearn.
In our re-turning to the figuration of (the) posthuman child, we need to reconsider to what extent by positing (as the posthumanism we subscribe to does) that all bodies are radically entangled, and have no fixed, separate, determinate boundaries, we, Adults, put (the) child at risk of erasure. It is this complexity we engage with through this special issue.
The posthuman figuration of (the) child is not mainstream. Instead, what researchers tend to bring to their research practices are assumptions about child in abstraction. And it is this latter, abstract notion of the universal child that has become the signifier of all ‘young human beings’ by professionals and researchers globally. Biologically and physiologically categorised by, for instance, height, weight, neurological state, or linguistic or motoric distinctives (Kennedy, 2006: 1–2), ‘child human’ as a concept has come to signify the chronologically developing child (e.g. (the) child of the United Nations Convention on the Rights of the Child). It has become the norm by which each young individual is measured and, by using so-called natural talents, intelligence and abilities as markers of ‘full humanity’ or ‘Man’ (Wynter, 2003), the always non-innocent, ethico-political dimensions of the concepts ‘child’ and ‘human’ remain hidden.
Of course, in academia, the way in which (the) child human is theorised has shifted significantly. Indeed, various attempts have been made to decouple humans’ ability from age (Haynes & Murris, 2019; Wall, 2016) and trouble the way in which younger humans are measured (by Adult humans) in reference to ‘adulthood’ through the routine use of psychological, developmental and chronological criteria (e.g. see Bohlmann & Hickey-Moody, 2019; Burman, 2008; Kennedy, 2006; Kohan, 2017). Yet it is remarkable how resilient early childhood education practices and policies are to these changed figurations of (the) child inspired by post-structuralist and new materialist theories, silencing the political dimension of the concept of ‘child human’ itself. However, although useful background and rightly researched extensively elsewhere, this is not our main interest here.
This special issue is an experiment in extending the groundbreaking work that feminist new materialists and posthumanists have carried out in reconfiguring human agency by focusing on decentring the human and their explorations of what this means for figurations of (the) child. The central concern is with how posthumanist research can be done that refuses erasure by (re)turning to ethico-onto-epistemological concerns, including intersectionality, agency, deconstruction, situated knowledges and partial perspectives. This focus seems urgently needed because there is a growing wave of scholarship that readily critiques posthumanist approaches but tends to rest on unwarranted assumptions and superficial engagements with its philosophical underpinnings. Putting new materialism and posthumanism to work to reconfigure subjectivity and agency in research is philosophically challenging because it requires fundamental and significant ontological and epistemological shifts. Therefore, it is only to be expected that posthumanist research has been met with dismay and sometimes disdain from various quarters, for varied reasons.
The posthumanist project is committed to philosophically reconfiguring who and what counts as (fully) human and to show why and how this ontological (re)turn matters ethically and politically (Murris, 2016; Osgood & Robinson, 2019). Yet this has rightly been called into question by Black, antiracist and Indigenous scholars, who have argued that posthumanists appear unaware of their own location and make universalising claims about ‘the’ human while remaining silent about past and present non-western or Indigenous scholarship (Hunt, 2014; Nxumalo, 2020; Todd, 2016; Tuck et al., 2014; Watts, 2013). In essence, many people are still struggling to have their humanity recognised, hence ‘dissolving’ the category of the human (Hackett et al., 2020: 6) at this historical juncture amounts to White privilege and also Adult privilege (Arculus & MacRae, 2022). After all, the concept of ‘human’ tends to refer to Adults, not child humans. These are important considerations that the articles in this special issue engage with in diverse ways.
