Theorising Posthuman Childhood Studies [1st ed.] 9789811581748, 9789811581755

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Children: Global Posthumanist Perspectives and Materialist Theories Series Editors: Karen Malone · Marek Tesar · Sonja Arndt

Karen Malone Marek Tesar Sonja Arndt

Theorising Posthuman Childhood Studies

Children: Global Posthumanist Perspectives and Materialist Theories Series Editors Karen Malone, Swinburne University of Technology, Hawthorn, VIC, Australia Marek Tesar, The University of Auckland, Auckland, New Zealand Sonja Arndt, The University of Waikato, Hamilton, New Zealand

This book series presents original and cutting edge knowledge for a growing field of scholarship about children. Its focus is on the interface of children being in the everyday spaces and places of contemporary childhoods, and how different theoretical approaches influence ways of knowing the future lives of children. The authors explore and analyse children’s lived embodied everyday experiences and encounters with tangible objects and materials such as artefacts, toys, homes, landscapes, animals, food, and the broader intangible materiality of representational objects, such as popular culture, air, weather, bodies, relations, identities and sexualities. Monographs and edited collections in this series are attentive to the mundane everyday relationships, in-between ‘what is’ and ‘what could be’, with matters and materials. The series is unique because it challenges traditional western-centric views of children and childhood by drawing on a range of perspectives including Indigenous, Pacifica, Asian and those from the Global South. The book series is also unique as it provides a shift from developmental, social constructivists, structuralist approaches to understanding and theorising about childhood. These dominant paradigms will be challenged through a variety of post-positivist/postqualitative/posthumanist theories of being children and childhood.

More information about this series at http://www.springer.com/series/15731

Karen Malone Marek Tesar Sonja Arndt •

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Karen Malone School of Arts, Social Sciences and Humanities Swinburne University of Technology Melbourne, VIC, Australia

Marek Tesar Faculty of Education and Social Work The University of Auckland Auckland, New Zealand

Sonja Arndt Melbourne Graduate School of Education University of Melbourne Melbourne, VIC, Australia

ISSN 2523-3408 ISSN 2523-3416 (electronic) Children: Global Posthumanist Perspectives and Materialist Theories ISBN 978-981-15-8174-8 ISBN 978-981-15-8175-5 (eBook) https://doi.org/10.1007/978-981-15-8175-5 © Springer Nature Singapore Pte Ltd. 2020 This work is subject to copyright. All rights are reserved by the Publisher, whether the whole or part of the material is concerned, specifically the rights of translation, reprinting, reuse of illustrations, recitation, broadcasting, reproduction on microfilms or in any other physical way, and transmission or information storage and retrieval, electronic adaptation, computer software, or by similar or dissimilar methodology now known or hereafter developed. The use of general descriptive names, registered names, trademarks, service marks, etc. in this publication does not imply, even in the absence of a specific statement, that such names are exempt from the relevant protective laws and regulations and therefore free for general use. The publisher, the authors and the editors are safe to assume that the advice and information in this book are believed to be true and accurate at the date of publication. Neither the publisher nor the authors or the editors give a warranty, expressed or implied, with respect to the material contained herein or for any errors or omissions that may have been made. The publisher remains neutral with regard to jurisdictional claims in published maps and institutional affiliations. This Springer imprint is published by the registered company Springer Nature Singapore Pte Ltd. The registered company address is: 152 Beach Road, #21-01/04 Gateway East, Singapore 189721, Singapore

This book is dedicated to our Planet Earth, and all children and their childhoods.

Posthuman Childhood Studies: An Introduction

The past decades have witnessed a significant growth of research, theories, frameworks and ideas that link the everyday, mundane lives of children in their communities with their local and global worlds. However, there are very few texts for researchers and students that track the trajectory towards the integration of posthuman and new materialist studies in relation to children and childhoods. It was our colleagues and students, who asked us to write this book in order to provide a foundation for recent shifts in understandings of agency, thinking, being and becoming at the local and global levels, in which established and new theories speak to the changing climate and global discourses about children and childhoods. This book is a genealogical foregrounding and performance of conceptions of children and their childhoods over time. We acknowledge that children’s lives are embedded in worlds both inside and outside of structured schooling or institutional settings, and that this relationality informs how we think about what it means to be a child living and experiencing childhood. This book maps the field by taking up a cross-disciplinary, genealogical niche, to offer both an introduction to theoretical underpinnings of emerging theories and concepts, and to provide hands-on examples of how they might play out. This book positions children and their everyday lived childhoods in the Anthropocene and focuses on the interface of children’s being in the everyday spaces and places of contemporary communities and societies. In particular, this book examines how the shift towards posthuman and new materialist perspectives continues to challenge dominant developmental, social constructivist and structuralist theoretical approaches in diverse ways, to help us to understand contemporary constructions of childhood. It recognises that while such dominant approaches have long been shown to limit the complexity of what it means to be a child living in the contemporary world, the traditions of many Eurocentric theories have not addressed the diversity of children’s lives in the majority of countries or in the Global South. In this book, we develop the foundations for and explore children’s lived, embodied everyday mundane experiences and encounters through theoretical lenses that elevate life as entangled with tangible objects and materials. These might include artefacts, toys, homes, educational settings, landscapes, animals, food and vii

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the broader materiality of representational concepts and objects, such as popular culture, air, weather, bodies, relations, identities and sexualities. The book is attentive to the mundane everyday relationships, in between “what is” and “what could be”, with objects and materials. To address some earlier omissions in Eurocentric theoretical conceptions, the book draws on, among others, Māori, Pasifika, Australasian and Global South views of children, childhood and growing up. It provokes thinking beyond historically dominant and colonising views in contemporary Western and non-Western realities.

Aims and Intentions The aim of this book is to combine and perform theories and philosophies that build understandings through everyday anecdotes of children’s lives. In doing so, we draw on both text and digital media accounts of children, and also use and analyse artefacts constructed by and about children found in contemporary societies. Through these cross-disciplinary theoretical insights our intention is to elevate the complexity of children’s everyday lives from a variety of perspectives, to encourage diverse understandings and deconstructions of research about children and how it constructs and positions children in certain ways. We contest universalising views of children’s lives by exploring differences as well as similarities. Overall, we position the question of what it means to be a child within the broader story of the planet and the impending implications of the Anthropocene, and the contemporary conditions of the human and more-than-human world. This book is intended to support both those new to the field of childhood studies and posthuman studies of childhoods, and established researchers in the study of children and childhoods. In 1998, James, Jenks and Prout offered their text Theorizing Childhood as a quintessential “go to” immersion into theorising children and childhoods through a new sociological lens. In this sense, the aim of this book is also pedagogical as it offers a posthuman response within educational thought to contemporary theorisations of childhoods arising from James, Jenks and Prout’s positioning. Like Theorizing Childhood, this book continues to demonstrate “the centrality of childhoods in sociological theory and contemporary debates”. Rather than rejecting sociology and the human, it builds on, re-articulates and offers new formulations of the anthropocentric and post-anthropocentric contexts of children’s lives and experiences with and beyond human-centric ways of knowing and being. We position this book as a critical bridge that connects historical studies and philosophies of children and their childhoods with contemporary scholarship and research. We acknowledge the important and ongoing contributions to the field, by recent work in areas such as children’s geographies and environments (for instance, Kraftl’s 2020 text After Childhood) or agency and nature (for instance, Taylor &

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Pacini-Ketchabaw’s 2019 work on Common Worlds), to name just a few. We hope that scholars and students across fields and disciplines will both benefit and gain inspiration from this book. We hope that, as a “critical bridge” and foundational text, this book offers new insights into a field that is continually evolving in new and previously unimaginable ways.

Book Overview The book is presented in nine chapters and concludes with a glossary. Each chapter complements the others, as they develop a posthuman narrative mapping the shifting terrain and shifting from one chapter to the next. Chapter 1 emphasises the importance of re-reading the history of the philosophy of the child and childhoods. It traces the application of philosophical perspectives in contemporary child subjects as they are shaped by discursive and material aspects of this world. In this chapter, we argue for re-reading philosophical texts with a focus on childhood studies and children’s education, and suggest that such a reading offers an insight into aspects of the classic texts that serve as a useful genealogical foundation on which to build our engagement and understanding of thinking with/on posthuman childhoods. Chapter 2 discusses the conceptual turn to the new sociology of childhood, to which we owe the attention to the child as a subject and the rethinking of what is childhood. This chapter unpacks key terms and serves as a precursor to posthuman childhoods. Chapter 3 with its multiplicities of theoretical perspectives portrays our thinking with theory, and introduces the Anthropocene and its impact as a contemporary context of childhoods. The first three chapters argue that new philosophies and concepts are needed to theorise children and childhoods in current times. They outline ways in which theoretical constructs can help to disrupt dominant or limiting constructions of children and their childhoods in order to make way for and deal in more nuanced ways with the complexities of children’s lives. The first three chapters provide a necessary foregrounding of the state of the art of current thinking and scholarship. Chapter 4 focuses on rethinking agentic childhoods situated in the Anthropocene and in uncertain times. This chapter disrupts conventional ontological views of childhoods where agency is held by humans, and often exclusively by adults, highlighting shifts from historical and sociological conceptions of agency from a rights-based perspective, and complicating conceptions with temporal and material complexities. Agency is theorised through a posthuman lens, as intra-relational, involving multiple human and nonhuman beings or forces. Recognising that children’s agentic relations with the world are not new, but are always already there, the chapter offers a rethinking of children’s agency within the posthuman turn. Chapter 5, on relational childhood natures, explores alternative pedagogies that support posthuman paradigms at this time of the Anthropocene, where we seek to expand our sense of ourselves with nature rather than outside of nature. The chapter tracks a range of ways to think about humans and their encounters, relations and response-ability

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with the nonhuman world, and how they underlie different ways of considering children, childhood and pedagogies. This chapter continues to encourage the reader to make connections and ask questions, about the human/nonhuman relations as open enough to create new conceptual spaces that cater for children’s contemporary experiences, while grounded in and moving on from the theoretical and philosophical foundations outlined earlier. Chapter 6, on entangling materials, curriculum and objects, takes further the notion of children’s agency by re-reading New Zealand’s early childhood curriculum Te Whāriki through a posthuman lens. This chapter situates the concept of curriculum and other regulatory or policy documents within the discourses that are being elevated in this book, in terms of a reconceptualised sociological perspective on childhoods. It applies the concept of curriculum as a useful tool for rethinking childhoods through the materialities of people, places and things. Chapter 7 further develops the openings created in Chap. 6, by placing a posthuman lens on children’s learning environments. In conceptualising children’s learning environments through this lens, this chapter questions linear expectations and hierarchies of learning environments, promoting a sense of openness to the complexities of the relationalities at work in children’s everyday situations and places. By reworking, rethinking and returning diverse conceptualisations of children’s learning environments, the chapter opens to seeing learning environments as always affected and complicated by the powers of things and forces in and beyond the human. Chapter 8 builds on Chapter 7’s focus on children’s entangled realities with and in the world. It places a posthuman lens on children’s lives and their affective relationships with human and nonhuman entities and things. The chapter provokes thinking beyond language, discourse and culture to reconsider the affective nature and influences of matter and materialities in children’s lives. A dominant focus on language illustrates the reliance on social constructivist views, driving the chapter’s aim to blur boundaries, and turn our thinking towards children’s performances of their lives in multifaceted, more-than-linguistic, more-than-discursive and more-than-cultural ways. In Chapter 9, we map how the posthuman and new materialist philosophical and methodological shifts and framings developed throughout this book have changed engagements with researching the child and contemporary childhoods. This final chapter reconnects to Chap. 1, by adding a further exploration of using philosophy as a method of inquiry, that takes us into the kinds of complications that adding a posthuman lens to researching children and childhoods might entail. The chapter offers a range of perspectives on what this could mean, affirming the value of philosophical thought as a crucial grounding of posthuman research paradigms. Following the trajectory of researching on, about and with children and their childhoods, this chapter revisits some of the earlier conceptions of children as immature, to build up to contemporary thought on researching with and by the child, through a posthuman focus. The book concludes with an Annotated Glossary which outlines the (sometimes contested) ways in which particular words or concepts have been used in this book. The glossary gives insights into particular meanings applied in our approach to

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collective thinking about children and childhoods through posthuman and new materialist lenses. We trust that this book will serve as a framing of histories and shifts that have led to current conceptions of childhoods, and that its genealogical approach will provoke lively engagements in discussions and conversations with those new to the field and well-established scholars whose work we humbly honour and draw on, with colleagues, with us and with children. We are exceptionally thankful to all of our students, colleagues, reviewers and thinkers who have, over the years of writing this book, provided us with critical and supportive feedback. Finally, and by way of an opening, we lead into the book with a poem, illustrating the thingness and the materiality of objects that draw us in. This poem evolved from an encounter with an oyster shell and leads us to thinking in the co-relational ways that we elevate in terms of children’s relations with and in their worlds throughout this book. The shell was located in a midden site, possibly used by Aboriginal people for cutting, or that is what it felt like, in this sensorial encounter. This shell, like this book, is a bridge between historical and present ways of being. Fingertips running along edges Wanting for penetrating skin, drawing blood Teatree smells playing on an ocean breeze Sand and shell grit between toes Thumb knows its place Slipping effortlessly into a worn groove Cutting through the air Tracing a ghostly shadow Lost tracks and traces Buried deep beneath the earth Revealing secrets Troubled in unruly graves Wind swept cliffs Moving towards the future Straight ahead Don’t look back to the past Promises of modernity Languish in spiralling ecologies Who were you? What have you become? Author Karen Malone 2018

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Oyster shell found by the ocean close to a midden site of the Boonwurrung people, Kulin Nation, Mornington Peninsula, Victoria. Source and Photo credit Karen Malone

We hope that readers will enjoy and take inspiration from this book. Taking up a posthuman lens not only shifts how we experience the world and our relationships with/in it, but deeply implicates us all in the ethical imperative of being and becoming as an ongoing, often uncertain process in the world. This book shares what we hope will be a step further in this process. Melbourne, Australia Auckland, New Zealand June 2020

Karen Malone Marek Tesar Sonja Arndt

Contents

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History and Philosophy of Children and Childhoods . . . . . . . . Children and Childhoods . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . The Evil, Rational and Free Child . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . Philosophy of Childhoods . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . Histories of Childhood Education . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . Classical and Early Modern Philosophies of Childhoods . . . . . . . . Dewey and Childhood . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . Analytic Philosophy of Education, Radical Tradition and Childhoods . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . Postmodernism and Poststructuralism in Philosophy of Childhood . Philosophy of Childhood in Action . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . Biopolitics and the Governing of Childhoods . . . . . . . . . . . . . . Toy Story 3: Childhood and Imagination . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . Towards the Posthuman Child . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . References . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . Reconfiguring Childhoods and Theories . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . Child as not Fully Human . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . Child Bodies Under Scientific Scrutiny . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . Children as Social Beings . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . Limiting Views of Childhoods . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . Disrupting the Dominant Framework with the New Sociology of Childhoods . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . Postdevelopmental Challenges of Childhoods . . . . . . . . . . . . . Postdevelopmental Theories as a Plurality of Childhoods . . . . Viewing Children and Childhoods Differently . . . . . . . . . . . . Children as Ontologically Complete . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . Social Constructivist Theories of Childhoods . . . . . . . . . . . . . Challenging Ideas on Structures and Agency . . . . . . . . . . . . .

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Reconfiguring Childhood Studies . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . References . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .

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Cartographies of Materialism: Thinking with Child(hood) Theories . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . Interrogating Child as a Construct . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . Child as a Vibrant Becoming . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . Child as a Hybrid Assemblage . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . Child as a Body . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . Child as Other and More-Than-Human Subject . . . . . . . . . . Multiplicities of Child-Constructs . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . References . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .

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Rethinking Childhoods and Agency . . . . . . . . . Agency in Contemporary Times . . . . . . . . . . . . . Socio-cultural Agency . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . Unequal Childhoods/Unequal Agency . . . . . . . . . Complicating Agency Through a Posthuman Lens Rethinking Agency . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . Thing-Power Agency . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . Back to Clementine . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . “Deep History” and Shared Agency . . . . . . . . . . . Freedom and Shared Agency . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . Political Agency . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . Concluding Comments . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . References . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .

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Posthuman Pedagogies in Childhoodnature Time and Temporalities of Childhood(s)nature Childhoodnature Disconnect . . . . . . . . . . . . . Posthuman Pedagogies . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . Sensorial as Pedagogy . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . Encounters as Pedagogy . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . Relations as Pedagogy . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . Response-Ability . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . Learning with Childhoodnatures . . . . . . . . . . Concluding Comments . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . References . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .

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Entangling Childhoods, Materials, Curriculum and Objects . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . Introduction . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . Why Curriculum? . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . Understanding Te Whāriki’s Posthuman Potential . Contextualising Te Whāriki’s Influence . . . . . . . .

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A Posthuman Childhood Studies Lens . . . . . . . . . . . . . Posthuman Curriculum . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . Child $ Materialities $ Curriculum . . . . . . . . . . . . . . Rethinking Curricular Relationalities . . . . . . . . . . . . . . Case Study #1: Children’s Entanglement with Materials Case Study #2: Children’s Entanglement with Objects . Concluding Entanglements . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . References . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .

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Children’s Worlding of/in Learning Environments . . . . . Introduction . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . Learning Environments as Precarious . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . Learning Assemblages: Meaning, Power and Circumstances Questioning Linear Expectations . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . Hierarchical Power . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . Picture Books and Learning Environments . . . . . . . . . . . . . Learning Environments as Relational Encounters . . . . . . . . Patty’s Learning Environment . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . Reconfiguring Learning Environments . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . References . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .

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Performing the Posthuman . . . . . . . . . Introduction: Matters and Worlds . . . . . . Children’s Posthuman Performance . . . . Cosmopolitics . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . Performance as Productive and Dynamic Performing Nature . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . Becoming-With . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . Time and Place . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . Learning from Indigenous Perspectives . Performing ‘Thing-Hoods’ . . . . . . . . . . . Performing Art . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . Performing Technology . . . . . . . . . . . . . Performing with Digital Technologies . . IPad Encounters . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . Affecting Performance Assemblages . . . . Ethics and Protection . . . . . . . . . . . . . . Concluding Comments . . . . . . . . . . . . . References . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .

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Re-searching with Children in Posthuman Worlds Introduction . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . Shifting Childhoods and Research Objectives . . . . . . Thinking Philosophically in Posthuman Research . . . Children as Knowledge-Able Posthuman Researchers

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Rethinking Data and Rethinking Posthuman Research . Complex Posthuman Data Relations . . . . . . . . . . . . . . Children in Posthuman Worlds . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . Conclusion . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . References . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .

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10 Glossary Key Posthuman Childhood Studies Concepts . . . . . . . . Introduction . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . Actant . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . Affect . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . Agency . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . Agential Realism . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . Anthropocene . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . Assemblage . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . Binaries . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . Childhood Studies . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . Conatus . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . Cognitive Developmental and Behaviourists Theories of Childhood . Deterritorialization . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . Developmental Theories . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . Dichotomy . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . Diffraction . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . Dualisms . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . Entanglement . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . Haecceity . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . Human Exceptionalism . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . Intra-action . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . Intra-relationality . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . Kin . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . Mutualism . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . Natureculture . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . New Materialism . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . New Metaphysics . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . New Sociology of Childhood . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . Onto-Ethico-epistemology . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . Ontology . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . Paideia . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . Participation . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . Performativity . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . Plasticity . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . Postdevelopmental Theories . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . Posthuman . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . Posthumanism(s) . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . Post-anthropocentrism . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .

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Porosity . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . Posthumanist Theories of Childhood Postqualitative Research . . . . . . . . . Power . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . Representation . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . Re-territorialization . . . . . . . . . . . . . Rhizome . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . Sensorial . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . Social Constructivism . . . . . . . . . . . Socialisation Theory of Childhood . . Spacetimemattering . . . . . . . . . . . . . Structure . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . Temporality . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . Vital Materiality . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . Walking-with Methodology . . . . . . . References . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .

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Chapter 1

History and Philosophy of Children and Childhoods

Abstract Outlining the complex relationship between childhood studies, philosophy and education, this chapter maps the story of the child and childhood, from a non-biological and non-medical perspective tracing philosophical perspectives over time. In the chapter, we interweave conceptions of the child subject with the philosophy and history of education, acknowledging the instrumental and important role these disciplines play and perform in shaping views on the child, childhoods and children’s educational futures. While illustrating how particular historical views on children and childhoods can help us to understand their lives and realities, the chapter foregrounds philosophical and theoretical perspectives. It considers how they are useful foundations to challenge and elevate contemporary understandings of children as subjects, and their relationships with both discursive and material aspects of this world. This chapter serves as a theoretical foundation for the concepts and shifting positions in childhood studies towards a posthuman lens. Keywords History of childhoods · Philosophy of childhoods · History of education · Childhood studies We start this book with a chapter that outlines the long, winding, complex relationship between childhood studies, philosophy and education. Mapping the story (or genealogy) of the child and childhood, narrated from a non-biological and nonmedical perspective through philosophy, is not a straightforward task. As we examine the past, we will interweave the story of the child subject with the philosophy and history of education, acknowledging the instrumental and important role these disciplines play and perform in shaping the child subject, childhoods and children’s educational futures. The first chapter of this book illustrates how particular historical philosophical perspectives on children and childhoods can help us to understand their lives and realities. At the same time, the chapter demonstrates the application of philosophical and theoretical perspectives as useful foundations that challenge and elevate contemporary understandings, of children as subjects and their relationships with both discursive and material aspects of this world. This chapter serves as a

© Springer Nature Singapore Pte Ltd. 2020 K. Malone et al., Theorising Posthuman Childhood Studies, Children: Global Posthumanist Perspectives and Materialist Theories, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-981-15-8175-5_1

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theoretical foundation for the concepts and shifting positions in childhood studies that this book engages with. The philosophy of childhood can potentially rupture and offer alternative ways of thinking and being in relation to the established ways of governing and resulting productions of childhoods in diverse educational settings. The figure and purpose of the child include many diverse categories, and often is subjected to institutional terms of reference that are both ontologically and epistemologically problematic. Challenging the boundaries of what it means to be a child and an adult, of childhood and adulthood as categories, is what philosophy ponders, as a disciplinary possibility for theorising and disrupting these categories at all ontological, epistemological and ethical levels. These terms—children and childhoods—are not only contested and challenged through philosophy: as Matthews (1994) argues, to understand the philosophy of childhood is perhaps to understand philosophy itself. He argues further in his book Philosophy of Childhood that something that portrays and encourages any form or shape of a relationship with childhood: “any developmental theory that rules out, on purely theoretical grounds, even the possibility that we adults may occasionally have something to learn, morally, from a child is, for that reason, defective; it is also morally offensive” (p. 67). Philosophy of education and childhood has the capacity to shape and offer multiple discourses around children and their education and care (Peters & Tesar, 2018). However, the philosophy of children and childhood is often considered to be a contested notion. The epistemology and ontology of childhood education is tightly connected with the history of philosophy itself, as well as with the history of children as subject and their childhood as a construct (Tesar, 2015; Tesar & Arndt, 2019b). Understanding and interrogating the very idea of childhood from a philosophical perspective relies on historical collaborations and philosophical tensions that underlie the theories of education and practice of pedagogy (Tesar, Rodriguez, & Kupferman 2016). This chapter argues for a re-reading of philosophical texts in relation to childhood education and childhood studies (James, Jenks, & Prout, 1998; Stables, 2008). This re-reading utilises the notions of “children” and “childhoods” as a lens through which we approach classic texts. We note, that in this chapter we will portray European white male philosophers as the dominant contributors to the philosophy of childhood. However, throughout the book we will also highlight why this is problematic (see, for example, Chap. 5). John Locke’s and Jean-Jacques Rousseau’s well-known philosophies of the rational and free child, respectively, together with Thomas Hobbes’ view on childhood, are critical in shaping our current understanding of the child as well as the response from the society. Comenius, a Czech philosopher, known in Central Europe as Jan Amos Komensky, is considered to be one of the most important seventeenth-century enlightenment philosophers, on which “modern” education was shaped. Comenius had a strong focus on the notion of common languages and emphasised the notion of universal schooling, and the origins of progressive education can be traced back to his scholarly writing. Comenius also published what is now often considered to be the first philosophical text focused directly on young children, The School of Infancy (1631). Other important philosophers whose focus

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was on the education of children of the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries were the Swiss Johann Heinrich Pestalozzi and German Fredrich Froebel, both of whom were immersed in the philosophy of the early years, and advocated particular pedagogies and teaching methods for young children. While Froebel is considered to be the founder of the “modern” notion of kindergartens, Pestalozzi utilised many notions from Comenius’ theory and philosophy, exploring pedagogy and methods that were relevant to and at different times implemented in numerous educational settings. As such, the story of philosophy and education is in these instances quite pedagogical, focused on the treatment of the child as a problem—to shape, to change, to mould, to educate—and different perspectives regarding whether the ideal was to maintain the status quo or to create a better educational future for all. These philosophical theories and pedagogies have foregrounded much of our contemporary thinking and as such have opened up discussions around children and their childhoods (Tesar, 2017a). Historian of childhood, Hugh Cunningham (2006), argues that childhoods are invented and not universal, across time, cultures and societies: We don’t all agree on when childhood begins. At conception? At birth? At some point beyond babyhood? And we certainly don’t agree on when it ends. At puberty? When we leave school? When we leave home? When we cease to be financially dependent on our parents? When we are of an age to be criminally responsible, or to have sex, serve in the armed forces, buy alcoholic drinks or drive a car? (p. 14).

