Posthumanism and Childhood Studies

Abstract

The current move in childhood studies toward posthumanism, new materialism, and agential realism articulates a broader transdisciplinary paradigm shift in the academy. Philosophically reconfiguring who and what counts as (fully) human, challenges dominant views of child as an economic resource and education as an individualizing, teleologically humanizing project. The ontological turn away from the individualized human allows other than dominant psycho-socio-cultural-linguistic and biomedical perspectives to be included in childhood studies and argues why this matters epistemologically, ethically, and politically. Posthumanist childhood studies engages affirmatively with research that challenges the limited and exclusionary focus on representational language, the discursive and the culture-nature binary that keeps the world at an ontological distance and has brought deficit figurations of child into existence. Moving away from attempts to define the essence of what an entity is (including “child”), new materialists engage with the materiality of a world that does not sit still; they focus on what bodies (including human ones) can do. In their nonrepresentationalist theories and methodologies, posthumanists and new materialists draw mainly on Western philosophers (e.g., Latour, Massumi) and feminist thinkers (e.g., Bennett, Braidotti, Manning), whose anti-Cartesian project includes troubling the heteronormative, ableist, classist, racist humanist subject. Instead, they reconfigure subjectivity, voice, intentionality, and agency inspired by the philosophies of Descartes’ contemporary Spinoza, and 20th-century French philosophers Deleuze and Guattari. Agential realism is mainly attributed to Karen Barad who diffracts through quantum physicist Niels Bohr, French philosophers Derrida and Foucault, and American feminist colleagues Donna Haraway, Judith Butler, and others. Agential realists focus on phenomena (not bodies) as basic ontological units for material-discursive analyses involving a different relationship with space and time (“hauntology”). Methodologically distinct from other posthumanist approaches to child/hood studies, agential realists acknowledge that the human is entangled with/in all research relations and cannot be “decentered.” Instead, what counts as “human” or “child” is a central part of the analysis and cannot be assumed as given. The exclusive sourcing of Western thinkers has been called into question by Black, antiracist, and Indigenous childhood scholars. Moreover, the primary sources posthumanist childhood studies’ scholars draw on are also remarkably silent about child/hood and age, and many claims made about the (White, male, able-bodied, hetero-sexual) “human” assume the “adult human.” This adult-centrism resonates with the invisibility of Indigenous peoples—a connection more recently taken up by child/hood studies scholars.