Although the political inclusion of historically marginalised groups is gaining traction in posthumanist research, the inclusion of children as political agents is not. Children might have legal and moral rights, but they have no political rights because they lack the kind of speech and reason (capacities considered to distinguish humans from animals) that is presupposed by democratic institutions (Rollo, 2016). Indeed, there is a remarkable silence about ‘age’ and childism as exclusionary, ironically even in the posthumanism literature (Haynes & Murris, 2019). Braidotti (2019: 31) describes ‘the missing peoples’ of humanism as ‘real-life subjects whose knowledge never made it into any of the official cartographies’. But who is included and excluded in her list of ‘missing peoples’? The liberating ethical task we face, Braidotti urges, is to help turn painful experiences of missing peoples’ ‘inexistence into generative relational encounters and knowledge production’ (31). But who is Braidotti’s ‘we’? Even when posthumanists refer to the phrase ‘human exceptionalism’ as something to be disrupted, they tend to assume adult humans of a particular age and their claims to knowledge based on speech and reason. Might children be amongst the ‘missing peoples’ of posthumanism? Enquiring into this question requires paying attention to the intricate details of what posthumanists mean by ‘dissolving the category of the human’ (Hackett et al., 2020: 6) and, by implication, what it means to dissolve the category of the young human. The articles in this special issue of the journal offer examples of posthumanist research that refuses to erase child subjectivity and maintains a keen focus on the situatedness of childhoods as they become through relational entanglements.
We contend that the theoretical and political frame of postmodernism, post-colonialism and posthumanism involves a deconstruction, not a destruction, of the human; posthumanists are anti-humanists, not anti-humans (Ferrando, 2020: 2). The category of the human is dissolved, not the human itself. Deconstruction or de(con)struction (Barad, 2017) of the human involves understanding the human as part of an intra-connected network of sociopolitical, material-discursive, nature-culture, human–non-human relations. The posthuman practice of decentring the human does not involve erasure of the fleshy individual human through (maybe) violent means (Ferrando, 2020), but centres around the conceptual work of reconfiguring what ‘the human’ (and by implication ‘child’) is historically and symbolically, and what she can become. De(con)structing the human is philosophically complex, hence easily misunderstood.
A steadily growing body of feminist new materialist and posthumanist approaches to the study of early childhood (e.g. Blaise, Duhn, Hackett, Lenz Taguchi, Malone, Murris, Nxumalo, Pacini-Ketchabaw, Osgood, Otterstad, Rautio, Ritchie and Taylor, among many others) argues for the embodied nature of such enquiry, stressing the importance of ‘situated knowledges’ and ‘partial perspectives’ (Haraway, 1988). Braidotti (2002: 69) argues that figurations demand a sense of ‘accountability for one’s locations’ and a ‘self-reflexivity’ that is not an individual activity but an intra-active process that ‘relies upon a social network of exchanges’. As she goes on to explain: The figurations that emerge from this process act as a spotlight that illuminates aspects of one’s practice which were blindspots before. By extension, new figurations of the subject … function like conceptual personae. As such, they are no metaphor, but rather on the critical level, materially embedded, embodying accounts of one’s power-relations. On the creative level they express the rate of change, transformation of affirmative deconstruction of the power one inhabits. (Braidotti, 2002: 69)
It is of concern that some critics dismiss posthumanism by critiquing posthumanist readings of research practices, without engaging directly with the theorists who have inspired the researchers. As argued by Ferrando (2020: 1): ‘some scholars have promptly entered the posthuman field, without a thorough investigation of the posthuman debate itself, thus basing their arguments on unwarranted premises and assumptions, generating confusion and even dismay’. For example, the post-structuralist and sociologist Eva Bendix Petersen (2018) rejects Banerjee and Blaise’s (2013) claim that their reading of non-human air as agential in Hong Kong offers something new. It is disappointing that, according to Petersen’s (2018: 7) own admission and even justification, only this one article was examined, for ‘pragmatic’ reasons, although the critique has been taken up as if this one article was somehow representative of all posthumanist and new materialist research (Rekert, 2016). Conclusions are drawn about the value of new materialist and posthumanist research on the basis of a single article. This is particularly worrying because Petersen avoids engaging directly with Barad’s (2007) germinal work Meeting the Universe Halfway and, at the same time, suggests that Banerjee and Blaise (2013) misappropriate Barad’s notion of intra-action. Such academic practices are potentially damaging because alternative (diffractive and generative) ways of engaging with colleagues’ scholarship are fundamental to the ethos of feminist posthumanist research. 1 As Banerjee and Blaise (2018: 11) point out in their response to Petersen’s critique, Karen Barad as well as Brian Massumi and famously Bruno Latour (2004: 225), in his declaration that ‘critique has run out of steam’, have been ‘instrumental in positing critiques that are affirmative and eventful’.