Philosophically, there has been an idea that childhood is in a way a performance of modernity: a modern invention to colonise, treat, mould and shape the notion of “childhood” as suits and serves the adults. In such a discourse, children’s childhoods have become a product—an artefact in fact—of modernity. Such a modernist perspective and view on childhood was emphasised by French scholar, Philippe Ariès (1960), who wrote the text Centuries of Childhood. This, to date, remains one of the most seminal contributions to the history of childhoods, and one of the most compelling, despite a continued hesitation around Ariès’ argument from some scholars. The debates his work have prompted have become a productive exercise in understanding the history and philosophy that was often forgotten, neglected and not considered important. What Ariès argued was the intention to shift the perception and the spotlight in thinking about childhood from the universal and top-down measures of prominent figures, towards the elevation of the experiential, more common day-today, mundane occurrences of childhoods, often ethnographic in nature, in subjective ideas, feelings, case studies on how human subjects understood themselves. Ariès claimed that in medieval society there was no apparent child-centred approach and children were deemed in need of protection by the family. The structure of the family unit was very limited and children left home at a very young age, seen as so-called “little adults”. There was no economy associated with children and their development, and as such, the line between the child and adult was extremely permeable. Furthermore, there were no services or agencies to support children. This is contradictory to the time of modernity, where a growing number of products and provisions were provided directly to, and for, children. In particular, the idea

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of public, free and compulsory schooling cemented the way we understand children and their childhoods, and the way they are considered in contemporary times. Products such as children’s toys, children’s clothing and children’s stories were virtually non-existent in medieval times. In short, as Ariès (1960) argues “in medieval society the idea of childhood did not exist” (p. 125). To write this influential, yet controversial text, Ariès conducted methodical investigations of medieval archives, diaries, philosophies and any writings that focused on understandings of age or development in relation to children. Furthermore, the focus of his examination was any literature and artworks, including paintings and sculptures and children’s clothes, games and play. All of these examinations in his studies pointed to the notion that in medieval times children were subjects performed and understood as miniature—or little—adults. As Ariès argued, “medieval art until the twelfth century did not know childhood or did not attempt to portray it” (p. 31). This view is reinforced, says Ariès, by the study of medieval children’s clothing, which was generally simply smaller versions of what was fashionable for adults. For example, infants wore baby clothes that were generally the same for boys and girls, but at about the age of seven children moved on into smaller versions of adult outfits. This changed in the times of modernity, both within the educational institution and in the family. The ideas around public educational institutions, that define schooling, shape our understanding of childhood. On the other hand, an American social thinker and scholar DeMause (1976) portrayed the history of childhood as times when children were abused, hurt, tortured and even killed—and different pathways of parenting and care were developed based on these experiences. De Mause argued that the care for a child, children’s rights or welfare were not part of the public discourse in pre-modernity, and the child-centred approach, including a focus on well-being and community, and education and care, was only slowly starting to develop from the time of modernity. Similarly to de Mause, others have contested Ariès’ perspective (Pollock, 1983), in particular, the notion that childhood did not exist during medieval times, and the idea that childhood is an invention of modernity. These critiques suggest that Ariès’ work lacked any study of children, and that in order to make the claims that he did, he needed to address the real, actual parent–child relationships as they occurred in the medieval history, rather than relying on secondary ideas around childhoods. The other arguments from historians are that medieval times cannot be viewed as only cruel, that cruelty was not a form of “normality of mundane and everyday life”, and that very strong sentiments over children existed in those times. The other critique, of a more methodological nature, is that Ariès’ study was generally restricted to the very literate upper and middle classes, while omitting experiences of lower classes (not necessarily surprising given the scarcity of extant records and documents focused on the lower classes). The idea of childhood was influenced in the nineteenth century, on the one hand, by the abolishment of child labour, and the rise of the importance and the political influence of schooling experiences for children, and on the other by the pressing need for children to be institutionalised in order to be governed. While poverty was still a significant contributor to the education and the experiences of children’s lives,

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the child-centred approach and policy as a way to mould and shape childhood were in place. The twentieth century has become known as the century of the child, and has had a very clear focus on family, interactions, education and care. This focus included an involvement of many agencies that are relevant and needed in a child’s life.

Children and Childhoods The notion of “childhood” cannot be considered outside of the realm of contemporary narratives. The concerns of what is childhood, and who is a child, have been part of longstanding philosophical debate. Many ontological and epistemological positions are present in these categories of children and childhood and are grounded in the contemporary conditions of the eras in which they were conceived. As such, when we talk about philosophy in current contemporary times we cannot avoid the contemporary time of the Anthropocene (Tesar, 2017b), which we will discuss in depth in this book (see Chap. 5). These conditions are, however, through some other notions, at a time when there is growing pressure on human subjects not to historicise, but rather greater and greater emphasis is placed on the implementation of an agenda of globalisation and related ideas that have and will, most likely, continue to managerialise and marginalise childhoods, in order to govern and police children and their childhood experiences, and argue for the best interests of the child. Some of the strongest and most significant statements about children and childhoods are represented in the document Convention on the Rights of the Child (UNCRC) which the United Nations uses to frame its notion of the child (United Nations Human Rights, 1989). This document in many ways defines contemporary understandings of “the child”. In Article 1, it defines the child, and his/her relationships with childhoods, as a young person under the age of 18 who has particular rights, related to his/her wishes, episteme, regardless of gender, abilities, ethnicity or race. Article 1 articulates the central idea relevant to both a philosophical and policy framework. These ideas disrupt policies focused on the idea of clear boundaries, and lead to uncertainty, using troubled language and definitions that benefit from in-depth examination through a philosophical lens. Philosophy acts as a method that questions what we—as adults—understand children and their childhoods to be (Tesar, 2016). We base this book on an argument that all philosophy is somewhat relevant and important for the philosophy of children and childhood. Philosophy as a discipline becoming the field of philosophy of children and childhood allows for a potentially productive space, using work that could be otherwise, for instance, monopolised and labelled as “developmental”, if not dangerous. Recognising philosophers for their contributions to the ideas, discourses and thoughts about children and childhoods is provocative and allows the further development of understandings of what it means to be a child, what is childhood, and raises questions and concerns around childrearing. For instance, Swiss philosopher and psychologist Jean Piaget is one of the major personas in the philosophy of children and childhood (and developmental

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psychology), whose work has been consistently considered by critical scholars as potentially detrimental to the child. Oppositional critiques in the postdevelopmental studies of childhood, in particular, have often positioned the work of Piaget as limiting. These views are considered more deeply in Chap. 2 where theories of childhoods are explored. However, beyond the critiques and under close reading, Piaget’s work uncovers strong philosophical contexts and ethical currents that still have value in contemporary thinking. As Matthews (1994) states, parts and ideas, and particular contexts of Piaget’s thinking are the basis of educational theory and ground us in a very important philosophical foundation to the contemporary childhood policy environment. Piaget’s thinking, that has come to be labelled as developmentalism, has thus become just another philosophical proposition and wondering, both ontological and epistemological in nature. However, as has become clear in the past decades of policy decision-making, his thinking also carries very strong ethical implications and imperatives. Policies and pedagogies imbued with Piaget’s legacy have become the mainstream grounding for Developmentally Appropriate Practice (DAP), one of the most common theoretical manifestations of policy for children and childhoods, including appropriate and desired behaviour management. DAP has caused and continues to lead to considerable tensions, resistance and even revolt among scholars, practitioners and activists.

The Evil, Rational and Free Child As mentioned at the start of this chapter, several philosophers have significantly crafted and devoted their philosophical work to the subject of children and childhoods. In the seventeenth-century political writings of philosopher Thomas Hobbes, children were very unruly, and the role of adults—parents or teachers—was to respond to mind, to shape and to mould them. There was a clear need to control the child in Hobbes’ work. Hobbes (2011) saw children as savage and, in a certain respect, as evil. These notions arose from the statement that all human subjects are born in original sin, and children need to be regulated and controlled, predominantly by their mother. English philosopher John Locke (1821), on the other hand, had a different philosophical stance: he considered children as subjects that were empty, and in his scholarship this argument functioned as the fabled tabula rasa (blank slate). Tabula rasa means that children required all input by adult subjects and was a view to be represented by the family and society alike. The result was that children could ultimately become productive subjects in society. Hence, Locke’s version of child subjects was considered as dependent yet productive. There were no innate or other inherited natural capacities, and children must be always reminded and ever minded, a sense that was very much pushed and shaped by the parents and the society. French philosopher and thinker Jean-Jacque Rousseau’s version of the child and children also considered them to be very much dependent subjects, and in need of support and protection. However, the danger for him lay mainly in the dilemma that adult subjects, and those who govern children and childhoods, contribute to the

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construction of the apparatus of control, production and invention of children—his view was that they serve, through parenting but mainly through education, primarily to corrupt the child and children and to remove their innocence and inherent goodness. Child subjects thus require protection from other subjects, and become very much in need of resistance from the powers that are there both to nurture and to develop them at the same time. In Rousseau’s (1957) Emile he understands that childhood is a contested subject and clearly articulates that “[c]hildhood is unknown” (p. 33) and pursues this narrative in his analysis of human subjects’ false search for the adult within the child. Rousseau critiques the view of children as “little adults” and argues that “[e]verything is good as it leaves the hands of the Author of things; everything degenerates in the hands of man” (p. 37). Thus, children in his work are innately uncorrupted and good, and very much positioned in harmony with nature. For him, it is the education that children receive from adult subjects (parents and teachers) that ultimately spoils and misshapes their development. The protection of a child subject from adult subjects is thus both a concern and a problem: as Rousseau accuses, adults “would gladly cripple them to keep them from laming themselves” (p. 43), which is caused, in his view, by adults’ fear for (and distrust of) children. Rousseau protects children’s rights: “[n]o one, not even the father, has a right to command the child what is not for his good” (p. 85). In Rousseau’s view, children should first learn about their rights, and then about their duties (Fig. 1.1).

Fig. 1.1 Situating children in nature, Campus Creche, Hamilton, New Zealand. Credit Sonja Arndt

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In Rousseau’s logic, the entire institution of education is problematic: “[e]verything is folly and contradiction in human institutions” (p. 82). These institutions corrupt childhoods and their “natural inclinations” (p. 85). However, childhood is a specific construct, as Rousseau claims, it represents particular “ways of seeing, thinking, and feeling, which are proper to it” (p. 90). Finally, when he speaks to young teachers, and focuses on governing childhoods and children he advises teachers to do “everything by doing nothing” (p. 119). While Rousseau suggests that childhood is a specific time, he calls for careful consideration of methods and techniques; an emergent curriculum; knowledge of each individual child; an education without verbal lessons, where a child learns from his own experience and for a return to nature. The overarching concept that Rousseau portrays as essential in a child’s education is freedom. However, it was not until the early twentieth century, in the work of the influential educational thinker Dewey’s (1916) that the child was perceived as capable and imbued with a form of individual agency. While Dewey argued that any form of learning should be very clearly directed and purposeful, his work also clearly notes a shift in the subject positioning of the child subject, as one who should be managed, regulated, and that is at a very uncritical and unthinking stage of human development, that is often barely tolerated, or even subjugated.

Philosophy of Childhoods Philosophy of childhoods is the philosophical study of children and childhood. This is in radical opposition to the traditional view of children as biological, growing children from infancy onwards, that are in perpetual development and thus ontologically incomplete. Similarly, philosophy of childhood challenges the simplistic view of the child as a victim ensconced in a reified time, space and era which exists out there and can be researched in laboratory conditions. The philosophical study of childhood thus challenges the established and dominant thinking about children and childhoods. As such, philosophy of childhood is conceptualised and understood as a field of applied philosophy and the theoretical study of childhoods at the same time. This positioning creates a particular dichotomy which draws from established branches of philosophy in epistemology, ethics, axiology and politics to raise and address questions of children and childhood issues, aims, methods and problems, and of associated children and childhood-related policy, pedagogy and curriculum. Like any field, it has multiple histories, approaches and models of practice. Philosophy of childhood is a diverse intellectual enterprise with roots going back to the great philosophers of the Western tradition, most of whom engaged with educational issues in some way, as well as to Indigenous thinking and child-rearing and Eastern philosophies. From the outset, it is important to note that the Western education and philosophy of childhood has a well-established written history and related philosophical systems. However, this does not mean that non-Western or Indigenous philosophical systems are less ontologically or epistemologically developed. Western childhood education

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and philosophy of childhood is “heliocentric”, stemming from Greek philosopher Socrates, who conceived of education as inseparable from philosophy and politics, especially in the preparation of citizens (children). This idea has had a fundamental influence on young children and as such provides a foundation that is summarised in the Greek concept of paideia. Paideia denotes the transmission of cultural norms, in order to educate citizens of the polis in ways that lead to “the right way” or excellence. This idea of childhood education through paideia incorporates both theoretical and practical subject-based schooling, and includes the intellectual, physical and expressive act of education (in traditional historical terms of mostly boys or males). The philosophy of childhood and children tends to draw on a rich philosophical history and points of connection with histories of and contemporary issues in education. Through the reading of classic texts of the Ancient, Medieval and Modern schools, philosophy of education and the field of childhood education can be characterised by successive and overlapping historical phases that “take turns”. Perhaps, one such turn in the post–World War II era is the so-called analytic revolution in philosophy, and the institutionalisation of the field of childhood and childhood education, and as such the adoption of methods and approaches from analytic philosophy. As this chapter is more skewed to the Western tradition, it traverses the area of classical philosophy and the early modern periods to modernity (and post-areas). However, it is important to note that the term “classical” might also be considered in relation to Chinese, Indian and Arab classical texts. Childhood education in the age of the Enlightenment centred on scientific principles and was held responsible for embodying and transmitting various ideals, including universal access and literacy, individual liberty and political unity (and separation of child and adult), that have largely influenced childhood and childhood education for decades. French philosopher Rene Descartes was one of the leading representatives who initiated a scientific revolution. He helped to define modernity as the search for certainty and defined a philosophy of subjectivity. His body of work influenced the way we consider children and childhood education through the prism of dualism. Major philosophers (some also before-mentioned) in the Early Modern period included Francis Bacon and John Locke, who pioneered British empiricism, Jean-Jacques Rousseau and his take on childhood and nature, and thinkers of the Scottish Enlightenment, principally David Hume, wrote specific texts or made occasional observations on education. Notable among the Enlightenment philosophers was German thinker Immanuel Kant. Kant’s moral and political philosophy bequeathed a tradition that emphasised an ethics of autonomy as the basis of human freedom that trickled down to philosophy of children and childhoods. In the early twentieth century, as we mentioned above, John Dewey was a figure of major importance and enduring influence, both in the first period of “progressive education”, when he wrote Democracy and Education in 1916, and thereafter in the 1980s, when his work was revitalised, especially at the hands of another American philosopher Richard Rorty, who extended pragmatism through his treatment of naturalism, liberalism and ethnocentrism. English philosopher Richard Stanley Peters was one of the architects of the analytic revolution in philosophy, which was based on the “linguistic turn”. He argued that it was the task of philosophers of education

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to clarify key concepts of familiar and theoretical discourse. His work and that of his colleagues in the “London School” reinvented the tradition of liberal education. All of these thinkers and philosophers have helped to shape and define the study of childhood and children as a philosophical field. Their work is critical to shaping our understanding of childhoods and children as we both understand and contest them today. Since the 1970s and 1980s, philosophy of childhood and children’s education has become more diverse, with the development of socialised fields and new areas of interest that are based around subject, objects, arts, animals, geography, indigeneity and also politics. Political orientations such as feminism, multiculturalism, cosmopolitanism, citizenship education, and Indigenous and intercultural education have all recently shaped the field of childhoods, and as such the histories and diversities of the contemporary fields of childhood education and childhood studies.

Histories of Childhood Education The fundamental question for philosophy of children and childhood is the concern of epistemology, ontology and ethics. Central questions revolve around the nature versus nurture debate; the possibilities of knowing and knowledge; and the question of the order, performance and potentials of ontological development. These enquiries are, of course, very important, as we may be asking questions, such as: What is the criterion for the constitution of knowledge? Who decides what knowledge is important? Who should have access to knowledge? How should knowledge be judged, changed or modified? Should all children have access to all knowledges, or should there be limits placed on who can be exposed to certain knowledge, and on when this exposure should take place? Questions of epistemology from the ancient Greeks onwards have also involved questions about ethics, and wider questions about the politics and discursive contours that shape different societies. All of these questions relate to children and childhoods. Should knowledge be experienced though Dewey’s progressive blending of the disciplines? The classical tradition revered abstract, universal forms of knowledge. The Enlightenment spoke to eternal truths about rational man as the fount of knowledge but separated experience from a priori forms of knowledge through Kant. Locke considered access to knowledge as integral to the maintenance and sustenance of the social contract, whereas Rousseau considered the polluting effects of society to sully the power of knowledge. All of this shapes and influences childhood and how we think about it. Have we reached a state of post-epistemology (knowledge) in the philosophy of education, as Peters and Burbules (2004) claim? In other words, we may ask, are we over Jean-François Lyotard’s legitimation crisis in knowledge, or have we somehow reconciled the grand narratives of modernity in education of children with the small narratives of postmodernity? The twentieth-century post-war context allowed for a flourishing of the analytic tradition, in which a liberal philosophy that draws very heavily on certain aspects

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of classicism proposed to analyse education through conceptual analyses. This had far-reaching influence on childhoods. While Dewey’s progressive philosophy was established in the first decades of the twentieth century, there was something of the post–World War II triumph that seemed to heighten the American reception to education as experience and to encourage approaches that were more childcentred. As such, philosophy of childhood became a central philosophical enterprise. Paolo Freire’s exploration of trenchant and endemic inequality and Ivan Illich’s deschooling approach brought into relief issues of knowledge and power. As thinkers, both Freire (Brazilian educator) and Illich (Austrian philosopher) were instrumental in rethinking and reconceptualising childhood education. The philosophy of childhood, with all the tenants and reaches, has in one form or another interrogated every facet of educational existence through the linguist/philosophic turn to postmodernism and poststructuralist methodologies and thinking. And children, childhood and education were part of this movement. Questions of power, ethics, politics, epistemology and ontology became regularly interrogated, questioned and modified. As the new forms of neoliberalism and capitalism continue to demand of its education systems an increasingly malleable and flexible workforce, even when the purpose of education framed in terms of human capital is under threat by the vicissitudes and failures of the economic system post-2008, so are the childhoods clearly impacted by these movements. In such a philosophical world, working with children and examining childhoods ask of education what philosophic standpoint will best revitalise the educational system in ways that are the most democratic and egalitarian.

Classical and Early Modern Philosophies of Childhoods To understand the philosophy of childhoods in classical and early modern philosophies, we are focused in this section on a number of philosophies that we see as important in shaping our contemporary understanding of children and childhoods. With a focus on classical and early modern philosophies of childhood and children, this section will keep a key focus on the contributions of idealist (Plato), moralist (Kant), realist (Locke) and naturalist (Rousseau) approaches to education in classical and early modern philosophies of education. For all four of these grandmasters of Western thought, whose work is directly linked to children and childhoods, the contributions made to conceptions of what education “ought” to be were both pivotal articulations and emblematic of their wider theoretical perspectives on knowledge and the conditions of existence in Antiquity, for Plato, and during the Enlightenment, for Kant, Locke and Rousseau. Importantly, while education might not have been overtly prominent in their respective intellectual trajectories, Plato, Kant, Locke and Rousseau recognised the importance of education to achieving some of their wider societal and theoretical aims, and all conceived of education as the primary site for these to be developed. As such, all four philosophers’ work significantly shapes philosophy of childhood.

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Plato, who was concerned primarily with the idea of justice and how to achieve a just society, considered knowledge to be universal and eternal (such as mathematics and, most of all, philosophy). As modelled in his text Republic (1968), societal power is to be distributed in parallel with the hierarchy of knowledge. Plato’s model of education assumes that few are capable of attaining understanding of the highest forms of knowledge and, accordingly, of exercising political power responsibly. While closer in spirit to Greek philosopher Aristotle, John Locke’s philosophy of education also related society to education, and ultimately to children. As the father of liberalism, Locke’s main aim for education was to produce individuals capable of making their own rational decisions as a citizen among others. Locke has a similar approach to Rousseau, despite possible protestations from both to the contrary, regarding the importance of acquiring knowledge through practical and sensorial experience. Like Locke, Kant believed in the importance of inculcating through education a cultivated and ethical sensibility. Surprisingly, Kant differed from Locke in holding that education was not to impose on the child the adult characteristics required for civil life, but rather it was to acknowledge the child as distinct from the adult. Through his work Emile, Rousseau also celebrated the notion of childhood, while simultaneously lauding the natural morality of the child and blaming society for all its deficiencies. While it must be acknowledged that these four philosophers do not account for all classical and modern contributions to the philosophy of education and childhood, they do provide seminal and far-reaching interpretations of the history of the philosophy of childhood. Some of the key classical texts had a fundamental effect on philosophy of education and childhood. Plato’s Republic presents his theory of justice and its bearing on education and theories of knowledge, and how it relates to notions of childhood. Kant’s lectures on education and “pædagogics” as the science of education, encapsulates his approach to education as an ethical pursuit in which moral values are emphasised for the cultivation of good character (of a child). Importantly, his text further underscores his debt to Rousseau. Locke’s (1824) seminal text for children and education, Some Thoughts Concerning Education, serves as a guide to pedagogy. It emphasises the importance Locke places on education in moulding the individual child into a citizen, in light of his familiar conception of the mind of a child as a tabula rasa on which ideas and knowledge must be imprinted. Finally, Rousseau’s Emile is a classic text of education theory and child-rearing, where he outlines his ideas about the natural goodness of man and the social origin of evil, explicitly in the context of education, children and childhood. Rousseau’s contribution to the study of childhood has implications on a broad scale, and his notion of “nature” and “innocence” is present also in the current times.

Dewey and Childhood Dewey’s work was progressive and contested the traditional view in education of children and the way childhood was conceptualised in the post-nineteenth-century environment. Progressive education was influential in the twentieth century, and

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Dewey’s key text Democracy and Education (1916) has become central to the way childhood education has been revitalised since the 1980s. A key influence was the alternative education systems that have tried to influence and shape childhoods in light of the restrictions and limitation of liberal approaches to education that formed the dominant framework. Democracy and Education presents the most extended articulation of Dewey’s educational philosophy including his key ideas on education and democracy as an alternative to traditional models of schooling. It is essential reading because of the links made between participatory forms of democracy and cooperative and egalitarian forms of learning in the classroom. It also is the text that foregrounds the progressive movement that formed childhoods in the West in the twentieth century. Dewey’s educational theories were first presented in My Pedagogic Creed (1897). Initially, at the beginning of the twentieth century, he was viewed as radical. My Pedagogic Creed represents the origins of Dewey’s articulation of the aims and purposes of education, encompassing a child-centred approach to education and learning, with both regarded as processes of living and not preparation for the future. These thoughts were further developed in The School and Society (1915), which is regarded as the first definitive statement of Dewey’s progressive approach to education, which outlines the social importance of childhood education as a preparation for working life. Dewey offers a democratic vision of education that promotes cooperation towards a common end and presents one of the key texts that links childhood education and adult contribution to society. In these works as well as in Art as Experience, Dewey argues that education and learning are social and interactive processes, and that the educational setting itself is a social institution where all children should have the opportunity to take part in their own learning to realise their own potential. This is a very different view on children and their childhood than the technical and digital childhoods that children experience in current times. As such, this text encapsulates Dewey’s notion of learning as essentially participatory and democratic, which position childhood into a very favourable position unlike in many other prior philosophical tractates. One of the key American philosophers and psychologists of empiricism and pragmatism, William James, in his 1907 work Pragmatism: A New Name for Some Old Ways of Thinking, provided an important synopsis of the elements of pragmatist philosophy which had significant impact on childhood. The importance of his text is the links that he suggests between pragmatist philosophy, in general, and Dewey’s particular articulation of progressive education.

Analytic Philosophy of Education, Radical Tradition and Childhoods Richard Stanley Peters, following the “ordinary language” approach, sought the conceptual clarification of central educational terms and a revival of the tradition of liberal education that influenced childhood in the twentieth century. In his work, the

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philosophy of education and childhood education became intrinsically interlinked, and provided another stream that shaped children and childhoods alongside educational psychology. As such, the discipline itself went through a number of changes that may be considered as “revolutionary”. However, still the geopolitics and history of analytical philosophy of education demonstrate that it has been developed mainly as an Anglo-American activity that is largely derivative in applying forms of philosophical analysis, including ordinary language analysis and conceptual analysis, aiming at the clarification of educational concepts. Peters’ philosophical collaborator Hirst (1965) expanded on the notion of liberal education, characterising it as a “general education” whereby an education curriculum would contain different forms of knowledge. This is where the notion of liberal education owes something to Aristotle’s distinction between education of children for “free” citizens and the servile training for children’s work. Hardie’s (1962) text on the analytic philosophy of education anticipates liberal educational themes later explored by R. S. Peters, Paul Hirst and others. He has rigorously argued a defence of rational attempts to define precisely what the philosophy of education “should” be. Peters and Hirst distinguish between exposure to an engagement with distinct forms of knowledge, and mere vocational “training” for children. The key claim of analytical philosophers of education for a liberal philosophy of education is that education involves the promotion of rational autonomy through a broad initiation into knowledge. This aspect has a seminal impact on thinking about childhood. While British analytical philosophers have done much to revive liberal education and shape childhoods, American philosophers such as Israel Scheffler (1978) and Harvey Siegel (1988) also have contributed much to the field. Of importance are the contradictory and often-counterintuitive elements to the liberal tradition, particularly through convergences with the more recent forms of neoliberalism and economic rationalism that deal with different notions of freedom, often seeming to pose challenges to the educative goals of these thinkers. In its final articulation, liberal philosophy of education was positioned as a critique of the almost hegemonic dominance of progressive education in the 1960s and offered an alternative perspective on freedom that derives explicitly from the pursuit of knowledge. This clash has resulted in the tensions of neoliberal childhoods of 1980s in Australasia which have become a new normality in Western countries, and, globally, from the 1990s onwards. The second half of the twentieth century was dominated by major radical philosophers such as Paulo Freire, who articulated a humanist existential Marxism as the basis of critical pedagogy, and Ivan Illich, who proposed a philosophy of deinstitutionalisation and “de-schooling”. We have already mentioned them above: while both were often considered to be sympathetic to each other’s causes, there are clear differences in purpose, intent and scope between the two thinkers and how their work impacted on childhood and on education. Freire, while mounting a scathing critique of traditional models of education, never lost faith in the transformative potential of education and the necessity for an element of organised state involvement. For Illich, as is well known, institutional public education was untenable to his ideas of individualistic resilience and health (well-being). While in many ways the period since the

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early 1980s has proven Freire’s revolutionary approach to education to be popular among education revisionists, Illich’s work seems currently to be undergoing a resurgence in popularity and relevance. Illich envisioned individuals reclaiming responsibility for their own education, away from what he saw as a consumerist dependency on institutional learning in which the purpose of school revolved around the necessity to teach people how to consume more of everything. Continuing the radical tradition, Apple (2004), and McLaren and Lankshear (1994) critique the imposition of market values and principles into the very essence of the educative endeavour. While Apple utilises the Marxist/Gramscian notions of ideology and hegemony, McLaren expands Freire’s revolutionary praxis into interesting and new directions. The emphatic articulation of Apple’s (1979) critique of schooling as an ideological pursuit in which certain hegemonic discourses are both propagated and given prominence in the field of teaching serves as a basis for Apple to mount an argument against the increasing penetration of business and economic interests into the spaces of education and the lives of children. In particular, the exploration into the ability of teachers to negotiate the curriculum in ways that resist reproducing societal inequalities, Freire’s importance lies in his reflections on text and its reception, and on the subsequent development of policy and practice. His work provides an important exploration of dialogue and the possibilities for liberatory practice. Freire provides a pedagogy of the oppressed and introduces the highly influential notion of banking education. He highlights the contrasts between education forms that treat people as objects rather than subjects and explores education as a cultural action. Illich’s (1970) work is perhaps the most radical (of these radicals) and mobilises a devastating critique of the institution of schooling. Illich considers organised, massed public schooling to fail on its terms, both in perpetuating inequality and failing to promote useful or worthwhile learning. This critique of schooling, while flawed in some respects, nonetheless provides a provocative and remarkably palatable alternative to institutional education.

