Abstract
Peter Kraftl’s After Childhood: Re-thinking Environment, Materiality and Media in Children’s Lives is a comprehensive book offering novel strategies for undertaking childhood research after childhood. Based on the premise that ‘post-thinking in childhood studies has both gone too far and not far enough – conceptually and methodologically’ (para 5). Kraftl proposes that perhaps the best way to consider and respond to the complex challenges children face today is to understand that we cannot begin with the child or childhoods, but rather after them, to better understand the phenomena in question and children’s positions within it. Thus, using a conceptual move Kraftl terms the ‘pull focus’, he brings childhoods in and out of focus (as opposed to decentering and re-centering). This strategy, which he also refers to (after Tsing, 2015) as ‘the arts of (not) noticing’, is used throughout the book to thoroughly attend to complex material entanglements such as environmental and resource nexuses that matter to children, and to locate children within these entanglements.
The 8th title in the Routledge Spaces of Childhood and Youth Series; this book contributes to the series by offering concepts and methods for scholars of children and childhood from interdisciplinary collaborations with digital media studies, archaeology, nanoscience, critical race and gender theories, generational studies and the visual arts. Kraftl draws empirical research and conceptual work from The Plastic Childhoods project (2018–2020), which studied British children’s entangled relations with plastics, energy and other matter. He also presents research from a wide range of geographical contexts. One such study involves searching for traces of children/childhoods in the geosocial complexities of the Guaratinguetá ‘eco-park’, an enormous waste site in Brazil. In another study, Kraftl demonstrates the multiple ways that children and childhoods are made visible (or not) through digital media and looks at the material implications of those inclusions and omissions. He skillfully presents these contexts to offer generative conceptual approaches and lines of inquiry for childhood research.
In the introductory chapter, Kraftl explains that this book was born of a sense of both commitment to and frustration with contemporary childhood studies. He argues that although social-scientific studies of childhood have accomplished much in the past few decades, there is still work to be done to develop theories, methods and frameworks that allow researchers to consider the challenges and traumas of contemporary childhoods. To address this, Kraftl attempts to expand the concept of ‘child’ and ‘childhoods’ further than new materialist and posthumanist works of literature have done by calling on feminist, queer and critical race theories and concepts from the object-oriented ontologies (OOO).
In Chapter 2, Kraftl provides an overview of childhood studies and an evaluation of its attempts to ‘decentre’ children. He goes on to bring in feminist, queer, critical race, object-oriented ontologies (OOO), and generational theories that are valuable for situated discussions of childhoods and matter.
Chapter 3 advances Nexus thinking as a method to analyze the complex, ‘intractable’ challenges facing young people. Here, Kraftl asks a question that will reverberate throughout the remainder of the book: where are children, precisely, in attempts to think and do, after childhood?
In Chapter 4, Kraftl engages the arts of (not) noticing children/childhoods through a detailed analysis of object-oriented and speculative-realist philosophies as they relate to the specific materialities encountered in a tour of Luz, São Paulo. Next, he calls children/childhoods into the frame by locating them in the material, ethical and political entanglements of an abandoned house in Luz, and the swirling masses of material/animal detritus off the island of Roatán, 40 miles north of Honduras, in the Caribbean Sea.
Chapter 5 considers the multiple ways in which children and stuff about childhoods circulates in digital media. In Chapter 6, Kraftl points out that children and childhoods are co-implicated in the ‘after-lives’ of objects, and develops a new term, ‘infra-generations’, to make space for the conceptualization of more-than-human generations. He goes on to present a challenge for OOO, new materialisms, and their propositions about matter. Next, in Chapter 7, Kraftl proposes juxta-position, embodiment and speculative fabulation to analyse the many ways in which children’s lives are entangled with energy. Oriented around the concepts of synthesis and stickiness, Chapter 8 experiments with researching children/childhoods by starting somewhere else – in this case, with plastics.
The concluding chapter gathers some of the most critical ideas threaded throughout the book. Drawing on Berlant (2011) and Braidotti (2011), Kraftl weighs the potential use of silliness, queer-kin to Haraway’s (2011) speculative fabulation, as a necessary accompaniment to trauma and an approach to experimenting with childhood research after childhood.
This ambitious book broadens the field of childhood studies by generating a dialogue between some of the newer developments in the field (SF, OOO, new materialisms) and theoretical considerations from a diverse range of disciplines. I feel this book was successful in expanding notions of the child and childhood and possibilities for posthumanist work in childhood studies. It reminded me that we, as researchers, should strive to experiment with our theories as a child might do with polymer clay. . . combining it with unexpected materials; pulling it as far as possible to discover its breaking point; revealing its potential weaknesses, and generating surprising new affordances.
After Childhood: Re-thinking Environment, Materiality and Media in Children’s Lives will be a valuable resource for human geographers, researchers in childhood studies and environmental humanities, and anyone looking for a range of novel, interdisciplinary frames for thinking about childhood. I highly recommend the book to any reader interested in expanding the conversation regarding childhoods and material-oriented ontologies.