The contributions to this special issue affirmatively and eventfully engage in critical scholarship that works to extend complex figurations of (the) posthuman child in contemporary research by calling into question what agency is, what it means and what it does. We provoked our authors to consider the idea of a ‘flat ontology’ – that is, ‘the human researcher [a]s not privileged over the nonhuman air’ (Banerjee & Blaise, 2013: 17) – and invited them to consider whether (and in what ways) the inclusion of the non-human as a discrete and separate agential entity depoliticises the human subject (Kipnis, 2015; Petersen, 2018; Rekert, 2016, 2018) in childhood research. Increasingly, post-qualitative researchers are drawing on and inspired by the ontological ‘unlearning’ that posthumanism requires. This involves calling into question the anthropomorphic logic framing ideas about agency – that is, wilful (human) intentionality. Posthumanism insists that agencies are relational, co-constituted and constantly becoming through intra-action. Unfortunately, though, it appears that Barad’s ‘intra-action’, which is at the heart of the relational ontology of agential realism, is frequently misunderstood in contemporary studies of childhood. As a result, claims made by posthumanist researchers that posthumanism offers perspectives and insights that are ‘new’ in research are rejected. Therefore, the articles that have been included grapple with agencies as relationally generated, hybrid, multilayered, material-discursive, often internally contradictory, interconnected and weblike, and attend to what this makes possible in attempts to extend figurations of (the) posthuman child.
It has been interesting to notice how challenging the task has been for many of the authors in complexifying posthumanist child/hood studies – in that sense articulating a ‘second wave’. We kept reminding ourselves – as well as our contributors – to be guided by questions such as: ‘Does posthumanist childhood research depoliticise our research practices to an extent that “child” drops out of the equation altogether?’ and ‘Where or what is “child” when the human is “dissolved” or de(con)structed?’ In particular, we urged the authors to address the following three questions by engaging with the posthumanist and feminist new materialist literature, and to illuminate their theoretical claims through examples from research and pedagogical practices:
How can/do we keep our childhood studies political? How do posthumanist researchers keep (the) child in play when they neither ‘follow the child’ nor make ‘child’ central to their investigations? How can posthumanist research make a difference to childhood (in the broadest, worldly sense)?
This collection of articles can be understood as a diffractive practice of contestation and creation for new insights and practices to e/merge by doing justice to the complexities of in/determinate figurations of (the) posthuman child. Resisting definition, they help shift, or at least shake, the ontological ground on which specific knowledge claims are made about child subjectivity and agency in contemporary research practices.
The issue opens with a piece by Ann-Hege Lorvik Waterhouse, Ann Merete Otterstad and Kelly Boucher, entitled ‘“Jeg skal sjekke”: Urban buggy-wayfaring and adventurous lines with data-ing and reconfigurations of children’. The authors refrain from referring to posthumanism, or posthuman child. Instead, they decentre ‘the human as the superior species in the world’ and attend ‘to the dynamic of adults having power over children’ by focusing on becoming child. By paying attention to minor gestures and ‘sjekking/checking’ what is happening, they notice what else might become. Also inspired by Manning’s praxis of research-creation, they think-with and respond to humans and more-than-humans as already in relation and as inseparably connected, including regarding digital technologies as co-participants in data-ing. Troubling subject-driven notions of agency (‘undoing the I’), they emphasise sight, sound, affect and motion. Arresting decoded and recoded images of diffracted textured lines speculatively experiment with the movements of collective buggy-walking through urbanised city surfaces to arrive at other ways of encountering child through research undertaken in a different key.