Postmodernism and Poststructuralism in Philosophy of Childhood In the 1980s, a strand of philosophy of education developed and matured (around the same time as changes in sociology of childhood became more pertinent), and this strand not only paid close attention to Continental philosophy, including studies of Nietzsche and Heidegger, as well as of Hegel and the “Frankfurt School”, especially the work of Habermas. More recently, there has been an outpouring of interest in modern French philosophy after existentialism, phenomenology and structuralism— especially the thought of Michel Foucault, Jacques Derrida, Jean-François Lyotard, Gilles Deleuze and Felix Guattari (see Koro-Ljungberg, Loyt ¨ onen, ¨ & Tesar, 2017). Lyotard’s premise that the condition of knowledge in modern contexts has altered to

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the extent that any claims to legitimation and authority in education must be scrutinised makes a fundamental claim for children and their childhoods. Lyotard’s diagnosis of performativity as the all-pervasive rule of optimal performance in advanced capitalist societies has proven a particularly generative and fertile tool for analysis. His world is broad: it looks at the status of science, technology and the arts; the significance of technocracy and the way the flows of information are controlled in the Western world. These themes—pertinent for childhood education and philosophy—explore legitimation, language games, modernism, the postmodern perspective, narrative and scientific knowledge, delegitimation, research and education, and postmodern science as the search for instabilities. Postmodernism utilises this notion to great effect when analysing the purpose, aims and processes of modern education systems, and how they impact on children and childhoods. Foucault has also proven helpful when analysing the connection between power and knowledge, and the disciplinary functions deployed in liberal education models. There has been an amalgamation of different schools of educational philosophy that can fit under the banner of poststructuralist approaches to education. Early twenty-first-century applications of postmodern and poststructuralist perspectives have become less mono-focused, less narrowly concerned with technical questions and also perhaps less interested in epistemology and, rather, more interested in ethics and ontologies. The bridging of the analytic and continental traditions, to a large degree, has already taken place, and allowed for the birth of the new philosophical era. The key thinker in this area is French philosopher Michel Foucault, who became an emblem for a generation of thinkers: someone who embodied in his work the mostpressing intellectual issues of his time. He was a student both of French scholars Louis Althusser and Maurice MerleauPonty, and grew up in the tradition of a history of philosophy that dominated the French University. It was a history that gave pride of place to Hegel and helped to legitimate the contemporaneous emphases on phenomenology and existentialism, especially as it developed in the thought of French philosopher JeanPaul Sartre. There are a number of thinkers who claim pivotal status as turning points or important awakenings in Foucault’s intellectual trajectory. As such, they influenced questions of genealogy, ontology, the body, the institution and the notion of the Child. While Maurice MerleauPonty and Louis Althusser both taught Foucault, their thinking offered both points of resistance and theoretical convergences in beliefs and theories important to Foucault at the beginning. Later on, the work of German philosophers Friedrich Nietzsche and Martin Heidegger had direct and lasting impact on Foucault’s thinking. And while he maintained a deliberately ambiguous stance towards Heidegger, Foucault acknowledged later in life the extent to which Heidegger’s thinking had shaped his own intellectual career. Reading Foucault’s work emphasises the generative and endlessly applicable potential of his work to different fields and avenues of thought (Tesar & Koro-Ljungberg, 2016). The application of Foucault’s thought to education and childhood has been extensive, both in direct and indirect ways. Foucault’s work has been appropriated, absorbed and internalised within different fields and domains. The medical areas of nursing and psychiatry have lent themselves very easily to the diagnostic elements

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of Foucault’s work, and nursing, in particular, has found the notion of governmentality as a particularly fruitful area in which to critique the conditions of nursing as a profession. The spatial and temporal dimensions in Foucault’s work have been utilised within the fields of political science and geography, while the disciplines of history and sociology have incorporated a genealogical approach to enhance potential avenues of exploration in their respective methodologies. Queer theory, so heavily indebted to Foucault, has incorporated much of the construction of sexuality and the subject as essential elements to the discipline in general. Foucault’s work has also been applied in the area of aesthetics in ways that challenge the centrality of the author and emphasise the Nietzsche–Dionysian dimension to the artistic experience. Finally, the contribution Foucault has made to the discipline of philosophy has established him as one of the pivotal thinkers of the twentieth century and beyond. Childhood education has proven a particularly receptive area to Foucault’s methods and concepts (Tesar, 2014b). Insights concerning disciplining and controlling bodies through regimes of truth and power have lent themselves in surprising and illuminating ways to the project of analysing the conditions of modern educational existence. The burgeoning amount of research in this area is testimony to the extent to which Foucault’s work can be applied further to education. The evermore sophisticated and creative applications of Foucauldian concepts continue to challenge and unsettle the terrain of educational research (Tesar & Arndt, 2016). A seminal project involves an investigation into autonomy and education; the discussion of power relations in educational context; a critique of materialism in relation to education and provides an analysis of neoliberal techniques of governmentality. Particularly important recipients of Foucault’s thinking are childhood education and education policy (MacNaughton 2005; Tesar & Jukes, 2018).

Philosophy of Childhood in Action In this section, we will utilise two stories as examples, adapted from prior study (Tesar et al., 2016), to showcase how philosophy of childhood can look in action. These two stories will be examined through the philosophical lenses of Foucault and Lyotard, which we have discussed above. Utilising philosophy and childhood lenses helps to demonstrate what lies beneath the surface of the obvious meanings of the text and enticing pictures in stories, as whether they are published in books or performed on the screen. These two stories that were selected are very diverse: one is the New Zealand government’s story book series My Feelings, and the other is the blockbuster American movie Toy Story 3. The diversity of the stories enables an examination of various (adult) views on childhoods and how these views can implicate complex treatments of the child and childhoods. The analysis thus exposes some of the complexities and multifaceted implicit messages of these stories and the importance of carefully considering multiple perspectives and layers of stories shared with children, to demonstrate how philosophy of childhood operates in action.

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Biopolitics and the Governing of Childhoods My Feelings was a series of picture books created, funded, printed and distributed for free to all licensed New Zealand childcare services by the Ministry of Education (Tesar, 2014b). On the surface, these stories resemble fairy tales with happy endings that aim to support teachers to work with children through difficult times and feelings. These books portray childhoods and children from a certain perspective that ultimately forecloses on children’s sovereignty. For example, in the story Off You Go, Auntie Ma, the child called Huriana enjoys attending the crèche, but she does not want her Auntie Ma, who brings her there, to leave (Holt, 2004). Huriana enjoys Auntie Ma’s company and wants her to stay at the centre with her. The story shows her change in thinking, within 1 week as she develops relationships with the teachers and children in the crèche, and “[b]y Friday, she can happily wave goodbye to Auntie Ma” (Ministry of Education, 2011). In another story from the My Feelings series called When Mum Went Away, Robbie’s mum, who is a peacekeeper, is deployed on a mission (Marriott, 2004). Her boyfriend Nick looks after Robbie while she is away, but Nick does not know Robbie so well and uses the wrong mug for Robbie’s favourite chocolate drink. Robbie has a hard time at school because children do not understand how his mum can be a peacekeeper and be away from home. Apart from the gender issues this book addresses, it also illustrates the subject of disabilities, as Nick, who is a former soldier, is in a wheelchair. On mum’s return from her overseas mission, mum and Nick work with Robbie’s teachers to support his relationship with the other children. Robbie comes to think about himself differently and is pleased with the new mug from his mum with a palm tree design. These and other stories in this government produced series present narratives of certain feelings that a child may encounter in “everyday” life in a neoliberal context. The child is targeted as the consumer of the stories and their normalisation of power and what is “good” behaviour on the part of the children while simultaneously delegitimising other habits or practices of the self. Foucault’s (1991) notion of docile bodies provides a trajectory for considering the complex power relations that influence Huriana and Robbie in their educational settings. Stories conveyed in these picture books produce docile child bodies, as they remove children’s sovereignty by guiding the children towards smooth and desirable outcomes. Through the discipline and control of teachers, children are subjected to complex surveillance, ostensibly intended for their care and protection. Children are not always aware when they are being observed and when they are not, and so they govern themselves, behaving and acting as if they were. Complex acts of self-governance can be traced in these My Feelings stories. They suggest and expect the child to behave and act upon his or her feelings in a particular, desirable pattern. Indeed, more than simply proscribing acceptable behaviour, these stories go so far as to delimit what is an admissible emotional response to particular traumatic events in the lives of young children. The stories thus aim to tame childhood by representing it in a way that produces docile bodies that follow the suggested pattern, especially since the implication in the tales of Huriana and Robbie is that

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mimicking their trajectories will result in a happy ending (although an ending to what is highly questionable). Yet, following Foucault (2008), we see that the children in these stories, and, more importantly, those children who read or have the stories read to them, are the locus of networks of governing the biopolitics of a particular population, in this case “the” child. Tracing the rationality of biopolitics from the limitations on the state imposed by a “liberalism” of political economy, Foucault (2008) explains, “an important substitution, or doubling rather, is carried out, since the subjects of rights on which political sovereignty is exercised appear as a population that a government must manage” (p. 22, original emphasis). The stories, and one might go so far as to say morals, offered in the My Feelings books therefore operate as a technology of government and of governing childhoods, such that they demonstrate the “right” way to function as a child. Huriana is being surveilled by both her teachers in the crèche and by Auntie Ma from a distance; thus, her only recourse is to embrace her new environment and inure herself to the pangs of separation from her aunt. The crèche, and by extension the state, provides the apparatus by which Huriana’s, and presumably the other children’s, sovereignty is constrained and made docile as a population. In Robbie’s case, his behaviour is managed by a much more violent arm of the state, the military, despite it being dressed up in euphemisms of “peacekeeping” and the concordant implications that military adventures such as the one in which his mother participates are at base benevolent exercises. This is driven home by the use of the mug, with which Robbie again enjoys his chocolate drink, given to him by his mum: a piece of kitsch which supplants any psychological or physical scars she may also have brought home with her (peacekeeping here is as innocuous as a vacation abroad, replete with souvenirs). In addition, the relationship that develops between Robbie’s mother, Nick and the school suggests an expansion of the “governmental reasoning” of the management of Robbie’s behaviour and habits of self that engulf the family into the political economy of the state schooling apparatus. The idea that Robbie’s sovereignty as a child could find refuge at home (and indeed this is the space in which he first asserts himself in his reactions to Nick’s inability to conform to his routines in his mother’s absence) is effaced, as the conditions of surveillance and management blur the boundaries of the various contexts in which Robbie exists. Whereas the state governed Huriana from within the confines of the crèche, Robbie is managed both at school and at home as a subject of biopolitics. Stories such as those in the My Feelings series do not present a simple top-down notion of power that forces a child to behave in a certain way, but rather they subject a child to the complexities of biopower in a Foucauldian sense (Fenech & Sumsion, 2007). Within these power relations, multiple concerns of what the children want to read, who selects the books and the complex messages within the stories produce children as particular child subjects: the children have a choice; their agency shifts into self-governance; children are compelled by each other’s behaviour and they are supported and become their own controllers as well as being controlled. These picture books are carriers of official and subjugated knowledge, and children listen, learn and are shaped through these tools of governance. Picture books tell stories that are

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not simple, and each child can derive an individual outcome; under the conditions and political economy produced by the state, those outcomes are easily predicted as they are inevitably foreclosed upon.

Toy Story 3: Childhood and Imagination The Pixar movie Toy Story 3 (released in 2010) is a prime example of a tale that represents and ultimately delimits childhood in a particular, “proper” way. The plot of this contemporary fairy tale is straightforward and follows the ongoing adventures of Woody, Buzz and their cohort of toys, when the human child, Andy, is getting ready to leave for college and no longer needs them. Part of the story takes place in an early childhood centre to which Andy donates the toys, which are “alive”. The toys are very excited, as they look forward to finally being played with and loved again by children. When they arrive, they are welcomed as “foreigners” by the “local” toys who introduce them to their respective rooms. The bell rings, and the new toys are extremely excited, while the “local” toys hide where they can. The infants and toddlers who then enter the room are portrayed as instinctive beings destroying, plundering and treating the toys in a careless manner—as “little monsters”—rather than “playing” with them. At one moment during the “madness” of this destructive activity, one toy looks out through the glass door to the older children, playing with the other toys as they are “supposed to”, in a manner that is the proper, correct and expected way of playing with and treating toys. The toys then want to move to the room with the older children, but the hierarchy of toys does not allow it, and this tension becomes one of the important plot points of the movie. The complex power relations present in the movie portray the toys’ fight for space and happiness. The division of toys shows a particular view of the microcosm of the early childhood setting: the space and nature of children’s play divided by age and developmentally appropriate criteria. The infants and toddlers are represented as violent, messy, uncontrollable and aggressive, not yet able to play, not caring about the toys, as little savages. They are shown repeatedly destroying the toys, and all the toys become scared of them. Toy Story 3 was a blockbuster hit, earning more than 1 billion dollars worldwide and received wide dissemination. The stories that this movie tells about children are that they act intuitively and must learn how to play, assuming that play and intuition are mutually exclusive. Through age-appropriate education and guidance, however, they can learn. In other words, there is a correct way to play—to hold a doll or play with a dinosaur, for example, and children need to be taught how to do it. What is more, the film portrays certain children as cruel: they behave in vicious ways, and the toys see their only way out as escaping to the older children or out of the horror of the setting altogether. On one hand, the movie argues something about children, namely, that they are “little monsters” until they are taught to behave and act as “civilised” subjects; on the other hand, the film comments on the purpose and nature of education, namely, that taming the child and teaching her how to play are desired outcomes of

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education. The audience learns that childhoods in early childhood settings are messy and violent, alongside and in tension with the image of cute, developmentally more advanced children, who obey, play and act in desirable, learnt and appropriate ways. The children are juxtaposed within a binary of “goodies” and “baddies”, civilised and savage, educated and ignorant. The story is powerful and seductive, conceptualising not only goodies and baddies but also “right”, correct ways of developing, performing and being a child. The complexities are minimised by a very clear message and recommendations. As in Giugni’s (2006) argument, the power raging between goodies and baddies is central to children using “dominant cultural storylines such as goodies and baddies as a vehicle to produce their identities” (p. 97). Children are active in this process and, as Giugni contends, “are savvy power brokers; they are political and moral agents” (p. 106). Lyotard (1984), in his seminal work The Postmodern Condition, understands postmodernity through the notion of performativity. In relation to these stories, this means that the stories are performed, narrated and produced, and they embody certain regimes: regimes of truth, regimes of knowledge and regimes of government. The roles that children play in Toy Story 3 legitimate a particular, normalised form of knowledge and course of action in early childhood contexts. Each of the roles that children have in the centre, whether as a “goodie” or a “baddie”, produces a normative certainty around the effectiveness of outcomes-focused childhoods. Children and their childhoods are measured in terms of how well they can perform their expected roles within the limited space in which they are allowed to manoeuvre. The way that knowledge becomes important, approved and legitimated within neoliberal early childhood settings is how useful it is, or, in Lyotard’s (1984) view, how well knowledge performs or allows the child in the centre to perform her or his desired roles. So, the performance has only a limited relationship with what the child learns or is, but focuses instead on how well, or not well, the child is able to perform it. There is also a problem when considering “childhood” in a narrow, proscriptive or prescriptive way. Lyotard (1984) not only refused to accept the axiomatic subject of childhood as binary, but he also went so far as to reject its idiom. The child is not an object upon which to delineate correct and proper ways of doing, being and constructing reality. On the contrary, as Smeyers and Masschelein (2000) argue, “the reality of the child is not an object of knowledge or of understanding, escapes all objectification, not the anchorage of our power to govern, but that which marks its impotence” (p. 155). That is to say, we do not know precisely what it is that we mean when we speak idiomatically of childhood, as, according to Lyotard (1984), we (adults) cannot know the heterogeneity of the reality of the child, or following Giugni, of her agency. We are limited in language when we speak of “the” child or of one “childhood”—and by extension of one “correct” childhood. Thus, ignorant of the reality of the child, we fall back instead on easy, uncritical binaries, such as the early childhood “monsters” who presumably “attack” the foreigner toys in the film, in contrast to the docile, “educated” older children who “know” the right way to play. The clever conceit the film makes here is not simply that the children do not know what they are doing (even the “goodies” at one point had to learn how to play the right way), but that it is the veteran toys themselves who understand this dynamic

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and who reproduce its effects by segregating themselves from both Andy’s toys and from the “baddies” who run roughshod over them. Indeed, what is perhaps the film’s most damaging argument is not what it implies about either childhoods or the nature of education, but what it says about imagination and specifically imaginative play. In a phrase, the film exemplifies the idea that the children in the early childhood setting do not even have the capacity to play, let alone to “play well” or “play nicely”, and that any imagination they display while encountering the toys is not “playful” but rather menacing and destructive. The reason given for this inability to “play” is, interestingly, the age of the children. Prior to the entrance of the children to the playroom, Rex, the Dinosaur, hops excitedly, shouting, “Play! Real play! I can’t wait!” When the comic violence perpetrated by the children ends and the toys regroup, Mr. Potato Head sums up the problem: “But these toddlers—they don’t know how to play with us”. Rex echoes this sentiment when he concludes, “They’re too young”. Thus, the children’s interactions with the toys are delegitimised as “false” play, and any suggestion that their actions are in fact a form of play is foreclosed upon, as is any space in which they can deploy imagination. What makes this scene problematic is that it assumes that there is a reality to childhood that we can know and study (and that there is indeed one form of that reality) and that any behaviour that manifests itself in opposition to that reality is illegitimate. In other words, the children in this scene are not displaying any “imagination”. As such, we could argue that the children are in fact demonstrating an important form of imagination, one that allows the children to discover and create in a way that speaks to their own, heterogeneous constructions of reality. Lyotard and Thébaud (1985) offer that imagination in a way that transcends the Kantian critique of judgement and is discernible by its “power to invent criteria” (p. 17). Thus, while the children fail to adhere to the rules of developmentally and chronologically more advanced—and more socially acceptable—versions of “play” that does not mean that they are not, in their own realities, playing. In fact, the children in this scene are displaying more imagination than that of the toys, who are in themselves imaginary subjects, for the children are inventing their own criteria, while the toys are clinging to a prescriptive form of “reality”. As Nuyen (1998) puts it, “the domain of imagination is not the actual world but possible worlds. To acquire imaginative knowledge is to acquire the capacity to transcend the actual world and to enter the realm of possibilities” (p. 174). Toy Story 3 asks its audience to enter a possible world in which toys think, talk, move and develop consciousness; yet, the children in the film are portrayed parodically as unthinking, unimaginative and in a certain sense unconscious. The film as a developed fairy tale works productively in that it asks the audience to consider a reality in which things (in this, case toys) are self-aware. At the same time, however, it wrongs the very childhoods that it depicts (in contrast to the example of Andy, who, according to Rex, “Never played with us like that”), avoiding the multiplicities of childhood that are—or should be—possible. Far from opening spaces wherein children and childhoods can imaginatively invent criteria, the film produces the familiar and dangerous trope of one, true childhood,

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Fig. 1.2 Human/nonhuman worlds. Credit Sonja Arndt

one that closes off imagination and play—even in a room full of talking toys. And talking toys are an indicator of the vibrancy that is recognised in the nonhuman, as we approach in the remainder of this book (Fig. 1.2).

Towards the Posthuman Child Throughout this chapter we have demonstrated a re-reading of philosophical texts as they relate to children, childhoods and childhood education. We have demonstrated that the notions of “children” and “childhoods” offer a conceptual lens that can be approached in diverse ways through the readings of these classic texts, and that the histories and understandings of concepts and constructions of childhoods have followed various twists and turns that are far from linear or simple. To conclude, the linguistic turn represents an unassailable and wholesale sea change in twentieth and early-twenty-first-century philosophy, capturing two fundamental insights: the claim that all knowledge is dependent on its expression in language (all thought is language dependent), as Wittgenstein (1963) suggested, “what can be said can be said clearly” and “what we cannot speak of we must pass over in silence”, and that the goal of philosophy is to provide an understanding of our conceptual schema in order to resolve problems that arise from the misuse of words. This is not an investigation of

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the world but rather a step removed—a meta-activity that seeks agreement to resolve conceptual and epistemological confusions that arise in our use of concepts (Tesar & Arndt, 2019a). After more than 2000 years of refinements, resistances and attacks, each branch of philosophy—such as analytic philosophy—now survives only as a “style” of philosophy. The bridging of the analytic and continental traditions to a large degree has already taken place. This is not to suggest that the poststructuralist moment is “over” and completed: indeed, there is still excellent work being carried out by representatives of analytic and poststructuralist traditions. And yet, every discipline needs to creatively renew itself by contemplating the new. After the linguistic turn, and after the structuralist turn, what comes next—what new possibilities are there for the field? Does the future promise a digital turn with a greater return to connectionism, biology and biopolitics based on new understandings of systems theory and knowledge ecologies? Does it foreshadow a genuinely alternative radical global turn based on a new openness and interconnectedness? How should philosophy, education and childhood reflect new forces of globalisation? Burbules (2000) warns us that “the field of philosophy of education must stand today in awareness of its roots in a particular conception of ‘philosophy of education’ that emerged from predominantly Englishspeaking countries; and recognise that in certain contexts its participants are still predominantly male, and, even where more equally male and female, almost entirely white” (p. 16). This concern thus remains relevant today because defining “philosophy of education”, and what and who is philosophical, could be answered through a turn to intercultural and comparative philosophy of education, with greater attention to non-Western classical and indigenous forms. The other concerns that the philosophy of education and childhood education have tended to emphasise are the challenges to equality and social justice that children and education continue to face (Tesar & Arndt, 2018). In many ways, these are a continuation of the ethical, epistemological and ontological interrogations inspired by the postmodern cultural turn and poststructuralist methods of analysis. The following chapters in this book will touch on feminism in education and childhood, radical challenges to traditional discourses of power and control, issues of gender construction, access to power and knowledge, and multiculturalism and intercultural forms of dialogue that have changed the fundamental tenets of education in the increasingly globalised context of education, and issues of politics, governance, culture, power and pedagogy that have become increasingly prominent. To achieve that, we will examine the past and present of childhood studies, which further develop the foundation on which they allow us to argue for a turn to posthumanism, new materialism and a space where the Anthropocene is seen as a reality for all children that are born into the world. This turn, as we will argue, is towards a philosophy of the posthuman child.

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References Apple, M. W. (2004). Ideology and curriculum. New York, NY: RoutledgeFalmer. Ariès, P. (1960). Centuries of childhood. Harmondsworth: Penguin Books. Burbules, N. C. (2000). Philosophy of education. In B. Moon, M. BenPeretz & S. Brown (Eds.), Routledge international companion to education (pp. 3–18). New York, NY: Routledge. Cunningham, H. (2006). The invention of childhood. London, UK: BBC Books. DeMause, L. (1976). The history of childhood. London, United Kingdom: Souvenir Press. Dewey, J. (1897). My pedagogic creed. In: J. J. McDermott (Ed.). (1973). The philosophy of John Dewey: The lived experience. New York: Capricorn Books. Dewey, J. (1916). Education and democracy. An introduction to the philosophy of education. New York: MacMillan. Dewey, J. (1915). The school and society. Chicago, IL: University of Chicago Press. Fenech, M., & Sumsion, J. (2007). Early childhood teachers and regulation: Complicating power relations using a Foucauldian lens. Contemporary Issues in Early Childhood, 8(2), 109–122. Foucault, M. (1991). Discipline and punish: The birth of the prison. London: Penguin Books. Foucault, M. (2008). The birth of biopolitics: Lectures at the Collège de France, 1978–1979. New York: Palgrave Macmillan. Giugni, M. (2006). Conceptualising goodies and baddies through narratives of Jesus and Superman. Contemporary Issues in Early Childhood, 7(2), 97–108. Hardie, C. D. (1962). Truth and fallacy in educational theory. New York: Teachers College Bureau of Publications, Columbia University. Hirst, P. H. (1965). Liberal education and the nature of knowledge. In R. D. Archambault (Ed.), Philosophical analysis and education (pp. 113–138). London: Routledge. Hobbes, T. (2011). Leviathan. New York: Broadview Press. Holt, S. (2004). Off you go, Auntie Ma! Wellington: Learning Media. Illich, I. (2002). Deschooling Society. London: Marion Boyars. James, A., Jenks, C., & Prout, A. (1998). Theorizing childhood. Cambridge, United Kingdom: Polity Press. James, W. (1907). Pragmatism: A new name for some old ways of thinking. New York, NY, US: Longmans, Green and Co. Koro-Ljungberg, M., Loyt ¨ onen, ¨ T., & Tesar, M. (Eds.). (2017). Disrupting data in qualitative inquiry: Entanglements with the post-critical and post-anthropocentric. New York, NY: Peter Lang. Locke, J. (1824). The works of John Locke in nine volumes, volume 8: Some thoughts concerning education. Lyotard, J.-F. (1984). The postmodern condition: A report on knowledge. Minneapolis, MN: University of Minnesota Press. Lyotard, J.-F., & Thébaud, J.-L. (1985). Just gaming. Minneapolis, MN: University of Minnesota Press. MacNaughton, G. (2005). Doing Foucault in early childhood studies. Applying post-structural ideas. New York, NY: Routledge. Marriott, J. (2004). When mum went away. Wellington: Learning Media. Matthews, G. B. (1994). Philosophy of childhood. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press. McLaren, P., & Lankshear, C. (Eds.). (1994). Politics of liberation: Paths from Freire. New York: Routledge. Ministry of Education. (2011). Down the back of the chair. Retrieved from thechair.co.nz. Nuyen A. T. (1998). Jean-François Lyotard: Education for imaginative knowledge. In M. Peters (Ed.). Naming the multiple: Poststructuralism and education (pp. 173–182). Westport, CT: Bergin & Garvey. Peters, M., & Burbules, N. (2004). Poststructuralism and educational research. Lanham: Rowman & Littlefield.

