Policy in the time of Anthropocene: Children,childhoods and digital worlds

Childhoods in the age of Anthropocene

2019: We live in precarious times. We have entered the era of the Anthropocene, the first man-made era from which there is, apparently, no return. The Anthropocene, the current geological age, is considered as an epoch in which human activity has become the dominant influence on both the environment and climate. Educators are yet to fully engage with all the challenges, knowledges and complexities associated with this era, and most particularly, the implications of the era for humankind and all children (Duhn et al., 2018).

Malone (2018: ix), in her book Children in the Anthropocene, writes: ‘We are not all in the Anthropocene together – the poor and the dispossessed, the children are far more in it than others.’ At a political level, this argument has profound policy implication. At a more personal level, it has profound implications for children and childhoods. Malone (2018) makes an argument for children, childhoods, and for a new theoretical reading of children within their environment in this epoch. It is a book that argues equally for children and for social justice. It mixes new theorization with thinking with children from as distant and diverse places as Kazakhstan, Bolivia, Papua New Guinea, the Cook Islands and Australia. Such a clear exploration of what the Anthropocene is and what it means for children of various regions is fascinating. Throughout Malone’s text is a belief that through the non-Western childhoods, the West can gain experience and new understanding of its current predicaments. It is in the stories of children in Kazakhstan and elsewhere that the West can not only read its own future and challenges, but – perhaps most importantly – can learn with these children and countries about how to create a productive response to the Anthropocene.

For children and policy alike, the Anthropocene is a gamechanger, and in recent decades we have started to witness the emergence of diverse political and policy stances towards it. Malone sharply describes and analyses what it means for children and childhoods of the past, present and future. Our reading of her work and its central argument is the promise of the future, promise of an opportunity for human kind to develop, and implement policies – generic and educational ones. As such, it is a catastrophe on one hand, and on the other perhaps a final opportunity for humankind to both develop and implement a relevant policies.

Childhoods in the post-digital age

2019: We live in precarious times. We used to think that we understood what digital is and meant. We were comfortable in a linear understanding of ‘digital’. As the digital has infiltrated nearly every aspect of our lives, as technological advances have encroached into cognitive areas once considered too complicated and ‘human’ to be automated, the digital is no longer linear or straightforward. Instead, we have entered a post-digital world, one which encapsulates the turmoil and nebulous nature of relationships among non-human and human elements that shape our contexts. The separation and dichotomy between digital and non-digital, between virtual and ‘real’, is increasingly problematic. The ‘real’ has become contested. Baudrillard’s hyperreality has become the everyday and mundane – the truth and the fictions have become one in the post-truth world of 2019.

The way digital has become part of all our lives, and our children’s lives, has superseded any separation of the ‘digital world’ and ‘real world’. Both virtual and augmented reality have not has become part of our everyday existence. We are no longer worried about a ‘visible digital environment’. We have become one. We have merged and incorporated seamlessly into one pedagogical post-digital space. The ‘post-’ does not mean, in this instance, that the digital does not exist any more. Quite the opposite: it means that it exists within new and enhanced conditions. The post-digital condition.

The post-digital anthropocentric condition

What does this mean for young children, for those born into this new world order? For them, the dominance of the human encapsulated by the Anthropocene, simultaneously contrasted with the fluidity of material and non-material, human and non-human, in the post-digital age, will be their only known. There will be an ever-present tension for these children. They will inhabit the post-digital world with the relative ease of someone who has known nothing else. Yet this will be punctured and constrained by the boundaries of binaries imposed by others, who have known the [pre]digital age. Similarly, they will be the first generation who has had to navigate and deal with the profound implications of the Anthropocene on a grand scale, grappling with the policies and [in]decisions of previous generations.

Navigating the spaces between the human-centric condition embodied by the Anthropocene and the fluidity between ‘real’ and ‘virtual’, human and machine in the post-digital world will challenge the next generation. The post-digital world does not necessarily fit easily with the Anthropocene. In one, the positioning and subjectivity of the human is elevated to a level beyond anything that has come before. And in the other, the human becomes more fluid, the boundaries between humans and other, material and non-material, increasingly blurred. Navigating these two approaches poses unique challenges to policy, particularly policy as it relates to children and childhood.

The post-digital anthropocentric condition will challenge conceptualizations of child and childhood. The child as the ‘innocent’ continues to dominate our positioning of children and childhood and inform our policy decisions. This positioning, however, is in tension with the post-digital anthropocentric condition. In the era of the Anthropocene, no human is immune from global forces shaping our planet. Indeed, children will be more affected than anyone.

At the same time, in our post-digital world, the concept of what is real is no longer needed. We move away from discrete, interdependent objects with clearly defined boundaries and instead embrace situated, relational entanglements that are always shifting. As Jandric et al. (2018) argue, ‘We are increasingly no longer in a world where digital technology and media is separate, virtual, “other” to a “natural” human and social life.’ Perhaps we live in an era where ‘real’ and ‘digital’ is becoming intrinsically connected, and we are forced to radically reconsider what it means to be a child, or what to have a childhood may mean, in the post-digital world in the time of the Anthropocene.

Now, more than ever, we need time and space for productive policy. Policy that moves beyond a superficial engagement with current contexts to grapple deeply with the issues discussed above. Policy that focuses not just on short-term gains but is based on a long-term vision for the future. Policy, that through careful implementation can radically level up the consequences of modernity and human exceptionality.