Inspired by Jane Bennett’s new materialism and her notion of ‘circuits of sympathy’, Gloria Quinones and Iris Duhn argue that posthuman child is neither in the centre nor decentred, but part of the agentic physical force of sympathetic circuits and atmospheric flows that connect (the) child’s body with the ‘external’ world. They put to work Bennett’s recent work on ‘influx’ and ‘efflux’ to argue that what they refer to as ‘the posthuman child’ is always plugged into creative political circuits of vibrant materials and forces. Their article, ‘Circuits of sympathy: Posthuman child, vibrant forces, things and places’, offers performative examples of Australian pre-service teachers engaging with sympathy (e.g. pain, love and suffering) as a more-than-human force. Curated examples of their pedagogical documentation of encounters with ‘posthuman children’ during a university early childhood education course show why it matters for the politics of childhood to finely tune into moods, affects and atmospheres created by the vibrant planetary (and other) forces of animals, plants, things and places. Diffracting through Quinones and Duhn’s article, we would like to suggest that Cara Furman’s ‘ghosts’ in her article have such more-than-human physical and atmospheric force (‘thing-power’).
Furman, in ‘Welcoming entanglements with ghosts: Re-turning, re-membering, and facing the incalculable in teacher education’, argues how the ontology of the figure of (the) posthuman child articulates how children live with/in multiple temporalities and can witness ghosts as part of everyday living. By revisiting her ‘own’ moving Holocaust basement ghosts in their materiality, she argues that in teacher education it is imperative that we welcome the ghosts that some children are already engaging with and invite other ghosts to the room. This posthumanist kind of responsibility is a way of producing more just openings for other futures – for example, being open to more-than-human forces and the vibrancy of matter making us thereby more ‘attentive to the diverse ways children perceive “reality”’, as Quinones and Duhn suggest. Both these articles seem to regard posthuman child as a physical, fleshy entity (at least partly) given in human perception through child observation. In contrast, Theresa Giorza, also inspired by Barad’s agential realism, adopts temporal diffraction as her methodology, and (the) posthuman child.
In ‘“Draw yourself and write your name”: Material-discursive agency of names and drawings in early childhood’, Giorza dwells on a small selection of performative encounters from a Grade R classroom that, when approached through a posthumanist onto-ethico-epistemological research framework, offer alternative ways of contemplating what else unfolds through literacy practices and how else ‘child’ might be encountered. 2 It is by focusing on naming practices, children’s artwork and the mobilisation of literacy in the classroom that placetimemattering and be/coming together with human and non-human companions, and the lived concept of ‘reading’, is extended. Children, hands, bodies, names, pages, drawings and ideas enact a literate becoming in an in-between space and time outside of what is pedagogically intended. Like Furman, Giorza stresses that making ‘child’ visible in posthumanist research involves recognising the inseparability of the child from the classroom, the learner from the learning, and furthermore that it demands that the temporal, material and spatial realities that produce ‘child’ involve noticing the lively entanglements of children to space, place and matter, and what that does in the formulation of other ways of viewing ‘child’ in early childhood contexts.
In ‘Frictional matterings: (Re)thinking identity and subjectivity in the coming-to-be of literacies’, the complexity (‘frictions’) of bringing into conversation with one other intersectionality, identity politics and post-philosophies is directly addressed. Through a playful analysis of a classroom vignette, Candace R Kuby, Erin Price and Tara Gutshall Rucker suggest a more porous notion of beyond intersectionality, or post-intersectionality, that refuses to pin down children’s identities (e.g. race, gender and dis/abilities, as well as additional reductive labels) on a fixed grid. Troubling how these tests, labels, curriculum script guides and so on produce children and literacies, the authors suggest that these grids ‘un-happen, not happen or happen differently’. Pushing back at what they call ‘stereotypical notions of (potentially) reductive intersectional labelling’ and ‘displacing’ binaries, they suggest that by giving children opportunities to work with and through materials, child is not ‘diminished’ but reconfigured as ‘fully (in)human’. Identity as ‘eventness’ foregrounds relational interconnectivity between child human (and more-than-human) bodies.