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Peters, M. A., & Tesar, M. (2018). The philosophy of early childhood: Examining the cradle of the evil, rational and free child. In M. A. Peters & M. Tesar (Eds.), Troubling the changing paradigms: An Educational philosophy and theory early childhood reader (pp. 2–15). New York, NY: Routledge. Plato. (1968). The Republic. New York, NY: Basic Books. Rousseau, J. J. (1957). Emile. London, UK: Dent. Scheffler, I. (1978). The language of education. In M. Farber (Ed.). American lectures in philosophy. Springfield, IL: Charles C. Thomas. Siegel, H. (1988). Educating reason: Rationality, critical thinking, and education. Philosophy of Education Research Library. New York: Routledge. Smeyers, P., & Masschelein, J. (2000). L’enfance, education, and the politics of meaning. In P. A. Dhillon & P. Standish (Eds.), Lyotard: Just education (pp. 140–156). London: Routledge. Stables, A. (2008). Childhood and the philosophy of education: An anti-Aristotelian perspective. London, United Kingdom: Continuum. Tesar, M. (2017a). Childhood undergrounds: Power, resistance, secrets, objects and subversion in early childhood education. Early Childhood Folio, 21(1), 22–26. https://doi.org/10.18296/ecf. 0033. Tesar, M. (2017b). Tracing notions of sustainability in urban childhoods. [Invited contribution]. In K. Malone, T. Gray, & S. Truong (Eds.), Reimagining sustainability in precarious times (pp. 115–127). New York, NY: Springer. Tesar, M. (2016). Timing childhoods: An alternative reading of children’s development through philosophy of time, temporality, place and space. Contemporary Issues in Early Childhood, 17(4), 399–408. https://doi.org/10.1177/1463949116677924 Tesar, M. (2015). Ethics and truth in archival research. History of Education, 44(1), 101–114. https:// doi.org/10.1080/0046760X.2014.918185 Tesar, M. (2014a). Reconceptualising the child: Power and resistance within early childhood settings. Contemporary Issues in Early Childhood, 15(4), 360–367. https://doi.org/10.2304/ciec. 2014.15.4.360 Tesar, M. (2014b). My feelings: Power, politics and childhood subjectivities. Educational Philosophy and Theory, 46(8), 860–872. https://doi.org/10.1080/00131857.2013.781496 Tesar, M., & Arndt, A. (2016). Vibrancy of childhood things: Power, philosophy and political ecology of matter. Cultural Studies ↔ Critical Methodologies, 16(2), 193–200. https://doi.org/ 10.1177/1532708616636144. Tesar, M., & Koro-Ljungberg, M. (2016). Cute, creepy & sublime unnamed childhood monstrosities. Discourse: Studies in the Cultural Politics of Education, 37(5), 694–704. https://doi.org/10.1080/ 01596306.2015.1075708. Tesar, M., & Arndt, S. (2018). Posthuman childhoods: Questions concerning ‘Quality.’ In M. Bloch, B. B. Swadener, & G. S. Cannella (Eds.), Reconceptualizing early childhood education and care: Foundational debates, new imaginaries, and social action/activism (pp. 113–128). New York, NY: Peter Lang. Tesar, M., & Jukes, B. (2018). Childhoods in the Anthropocene: Re-thinking young children’s agency and activism. In N. Yelland & D. Bentley (Eds.), Found in translation: Connecting reconceptualist thinking with early childhood education practices (pp. 76–90). New York, NY: Routledge. Tesar, M., & Arndt, S. (2019a). Writing the human “I”: liminal spaces of mundane abjection. Qualitative Inquiry. https://doi.org/10.1177/1077800419881656 Tesar, M., & Arndt, S. (2019b). Philosophies and ethics of the project archive. Educational Philosophy and Theory, 51(4), 434–444. https://doi.org/10.1080/00131857.2018.1476237 Tesar, M., Rodriguez, S., & Kupferman, D. (2016). Philosophy and pedagogy of childhood, adolescence and youth. Global Studies of Childhood, 6(2), 169–176. https://doi.org/10.1177/204361 0616647623

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Tesar, M., Rodriguez, S., Kupferman, D., & Arndt, S. (2016). Forever young: Childhoods, fairy tales and philosophy. Global Studies of Childhood, 6(2), 222–233. https://doi.org/10.1177/204 3610616647642 United Nations Human Rights. (1989). Convention on the rights of the child. Retrieved from http:// www.ohchr.org/en/professionalinterest/pages/crc.aspx. Wittgenstein, L. (1963). Philosophical investigations. Oxford: Basil Blackwell.

Chapter 2

Reconfiguring Childhoods and Theories

Abstract In this chapter, we examine the new sociological ways of thinking about children and childhoods introduced in critique of the dominant developmental theories in the later part of the twentieth century. The chapter seeks to clarify some of the rethinking of childhoods beyond developmental frameworks and towards the posthuman, new materialist perspectives that are further unpacked throughout the book. Foregrounding the book’s aim, which is not to negate biological or developmental views of childhoods altogether, the chapter seeks to acknowledge the important contributions of prior theoretical perspectives on contemporary views of childhoods in the twenty-first century. Although these paradigms in isolation no longer dominate ways of theorising childhoods, tracings of past views remain visible and have helped to shape the focus of this book. They are an unmissable link in framing new theorisations of childhoods. Keywords Postdevelopmental theories · New sociology of childhood · Re-theorising and rethinking childhoods · Posthuman and new materialist perspectives of childhood In this chapter, we consider the terrain of the new sociological ways of thinking about children and childhoods, as they were introduced in critique of developmental theories in the later part of the twentieth century. Whereas in Chap. 1 we focused on the philosophy of children and childhoods, this chapter’s focus is on a sociological perspective, with a particular focus on the new sociology of childhoods. It is a step in a journey to clarify the rethinking of childhoods beyond developmental frameworks. In this book, we do not wish to negate biological or developmental views of childhoods altogether, those views inherited in childhoods studies since the introduction of Darwin’s studies of his own young children. Instead our intention is to acknowledge that all of these theories have influenced how we come to view childhoods in the twenty-first century. Although, as we argue in this book, these paradigms in isolation are no longer central to our ways of theorising childhoods, the tendrils and tracings of all the generated pasts are always visible and have helped to shape the focus of this book.

© Springer Nature Singapore Pte Ltd. 2020 K. Malone et al., Theorising Posthuman Childhood Studies, Children: Global Posthumanist Perspectives and Materialist Theories, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-981-15-8175-5_2

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Child as not Fully Human Does being a child mean you are not fully human? Is childhood the process of becoming fully human? Childhood as a social, historical, cultural and political artefact of our times is and continues to be a very new concept. Less than 200 years ago the majority of children on the planet were viewed merely as “human”, as animal, maybe younger, less skilled and less productive, than older human animals, but human, nonetheless. To be human was to be entangled with all other humans within an evolving ecology of animals, plants and others. During the nineteenth century, with the advent of industrialism and democratisation, of the Western privileged kind, “children” (uncivilised humans) were increasingly being excluded from the unified human animal story and granted their own status, unhuman, seeking and becoming human. Education as a humanising process (as described by Snaza, 2017) locates children and childhoods as the quintessential organising “subject” of the schooling process. To be a child without education is to be wild, uncultured, untamed and animalistic. Education and schooling became the mechanism, or social apparatus, to manage child bodies as they transitioned from child to adult. It also assumed some form of equality in life potential for these becoming humans. Education has often been espoused as the great tamer, the great equaliser, education for all in a new capitalist democratic society. The dominant theories of the day were behaviourist and developmental, following a science of children and childhoods that focused on their not quite human capacities. Childhoods in Western societies and those colonies they captured, the tools of a machinery of production and dominance. Postdevelopmental theoretical framings (defined as the group of contemporary approaches that came after and critiqued behaviourist and developmental theories) have helped to disrupt, rework and engage age-old debates around the significance of changing factors influencing a child’s “development”. Nature–nurture debates, for instance, are often claimed as one of the single most divisive ideologies in childhood studies and have brought about a continued upsurge in either/or situated binaries stemming from questions around what is most influential in a child’s life: their biological genetics or their environment. Extending the question of the usefulness of such divisive binaries, postdevelopmental theories have also supported the means for eroding moral and ethical boundaries that have separated children from adults. The child– adult binary produced boundaries with the intention of positioning children from a deficit perspective, as in the process of becoming (something of value), becoming adult, becoming more than child, rather being viewed as legitimate “humans” as a child. Child when viewed as different, less than fully human is other to the adult human. De Castro (2004) supporting a challenge to adult–child binaries wrote: Difference between children and adults consists of a separation between them which ensures for the child a position of being the one who is not … The conceived difference between children and adults has served to regulate social and domestic practices as well as public policies concerning the status of children in modern societies (p. 470),

the question with postdevelopmentalism was: did this go far enough in helping to understanding not just the child in relation to the adult but the child in relation with

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all entities? These binaries emerging from developmental, positivist and humanist theories are considered in this chapter in order to open up spaces to consider firstly how binaries work to prioritise certain ways of positioning children/childhoods and how binaries have been used to separate disciplines such as natural science and the social sciences in childhood studies. In providing this foundational mapping of children and childhoods as a site of study, certain privileged knowledges will open up possibilities explored in later chapters of the book. It will prepare for considering how posthumanist, agential realism/new materialism and diffractive approaches can produce different types of childhood knowledges that account for more than a child as becoming human, and the ecological relationship between human and nonhumans as entangled beings. That is, by extending the notion of what it means to share agency with a range of human and nonhuman entities, opportunities arise for exploring what it means to be shaped and to shape intra-actions of the child with a host of others through a view where humans are in complex entangled subject positions with a range of human–nonhuman subjects. But before we explore these alternative contemporary posthumanist and new materialist approaches that frame the book, we begin with a quick introduction to traditional developmental theories and more explicitly a discussion on the introduction of the new paradigm known as the “new sociology of childhood”. These traditional theories and then the critique of them by the new sociologists of childhood have been influential in determining how we come to view and construct the experience of being a child in modern society and help to frame the stepping off point for what this book seeks to explore. Haraway (1990, cited in Prout, 2005) helps us to frame the scientific approach with which we begin, as she states: It will not do to approach science as social or cultural constructions, as if culture and society were transcendent categories, any more than nature or object is. Outside of the premises of enlightenment – i.e. of the modern – the binary pairs of culture and nature, science and society, the technical and the social all lose their constitutive, oppositional quality. Neither can explain the other (p. 83).

The key concepts, in what Wyness (2012) names the “the dominant framework” surrounding the study of children and childhoods, have operated around three enduring themes: “rationality”, “naturalness” and “universality”. According to James and Prout (2008), …rationality [unification], is the universal mark of adulthood with childhoods representing the period of apprenticeship for its development… childhoods is a biologically determined stage on the path to full human status (p. 10).

They go on to state that “the naturalness of children both governs and is governed by their universality” and that “childhood was a universal (and historical) human condition” (p. 10). By the dominant or developmental framework here we bring together both psychological and early sociological approaches in terms of general principles around children and childhoods—so we will touch briefly on both cognitive developmentalism and socialisation theory as a means for then exploring how the new sociology of childhood brought something different to the stage of childhood studies.

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Child Bodies Under Scientific Scrutiny The Enlightenment had radical implications for childhoods and what it meant to be a parent. Prior to the Enlightenment, parenting was predominantly about disciplining children and pushing them towards adulthood as soon as possible. As was discussed in Chap. 1, during the Enlightenment, childhood came to be considered a precious time of development, and these ideas of development and maturity came to be instrumental in the way children and childhoods were written about, researched and how children were “acted” on in terms of their subject positions. Charles Darwin at the later part of the nineteenth century, for instance, engaged in a series of biographical accounts of his son’s early development utilising frameworks and categories from his own field of study, biology. The paper he published on this some 37 years later called “A Biographical sketch of an Infant” was one of the first extensive biographical studies of child development. His interests were clearly on the intimate detail of his child’s developing capacities in such areas as vision, movement, affection, moral reasoning and language acquisition, all according to age milestones. He later went on to compare his son’s development with his daughter’s and then how their development compared to other species he was also observing such as “higher apes”. His focus on language acquisition of children helped to support his own theories of evolution with him presenting an argument in his infamous book The Descent of Man (1871) that language was not an impossible barrier between humans and nonhumans and that infants under 12 months could be compared to language knowledge similar to that of dogs. Darwin expressed hope that others would follow in his footsteps and build on his theories. According to Walkerdine (1984), this enthusiasm for studying children’s intellect and their bodies continued to evolve into the early years of the twentieth century as an interest of scientific study, where Children’s bodies were weighed and measured. The effects of fatigue were studied as were the children’s interests, imaginings and religious ideas, fetishes, attitudes to weather, to adults, to drawings, dolls, lies, ideas and most importantly for us, their stages of growth (p. 171).

In recent times, we see a new resurgence of scientific measurement applied to child bodies with the advent of neuroscience, and the medicalisation of “learning and deficit conditions” such as ADHD as a growing epidemic. Studies in the UK, in particular, were focused on considering the growing impact of industrialisation on children’s lives and the idea that scientific outcomes could then be generalised for whole populations of children who were now being herded into “schools”. Defining stages for a child’s “normal” development was central to the establishment of educational institutions when the purpose of schooling was to humanise the child (to be fully functionally human) and also became the standard through which “abnormality” (or dehumanising) of the child when physical, motor skill development and slow or a lacking of intelligence could then identified, scrutinised and medicalised. Arnold Gessell’s research at Yale in 1911 in the USA brought the child literally and metaphorically into the laboratory and under this type of biological scrutiny. Observed by Gessell and others, children placed inside a large

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observation dome were subjected to a series of devised tests. Using photography and movie cameras, he recorded and then assembled a large database of young children’s behaviour at various ages. He distilled this information into a set of categories or what he described as “normative summaries” that represented the milestones of children for each age grouping (Woodhead & Montgomery, 2003). These beginnings of the scientific developmental approaches became keenly known through the continued work of Jean Piaget (1896–1980), in the early part of the twentieth century. Nearly a hundred years on his findings are still central to the way children are monitored and evaluated as “normal or abnormal”—human or unhuman in schools and other social institutions. Jean Piaget proposed there were four distinct, increasingly sophisticated stages of mental representation that children pass through on their way to becoming an adult. Children are routinely positioned along the pathway to “completion” by connecting chronological age with a clearly defined set of stages of development. Based on an ideal of a “universal childhood”, Piaget’s scientific approach to observing and thinking about children’s capacities was referred to as his theory of cognitive development. The theory was based on the view that rather than children gradually developing a deeper understanding of the world as they are exposed to varying experiences and that this evolution was an individual journey. He believed children become more and more competent through a set of transformative phases, and that this transformation in their thinking could be understood as a sequence of four “stages” of development. Considering Piaget trained as a biologist, these transformations of child development are often likened to biological evolution such as the metamorphosis of a butterfly, “first there is an egg, then a caterpillar, then a chrysalis and finally the adult emerges” (Woodhead & Montgomery, 2003, p. 14). The cultural impact and significance of scientific and developmental approaches to understanding children can be seen in the many ways they continue to be evaluated in terms of their physical development and learning. For instance, when you ask a child “how old are you?”, there is already a vast array of assumptions about what is appropriate for a child to be and act like at a certain age. School as the most dominant institution through which children are engaged is mostly based on age groupings and through the monitoring of children’s behaviour decisions are made as to whether a child is maturing appropriately. The opportunity to advance to new levels or grades is then commonly based on these scientific assessments. In response to this, many parents feel they are being scrutinised about their parenting capacities, and that, in order for their child to “not be left behind”, often opt for possible ways to enhance their child’s education and physical advancements. These expectations around a child’s competencies and physicality based on age illustrate how powerfully developmental theory and the comparative stages of development have influenced Western constructions of childhoods. There have been many critiques of Piaget’s theories of cognitive development based on variety of limitations set down within his own scientific approach. For many, it is believed Piaget’s theory understates the contribution of the social world to cognitive development. As the majority of his studies were conducted under scientific conditions, that is, in laboratories, it is believed that it is difficult to translate

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the findings into the “real world”. This universalising view of children also undermines debates around the influence of contexts and encounters on children’s life and the impact changes, capacities and opportunities within the family, the community and within ecological contexts can have on a child maturing. This brings to the fore the second significant limitation of Piaget’s work that the tasks through which he conducted his studies are culturally biased. For example, Margaret Mead (infamous anthropologist of the 1920s) challenged Piaget’s stages of development on contextual grounds. Her research illustrated that children brought up in different cultural communities did not exhibit a replica of the stages that Piaget stated were universal. Mead’s research into the experiences and impacts of environmental factors on children’s lives weakened the Piagetian developmental thesis. Other critiques of his work have focused on the model of staged development depicting children’s thinking as being more consistent than it really is. In order to create normalised categories, his theories have reduced children’s thinking to being ordered and linear. Many research studies have since illustrated that children’s development is a complex process and that their thinking, language acquisition and even physical growth tend to evolve in often unexpected leaps and lags. Finally, as Piaget was attempting to reduce children’s cognitive development to a set of universal competencies, he has been critiqued by those who think that generally children are more capable than Piaget recognised. Reducing children’s capacity has limited the possibilities for considering more complex approaches to children’s shared agency with others (human and nonhumans) and how they can be/are agents for shaping worlds with others (see the previous chapter and Chap. 4 for an extended discussion on shared agency). Something we have come to know as “worlding”, which is discussed in later chapters of this book. It is important to note that worlding draws on a view of children as not less, or becoming human, but as always entangled in complex relations with all humans and nonhuman entities. “Thinking and feeling with the Earth as we learn ‘being-in-common’ with the world”, Harcount (2019) describes worlding using the work of Escobar (2016) who says, “how we create and experience different interconnected worlds—past, present and futures—human and non-human worlds, material and spiritual worlds with different practices, cultures and natures connecting them”. Worlding brings our attention to the diversity, difference and similarity of being in the world, and particularly in various places in the world. So rather than looking to homogenise or universalise lives and living, it is about understanding the complexity of interrelationships that are constantly ongoing in different time and space. Malone (2011) writes the following description of the land and the Oceanic View of the South Pacific Islands where infamous anthropologist Margaret Mead engaged in her research with children and youth. It was from her observations that Mead developed a critique of Piaget’s theories as not being open or porous enough to encompass the diversity of children’s everyday lives, in particular, the cultural and social nuances of how relationships with a place over time have specific influences on how children are viewed within their worlds:

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In his influential essay, ‘Our Sea of islands’, the Tongan anthropologist Epeli Hau’ofa describes the view of ‘ancestral Oceanians’ who saw the Pacific as ‘a large world in which peoples and cultures moved and intermingled…. From one island to another they sailed to trade and marry, thereby expanding social networks for greater flows of wealth’. He contrasts this with the perspective of Western explorers, men who entered the Pacific after long sea journeys, who saw the world of Oceania as islands in a far sea. This vision conjures up isolation, uniqueness, and an assumed boundedness of systems, which were mistakenly imagined to have had only faint links with other social units. The Oceanic view encompassed expanded social networks in ways that resonate with contemporary theorising about globalisation, which finds that cultural and physical boundaries are never absolute, and that the webs of communication and influences (whether direct or indirect) of global politics and economic markets have seeped into even the most apparently isolated spaces. That is, cultures and societies are tied together in increasingly complex ways. The boundaries become blurred globalisation lies at the heart of modern culture, cultural practices lie at the heart of globalisation (p. 242).

This view of diverse childhoods opens up the opportunity to explore in more detail the socialisation process, that is, how humans develop and grow through specific types of human interactions. This is explored next.

Children as Social Beings According to the theory of socialisation, socialisation is the process whereby the child acquires a specific cultural identity and their responses to such an identity. Socialisation is the process whereby the child as a biological being is transformed into a cultural being, where the human child is prepared to function in the social, cultural life of their community as fully human. Because there are a variety of diverse communities that humans can be socialised into, socialisation is culturally relative. That is, children in different cultures are socialised differently, and because socialisation is the adoption of culture, the process of socialisation is different in every culture. According to socialisation theory, socialisation, as both process and outcome, is not better or worse in any particular culture, just relevant to the specifics of a culture. Emile Durkheim, the French sociologist and pioneer in the development of modern sociology and anthropology, was a supporter of socialisation theory as was Sigmund Freud. There are a number of core theoretical underpinnings of socialisation theory that have been central in forming the field of childhood studies. Symbolic interactionism as a theoretical approach supported the notion of the developing self as a result of social interactions; socialisation therefore becomes highly dependent on the situations in which the actor finds themselves. This approach also argues that socialisation is a continuous, lifelong process and that childhood provides a series of opportunities where everyday encounters can enrich and enhance social learning potential. This approach exemplifies the importance of schooling as the space where children are in the process of being human with and through social interactions with other becoming humans.

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Role theory seeks to understand how learning norms, attitudes, developing selfimages and values engage in certain activities that enable the child to be accepted within the group and perform their role (Parsons, 1951). The performative aspects of humanism constructed within these socialising roles ascertain the boundaries of what is accepted as human behaviour and what is not. Who is able to function as human, who has acquired the capacity to be considered fully human? The reinforcement of acceptance, being in and not outside the group—to be human and not dehumanised—by the educative production of learning, draws on reinforcement theory. Finally, socialisation is also often understood as a series of stages in which the individual learns to participate in various levels of society; the child internalises a cognitive frame of reference for interpersonal relations at the level of family first and then extends to the community and beyond. Bronfenbrenner’s (1979) ecological systems theory also stressed the importance of studying a child in these multiple environmental contexts. His studies provide a classic example of how a human-centred approach or model of life, in his case using ecological systems theory, might reduce rather than embrace complexity. Bronfenbrenner often cited Lev Vygotsky (the founder of an unfinished Marxist theory of human cultural and bio-social development) and German-born psychologist Kurt Lewin (often recognised as the founder of social psychology) as important influences on his theory development. Drawing on Freudian and small group theory the nuclear human family in socialisation theory was positioned as the primary and most significant location for socialisation. Primary in the sense they were viewed the most important, the most enduring and the most formative places for socialisation to occur. As the child grew, the school as the next most significant social institution introduced the child to the relatively fixed practices and procedures, routines, norms and practices that reinforced their “in process of becoming human” status in the community. This reinforced expectations and values of what it meant to be fully human in that context, surrounded by the systems and structures of the society.

Limiting Views of Childhoods Piaget’s cognitive developmental theory supported the claim that most children, irrespective of their cultural or social background, would go through a series of similar stages of development, and therefore presupposed a modern Western model of the completed adult or “being”. Many argued it was a partial view, that is, it provided some general insights but could not be used to universalise the experience of childhoods. Socialisation theory, although located in sociology and not behaviourist sciences, also offered only a partial view of growing up and reiterated many of the same limitations of developmental theory. Socialisation theory supported assumptions about children as “persons-in-waiting”, although it did provide possibilities for acknowledging the importance of children and childhoods as being located with, and through social communities of “others”, supporting an expanding view of a

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deeply influential social and cultural world. However, the “socialised” child often suffered the same fate as the “developing” child, by inhabiting the social periphery of humanity as a transitional object or project (Wyness, 2012). These limiting views of childhoods opened up the desire for new theoretical spaces where children could take up active positions as social political beings, constructing and creating social relationships, rather than as the “cultural dopes” of socialisation theory (Wyness, 2012). And while the dominant framework helped bring together psychology and sociology within some general principles relating to children and childhoods, developmentalism (cognitive developmental theory and socialisation theory) predominately viewed children from within very limited individualised/human-centred frameworks that did not account for the complex world of being and becoming human within a complex social, cultural, ecological world with a host of other humans and nonhumans. And as you will find as we explore further posthuman theorising in later chapters, there is a need to extend this critique beyond asserting the exclusion of children as one of many others considered to be “not quite humans” (black, slave, woman, indigenous people and refugees, for example), from the category of “human”, to disrupt speciesism that positions humans outside of (and powerful over) categories of other living things.

Disrupting the Dominant Framework with the New Sociology of Childhoods Wyness (2012) identified four key features of the dominant framework that limited its capacity to be useful in contemporary society. These few features included the following: – childhood was distinguished in oppositional or binary terms; – children lacked an ontological position; – there was an emphasis on the child as singular rather than children as collective and – the influential role of State control in a child’s pathway to “growing up”. According to those writing about limiting factors of the dominant framework on childhoods, there were a number of assumptions used for framing and conceptualising childhoods that operated using oppositional politics and binaries. These assumptions are explained in detail in Prout and James’ seminal publication Constructing and Reconstructing Childhoods, where they for the first time set up the possibilities for how a new sociology of childhood could change the way dichotomies operated in current scholarship around child’s life. The dominant framework according to Wyness (2012) drawing on the work of Prout and James (1997) set up a series of potential dichotomous binaries built around the central ontological position of a child. That is, that it only exists in relation to adult and childhoods as the process for a child becoming “adult”—to be brought into existence through an inheritance

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of “humanness”. A dichotomy is any splitting of a whole into exactly two nonoverlapping parts. In other words, it is a partition of a whole (or a set) into two parts (subsets) that are mutually exclusive—nothing can belong simultaneously to both parts, and jointly exhaustive—everything must belong to one part or the other. Logically, the partitions are opposites if there exists a proposition such that it holds over one and not the other. Some of the key dichotomous binaries operating in the studies of childhoods include child–adult; nature–culture; simple–complex; amoral– moral; person-in-waiting—personhood; becoming human–being human (Wyness, 2012). To understand the means for disrupting the framework it is helpful to return to its beginning with exploring alternative ontological positionings of child–human and adult–human from the common position of the child being ontologically viewed as “becoming”, while the adult is an accomplished “being”. Ontology is the philosophical study of the nature of being, existence or reality in general, including the basic categories of being and their relations. Ontology deals with questions concerning what entities exist or can be said to exist or are on the way to existing, and how such entities can be grouped, related to within a hierarchy, and subdivided according to similarities and differences. If children are conceptualised in terms of what they will become rather than who they are, they are ontologically positioned as incomplete human beings. Adults on the other hand are positioned as ontologically complete as fully constituted human beings: “the child [in the dominant framework] is never ontologically established in their own right” (Wyness, 2012, p. 121). To be a non-unified being—to be incomplete—is to allow the dominance of other categories through which “child” must perform in order to be validated. You can see here how important it was then to create “schools” as a social institution that could be the mechanism or apparatus to actively perform this task. The position of the child in postdevelopmental theories is based on the beginnings of a relational ontology, something that is central to posthuman and materialist approaches. The child becomes seen as a complete being whose role within families, and other categorical groups, gendered, ethnic, queer exist and are visible regardless of how or if these groups are ushered to the margins, dehumanised (Snaza, 2013). Therefore, the child who had been for past centuries viewed as invisible both metaphorically and realistically in the recording of human society, particularly in the early years of anthropology and other disciplines, within the new sociology of childhoods became potentially illuminated. A number of limiting binaries operating within the dominant framework beyond child/adult have been unpacked within the new sociology of childhood, including nature/culture, simple/complex, subject/object and male/female. The nature/culture binary, for instance, presupposes the idea that being a child is closer to nature than human adults and being adult means to be closer to culture. Children within a nature/culture binary are determined to be undisciplined, wild, primitive—that is, not understanding of or capable of performing the culture—while becoming adult means to be cultured, controlled and civilised. This is just as slaves, blacks, woman humans have also historically been positioned as less than human based on biological determinism. Because of woman’s greater bodily involvement with the natural functions

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surrounding reproduction, for instance, biological deterministic approaches construct her as more a part of nature than man is. Yet in part because of her consciousness and participation in human social dialogue, she is recognised as a participant in culture as well. Thus, she appears as something intermediate between culture and nature, lower on the scale of transcendence than man. Binaries help to maintain these distinctions of less than fully human. Prout (2005) claims that one of the reasons for the long neglect of childhoods in the field of sociology was adult behaviour and dispositions being seen as more sophisticated, more helpful in naming the human condition. Infants are barely human and utterly unsocial, like nonhuman animals they are unable to walk upright, they excrete without control and they do not speak. Even slightly older children it is argued are clearly not yet fully capable of properly performing “culture”. In this view, where children are simple to understand, to explain, where their behaviours are not ingrained and there is still psychological scope to go backwards, childhood is seen as the foundation on which to explain adult inappropriateness. If we can equate simplicity with purity and innocence, or naivety, then the nature of children is essentialised through developmental approaches. Complexity describes the fully developed cognitively whole adult as unified personhood. Child is a personin-waiting or person-in-process—which leads to notions of a lack of ontological integrity for a child. The binaries of child as simple/adults as complex, therefore, equate to the superiority of adults as sophisticated, complete, beings. Adults are more complex and harder to analyse. The child in the role of simple laboratory “subject” is easier to control, appears not to need deep analysis: the complexities of being child are rendered invisible. Other critiques that the new sociology of childhood had of the dominant framework are the way children are seen as discreet individual bodies and not a collective category in society. Childhood becomes a transitional category that adults pass through on their way to being adult—and while this may be true biologically, for new sociologists of childhood this isn’t true in terms of the social construction or the status of children as worthwhile contributors to society. The dominant framework, therefore, takes for granted that children are discreet entities. This means that the emphasis is on the singular child rather than children and their collective practices (both as human actors and animal actors and entity actors, objects/subjects within complex ecosystems), and therefore that their influence as an actor within a networked system is diminished. Finally, children’s lack of status, legitimised the power of external governing bodies in terms of what and how childhoods, children and their bodies would or could be regulated and managed. Much like the arguments around the animal rights movement, without rights or a voice, decisions based on their welfare were taken up by the government and courts rather than children deciding on whether they wanted to go to school, live with foster parents or even be subjected to chemotherapy if they had cancer. Their opinions, choices and desires were not valued or taken seriously. Supported by a strong view of the child as a prototype individual, extended the hand of the state into the private spaces of the home. Training and educating children in order that they will serve the needs of the state guided by the ways the state treated and

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managed children. Moral demands could be made on families to bring up children in ways determined to be the best for the child and the state and these “means” were universalised based on the ideal model of the “child” such as those developed through the research of thinkers claimed by psychology, such as Piaget and Freud. By legitimising the power of the state, children and mothers were predominantly subjected to health, education and social technologies and state developed statutory frameworks “supporting” the care and “needs” of children. The role of the state in this respect is to produce productive citizens, who can “fit” into society as fully functioning members of the society.

Postdevelopmental Challenges of Childhoods Summing up the above issues, there are a series of challenges that postdevelopmental theories including those introduced by the new sociology of childhood sought to address. The following four challenges have been adapted from the work of Wyness (2012): Challenge 1: Bias of Biology. The centrality of biology as at the centre of developmental theories has been instrumental in developing a view of children as having very little or no agency as a social actor within the collective societies where they exist. While biology tells us something about the differences between children and adults there is no necessary relationship between biological immaturity and childhoods as social and cultural phenomena. The bias of biology relies on a deterministic view of relationships based on chronological age and development of children’s experience in other societies outside of the Western viewpoint, and this lack of focus on the social world and social experience of children has limited the potential of children and ignored the central role that many children play in their communities. Challenge 2: Overdetermined Child. The overdeterministic conception of children’s lives, especially around the emphasis of their biological age as being critical to understanding a child, is central to a critique of developmental theories by postdevelopmentalism. Developmental frameworks focus on children’s accomplishments, but mostly on the basis of their deficits—problems within their biological life cycle or the life course that needed to be attended to, medicalised, treated, responded to, before they become disorderly. For example, the times considered as adolescents’ storm and tyranny, the terrible two’s, and so on. The emergent paradigm of the new sociology of childhood assumed a much more dynamic and complex relationship between childhoods and adulthoods, promoting a non-linear account of being. The emphasis in dominant developmental frameworks was on the phases of transition to becoming an adult rather than on being a child. The challenge for postdevelopmentalism was children’s lack of social competence and agency when viewed as passive recipients under adult control. Challenge 3: Cultural bias. The dominant framework was shrouded under a cloud of Euro-Anglo-centrism, a scientific methodology of generalisation is a Western mode of thought. The scientific tendency to generalise and emphasise a

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universal, normalised form of childhood has assumed that this way of thinking applies also to non-Western cultures. Piaget’s proto-individual is based on a white male perspective, for example. The challenge of cultural bias takes a number of forms with age, gender and intelligences having significance in the dominant model, and therefore assumed to be replicated cross culturally. For Piaget, the child is like a pilgrim, a detective, a free standing individual who makes their way through the developmental process, with all the pitfalls of Eurocentric patriarchal frameworks supporting them—masculinities are supported through development constructions of play and prowess, stereotypes are modelled on Western values and ways of thinking, so child–parent relations and ways of being are produced without any consideration of non-Western and non-traditional ways of acting. Postdevelopmental theories, therefore, have opened up the possibilities of different and diverse childhoods, that is, non-traditional childhoods are acknowledged and recognised. Challenge 4: Absence of “Here” and “Now”. The final challenge is the lack of acknowledgement of the unique experiences of children and the problems that affect them because they are children. For instance, physical immaturity or age is a strong indicator of greater impacts, of such things as air pollution or food additives. Social, cultural and collective impacts of poverty or these environmental degradations affect children as a collective and cannot be categorised in the same ways as community poverty or family deprivations. This is compounded by a tendency to look at these impacts on the body, for instance, as consequential for the child in their adulthood— what does this mean in terms of their life expectancy? How will sexual exploitation as a child affect the stability of that child in adulthood to be able to function within society? Does abuse or deprivation as a child lead to an ongoing pathway that is irreversible? While these are all valid questions about the projection of the future adult, the critique is the lack of attention paid to what they mean for the child now? Is this suffering discounted for the life of the child in the here and now? Isn’t it about the quality of their life now? Children are often valued as an asset for the future, but alongside this is a tendency to project children backwards—making sense of an adult’s life because of what happened in their childhood. This is particularly the case in socialisation theory when applied to explain delinquent or criminal behaviour through an inadequate socialisation, coincidentally making a further case for state intervention and control in children’s lives.

Postdevelopmental Theories as a Plurality of Childhoods The idea of a universal state of childhood has been challenged in contemporary times through ethnographic, cultural and anthropological studies. The shift towards a recognition and acceptance of children’s voices in determining their own worldview and an increasingly globalised perspective that questioned the structural norm of childhoods brought about a theoretical position that recognises the pluralities of childhoods. For example, in many majority world countries career responsibilities are given to older siblings and other family members, so that it is an “apprenticeship

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system in which women and men are trained in parental roles by the time they actually have children of their own” (Corsaro, 2005, p. 95). As Corsaro remarks, there are a vast array of traditional caring practices that are in opposition to parenting principles based on a Western model of developmental theory. “African babies received three times the amount of attention of the US babies” (p. 50), for example, because they are never left alone. The idea that the ability to soothe herself to sleep is important to a baby’s development, has led to “sleep training”, which involves “crying it out” methods where an infant is left to cry for as long as it is necessary for them to fall asleep. Such methods have been viewed by non-Western cultures as cruel and barbaric.

Viewing Children and Childhoods Differently For such theorists as Chris Jenks and Jens Qvortrup, it was more accurate and helpful to talk of many childhoods or a plurality of experience both across cultures and within them. Diversity of experience according to class, ethnicity, gender, culture, place of residence, health or disability rather than one common childhood has been emphasised, in spite of growing recognition of the universalising effects of globalisation. So how did those promoting a new sociology of childhoods view children and childhoods differently? Within the emerging paradigm of the new sociology of childhood there were some key guiding principles. These included the core premise that follows: – childhood is not a biological necessity but a social construction; – childhood is a set of beliefs and the values attached to the way we “think” about children and – growing up as distinct from children themselves. Therefore, children as living, breathing, biological creatures and childhoods are not the same thing. Childhoods when understood as a social construction provided an interpretative frame for contextualising and informing new ways of understanding the early years of life (James & Prout, 2008). Social constructivism as a theoretical perspective focused on how we viewed the reality of everyday life as arising through the interactions people have with one another and their environments. Childhoods as a social construction offers a mode for understanding that there is no universal or essential child but that the child, children and childhoods are all constitutive practices and forms of social interactions, actions and social structures that are culturally located and therefore humanly constituted. Childhood is not a relative essential truth. It does not exist outside of culture and society, but the social reality of childhoods is experienced through and within the bodies of the child, who is located within a specific space and time. According to the initial framing of the new sociology of childhood, James and Prout (2008) argued that childhoods could never be entirely divorced from other variables such as class, gender or ethnicity. Therefore, understanding childhoods as a social category that existed outside of adults allowed children to be represented

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in places where historically they had been invisible. For many children in Western societies, especially younger children and babies, they existed only within the social context as entities owned or within families or communities of adults. By establishing children and childhoods as a variable of social analysis it opened up the possibilities for children to exist as an entity within society both as a physical and biological state, with childhoods existing as a structural category outside the experiences of any one child. This opening up lead to a deeper understanding of child relevant ontologies and what it could mean to be a child ontologically complete, to exist as a human, child, animal, as a being, among other beings. A complex entity is an entangled network of potentialities.

Children as Ontologically Complete A central tenet of the new sociology of childhood was a focus on children being viewed as ontologically complete as “… human beings and not human becomings”, (Qvortrup, 1994, p. 4). As ontology deals with questions concerning what entities exist or can be said to exist, and how such entities can be grouped, related to each other within a hierarchy, and subdivided according to similarities and differences, for children to be seen as ontologically complete means that they take up a social category of their own outside of “adults”. To take up a social category and exist in their own right then demanded an ontological shift from viewing children as only existing in relation to becoming adult to one where children exist within a non-binary framing as multiple: children being seen as “becoming adult” and “being child” at the same time. The social scientific status of being a fully active constituted adult disrupts this view, and the child and the role of childhoods are not assumed as having a performative stance of moving the child from the social position of being incomplete to complete. As incomplete, only becoming adult, allows children to be dominated by others and to have no status as a category for social analysis worthy of discussion. Murris (2013) argues that we should consider this position and name it as epistemic injustices. Epistemic injustices are not just social, but also within this ontoepistemic are moments of silencing. Children not being listened to, being silenced because their very being (onto) is as child unable to make claims to knowledge, because it is, “assumed that they are (still) developing, (still) innocent, (still) fragile, (still) immature, (still) irrational (still) becoming” (Murris, 2018, p. 2). According to the early writing by Prout and James (2008), “children are and must be seen as active in the construction and determination of their own lives” (p. 8), to be active social agents. The idea that children can be seen as independent social actors to have agency was central to the new a paradigm informing the new sociology of childhood. It emphasised the capacity for children to make choices about things they do and to express their ideas. Even babies inside and outside of the womb, for example, are viewed as influencing and participating in the social world through their mere presence. The concept of agency is explored further on in this chapter and in Chap. 4, but it is important to note that by positioning children as social agents actively

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engaging in the production, transformation and determination of their own lives was a central tenet to the new sociology of childhoods. At the time this evolving paradigm was enacted, the UN Convention on the Rights of the Child was also being ratified and governments/countries were seeking to understand what it meant to provide and support children to actively take up their rights. These two social movements became entangled in the constructions of the methodological means for producing information about children’s lives through participatory processes. This is not to presume that children having an active role in their communities was something entirely new, in fact children had always been responding and being active in their societies—the difference is the ways in which they were thought about and identified. As invisible members of the larger group, children’s agency had been somewhat invisible, unrecognised and often presented in tokenistic or even demeaning ways. Corsaro (2005) wrote, for example, that children have always negotiated, shared and created culture with adults and with each other. Using the example of cultural routines, Corsaro (2005) writes “the habitual, taken-for-granted character of routines provides children and all social actors with the security and shared understanding of belonging to a social group” (p. 19). Unlike linear views of child development, Corsaro (2005) argued that children’s membership in cultural groups evolved from a reproductive view, that is, children do not just reproduce the world they see around them through practice or routines, but as social actors in adult’s routines they come to reproduce their own peer worlds and cultures. Many researchers such as Qvortrup (1994, 1999) and others argued that research around children’s invisible roles in society needs to continue. As Qvortrup (1999) challenges: … children have been present all the time and they have influenced both their significant and insignificant others as well as the environment they were a part of. As other minority groups in history they cannot help having had an influence – by means of their mere presence either as workers, helpers or as a nuisance. The research which is now being done in order to reveal their actual role in history and society is very important and must be continued with vigour and hard work (p. 5).

In this light, postdevelopmental theorists argued that developmental theories and traditional sociological theories distanced and stigmatised children, by deeming them to be “different” from the majority, or the powerful group (adults) and ignoring the role they played and continue to play in the constructions and reconstruction of their collective communities. De Castro (2004), for example, stated that Difference between children and adults consists of a separation between them which ensures for the child a position of being the one who is not … The conceived difference between children and adults has served to regulate social and domestic practices as well as public policies concerning the status of children in modern societies (p. 475).

Social Constructivist Theories of Childhoods Within the group of postdevelopmental theorists, a specific focus was established on relationships between structure and agency. Three central assumptions informed their social constructivist theory of childhoods using a structural approach that

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– childhood constitutes a particular structural form; – childhood is exposed to the same societal forces as adulthood and – children are themselves co-constructors of childhoods and society. As illustrated in the earlier section, in the new sociology of childhood, it was well established that childhood was both a period in which children lived their lives, and a political category, much like social class. And due to this structural form, it was then argued that child humans were subject to the same micro- and macrostructures of adult humans. And while childhood was a temporary period for children, it was also recognised as a permanent structural political category in society and therefore had its own collective rather individualised structural form. Another way the new sociology of childhood looked at structure in the lives of children was to consider social structures—categories that could become the focus of social analysis. They argued that without a social status as a category within social structures, children could continue to be rendered invisible. Guided by this new view of childhoods as having a visible position within social structures, a comparative study by a number of sociologists in the 80s and 90s emphasised relations among legal, political, economic, health, educational, family and other institutions. Qvortrup (1997) and his colleagues found in this study that statistical information available about children was highly uneven, because parents or households, rather than children themselves, had been the central categories used for gathering statistical information. They illustrated that when demographic information is gathered with children at the centre, the picture shifts, sometimes dramatically. For example, Donald Hernandez found that in 1988, 18% of U.S. adult parents lived in poverty when the focus was on children only this rose to 27%. Therefore, what these studies were able to show for the first time was that the distribution of children’s economic status differed from that of their parents. This structural approach viewed childhoods as integrated into society. Children in their particular childhoods were, like adults, active participants in organised activities—for example, buying and consuming goods and services—and subject to micro-, macro- and meso-social forces. The term “social forces” in this sense described the influence society had on shaping behaviour. The media and marketing were one of the first industries to acknowledge that children had buying power and in fact started to market directly to children as not only powerful in their own child choices but that they could be influencers in adults’ purchases: the term cradle-to-grave marketing was born. The concept of cradle-to-grave marketing really came into its own in the 1980s and ‘90s when industry marketing consultant James McNeal (1992) authored the book Kids as Consumers: A Handbook of Marketing to Children. Another example of structures opening up new ways of viewing childhoods is the case of child abuse or maltreatment in families. For example, it has been shown that when there are socio-economic pressures such as a global downturn in the economy at a meso-level, these can have consequences for national employment levels, which in turn can push up unemployment levels. This is then likely to cause poverty and stress on the family capacity at a micro-level, and research shows this can have impact on the likelihood of increased family violence including child abuse. Therefore, by focusing on the structural categories of children and childhoods scholars was able to

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empirically verify that meso- and macro-structural changes could have a profound impact on children’s life conditions. What theorists also argued for when developing structural theories was to acknowledge that external circumstances, the social and economic forces, can limit a child’s agency, how they contribute to society and what is possible. Corsaro (2005) wrote at this time “…children have always been useful … it is the nature of their contributions to society that have changed” (p. 33). According to postdevelopmental theories, children are collaborators who cooperate with adults to enforce social norms and values. From birth, children experience living and learning with others in a range of communities. These might include families, local communities, early childhoods settings, and wider local and global environments. Having a positive sense of identity and experiencing respectful, responsive relationships are said to strengthen children’s interest and skills in being and becoming active contributors to their world. This only can be achieved when children are viewed as competent humans, who have the inherent right and capability to contribute to decisions that affect their lives. Such is the assertion of Article 12 of the United Nations Convention on the Rights of the Child (UN, 1989) that when adults are making decisions that affect children, children have the right to be consulted on what they think should happen and have their opinions taken into account. The idea of children’s agency is sometimes rather vaguely articulated as anything from children having full control of their social environments to a weaker sense where children make some contribution within their social environments (see Chap. 4 for a deeper exploration of the idea of agency, in particular, shifts to a posthuman shared agency). Jones (2009) in his book Rethinking Childhoods summarised the new sociological view on childhoods around two things—children being agents in their own lives and children being able to contribute and participate in decision-making. That is, the idea of children’s agency could be reflected in anything from children capable and having full control and autonomy around key areas of their lives to something far weaker such as children being recognised as being participants within their societies. Malone (2011), for instance, argued “The value of the new sociology of childhoods is its capacity to free notions of the child from biological essentialism and to open up possibilities for viewing childhoods as a dynamic and complex social process with a variety of distinctive cultural possibilities one being a global cultural identity” (p. 466). Drawing on her extensive study of children living in villages in Papua New Guinea, Malone (2011) writes about the complexity of children’s lives, where there is little or no delineation between binaries, just blurred boundaries between local/global, modern/tribal, village/city, human/nature, child/adult: When we visit the village through the child’s eyes, we discover place in a very different sense, which is physically and socially very complex. Analyzing this complexity, we see that the capabilities of the child to manage and operate in these spaces becomes essential for their survival (Malone 2006, p. 58) (Fig. 2.1).

The next section looks more deeply at structure and agency as influential in framing the new sociology of childhood and challenges their currency in terms of moving towards posthuman approaches.

Challenging Ideas on Structures and Agency

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Fig. 2.1 Motu Kiota Village, Papua New Guinea. Credit Karen Malone

Challenging Ideas on Structures and Agency Questions of social construction and the new sociology of childhoods are intimately bound up in the major theoretical debate of contemporary sociology: that is, the problem of the relationship between agency (or action) and structure in social life (James and Prout, 2008, p. 27).

The fields of anthropology and sociology share a theoretical interest in the relationship between structure and agency. Karl Marx framed the issue in 1852 when he observed that people make their own history, but under circumstances shaped and transmitted from the past. Structural theories emphasise the external circumstances– economic forces, institutional arrangements, systems of belief–that have shaped the lives of children, in particular, times and places. These approaches, like the traditional socialisation framework, imply that children are relatively passive, and that their lives are moulded from the outside. Seeking to modify this image, the new sociology of childhood emphasised children’s agency within a structural analysis, that is, children’s capacity to help shape the circumstances in which they live was embedded within the circumstances of their lives. Structures from a sociological standpoint are systems of social relationships that can be modes of power, production, domination, ideology and belief systems. When we talk about structure what we are talking about are both intangible aspects of our

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culture, its rules and regulations, norms and values espoused through sometimes deliberate regulation (such as religion), or more subtly through the ways feel we belong or not. Class structures in Western society, for example, work to sustain often large inequalities between what access people have to money, work and education. These class structures within which families are located often serve to reinforce particular norms and cultural values for within the classes and from external forces. How this might play out in a sociological analysis is that a child from a workingclass background with little or no support to succeed in school may find that even if they endeavour to be active in changing their own life, they might find the cultural norms deeply embedded in their community and external influences to be outside of their control. This may limit their educational achievement far more than their actual scholarly achievements. If we read statistics, for example, that show children from working-class families in a particular city as less likely to enter university than their middle or upper class peers, some might make an assumption that it is because those children from working-class families are less intelligent (biological inheritance) or that they lack cultural currency and therefore have limited agency to make it work for them. Another way to read this situation could be to emphasise the structural constraints, including a lack of access to materials, resources or good teachers, in the places where they live. Structures are viewed as tangible, they can exist as real objects, buildings, streets, playgrounds and schools which according to how they are managed, engaged with, can operate in different ways to create certain types of possibilities. A child is often in positions where they are awarded the least amount of power to determine the places where they are located for home or school and has the least influence on how the rules and regulations are enforced in these places. They therefore have little opportunities to exercise agency even if granted some opportunity to make choices. To talk of agency within the new sociology of childhood is to talk about the capacity for a child-human to be actively making choices in what they do and how they are represented, their freedom to speak and be acknowledged. Having or taking up agency becomes a creative endeavour. That proposes the right for a site of negotiation and interaction between an individual as an actor with other actors. To have agency, therefore, in this context means to be able to exert some control over life by being free from the restraints put on an individual by structures that manage and regulate their actions. To be a human child or be any entity in the world is to be agentic—is to have some level of agency. Sometimes this agency may seem small, a baby who refuses to eat their food, for example. From the standpoint of the new sociology of childhood, it has been claimed that only when you adopt and recognise your own agency can you be positioned as an actor. In this way, all humans are actors, all are agentic, but the capacity to exercise actions will be determined by the structures through which that human operates within. The less agency, the less capacity to be a social actor. So here we see the bringing together of these two often competing fronts—if a society exerts through structural constraints the capacity for a child/human/object to have agency then no matter how much we might say a child has a right to be active in making their own choices about their life—it is unlikely that they will be able to

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take up the full extent of their agency. Qvortrup (2008) articulated this well in the following quote when he argued: Whatever children do, they do it within frameworks of childhoods that have primarily been constructed and reconstructed by the larger societal forces - the macrostructures (p. 27).

For instance, even though the new sociology of childhood acknowledged that children are capable of producing their own cultures outside of adult cultures, Qvortrup would argue that it is almost impossible for child/becoming human to act outside of the structures they are in because they reside in a primarily adult/human-centred world within which they have little control, because they are not given full human– adult status. What is interesting in contemporary childhoods though is the role technology has for allowing children to take up the role of social actor with far less limitations by adults. For many children across the globe in both high- and lowincome nations, technology has become a key player which facilitates and enables unstructured and non-adult controlled spaces. In the same way that a baby might exert agency by refusing to eat their vegetables even when parents insist they do so; technology has given children a genuine space for reproducing alternative sociological entities. Sociologist Giddens (1979) wrote, for instance, that every act which contributes to the reproduction of a structure is also an act of production, and as such may initiate change by altering the structure at the same time as it reproduces it. Giddens (1979) takes these ideas of the relationship between structure and agency even further when he states: So here we can see that the relationship between structure and agency can also be a generative one – not just about containing people or the child’s capacity to be active in making their own decisions or changing their lives but that through children being social actors they then influence and transform their society therefore altering any structures, rules, regulations, norms, values that are being regulated and policed (p. 132).

Jones (2009) asks what happens if children are viewed as capable rather than incapable? What if we viewed them as active rather than passive actors in society? What if they were visible rather than invisible in the stories we told about our society and the way it came to be? What if they were seen as powerful and transformative actors rather than vulnerable and in need of adults covering and protection? What if we valued them in the present (for being now, contributing now) rather than just thinking about childhoods as preparation for the future as investing in children as being about what they might become, rather than who they are. If we respond through the principle from the new sociology of childhoods, for example, children are of the social world: beings rather than becomings, agency means children take actions forward and implies that they can and do make a difference. Malone (2011) in her study of children Growing up in the Cook Islands stated that: Children were strongly committed to being active agents of change in their community, especially through the use of technology. We heard stories from both children and elders of villages, explaining how the children had become keepers of much of the traditional knowledge as they recorded songs, language and other cultural artefacts from island elders on computers and uploaded them for others to see on the internet. There has also been a

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2 Reconfiguring Childhoods and Theories strong conservation movement fuelled by a number of active NGOs in the Pacific which have been working to develop environmental and sustainable practices for small island nations. Children have often been identified as the key actors in these environmental projects. From large-scale clean-up days, to campaigns to create Raui (marine protected areas) on fragile island reefs, children have been taking a lead. ‘We don’t know enough of what is going on outside in the world, we need to be connected in order to be active in the future so we can protect and contribute to the global environmental issues’, states Teokotai, aged thirteen, from Mitiaro (p. 474).