The article ‘Grappling with the miseducation of Montessori: A feminist posthuman rereading of “child” in early childhood contexts’ also invites a critical engagement with how ‘child’ gets produced, and offers alternative readings by doing justice to the what else and where else when enacting a posthumanist approach to child(hood) studies. Through a contemporary feminist posthuman rereading of Montessori educational philosophy as generated within three everyday fieldwork fragments, Jayne Osgood and Sid Mohandas argue for a decentring of humanist ‘child’ without erasure of gender, race, class and sexual orientation. Like Kuby et al.’s article, this piece offers porous accounts of the ways in which intersectionalities are produced through everyday encounters within early childhood contexts. Profoundly grappling with some of the complexities involved in reconceptualising ‘child’ in the context of Maria Montessori’s own writings, they refuse to fix, contain and codify ‘child’ ‘against developmentalist, civilising logic’. Inspired by Haraway, their feminist diffractive reading of texts (in the broad sense) attunes to more-than-human relationalities and differences, offering rich material-semiotic accounts of ‘child’ by foregrounding affect (e.g. suspicion), matter (e.g. snot) and porous bodies (e.g. an iPad camera) that move (e.g. sweeping). Thus, in their deeply political take on child subjectivity, also in the context of queerness, they move ‘ethnographic observation’ in a Montessori classroom (and elsewhere) beyond representation towards observations that are ‘more childlike’ by doing justice to the liveliness of the world.
Picking up some of the threads offered by Kuby et al. and Osgood and Mohandas, Jaye Johnson Thiel pursues ‘thinking with theory as an analytic process to make sense of a world’ where the conditions of possibility exist for neoliberal ‘child’ to be produced through social media. In ‘Twitter, Pre-K Week, and neoliberal childhoods: Posthuman reimaginings of a sigh’, the everyday politics of childhood and the ways research can attend and attune to inequities while simultaneously engaging in an ontological flattening of the child subject are explored. By dwelling on and persistently re-turning to a tweet sent by a North American state-led organisation during Pre-K Week, Barad’s concept of the ‘material-discursive apparatus’ and Bennett’s concept of ‘vibrant matter’ are mobilised to explore neoliberal childhoods as a phenomenon. Tweets are understood as public phenomena that become etched into a digital socio-material archive with a life of its own. The author pursues three threads of capaciousness: the visual, the discursive and the virtual which work collectively to un/ravel material consequences for ‘child’. In response to the invitation to address the question ‘How can/do we keep our childhood studies political?’, Thiel contests that posthumanism offers a theoretical and practical conduit for rethinking, reconfiguring and reimagining child–world relations while maintaining a firm focus on issues of equity and justice.
This special issue concludes with an article from Karin Murris and Joanne Peers that directly responds to the call for papers and the three questions it poses. The authors show how the ontological posthumanist shift (of Baradian agential realism) does not erase, but keeps the child human of colour in play, despite the inclusion of the other-than-(Adult)human in its methodologies. In ‘GoPro(blem)s and possibilities: Keeping the child human of colour in play in an interview’, a montaging technique (Barad, 2017) is used to explore the philosophical complexity of ‘decentering without erasure’ by re-turning to data generated as part of a project about digital play in South Africa. Their agential realist reading of interview data attunes to ‘what else is going on’, and the difference this makes for reconfiguring child subjectivity – politically and philosophically. It also makes us think (differently) about ‘interviews’ as research instruments. The researchers literally ‘follow the child’, but in a way that refuses to exclude or erase the more-than-(Adult)human. They are introduced to the GoPro(blem) through their non-linear situated encounters in an informal settlement in Cape Town. It is by diffractively reading Barad’s scholarship through visual and aural texts that the article explores how posthumanist research makes a difference to childhood studies by shifting from Object and Subject to Phenomenon. This ontological shift, they argue, makes it possible for ageist, ableist, racist, extractive and settler-colonial logics in education research to explode.
An inevitably multiple, in/conclusive conclusion
Taking into account how diverse posthumanism as a philosophy is, it did not really come as a surprise how the three open questions we invited the authors to engage with generated diverse and in/conclusive responses. The value of these differences in between the various research approaches and analyses of examples from practice, and the philosophical differences between these analyses, provokes further serious play with other questions and amplifies the concepts that propel us in new directions. Our ongoing imperative is to persist in stretching, disrupting and exploding ‘common-sense’ notions of child subjectivity and human agency. What is urgently needed in pursuit of more liveable lives on our damaged planet is taking up more queer, expansive, embodied and affective other ways to undertake research with, for and about (the) ‘child’.
Footnotes
Funding
Karin Murris would like to acknowledge that some of her work in this Special Issue was supported by the National Research Foundation of South Africa under Grant number 129306.