A call for children to be understood as social actors shaping as well as being shaped by their circumstances means we need to also see them as capable of intra-actions with all things. This notion of intra-action that will be explored more fully during the book was introduced by Barad (2007) in her book Meeting the Universe Halfway, where she argued that phenomena, or objects, do not precede their interaction, rather “objects” emerge through particular intra-actions. As she argues, “intra-action understands agency as not an inherent property of an individual or human to be exercised, but as a dynamism of forces” (p. 141). We have to ask ourselves, do adults believe that children are capable of shaping and/or shaped by phenomena as part of their everyday intra-actions with the world? Wyness (2005, p. 37) argued nearly two decades ago that: “rather than romanticising children’s agency, we need to start from the basic assumption that children are of the social world and are, in a number of complex and not always readily visible ways, socially competent and powerful”. If children are positioned as powerful active agents then can other not fully human subjects also be rendered as acting agents? Trees, dogs, earthworms, acorns? If there is no doubt that children have agency in the sense they have the capacity to experience, interact and make meaning, the question is who do they share that agency with and how? When Karl Marx wrote that people make their own history, he used agency in a stronger sense, referring to collective efforts to change existing power arrangements, for example, by challenging patterns of exploitation. Is their space in our society or our view of children to consider that children can exercise this kind of shared political agency? It partly depends on one’s definition of children. In the 1970s and 1980s, children as young as 12 were arrested for their participation in the struggle against apartheid in South Africa. Recently, across the world, there has been an uprising of millions of children who have been marching city streets and striking from school to bring attention to the ecological crisis, in particular, climate change. Questions of being and becoming human are central to the philosophical argument presented by the new sociologists and postdevelopmental theories generally, when considering the potential for shared agency and the force of social action. Fully fledged “beings” can self-regulate, be autonomous, free. In contrast if you are viewed as becoming (still wild, untamed), there is still a need for regulation, maintenance and external control. Lee (2009) wrote in relation to children: “Sociologists of childhood, in seeking recognition for children as beings, have been participants in a political and cultural struggle, working in the hope that the more children can be seen as beings, the more access they will have to the privileges and powers of self-determination” (p. 106). Therefore, the uprising by adults, including politicians and educators, who are publicly speaking against children, and attempting to regulate and in many cases

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punish children who engaged in the climate change strikes and marches in the streets of major cities is predictable (see more on this in Chapter 5). Children demanding to share political agency as fully human is not part of the human project, according to Snaza and Weaver (2015), and to take it a step further, to acknowledge the agency of a knowing nonhuman subject is unprecedented. In these times of uncertainty and precarity, Lee (2009) has argued total completeness (even by adults) is unlikely and “regardless of age and status, humans are dependent on mediation and supplementation. All human life is lived in extension” (p. 111). Taking from the study by Malone (2011) on childhoods in the Cook Islands she notes: Children’s accounts of their lives reveal that the coming together of work, cultural practices and play can bring many important social benefits for the children of the Cook Islands. Their sense of their own importance, of self-determination and responsibility to their kopu tangata, and their commitments to practices of environmental sustainability, positions these children as protagonists and co-constructors of their world: ‘On my island children are now changing their life by caring for the beauty of the island. They are stopping people not to be careless’, says one, while another illustrates the same concerns with the comment: ‘with more transport, cars and tourists we get more smoke, too much pollution in the air and damage to our plants and trees. We need to manage changes’. As social agents in their own right, Cook Islands children are actively wanting to negotiate and share power with adults: ‘...all people including children must have a voice to know what is happening’ (p. 476) (Fig. 2.2).

What social constructivism does to childhoods, Prout (2005) wrote, it treats “agency and structure in the same way—as effects produced within discourse. It decentres both, demanding to know how they mutually produce each other and under what conditions” (p. 63). But if Malone (2011) reconstructed her story as abundance, a network of shared agency, where the Cook Island children’s “care” for their island

Fig. 2.2 Source Map by Franco, Growing up Cook Island Project. Credit Karen Malone

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environment was viewed as a co-relational encounter between childhood nature and nonhuman nature then the tension between adult and child humans becomes insignificant. In a posthuman reading where all humans are equal, the binaries between child–adult, human–nature and nature–culture become blurred.

Reconfiguring Childhood Studies The argument for a social rather than a biological view of children and childhoods focused on the view that children reside in and outside of a political, cultural and social world. Whatever children do, they do it within frameworks of childhoods that have primarily been constructed and reconstructed by the larger societal forces—they exist simultaneously outside and within the world of adults and have agency through the spaces societal forces have when acting on both. Within this stance postdevelopmental theorists have acknowledged that children’s differences to adults needed to be honoured and their relative autonomy outside of the group called “adult/human” should be celebrated. They saw the world of children as a real location just as those of adults’ worlds. Taking this stance meant that children were seen to live in the world with adults but also reside in a world known as childhoods that exist alongside but outside of the adult world. Childhoods as a structural form within this shifting paradigm reconfigured childhoods as its own category and source of social analysis such as social class, gender and ethnicity. Childhoods for children was recognised as a temporary period, but for society childhoods was acknowledged as a permanent structural form, it never disappeared, even though its members change. The new paradigm posited by the new sociology of childhood recognised that children reproduced children’s cultures and that children’s use of consumer and social media cultures particularly in Western countries helped to produce meanings, identities and new versions of their own individual and collective realities and that this technology (local and global) played a critical role in reproducing and disseminating the norms and values of an advancing children’s agency (Tesar, 2016). Children’s cultures and youth cultures, therefore, became reconstructed as a critical site of cultural reproduction. That is to say how children and young people learnt about the world became recognised as not just through the transmission of adults, as a mimicry of existing cultural norms, but by engaging and transforming their own worlds through the reproduction of their own cultures. The advent of children’s access to technology certainly helped to champion the potential for this to happen more readily, locally and across global domains, and as we see technology and, in particular, different forms of social media made available to the vast majority of children and young people. The forms of social action, social reproduction and collective cultural constructions outside of adult humans continue to have significant and world-changing consequences. By responding to and acknowledging this discourse of reconstructing childhoods, the new sociology of childhood as a central approach advocated for a new postdevelopmental paradigm of scholarship on childhoods. What is more, this movement acknowledged that adults can contribute with

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children in the process of reconstructing a new view. What it failed to do was to break down dichotomies and open up possibilities for more complex ways of human beings in the world not only as potential or fully unified human beings, but as part of a larger worldly assemblage of “acting” beings. This legacy of a “crushing weight of several millennia of humanist thought” (Snaza & Weaver, 2011, p. 1) has disguised that the project is not about providing agency for the child–human, but to disrupt notions of agency altogether that privilege human exceptionalism. To summarise, the new sociology of childhood, positioned within social constructivist and postdevelopmental theories, identified that the categories of child/childhoods/human should be viewed as active in the construction and reconstruction of their lives, the lives of those around them and of the societies in which they lived. Children were not just seen as passive subjects of social structures and processes and they employed a variety of modes of agency within and between the different environments they encountered and were shaped by. Children, in this sense, by the very nature of being positioned as a group inside and outside of adult society were recognised as being part of a complex set of systems, some with adult humans, some without, some with nonhuman others or without. What all child humans had in common was their capacity to construct an alternative system of meaning outside of that of the adult human. Unfortunately, although this separation has been useful in order to put a spotlight on children, its artificial construction based on a set of dichotomous categories often did the very thing which the new sociology of childhoods sought to breakdown, by launching its critique of scientific constructions of childhoods. To understand how theories of social constructivism and postdevelopmental theories of the child and childhoods were transformative and helped move childhood studies beyond restrictive past paradigms, it is helpful when considering how we can make the leap forward to posthumanism (Tesar & Arndt, 2018). Paradigms are not just social rules that bind ways of thinking together—they are deep rooted assumptions and principles about how we come to experience and know the world. When reconfiguring childhoods we cannot always take some of the past and mix it with the new, but it is useful to recognise that the new is never “fully new”. According to Prout (2005), the dichotomies of childhoods, although intending to move outside of binaries, have continued to reiterate a nature/culture, science/social split. Although the new sociology of childhood did provide the opportunity for a vast array of possibilities for generating new empirical data, it lost its vibrancy and is “now running up against the limits of its possibilities” (Prout, 2005, p. 67). Prout (2005) argues extensively that “… after more than two decades of extraordinarily creative effort, leading to new theoretical, methodological and empirical insights, the new sociology of childhood is increasingly troubled” (p. 67). The challenge is essentially theoretical, in that while arguing the need to break down binaries and boundaries, the principles and categories of the new paradigms of sociology of childhood have by all accounts been dichotomous and acted to separate the field into an either/or battle between the science and the social, nature and culture (Prout, 2005). When considering what type of framework would allow for more diverse multidisciplinary means for exploring childhoods Prout (2005) states:

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2 Reconfiguring Childhoods and Theories In reconsidering this question I have come to think that childhood studies cannot base themselves upon a set of unexamined and problematic dualisms. The culture/nature division is one extremely, perhaps supremely important instance of dualistic thinking. Just as onesided emphasis on biology means that much that is important about childhoods is missed, so too does one sidely prioritizing culture over nature (p. 84).

Social constructivist theory along with postdevelopmental theories generally has through their rejection of anything biological dismissed the physicality and materiality of the body and of any consideration of the entities and objects through which the body encounters being in the world with an assemblage of others. While these new paradigms of sociology were clearly evolutionary in terms of creating visibility for childhoods as a production of their locations and time, they have in most cases been blinded to the vast opportunities for considering children as one of many actors in the ecological collective of nonhuman/human worlds (Tesar & Jukes, 2018). In this way, the new sociological and postdevelopmental theories and the discussion in this chapter have provided a roadmap of childhood studies prior to the introduction of posthuman views of childhoods. What this chapter has revealed is that even though this complex sociological view of childhoods provided new spaces for reinserting children and childhoods back into the adult human landscape and to disrupt well-ingrained binaries, there was still something missing. What wasn’t visible was any acknowledgment of the complex relations children have outside of being “only human”; that being in the world also means intra-acting with a host of other acting agents, many of whom are not “human” and don’t consider humans to be exceptional. Where we finish this chapter is with a question to “think with”: what is the nature of this relation of children and childhoods with human and nonhuman, when thrown together and exposed as entangled nature/culture worlds? And how might childhoods and childhood theories look differently in this space? As Haraway (2016) so adeptly purports: “What happens when human exceptionalism and bounded individualism, those old saw of Western philosophy and political economics, become unthinkable in the best sciences, whether nature or social? Seriously unthinkable: not available to ‘think with’” (p. 23).

References Bronfenbrenner, U. (1979). The ecology of human development. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press. Corsaro, W. (2005). The sociology of childhoods (2nd ed.). London: Pine Forge Press. De Castro, L. (2004). Otherness in me, otherness in others: Children and youth constructions of self and other. Childhoods, 11(4), 469–493. Escobar, A. (2016). Thinking-feeling with the earth: Territorial struggles and the ontological dimension of the epistemologies of the South. AIBR. Revista De Antropología Iberoamericana, 11(1), 11–32. Giddens, A. (1979). Central problems in social theory: Action, structure and contradiction in social analysis. Los Angeles, CA: University of California Press. Harcount, W. (2019). Feminist political ecology practices of worlding: Art, commoning and the politics of hope in the class room. International Journal of the Commons, 13(1), 153–174.

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Jones, P. (2009). Rethinking childhoods: Attitudes in contemporary society. London, England: Continuum. McNeal, J. U. (1992). Kids as consumers a handbook of marketing to children. New York: Lexington Books. Malone, K. A. (2011). My island home: Theorising childhoods in the Cook Islands. the Asia Pacific Journal of Anthropology, 12(5), 462–477. Malone, K. (2006). Hybrid Identities: Learning from children’s stories of place in PNG. In D. Behera (Ed.), Children in South Asia. India: Pearson Education. Murris, K. (2013). The epistemic challenge of hearing children’s voices. Studies in Philosophy and Education, 32(3), 245–259. Parsons, T. (1951). The social system. Toronto, Canada: Glencoe Free Press. Prout, A. (2005). The future of childhoods. Oxon, London: Routledge. Prout, A., & James, A. (1997). A new paradigm for the sociology of childhoods. In: A. James & A. Prout (Eds.), Constructing and reconstructing childhoods. London: Routledge Falmer. Qvortrup, J. (1994). Childhoods matters: An introduction. In: J. Qvortrup, M. Bardy, G. Sgritta, & H. Wintersberger (Eds.), Childhoods matters: Social theory, practice and politics (p. 124). Avebury, Aldershot. Qvortrup, J. (1999). Childhoods and societal macrostructures. Working paper 9. Child and Youth Culture, Department of Contemporary Cultural Studies, The University of Southern Denmark. Tesar, M. (2016). Timing childhoods: An alternative reading of children’s development through philosophy of time, temporality, place and space. Contemporary Issues in Early Childhood, 17(4), 399–408. https://doi.org/10.1177/1463949116677924 Tesar, M., & Arndt, S. (2018). Posthuman childhoods: Questions concerning ‘quality.’ In M. Bloch, B. B. Swadener, & G. S. Cannella (Eds.), Reconceptualizing early childhood education and care: Foundational debates, new imaginaries, and social action/activism (pp. 113–128). New York, NY: Peter Lang. Tesar, M., & Jukes, B. (2018). Childhoods in the Anthropocene: Re-thinking young children’s agency and activism. In N. Yelland & D. Bentley (Eds.), Found in translation: Connecting reconceptualist thinking with early childhood education practices (pp. 76–90). New York, NY: Routledge. Wyness, M. (2012). Children and society. Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan.

Chapter 3

Cartographies of Materialism: Thinking with Child(hood) Theories

Abstract This chapter focuses on the multiplicities of theoretical thinking and the means for pursuing new ways of being and knowing about children and about childhoods. To do so we utilise theories, think with theories and with contemporary scholarship and conceptual thinking. We recognise the development of thought over the past two decades that has been labelled by different scholars and in various publications as posthumanism, new materialism, new empiricism and other scholarly thought as part of the cartographies of materialism. These theories have emerged and shaped our thinking about the way children learn, grow up and play, as we examine in this chapter. As cartographies of materialism, these theories illustrate how the evolution of our scholarly and childhood study traditions provide a solid basis for an approach that addresses the implications and challenges of living with and beyond the Anthropocene. Keyword Cartographies of materialisms · Posthumanism · New materialism · Childhood studies · The Anthropocene This chapter follows on from Chaps. 1 and 2 to focus on the multiplicities of theoretical thinking and the means for pursuing new ways of being and knowing with children and about childhoods. To do this, we utilise theories that are associated with “thinking with theories” scholarship (see Jackson & Mazzei, 2012), and conceptual thinking, that over the past two decades has been labelled by different scholars and in various publications as posthumanism, new materialism, new empiricism and other scholarly thought that is part of the cartographies of materialism. These theories have emerged and shaped our thinking about the way children learn, grow up and play. These theories also, as the cartographies of materialism, illustrate how the evolution of our scholarly and childhood studies traditions provide a solid basis for an approach that addresses the implications and challenges of living with the Anthropocene. We live in precarious times. We have entered the geological era of the Anthropocene, the first man-made era, that links the ontology of human time on Earth directly to changes in the environment. The Anthropocene is considered an epoch in which human activity has become the dominant influence on both the environment

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and climate. Educators are yet to fully engage with all the challenges, knowledge and complexities associated with this era, and most particularly, the implications of the era for humankind and all children. In this chapter, we position the argument that in such an era we need new theories, methodologies, philosophies and thinking in order to create opportunities for different childhoods to be constructed, invented, imagined and lived. Throughout this chapter we argue for new ways of thinking with children and about their childhoods, which are shaped by these new ontological realities and epistemologies. We, as humankind, create not only catastrophic situations for generations of children to come, but also hope to offer a productive response from the educational research community. Perhaps this kind of response is critical in understanding educational discourses and childhood studies as we are reaching the third decade of the twenty-first century. Malone (2018) in her book Children in the Anthropocene writes: “We are not all in the Anthropocene together—the poor and the dispossessed, and the children, are far more in it than others” (p. ix). This argument is extremely powerful, at a political, policy and an educational level. This argument has particularly profound implications for children and childhoods. Malone makes an argument for children, childhoods and for a new theoretical reading of children within their environment in this epoch. Hers is a book that argues equally for children and for social justice. It mixes new theorisations 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 not only fascinating, but also elevates the contemplation of what is childhood in the Anthropocene. The message is clear: we can learn with and from children and countries about how to create a productive response to the Anthropocene, and these children do not have to be from developed countries in the West or from articulate, white, middle-class families. Quite the opposite is the case, as we learn the most about productive responses to the Anthropocene from the fringes, that is, from countries and places that articulate their world very differently to ours. For children and their childhoods alike, the Anthropocene is a game changer. In recent decades, we have started to witness the emergence of diverse political and policy stances towards it. We have become more aware of it and theories and philosophies are increasingly being linked to the notion of a planetary outlook. Malone sharply describes and analyses what the Anthropocene means for children and childhoods of the past, present and future. One of our tasks in this book is to build on this knowledge and challenge ourselves to understand what this means through the lens of theories and philosophies that overcome the binaries or simplistic correlations between system-level inputs and desired outcomes for our children. Yes, as such, we do live in precarious times. For children, for those who were born into this new world order, the dominance of the human–adult subject is encapsulated by the era of the Anthropocene, and simultaneously contrasted with the fluidity of material and non-material, human and nonhuman, in the time (era) which will be their only known. There will be an ever-present tension for these children. They will inhabit the digital world with the relative ease of someone who has known

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nothing else. Yet, this will be punctured and constrained by the boundaries of binaries imposed by others, such as adult subjects. As such, these children, faced with new challenges, will be grappling with tensions associated with generationally ordered societal tensions. Navigating the spaces between the human-centric condition embodied by the Anthropocene and the fluidity between “real” and “virtual”, human and machine in the contemporary post-digital world, will challenge this and future generations. The child as the “innocent” continues to dominate our positioning of children and childhood and to inform our policy decisions. However, we now live in an era where “real” and “digital” are becoming intrinsically connected, and we are forced to radically reconsider what it means to be a child, and what “to have a childhood” may mean. To understand this, we need not only new and different pedagogies and philosophies, but also to theorise differently, to rethink the theories that we have discussed in Chap. 2. Now, more than ever, we need time and space for productive responses that work with children and for children, to move beyond times of superficial engagements as satisfactory temporal solutions. In the sections below, we will outline how new ways of thinking with theory can help to disrupt child-constructs in order to deal with the complexities of children’s lives.

Interrogating Child as a Construct The child-construct in a poststructural world is an embodiment of discursive lines and the production of subject positions and subjectivities. As such, poststructural thinking seeks what we may refer to as a genealogical reading of this construct. We introduced philosopher Michel Foucault in Chap. 1. In one of his texts, he argues that genealogies search for unexpected relationships, and non-linear, accidental origins, while they focus on complexities and contradictive productions of a child-construct (Foucault, 1980). We utilise a childhood study lens for the examination of children and childhoods, which pushes the positioning of the argument towards a discursive power/knowledge relationship. Foucault’s reinterpretation of Nietzsche’s concept of a genealogy of morals allows us to analyse the power structures of the child-construct, and this genealogy of child-construct focuses on mundane, yet very complex, nonlinear origins of histories of the present (Tesar & Arndt, 2019). For the purpose of interrogating the child-subject construct in childhood studies, Foucault’s thinking around the concept of governmentality is often utilised, as it allows considerations of macro-political and economic apparatuses, and at the same time the close examination of intricate micro-relations and practices that allow child subjects to become “productive” in the society. This argument leads to alternative research, focused on the non-linear ways in which political rationalities govern childconstructs and associated subjectivities. It also is linked to examinations of how governments, systems and societal agencies govern local and global childhoods. Foucault’s thinking guides the examination of techniques and instruments that are,

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in a certain way, indispensable to the way government agencies govern how children and childhoods operate. The notions of power and power relations are very important in childhood studies, as Chap. 2 has discussed. The traditional model of a juridical power construct claims that power belongs to a subject, or that it can be possessed by a class, people or an institution, adults, for example. Within this positioning, the subject or institution at the top of the hierarchy possesses the power, which is subsequently pushed, forced and distributed towards the bottom. Such a distribution of power is therefore punitive, dark, repressive, and usually takes the form of orders and pressure. Foucault (1991) argues that historically the way power was utilised was to punish and to discipline subjects’ (in this sense children’s) bodies. In this seminal work, Foucault rejects this traditional model of power of the individual and group, and argues for a disciplinary type of power, where power is exercised, and not solely possessed by any particular person, group or institution. Foucault’s key argument is that power is not only repressive, but also productive in nature. His claim that power produces knowledge and subjectivities is relevant for us to consider as part of the child-construct. This productive nature of power means that power as a concept cannot be studied on its own. Power must be analysed in conjunction with institutions, political contexts, ideologies and government, as the mechanisms of visibility, and connections with the macrostructures. For this book, this means that such thinking needs to be associated with the child and their relational worlds. For Foucault, power also is connected with knowledge, as power/knowledge, that emphasises that as child subjects are drafted and produced, so power is constituted through discursive practices, and particularly through accepted forms of truth, science and knowledge— about child development, parenting, childhood innocence, stranger-danger concerns and similar. In childhood studies, MacNaughton (2005) examines the importance of power relations and troubles the truths about the notion of the child, thinking with Foucault to empower both childhood studies scholarship and activism. As her scholarship demonstrates, it is critical for adults to question their practices, understandings and claims about truths on the child and childhood. Another scholar whose work can be used to identify and engage with the concept of the child subject is Vaclav Havel. Havel (1985) analyses the discursive differences between the public and private domains, as central to where he locates power, and how it relates to the child subject. Similarly to Foucault’s notion of disciplinary power, Havel’s concern is with a shift in power relations in changing ideological contexts. For Havel, the way power operates in the public and private domains shifts. In other words, if child subjects want to live a “comfortable” life without repercussions, they have to accept living within a “lie”, which means to publicly conform with the system and its requirements. Children’s private lives then can remain undisturbed by the governing system, as long as they do not cross into the public sphere. So, for Havel, power relations are bound by a social contract. If children support the expected and prescribed rules and commitments of the society, and publicly demonstrate their support of the governing regime, ideology and the adults who are in charge of shaping it, child subjects will not experience any repression towards them, and their private lives will remain untouched. In Havel’s work, all child subjects

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are subjected to complex and permanent forms of surveillance and self-surveillance. These mechanisms interact within an ideological context and its anonymous, selective and calculated power relations. For children, living in such a system thus encourages, and even forces, the withdrawal from the public sphere into the private spaces of life, and selecting what kind of subjectivities are produced in public and private spheres. These private spaces create a form of “parallel polis” (parallel community/city), which provides alternative experiences for children and their childhoods. Benda (1991) applies this idea of parallel polis in various contexts including parallel education systems, childhoods and discourses of knowledges. The parallel polis presents the resistant, private sphere of children’s cultures and childhood undergrounds, and is a significant concept for recognising life outside the public domain. It contributes to theorising the tension between private and public discourses, and their complex power relations. The notion of a parallel polis creates a possibility for small groups of child subjects to act upon events in radically different ways from other children in the public domain. In Havel’s philosophical work, these complex power relations infiltrate the whole society and shape the way children live, play and learn. Within these power relations the focus is not on how one social group uses power over the other group, but rather on how the power relations produce the dynamics between these groups. As the possibility of a parallel polis demonstrates, it is also less about the directly oppressive nature of power, and more about power being harnessed and exploited to create spaces of resistance through subjugated knowledges. Havel, then, isolates ideology as an essential mechanism of power, as giving it a purpose, providing its identity, and connecting the power to the ideological rules and structures. Ideology is thus experienced by all subjects, including children, and is an irremovable influence on their everyday life. The notion of ideology, for Havel, is thus the binding element in power relations. Havel’s analyses of these complex power relations point out how all child subjects have access to power. Havel is cautious not to reject the traditional, top-down model of power, as he notes how some groups of child subjects—for instance, on the basis of ethnicities, socio-economic status or gender—are considered to be powerful, and others powerless. These minority groups can exploit the fluid and free nature of power that they harness and have access to. Havel’s “power of the powerless” creates the possibility to exert pressure, to produce an anomaly in and to resist the governing structures and systems, such as generationally ordered society. While society and ideology may channel the hegemonic discourse within society and its institutions, where childhood subjectivities are formed and produced, the resistant discourse of a childhood underground (see Chap. 6) is powerful and significant in the formation of childhoods and the ways in which children learn and play. Child subjects are thus not passive in these complex power relations, but they are active agents and social actors, and respond to the hegemonic dominant public domain. For Havel (1985), the ideological system in which children operate is an extremely multifaceted “network of manipulatory instruments” (p. 24) which is supported by a “precise, logical, structured, generally comprehensible and, in essence, extremely flexible ideology” (p. 25) that responds to the scientific model of adult society. From the

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perspective of childhood studies, this is the challenge that child subjects experience when contesting the structural basis of society, when they are expressing their voice, agency and power in this discursive space.

Child as a Vibrant Becoming New materialism, posthumanism and new empiricism are approaches that in recent years have been shaping childhood studies and moulding our understandings of the notion of the child. In this section, we start by quoting Barad (2015), who argues that “lightning mucks with origins. Lightning is a lively play of in/determinacy, troubling matters of self and other, past and future, life and death. It electrifies our imaginations and our bodies. If lightning enlivens the boundary between life and death, if it exists on the razor’s edge between animate and inanimate does it not seem to dip sometimes here and sometimes there on either side of the divide” (p. 390). What is new materialism? New materialism is about relationships between subjects and objects, and thinking about a “new metaphysics” (Dolphijn & van der Tuin, 2012, p. 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, to name just a few. It is important to note that the thinking of these scholars is not homogeneous. However, there are connections across their work projects, such as the continuous rewriting and traversing of uncharted territory, challenging dualistic Cartesian thinking, moving beyond poststructural understandings of discourse, and relating to the particular interest of this chapter, the rethinking of “matter” and what Bennett (2010) calls “thing-hood” (p. 4). In the centre of this thinking is Barad’s (2007) articulation which, in the sense of Haraway’s earlier work, introduces what she called “agential realism”, the challenge to a metaphysics based on the individual that turns to the constitution of objects through “intra-action” (see also Chap. 2). For Barad, matter is both discursive and material, and everything in the world can be perceived as an “onto-ethico-epistomology”. This means ontological, epistemological and ethical (which we read as also political) at the same time: everything then, subject and matter, is in constant entanglement denying any separate entity. Barad’s agential realism sees that “matter and meaning are not separate elements … [they] cannot be dissociated” (p. 3). Elevating this performative element further challenges the “too substantialising” (Barad, 2003, p. 802) reliance on the power of words, as emphasised earlier. Such thinking has a tremendous impact on the notion of the child-construct, as the vibrancy of things shifts the centre of attention from purely discursive and/or material body of a child to the place of agency of things. Things speak to children through their agency that is both political and ethical in nature. These vibrant things and thing-hoods have agency that shape childhoods and thus also shape how we construct the child. The reading of child’s construct thus is a re-reading, a deterritorialization of conceptions of power, discourse and matter as we have outlined above. We aim towards a child-construct that is understood as a set of openings and

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becomings, in the forms of fresh views on the entanglements of experiences, relationships, commitments and responses, which shape the materialities of child subjects and their experiences in the Anthropocene. The “vibrancy of matter” and of “things” are relevant to child-constructs and their childhoods, as they call for desires and engagements that, like the lightning in Barad’s quote above, drives the imaginations and bodies of child subjects (Tesar & Arndt, 2016). In the onto-ethico-epistomological child-construct, we need to consider the “animate and inanimate” and how they dip “sometimes here and sometimes there on either side of the divide” (Barad, 2015, p. 390). For a vibrant child-construct, Bennett’s (2010), Latour’s (2011) and Braidotti’s (2013) ideas on the political ecology of place, and connectedness in a philosophical examination of vibrant entanglements of “things”, “thing-hoods” and childhoods are important to consider. To understand this complex human/nonhuman agentic child-construct means to perform a deterritorialisation of child-construct following what Patton (2009) describes as Deleuze’s ontology of assemblages: as an ethics of becoming or an ethics and politics of deterritorialisation, as “[a] movement or process by which something escapes or departs from a given territory” (p. 190) or system. Reterritorialisation, then, is the combination of the deterritorialised elements with others to constitute new assemblages. In this sense, the possibilities for reterritorialisations and fresh becomings work as theoretical-actual assemblages, connecting children and things. Cautioned by Barad’s (2003) claim that “language has been granted too much power” (p. 801), these ideas help us rethink the poststructural child subject that we discussed previously in this chapter and follow her urge for a turn to the matter of matter. In particular, Barad (2003) offers an in-depth analysis of power in relation to materialist theories of the body, critiquing the heavy reliance on the social and human body. She calls for increasing engagements with the “materialisation of all bodies—‘human’ and ‘non-human’” (p. 810). The concept of matter and its vibrancy, within and beyond the discursive, is deterritorialised, and, as such, different child-construct is produced. A new materialist perspective challenges the reduction of perceptions to linguistic and discursive interpretations and therefore urges the legitimation of other ways of seeing and being of child-constructs. While a postmodern (or poststructural) childconstruct, as presented above, has been related to the linguistic turn, new materialism offers not its denial but yet another turn towards the material and matter. As such, moving beyond the discursive (Foucauldian construct above), Bennett (2010) represents an intriguing element in new materialist thought. In arguing that matter is not passive but active and therefore productive in nature, or as she argues vibrant, she elevates matter beyond something that can be just humanly measured, evaluated and moulded. This is a radical thought that shapes the child-construct. Bennett argues against dichotomising things, matters, objects, and active, vibrant organisms, and beings, or actants (Latour, 2004). Latour’s actant (a de-anthropomorphized actor) is anything that impacts and modifies another thing thereby changing its being or behaviour. In Bennett’s (2010) thinking, she refers to this active process as “vital materiality” (p. vii). She builds upon Spinoza’s ethics and his concept “conatus”, which she explains through his work as “[e]ach thing, as far as it can by its own

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power, strives to persevere in its being … The striving by which each thing strives to persevere in its being is nothing but the actual essence of the thing” (as cited in Dutton, 2006). Spinoza believed “conatus” was essential to everyone and everything: both subjects and matters have it, and it is a natural inclination of things to exist and enhance themselves. Drawing on notions of material vitalism in Deleuze’s and Guattari’s (2004) work in A thousand plateaus, Bennett (2010) adds that “matterenergy” is “a-subjective”, and that such a vitality represents “pure immanence” (p. 52). Further examples can be found in Deleuze and Guattari’s work on intensities, becomings and assemblages. Bennett’s aspiration, she writes, “is to articulate a vibrant materiality that runs alongside and inside humans to see how analyses of political events might change if we gave the force of things more due” (p. viii), and she asks “why did Foucault’s concern of ‘bodies and pleasures’ or Deleuze and Guattari’s interest in ‘machinic assemblages’ not count as materialist” (p. xvi)? This is one of the key theoretical underpinnings for rethinking child-constructs in this section. Bennett’s contribution to thinking about the inorganic reinforces our rejection of subject/object binaries, and as such adds a new dimension to child-constructs. Bennett (2010) thus helps us to blur boundaries on the basis, for example, of what she sees as political agency. She uses Rancière to emphasise how the “political” is constituted as a uniquely human realm on the basis of skills, capabilities and talents that only human subjects can perform. Furthermore, to differentiate between an ecosystem and a political system, she examines Dewey’s idea of “conjoint action”, where agency is a generative drive leading to a “public” and to the public’s agency to affect or produce effects on action. A public, then, is a human agency that arises in an intentional, collective response to certain ecologies. For Bennett, a political act does not need to have been consciously planned or conceived as such. In other words, nonhuman actants might be equally as political in their acts as humans (and perhaps contribute in a greater sense to certain interdependencies and ecologies). Matter or things, then, such as piles of rubbish on the street, also possess agency. Matter, objects, things and humans become something different as a result of being connected in assemblages with each other. What may appear in a purely discursive, human-centric view to be “dead” thus has the potential to become “alive”, political and agentic. The precise time, place, beginning and end of the transformations arising through such entangled actant–actor, matter–thing–human–nonhuman assemblages are individually and collectively complex and unknowable. Bennett targets microlevel rather than macro-level connections when she thinks about force and power. And this has a radical impact on the child-construct. Such complex philosophical thinking about child-constructs may benefit from showcasing this thinking through some examples. As such, we will utilise two stories, one of which is the well-known story of Pinocchio, and the other a little less known story of Little Otik. These stories emphasise the ideas of matter and its vibrancy, relational practice and connectedness between things, and how they can evoke emotions, desires, drives and yearnings. In addition, they recognise subjects in the environment, children, teachers, perhaps parents and other adults, in earlyyear educational settings. We begin with Pinocchio, a story that stems from early

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twentieth-century Italy (Collodi, 1911). Pinocchio is a carved wooden puppet (or we could say, a “wooden puppet-thing”) which evokes reactions through its presence. Already in carving the puppet-thing, Geppetto, the carpenter, is filled with desire that his creation turn into a real live boy-child subject. He wished that this nonhuman thing would somehow fulfil his dreams of having a boy. As the story unfolds, the wooden puppet-thing magically does come “alive”. Pinocchio performs the role of a child subject. He goes to school, runs away, disobeys Geppetto and gets up to all sorts of mischief as if he were a “real” boy-child. Still, maintaining the fantasy, Pinocchio’s wooden nose betrays this “reality” by growing longer and longer whenever he tells a lie. Pinocchio exists simultaneously within an imaginary realm, as a wooden-thing, while the emotional connections between the puppet and the readers-listeners and Geppetto draw this thing into humanly subjective behaviours to which children (and adults) might relate. The story bridges the notions of human and nonhuman agency. While challenging the norms of being and becoming, the puppet transgresses and reverts to what might be considered normal childhood activities—only to shatter that normality with his vibrantly material nose and body. A similar thing happens in an old Czech folk tale, Little Otik. Little Otik is a tree stump found in the forest that resembles (looks and feels like and has the vibrancy of) a baby. Little Otik, the tree stump, like Pinocchio, arouses desires, imagination, hope and fulfilment, as well as dread, fear and concern. Once brought home and cleaned up, the stump is named Little Otik and is treated like a real baby (Erben, 2008). Both Pinocchio’s and Little Otik’s power and agency arise through the intersections of human and nonhuman matter—Geppetto’s carving tools and his loving hands working to carve the puppet; Little Otik’s baby blanket, pacifier, baby bed and bath illustrate how matter impacts on matter, notwithstanding both of their powerful influence as matter-thing on and with the human subjects with which they are entangled (Image 3.1). Pinocchio and Little Otik become the intersection. At once performing-being matter-thing and the im/possibility of the humanly performance of “babying” a tree stump, or “fathering” a wooden puppet, they both are and continue to emerge through a complex assemblage. Through them, desires are aroused, for instance, to care for, love, play with and to feed, albeit with disastrous consequences; in Little Otik’s case, he eats his mother and father, and in Pinocchio’s case, he rebels, gets into trouble and lies. Spinoza’s conatus, as a thing-power and resistance to destruction and alteration arises in and from these wood-thing-stories. Two wooden objects, formerly growing and alive, now fluctuating on a dead-alive “razor’s edge” (Barad, 2015, p. 390), play out Barad’s onto-ethico-epistomology. They transgress expectations of ethics and morality in a purely human realm to enact their own ethics: What lies can a wooden puppet boy get away with? What is and what isn’t OK for a tree stump baby to eat? The cracks of im/possibilities, like Barad’s lightening, electrify the imagination through the thinking but not really thinking, acting but not really acting of these wooden-thing-toy-stories. Matter and meaning cannot be dissociated within these Pinocchio and Little Otik entanglements, but neither can they be explained through discursive logic. Pinocchio and Little Otik, these wooden actants affect things, being, beings and humans, through their complex

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Image 3.1 Little Otik. Credit Drawn by Karen Malone

agency and vital materiality and, while not necessarily acting with political intention themselves, arousing what might be political through their evocative affective ability to do so (Bennett, 2010). Wood-child-constructs-childhoods entanglements should be taken seriously. Their complexity eludes simplistic explanations, in the actions and intra-actions that occur within and because of their vibrancy. They affect, in the sense that Bennett (2010) describes as “the capacity of any body for activity and responsiveness” (p. xii) and enact their materiality through their very thing-hood. In response to Barad’s (2003) earlier call above, they are materialities that reach beyond human, social or discursive concerns of bodies and also beyond concerns of language, knowledge and power. They present an affective influence that inheres in the more-than-human, even while they present, on a surface level, well-loved children’s (and adults’) stories to be told at story time. They represent power in ways that emerge through what can be seen as forces or potentialities, as Duhn (2014) has explicated, differently arising

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in the diverse assemblages with what or whom they affect. They infuse their entanglements with the setting, with children, with the other things around them and with uncertainties and unknowabilities, without having themselves an intention. These stories create a space, then, for what Massumi (2015) has recently elevated as the importance, from a Deleuzian perspective, of “mattering-on” and honouring the mattering process. This returns us to Bennett (2010) and to the idea that the vibrancy and power of things and matter are in line with considerations of the “curious ability of inanimate things to animate, to act, to produce effects dramatic and subtle” (p. 6). The process of matter and power can be seen as operating through these Pinocchio and Little Otik-things and their thing-hood as creative, motivating, inspirational forces that arouse desires, passion and care, but also abjection, resistance and revolt. In these stories, we can identify the heart of the matter of this child-construct. Pinocchio and Little Otik help to interrupt common-sensical, linear expectations (Barad, 2003). They demonstrate how things “speak to us”, as they have agency that is both political and ethical-moral in nature. Pinocchio’s and Little Otik’s thing-hood responds to Bennett’s (2010) argument for a shift from thinking solely about thinkpower, to challenge relationships with power and elevate the importance of thingpower. Things have a vitality and lack ontological hierarchy in Bennett’s thinking about matter and subjects, and an “urge to cultivate a more careful attentiveness to the out-side” (p. 17). As pieces of wood, Pinocchio’s and Little Otik’s subjectivity of matter emerges through their interconnectedness. They illustrate that matter does not exist on its own, but rather that it is linked and connected to other matter. What all approaches, tentacles and versions of these (new) materialist philosophies have in common is their urge to move beyond simplified, absolute and “objective” definitions and classifications of matter as unitary, passive, inactive and dead. Bennett argues for an active, productive power force that is harnessed by both matter and subjects. Matter has agency that behaves in non-predictable ways as material bodies are assemblages, aggregates of powers, forces and thing-hoods, interacting with other forces and thing-hoods and impacting upon each other, shaping and moulding, with an agency that plays out in such non-predictable ways as with Pinocchio and Little Otik (Tesar & Koro-Ljungberg, 2016). The way actants operate, like art, can “become expressive, to not just satisfy but also to intensify—to resonate and become more than itself” (Grosz, 2008, p. 4). In other words, objects, things and matter, like Pinocchio and Little Otik, can not only become more than what they are, but also invoke transgressions in the other objects, things and matter with which they are entangled. As-yet-unknown forces and variations must be re-affirmed, according to Massumi (2015). In support of this elevation of uncertainties, Duhn (2014) further argues that agency “is no longer the expression of sovereignty and of an autonomous, knowing self but a seeking of encounters with vibrant matter that force continual invention to maintain the relation between movement and rest” (p. 8). Working with Bennett’s notion of modes, Duhn emphasises the importance of “complex organic organisms and nonorganic structures”, that overturns “the old hierarchy of mindover-matter” (p. 8). Thus, a new materialist lens brings to the child-construct an intricate, distinctive and nuanced web of thinking, being and uncertainties that is political, ethical-epistemological and ontological in nature.

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In a child-construct, to work with these notions means asking, as Duhn (2012) does, how they play out in contemporary realities, and what they mean for the childconstruct? Duhn asks, what are “the forces and forms that make a place? How does ‘place’ work in current political and social economies?” and “What does it mean for early years’ pedagogy to take seriously the agency and vitality of matter that makes up places” (p. 100)? She further argues that the concern is not to answer these questions but to continue to ask them “to stimulate thought regarding the entanglements of self, matter and place” (p. 100). In a Deleuzian sense, matter becomes the embodiment of sensations, affects and aesthetics: it is something that Bennett (2010) is intrigued with in her calling for a political ecology. She argues that the “cultural forms are themselves powerful, material assemblages with resistant force” (p. 1) and argues for “the active role of nonhuman material in public space” (p. 2). Is it important, then, to determine whether or not wooden-thing-toys have intentionality and are thus political? Or perhaps the political ethics of matter should be allowed to act on humans, to affect desires and respond in the critical ways that Latour (2014) described, and to engage wider worldly crises through crucial vibrant encounters. And while we keep asking questions about what this may mean for a child in the Anthropocene, we are critically aware of the impact of these theories on child-constructs as forming a new way of thinking of the hybrid emerging assemblage.

Child as a Hybrid Assemblage We started this chapter with an argument for the importance of disrupting the reproduction and representation of the child-construct. In the public discourse, children, and their childhoods, are often portrayed as child-subject assemblages in a state of “becoming”. This book and its content across most of its chapters embody new forms of human and nonhuman agencies that move past the discursive limitations of the poststructural paradigm. In other words, this book raises possibilities for new readings of the child-construct. In this section, we draw, in particular, on the work of Deleuze and Guattari, and Donna Haraway, exploring how a rethinking through their theoretical positions allows opportunities for producing diverse representations of the child and childhoods. It proposes that in moving beyond simple representations, the body is becoming a place/space of inscription, in which children and their childhoods are tweaked by society, education and care. In order to understand these complexities, we have opted to disrupt and trouble the traditional, biological and psychological thinking of child subjects through the notions of becoming, and through thinking with the more-than-human discourse. Children and their childhoods, as argued in Chaps. 1 and 2, have strong philosophical, anthropological and sociological groundings. In this chapter, we use a lens that moves us out of the “traditional” power—structure—agency scenario, as discussed in Chap. 2, in order to provide a counter-narrative to the biological reductionisms of “childhood” and “body”. It ruptures their strong biological and realist relationships. The argument that we portray in this section is that through fluid theories,

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philosophies and methodologies the child and nonhuman subjects become hybridised within places and spaces, and, in particular, educational settings. They also lead to a rethinking of material and representational notions of childhood and of the child as always in relational encounters with the more-than-human. As such, a childhood study lens is interrogated by the introduction of complexities and tensions inherent in biologising childhoods as well as in the sociology of childhoods. We present new connections and possibilities for rethinking child subjects and their childhoods in the Anthropocene. Throughout this book, we argue that there are complexities associated with the Cartesian dualism of positioning the child into a discursive statement and at the same time taming, treating and considering the material grounding of a human growing child’s body. Such thought has implications both for the development of a child, but also for the shaping, moulding and producing of childhoods and children in the Anthropocene. Traditionally, images of childhoods often portray an adult view of the child, childhood and of a child’s body, leading to an adult-centric argument of development and of productions of child subjects. The contemporary childhood study lens that we are disrupting represents a child-focused attempt to consider and engage with a child’s world and worldview: a landscape where the child decides, acts and plays, where self-regulation, within certain regulatory frameworks, is elevated, and where the concern is for not only child-centred, but also child-initiated learning and play. As such, this childhood study lens contests the process of growing child bodies and the singularity of becoming child subjects, which is the key focus of traditional child development theories. In those theories, which we have referred to already in Chaps. 1 and 2, an infant’s and child’s body is seen as growing and developing in complex and diverse ways, but is classified and governed by orderly, sequential tables, charts and milestones laid out in textbooks. There is, therefore, an embedded discrepancy and tension between the becoming of an “ideal child”, the “global and local child” and the “holistic child”, as many progressive curriculum frameworks argue. Childhood, however, also can be considered as part of a larger “assemblage”—the human and nonhuman conditions of discursive and material that produce a child as hybrid, or as de la Cadena (2010) calls for, the human as “more than one but less than many”. Malone (2007) in her study of children in Papua New Guinea, for instance, illustrates the complexity of the global/local hybrid identity when she writes: The children of Papua New Guinea (PNG) are constructing and reconstructing their own identities through the hybridization of local cultures in fixed locations while adapting to a changing global world … the stories of four children growing up in PNG and their struggles in constructing their sense of place in a changing local–global space. The discussion on their stories explores what it means to be ‘located’ in a physical space and tied to a fixed geographical locality yet forming hybrid identities that are and fashioned constrained by global political, economic, environmental and social constructs (p. 43).

She argues that the capacity of children to negotiate and participate in their environments is intricately tied to temporal constructs and informs their experience of place. The view of hybrid identities discussed here expands the general view of the notion of hybridity that focuses on accommodating multiple identities of human subjects moving between and adapting to changing cultural and ecological contexts.

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Image 3.2 Child taken photograph “Me, my family house and rubbish—my parents use to fish here”, Hanubada Village, Port Moresby. Credit Karen Malone

For the children of PNG who, within one context and culture, are local and global becomings through which their histories and futures are and have been shaped as hybrid (ecological) assemblages (Image 3.2). As such, children are becoming with hybrid bodies and have an affective representational space/place of childhoods, where child subjects are part of the bodied curriculum that shapes both the child’s body and mind. Such a curriculum both resists the holistic curriculum and developmental ideas, while at the same time it supports and performs them. The tensions within curriculum are well considered and explored in work by Sellers (2013). This leads to our argument in this section, for childhoods and child subjects as “hybrid entities” as Prout (1999) claims: … children’s (or for that matter, adults’) bodies are inextricably interwoven with other aspects of the material environment artefacts, machines and technologies. Children’s bodies emerge as hybrid entities. They are inseparable from, produced in, represented by and performed through their connections with other material objects … This line of enquiry feeds back into the question of children’s agency by reconstituting it less as an essential attribute of children and more as an effect of the connections made between a heterogeneous array of materials, including bodies, representations and technologies” (p. 2).

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Child as a Body This section outlines some of the complexities of the child and childhood drawing on the previous thoughts in this chapter, through a narrative that explores in a new way the enduring question: Who is a child and what is childhood? These questions are fundamental and at the same time produce a tension for adults and governing agencies. In order to position the argument, we utilise Stainton Rogers and Stainton Rogers’ (1992) work, in which they portray the narrative of a fictional young woman, who we will for the purpose of this exemplar re-purpose and call Jane. In the Westfield mall of an unnamed Australian city, the police and an ambulance were called to attend to an unusual situation. The staff of the mall walked into the restroom area on the second floor and found lying on the ground a naked young woman who was visibly alive, yet unconscious. No one could wake her up. The police were called and as the two policewomen were standing above her, they notice: it was just the body on the ground, breathing, with no sign of a struggle, no sign of any clothing or any handbag that could contain an ID. The younger of the policewomen started to call the naked woman Jane, as they were waiting for the Ambulance and paramedics to arrive. The other one looked at her physical body lying on the ground and it seemed fairly childlike. Someone came and put a blanket over the body. One policewoman, still looking at the body, saw that the petite physicality of her body was not fully covered. And then, after some assistance from the Ambulance personnel, Jane gained consciousness. She could not recall anything: her name, where she was from or how she had got there. She could not remember her birthday, or where she lived, family members or friends. She could not tell the doctors or police where she was right now, or what year it was. The doctors determined that she had suffered complete memory loss, total amnesia. Jane is taken to the hospital, where a proper, full examination is conducted. Doctors carefully examined her body, her reflexes, and conducted exams and scans. There are no visible inscriptions found on Jane’s body. There are no signs of bruising or other trauma. When a policewoman asks what should happen next, the doctor can only state that Jane’s age—using the name that everybody now refers to her by—and that she seems to accept—is somewhere between thirteen and twenty. Jane’s background, identity, life story—even her precise age–remain a mystery. In hospital, it took a whole week to conduct all physical, neurological and psychological examinations of her body. She had a full check-up at the local hospital, and there was nothing found wrong with her physicality or her body. However, her mind—her memory—only spans 7 days. Jane thus remains to be called Jane, and her very first memory remains waking up in the Westfield Mall restroom. The story of Jane raises a number of questions. What should we do with, and about Jane, and who should get to decide about Jane? It became clear over the period of a couple of weeks that just like the medical doctors, clinical psychologists too are unable to offer any solutions or provide advice about Jane. Soon it became clear that Jane was in perfectly healthy shape and that there was nothing “wrong” or “abnormal” with her body. However, it is the materiality of her body, and its discursive reading, that becomes the problem. Jane needs to be assigned an identity; however,

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should it be the identity of a 13-year-old or a 20-year-old? The repercussions of such a critical decision are not easy to determine, and must be carefully teased out. The age that we are about to assign will determine something quite important, and produces knowledges that are incredibly complex: sexually, medically, legally and educationally. The age of Jane’s body is highly problematic. Jane seems socially competent; however, should we—and society—let her vote, drive or drink alcohol? Should she be allowed to be sexually active; should Jane be allowed to see R16 or R18 movies? Should the innocence of Jane’s childhood be protected, constructed, produced and decided for her, or should her body be taken as the body of an adult woman, and the choice of what she wants to do with it be handed back to her? The materiality and time (age) of Jane’s body is a problem to solve. From a childhood study perspective, the concern of what to do with Jane’s body highlights the tensions between biological childhood and childhood that is constructed, assigned, imagined and portrayed. A childhood study lens shifts these concerns, by building on the argument that childhoods are socially constructed, invented and produced within certain governing rationalities. This focus differentiates childhood studies from psychological, biological and developmental perspectives. The questions of how to define childhoods, what childhoods are and how they are produced have been extensively researched from a sociological perspective and as a critique of developmental psychology (see, for instance, Burman, 2008; James & James, 2008; James, Jenks, & Prout, 1998; Jenks, 2005; Jones, 2009). A biologising approach to childhoods (Morss, 1996) works to classify, segregate, place, divide and distribute childhoods into sections, schooling institutions and leagues such that the absence of certainty about the biological age of a body leads to uncertainty in decision-making about what should happen with the child, how the child should be educated and how the child should grow up. By giving up knowing a child’s age, we lose an ideal, an image of the good and innocent child. The control over the child and decision-making on/for/with the child becomes a much more complex process. This thinking is in line with what Prout (1999) calls the “radical disjunction between society and biology” (p. 3), where societal discursive practices lead to a view of the body as a cultural and social construction, rather than as a natural discernible part of biological growth and development. As such, the child is in a constant state of becoming, and the material-discursive assemblage provides an opportunity to see the child through this Deleuzian assemblage framework.

Child as Other and More-Than-Human Subject Seeing the child as a hybrid assemblage opens up consideration of new frameworks that we can use to think about its relations to human and nonhuman agencies. These notions are examined and outlined in the work that take a planetary outlook on ontology, epistemology and ethics, and thus on human and nonhuman subjects. Leading from the idea of the child as a hybrid assemblage of the material and the

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discursive, and its relations to the society, culture and policy as discussed above, the work of Haraway (2003) on human and nonhuman agency can add additional complexity. Taylor (2013) states that Haraway delivers “bag lady stories, assembling unexpected partners and irreducible details across the nature/technology/culture divide” (p. xv). Haraway’s feminist cyborg manifesto deconstructs and denies boundaries of human and nonhuman, and Haraway’s positioning is, Taylor argues, “neither realism, nor biological determinism, nor social constructionism but a serious … effort to get elsewhere” (p. xv). Taylor, Blaise, and Giugni (2013), working with Haraway’s ideas of a “posthuman landscape” in education, address the Deleuzian assemblage of “more-than-human subjects” that problematises education, pedagogy and relationships of childhoods. We can argue that there are narratives where the child is analysed, moulded, shaped, learns from, interacts with, is compared to and becomes the nonhuman subject and vice versa. The child in such theories becomes so much more than just narratives of subjugation and ontological (un)completeness. The work on companion species, more-than-human relations, is particularly relevant here in a collective of scholarship referred to as “Common worlds” (Taylor & Pacini-Ketchabaw, 2019). For instance, Blaise’s work and her experiences of living in Hong Kong pointedly foreground the argument (Taylor et al., 2013). Blaise visits “dog playgrounds”, where dogs are treated like children—dogs becoming children, shaped and moulded and treated in ways that assign them human characteristics. The dog receives an education and care just like a human child would: dogs are protected, “babied” and even pushed through the park in a pram. Only a careful look inside the pram reveals that the expected child and child-body is actually a dog. Local citizens behave towards the dog-child as they would to an infant child subject in a pram: they lean over the pram and admire the more-than-human subject, the species companion that has become “not an alibi for other themes; dogs [non-human subjects] are freshly materialsemiotic presences in the body of technoscience. Dogs [non-human subjects] are not surrogated for theory; they are not here just to think with. They are here to live with” (Haraway, 2003, p. 5, brackets are added). Taylor’s, Blaise’s and Guigni’s analyses further see links with postcolonial history and explore the genealogy of the pram in Asian countries. Their work with more-thanhuman subjects is essential to education and childhood studies. Blaise’s posthuman dog-pram construct in urban Hong Kong asks questions, such as “what colonising or cultural practices place little dogs into a pram in Hong Kong?” This “imagining baby/dog” exercise becomes the concern of the ethics and politics of child subject and nonhuman animal–subject species encounters in the more-than-human world (Taylor, Pacini-Ketchabaw, & Blaise, 2012). As Blaise notes, prams were originally pulled by animals such as goats or dogs or ponies, and her wonderings “who is pushing the pram at this moment in Hong Kong” cause her to reflect and “notice that non-human animals no longer pull the carriage. Instead, I see human animals pushing human and canine animals. In Hong Kong, these particular human animals are more likely to be foreign domestic workers, rather than pet owners or parents …” (Taylor et al., 2013, p. 55). It is a paraphrasing of issues of colonisation. Notions of constant and active

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change, flight and movement, or “becoming” (Deleuze & Guattari, 2004) illustrate the notion of a child and nonhuman as becoming more-than-human assemblages. A nonhuman subject (dog) is becoming a human subject (child) and portrays a more-than-human construct of childhoods: dog-becoming-child. Picture books and children’s literature can, of course, portray the longing, and the desire for being a human subject in some stories is often reversed by the stories of children wanting to become like nonhuman subjects. Instead of positioning them as binaries, through a Deleuzian “and … and … and” this idea can be traced as a story of metamorphoses, where human and nonhuman subjects are becoming an assemblage of animal/child subject (Image 3.3). In stories, children, human subjects, demonstrate the desire of becoming (an obedient, valued and important) child/dog subject. In these human/nonhuman entanglements, the child’s body is becoming the dog’s body, in another construction of more-than-human childhoods. The subject position and subjectivities of nonhuman subjects become transferrable between these subjects and desirable by them. In this

Image 3.3 Dog-becoming-child Melbourne, Australia. Credit Karen Malone

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sense, these stories of assemblages of animal–child-construct narrate the death of a subject as represented in the traditional theories of singularities, essentialisms and universalisms. Re-positioning the animal/child subject creates the desirous becomings of human/nonhuman agency. The becoming and unbecoming, human and nonhuman, the child “becoming”, the animal “becoming”, are complex fluid and multiple assemblages of identities. As Deleuze and Guattari (2004) state: “Becoming-” is a process of change, flight, or movement within an assemblage. Rather than conceive of the pieces of an assemblage as an organic whole, within which the specific elements are held in place by the organization of a unity, the process of “becoming-” serves to account for relationships between the “discrete” elements of the assemblage. In “becoming-” one piece of the assemblage is drawn into the territory of another piece, changing its value as an element and bringing about a new unity (p. 215).

Becoming in an animal–child assemblage means a new body structure and capacity to perform is produced. In this sense, the “becoming” is a process of fluid change, in childhoods it may be stories of assemblages of paints and pedagogies performed on the surface of the child’s and the teacher’s face through face painting activities, reimagining the assemblage and idea of becoming. By interrogating, deterritorialising and re-interpreting everyday mundane images and representations of childhood stories, we push boundaries of the child-construct beyond simplistic representations of childhoods. An “event” of childhoods becomes productive and pedagogical in an unexpected way, and resists and disturbs normative, traditional developmental representations of childhoods. As we stated earlier in this chapter, a traditional childhood study lens gives scholars the freedom to think differently and across disciplines about childhoods, bodies and education. While challenging developmentalism and universalism, as Prout (1999) claims, childhood studies enable us to argue that “children understand and perform their bodies in ways often different from adults; entering into their world is thus an essential step in an adequate sociology of childhood bodies” (p. 2). Thus, when examining the animal–child-construct in diverse ideological contexts, the representations of childhood produce certain “ideal bodies”: on the surface, the stories expectedly “biologise” children’s and nonhuman bodies. A childhood study alternative allows a different interpretation of a discourse of resistance, and of thinking of child subjects and nonhuman subjects in a posthuman landscape as a more-than-human assemblage. They portray images of childhoods and bodies as powerful and pedagogical: these are the stories that govern childhoods. These stories become part of the “bodied curriculum” (Springgay & Freedman, 2012) that shape children’s understanding of self, of their bodies and of their place. The notions of good and bad, the notions of ideal, “fairy tale and innocent, cute outcomes” are strongly represented in the contemporary world. The idea of becoming the good, ideal child in reality is the embodiment of educational and societal regulatory spaces that govern children’s bodies, as discussed through Foucault and Havel earlier in this chapter. The morethan-human assemblages and constructs, as an alternative, may shift and shape the ideal child, and disrupt the reproduction of ideal childhoods, offering a resistance to

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the expected public child subjects and childhoods. The animal/child allows the materiality and discursiveness of children and childhoods to come forward. Animal/childconstructs help us move beyond constructions and representations of the singular, single-lensed child-construct.

Multiplicities of Child-Constructs As a conclusion to this chapter, we are faced with the question of how to synthetise all of these diverse child subjects and constructs, and the philosophical concepts which we have presented to you? We will say a bit more about poststructural and new materialist, or discursive and material connections. The concern of power force is not only relevant for “subjects” but also for “things” as in the stories of Pinocchio and Little Otik. Power and relations of power constitute the subject, matter and objects as they manifest through discursive and material practices and agency which impact upon all of them. Thus, as with Bennett’s blurring of boundaries, we cannot speak of subjects and objects, or subjects and matter, but of complicated interconnections between them in relations of power that are discernible only on the basis of such interconnections. This is a critical point for the child subject. Power thus encompasses the all-inclusive embracing layers and complex ideas of all subjects, all matter and all objects and the energy and forces surrounding them. So if power is productive and pleasurable, and not only oppressive, it constitutes the subject, objects and matter in unexpected ways and not only within discursive practices. Perhaps power is a “set of actions upon other actions” (Dreyfus & Rabinow, 1983, p. 220), but in our thinking these multiple directions of power, reversibility and mobilities intersect in ways that power weaves into and through them, and subjects, objects and matter become on-goingly constituted by them. A further concern, in Bennett’s sense, is whether power also disciplines “matter” in the sense of inorganic “thing-hood” such as a wooden toy or a tree stump? If so, does the matter-thing-hood embody the power–knowledge assemblage in the same or in a similar way as a subject does? This concern raises the question of “control” of the material, of the “thing-hood”. From a discursive perspective, power produces certain discourses that provide and promote particular versions of truth and knowledge. The relationality of power–knowledge determines that knowledge does not exist on its own: perhaps this operates similarly to knowledge about matter? Power relations of how we understand knowledge about matter are embodied in what we include and exclude, and this act of masking and unmasking may force the knowledge– matter assemblage to become subversive and resistant. Matter and thing-hood are disciplined, classified and placed into a particular space and place and within a certain time through the new materialist paradigms. Foucault aimed to unmask power and the way it is exercised over the subject through disciplinary power. Can this lead to a reterritorialisation of “matter” as also governed, subjected and docile? If so, technologies of domination not only discipline, classify and objectify to produce subjects, but in a similar way they then

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also discipline, classify and objectify matter. The paradoxical subject position of docile and productive, yet self-governable, leads to Foucault’s concept of the conduct of conduct (Dean, 1999). A mechanism of control is in place and disciplines as “a type of power, a modality for its exercise, comprising a whole set of instruments, techniques, procedures, levels of application, targets; it is a ‘physics’ or an ‘anatomy’ of power, a technology” (Foucault, 1979, p. 215). This could also be seen as essential for understanding “matter”: the way power penetrates spatiality and time and impacts upon the conceptions and capacities of matter, as it impacts upon subjects, as subjects impact upon matter and, finally, as matter impacts upon other matter, as illustrated above, by Pinocchio and Little Otik, and in Barad’s reflection on lightening. Foucault’s thinking about biopolitics draws in a reterritorialisation of Foucauldian power in relation to matter. It traces notions related to the political, the social, the biological and to thing-hoods within a framework that Lemke (2014) has eloquently analysed in his work on the government of things, stating “the art of government determines what is defined as subject and object, as human and non-human. It establishes and enacts the boundaries between socially relevant and politically recognized existence and ‘pure matter,’ something that does not possess legal-moral protection and is ‘reduced’ to ‘things’” (p. 7). So, what if we suggest that Foucauldian relations of power operate in ways that also affect matter and that they strengthen ways in which matter matters? The childconstruct through being acted upon alters and modifies his or her behaviour in order to become normalised and subjectified towards a particular truth. However, what happens with matter? Is matter also affected by this process? Does matter take “matter positions”? Does the inorganic also change its behaviour, and does it, in the new materialist sense, become vibrant matter within the system? If matter is also subjected to such disciplinary power, does it become similarly normalised and at the same time individualised? Power might then become the productive force that structures and shapes the subject and the matter—thing-hoods alike—then matter could become accepted as a part of these complex anatomies and structures of power relations. Foucauldian disciplining technologies in which discourses contain and conceal power would then constitute the subject and matter alike. They would themselves form openings to move beyond the linguistic and discursive and affirm the im/possibility of differentiating between what is a subject and what is matter in such (possibly) political, ethical, epistemological and ontological performances of reciprocal entanglements. We have attempted to move beyond this positioning in this chapter, pointing rather to cluttered and unclean assemblages of subject-thinghood and power-matter entanglements in early-year settings through the stories of Pinocchio and Little Otik. This chapter tells a story of different theorisations of child-constructs: from childhood studies, to hybridity, to assemblage, and all the way to the philosophical deand reterritorialisation of Foucauldian-new-materialist entanglements within a multiplicity of child-constructs. It is merely an initial foray into seeing, feeling and being matter, energy, forces and things differently. We believe that the multiplicity of our theoretical thinking is critical. We finish this chapter with a quote by Massumi (1992), who rethinks the aim of the philosophers Deleuze and Guattari, in a way that can be

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positioned in relation to the purpose of child-construct. As he states, they “neither to redefine, misapply, or strategically exaggerate a category, nor even invent a new identity. Their aim is to destroy categorical gridding altogether, to push the apparatus of identity beyond the threshold of sameness …” (p. 88).

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Chapter 4

Rethinking Childhoods and Agency

Abstract Rethinking constructions of childhoods, and what it means to be a child, this chapter builds on the foundations developed in the first three chapters of the book. While those chapters challenged the rational, naturalising, social, universal or oppositional, binary constructs of childhood and addressed the concept of childhoods as plural, this chapter begins to resituate childhoods in contemporary times. In this chapter, we debate how children share agency as one among many agentic actors in the ecological collective of human and nonhuman worlds. The chapter further introduces and applies the posthuman and new materialist thinking introduced in Chap. 3, through a focus on agency and childhoods in children’s entangled posthuman worlds. This chapter examines the idea of agency, discussed in earlier chapters and expands this in order to explore what agency might look like when it is shared with a range of human and nonhuman entities and beings. Keywords Shared agency · Human and nonhuman agency · Rethinking childhoods · Ecological collectives · Entangled posthuman childhoods Rethinking constructions of childhoods, and what it means to be a child, have been discussed in Chaps. 2 and 3. We have challenged the rational, naturalising, social, universal or oppositional, binary constructs of childhood. We have already addressed the concept of childhoods as plural. In this chapter, we debate how children share agency as one among many agentic actors in the ecological collective of human and nonhuman worlds. The chapter further introduces and applies the posthuman and new materialist thinking introduced in Chap. 3, through a focus on agency and childhoods in children’s entangled posthuman worlds. In the previous chapters, traditional constructions of childhoods evident in historical and philosophical approaches of childhood studies have been introduced as managing, moulding, and in other ways purposefully shaping children and their childhoods to serve the (often economic) interests and agendas of adults. This chapter extends the idea of agency, discussed in Chaps. 2 and 3, and explores what agency could look like when it is shared with a range of human and nonhuman entities and beings.

© Springer Nature Singapore Pte Ltd. 2020 K. Malone et al., Theorising Posthuman Childhood Studies, Children: Global Posthumanist Perspectives and Materialist Theories, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-981-15-8175-5_4

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Agency in Contemporary Times Investigating children’s agency in contemporary anthropocentric times means conceptualising children and their childhoods within both the exciting and the worrying times that we face. Through a posthuman lens, where humans and nonhumans are seen as equally affected by their relationships with each other and with their environment, humans and nonhumans have shared agency. This can be illustrated through Haraway’s (2016) concerns, with catastrophic impacts of the human-centric, anthropocentric actions of individuals, politicians and societies. Haraway urges us not to look away, but to take seriously the human and nonhuman nature of what she calls in the title of her 2016 book “staying with the trouble”. Haraway (2016) cautions that: These times called the Anthropocene are times of multispecies, including human, urgency: of great mass death and extinction; of onrushing disasters, whose unpredictable specificities are foolishly taken as unknowability itself; of refusing to know and to cultivate the capacity of response-ability; of refusing to be present in and to onrushing catastrophe in time; of unprecedented looking away (p. 35).

This means continuously learning to be immersed in the present, and to see children as having an impact on and shaping the present, alongside other humans and nonhuman entities. Seeing children, as Haraway says, as “mortal critters entwined in myriad unfinished configurations of places, times, matters, meanings” (Haraway, 2016, p. 1), helps to de-elevate children as in some way exceptional because they are human. Rather, it highlights their close relations and interdependencies with others with whom they share their “places, times, matters, meanings”, and implies that they, and those others, are equally able to affect, or have agency in, their contemporary worlds. Rethinking children’s agency and childhoods in a time of “unprecedented looking away” elevates the urgency of cultivating “the capacity of response-ability” and of conceptualising children’s place in this “onrushing catastrophe”, as Haraway presents it. Posthuman thinking such as Braidotti’s (2013) and vital materialist conceptions like Bennett’s (2010) or Barad’s (2015), push certain aspects of an investigation of children’s shared agency beyond what is humanly knowable. They disrupt our thought and being, by pushing us to confront both what is knowable, and what is unknown or unknowable. That is, they alert us to elements, forces, matter or energies which we may neither know, understand nor even be aware of. Barad’s (2015) illustration of lightning, as “a lively play of in/determinacy” as she states, that troubles “matters of self and other, past and future, life and death” (p. 390), indicates how unknown or unknowable elements—here of the electric currents intra-acting in the case of lightening—interact and interfere with what we might expect to be easily understood concepts or realities. In what ways, we might ask, does rethinking children’s agency raise lively in/determinacies, when situated in the complexities of contemporary times? As we proceed with rethinking childhoods as a complex entanglement not only of human and nonhuman being, but also of their agency, this might indeed place

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our thinking on a bit of a threshold. It could feel like we are sitting on a “razor’s edge between animate and inanimate” as Barad (2015) continues, where it feels like our thinking is “sometimes here and sometimes there on either side of the divide” (p. 390). Reconceptualising children and their childhoods as merely a small part in the complex assemblages of contemporary times, raises the possibilities that there are other vibrant materialities at play, and it shifts how we conceptualise their agency and their agentic participations in their lives and worlds. Immersed in the urgency of cultivating our capacity for response-ability, or to react, to the anthropocentric concerns raised earlier in the chapter (these ideas are further expanded in Chap. 5). An important concept raised in these concerns is Bennett’s notion of vibrant matter. Vibrant matter arises as a “vibrant materiality that runs alongside and inside humans” (Bennett, 2010, p. viii). It refers to the idea that things and materials also have agency. In other words, it alerts us to the ways in which things, beings and forces that are not human act on, affect and shape other things, beings and forces. Such an insight fundamentally changes our orientations towards children’s agency, when, rather than focusing on their human ability to act on and have power over their lives, rights and situations, we give “the force of things more due” (p. viii, our emphasis). Bennett’s idea provokes a vital materialist shift towards seeing children as not just “actors” acting, but as one of many actants acting upon one another. As she explains through Bruno Latour’s term, an “actant can be either human or nonhuman: it is that which has efficacy, can do things, has sufficient coherence to make a difference, produce effects, alter the course of events” (Bennett, 2010, p. viii). The complexity that arises in seeing children as just one of many actants who have agency allows us to explore children’s agency as shared. It introduces the idea of agentic actions or encounters as emerging, being felt, acting, reacting and affecting in unpredictable ways. As an example, let us consider children’s agency in an Amarasi village in Indonesia. Located in the Kupang Regency, in Nusa Tenggara Timur, on Timur Island, the children of the Amarasi’s relationship with their local context appears isolated and removed from wider worldly concerns—see Fig. 4.1. Conceptualising their agency as shared with beings, things, energies and materialities as we have done above, through Bennett’s (2010) view of vibrant materialities, however, entangles these children simultaneously with the local banana, papaya and coconut crops, chickens, dirt and the village hall, and with the environmental concerns affecting global agriculture and societies. A vibrant material view of children’s agency thus opens us up to seeing children and their ability to act on the/ir world as always already situated within a wider worldly relationship of affect and dependency. This view is in strong contrast with dominant Western conceptions of agency as social and cultural constructs and acts. We “return” to reread some of these conceptions now, in order to further illustrate the shift occurring in the turn to a posthuman, new and vibrant materialist view of agency.

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Fig. 4.1 Source Amarasi Village Hall and garden, Indonesia. Credit Sonja Arndt

Socio-cultural Agency Returning to consider a dominant socio-cultural perspective on children’s agency helps to illustrate the shift in thinking proposed in this chapter. From a socio-cultural perspective children’s sense of themselves emerges within and on account of their everyday influences. As the late Smith (2013), former director of the Children’s Issues Centre in Aotearoa New Zealand, said, even infants have “a biological tendency to reference their own actions to those of others, and to operate on the ‘like me’ principle” (p. 137). In other words, this lens posits that from an early age, very young children form a sense of who they are, of their own self-identity, in relation to who those around them are (Tesar & Jukes, 2018). This includes how those around them look, feel, and behave, what they do and how they do it, throughout their day and in diverse aspects and roles within their community. From this humanist, social and cultural perspective, “[s]ocial and physical activities provide the roots of agency and self-concept” (p. 137). It sees children’s developing sense of self as leading to a growing “awareness of oneself as an agent” (Meadows, as cited in Smith, 2013, p. 137). Through their experiences of themselves in relation to others around them, children are thus seen as internalising rules about what is acceptable, in which situations and for/by whom. Guided by this kind of ethical and moral compass, children are then seen as forming a sense of what they can and should act on. That

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is, they form an understanding of their own agency within their social and cultural world. Seeing children as having agency already in their childhood years, however, has only relatively recently usurped popular views of childhood from before the nineteenth century. As outlined in the genealogical review of developmental and early sociological theorisations on children and childhoods in the earlier chapters, these theories often held that children were ontologically incomplete. To become complete—as adults, older learners, or members of the community, for example— children needed to progress through a number of sequential stages. Only then could they be considered as full participants in decision making or as agentic actors within or on their lives. Heywood (2018) reflects on this perceived lack, where “Humans are born helpless, and when they become independent, with a household of their own, they are deemed to have left childhood and youth behind them” (p. 43). Children’s perceived “independence”, then, is what determines that they are now “complete”, recognised and agentic, or “able to run a household”. That children have agency, “a growing awareness of [themselves] as an agent”, means that they have some level of control and power over what happens in their lives and how they live and experience them. This view emerged largely out of the passing and large-scale ratification of the United Nations Convention on the Rights of the Child (UNCRC) in 1989 and related local and global policy and regulatory frameworks. The UNCRC and surrounding research compels the signatories—all countries except the United States of America—to act in the best interests of children. It calls on signatories to take specific steps to protect children’s rights and to elevate their agency (United Nations Human Rights, 1989). This is done in 54 articles, where children’s rights are spelled out, to have their voices heard in various ways in relation to their education, health, emotional safety, physical safety, diverse beliefs and practices, and in their implementation. All of the rights promoted in the UNCRC consider “that … recognition of the inherent dignity and of the equal and inalienable rights of all members of the human family is the foundation of freedom, justice and peace in the world” (United Nations Human Rights, 1989). The UNCRC compels signatory countries to align their orientations towards children, to see them as on the one hand as having power and influence over their own lives, and to ensure that their ability to do so is protected; and on the other, of protecting children from abuse and neglect through which their rights and agency might be diminished. Further, it takes “due account of the importance of the traditions and cultural values of each people for the protection and harmonious development of the child”. It recognises “the importance of international cooperation for improving the living conditions of children in every country, in particular in the developing countries”. These statements indicate the UNCRC’s strong advocacy for recognising and elevating children’s agentic contributions to their own lives. Its statements also recognise the diversity of contexts in which it is ratified. Relying on such a universalised statement, even when it has had input from diverse contexts, necessarily also creates limitations, especially if we consider the complexities exposed through a posthuman lens.

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Let us return to thinking about children as in relationship with their wider worlds, going beyond the immediate localised context. Rethinking agency beyond a sociocultural perspective situates children as actants among wider child–nonhuman–thing assemblages. To return to an Indonesian context, for example, we might consider the child in Fig. 4.2, in an early childhood setting as having agency. While a socio-cultural lens alerts us to the ways in which the child in the image has developed certain ways of acting on her world—using a mobile phone, for example—from the ways in which it has been modelled by others in her social group, about what is acceptable (or not), and what she can access, as enabled by adults or other humans around her. To rethink her agency through posthuman and new materialist considerations moves agency beyond the human world, adding considerations of much more complex ideas and relationships. It adds, for example, that the girl’s rights are crucially important, but not solely important, as it is not only her, but also all the matter and things within this girl-mobile phone–tile–sunlight–door and wider worldly assemblage with the surrounding environment, that have agency. In other words, all of them act upon each other, all of them affect the parts and the assemblage. Furthermore, while all are important, we may not recognise or identify all of the elements that are important, nor will they remain the same: there remains always an element of uncertainty. Fig. 4.2 Girl–phone–tile– sunlight, Indonesia. Credit Sonja Arndt

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Unequal Childhoods/Unequal Agency Foregrounding conceptions of shared affective agency reinforces some of the contrasts with earlier sociological and socio-cultural ideas on children’s sense of themselves, their independence and their agency and power in children’s every day, mundane realities. Viewing children’s agency from humanist perspectives raises questions and limitations, as upholding children’s rights and agency can have different implications in different situations and locations. The UNCRC is a crucial document, and in many countries, including our own two countries, Australia and New Zealand, there is still much work to do to uphold the rights that the Convention intends to cover. The inequalities and injustices that continue to face children elevate the unequal nature of childhoods, and a growing discourse of challenging a rights and social justice focus as a normalising imposition of universal expectations. As Snaza (2013) writes, “for educators interested in social justice, ‘the human’ has been understood as the most universal concept with which we can identify, an identification that allows us to denounce inequalities deriving from educational encounters” (p. 39). We need to more strongly contest what it means to identify as “human”, as Malone (2020) argues, when normalising conceptions arise in particular dominant—cultured, gendered, situated—realms. Unequal childhoods in different local contexts illustrate the unequal nature of their agency. Lareau’s (2003) research illustrates how children live in diverse expectations, even close geographical proximity, where power, rights and agentic contributions play out in very different ways. She shows how families’ backgrounds, influenced by various circumstantial combinations, determine what is normal in children’s daily lives and the expectations of children’s agency. In some instances, the emphasis might be on raising children to play an active role in daily decisions, to actively engage in discussion, for example at mealtimes and in family and after school activities. Here, Lareau describes, children are generally seen as valuable contributors to parent–child discussions. Like many families around the world, these families offer children diverse experiences of organised after school activities, for example, to “ensure” that their children gain what are elevated as the important skills in a particular social community or society, to “develop” their personality, or become “appropriate” and “accepted” members of their society. In some families, the focus might be on developing sporting talents, involving children training hard, competing against each other, and instilling as a desirable attribute the desire to win. Some of these reified skills, for example, playing musical instruments, or various forms of dance, may involve children in performances in front of various audiences from an early age, and measuring their abilities by advancement through “levels”, sitting exams, and making “progress”. Lareau (2003) calls this orientation towards childhood a “concerted cultivation” (p. 2) of the child. In other communities, childhoods may feel different. Families may not have the resources to fund or the time or interest in taking children to extra-curricular activities. Children may be left much more to themselves, with both parents working, leaving children’s after school activities to emerge as the children meet up after

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school on their way home or with others living in the same street, playing with what they have at home. In her extensive studies, Lareau (2003) found that often in blue-collar neighbourhoods there was less focus on organised after school activities, more likelihood that both parents worked at least one job, and that families tended to prioritise a focus on local community, neighbours and extended family, as a prominent element in children’s lives. She identifies poor or working-class families as less likely to view children’s leisure time as their responsibility, or as being less inclined to “see themselves as responsible for assertively intervening in their children’s school experiences” (p. 289). Instead, these parents “carried out their chores, drew boundaries and restrictions around their children, and then, within these limits, allowed their children to carry out their lives” (p. 289). In highlighting these scenarios, it is important to note that direct comparisons are problematic. Within each neighbourhood there are of course myriad complicating and influencing factors, that can lead to deviations of these generalised outlines. The individual and collective histories of each family, their work histories, cultural, spiritual and relational histories, including stories of migration, disasters or the parents’ childhood memories, are just a few such influences. Childrearing methods and the enactment of children’s agentic contributions within them are likely to be impacted by such influences. This can include the places where childhoods are situated: busy streets, rural or urban environments, vicinity of landmarks, the ocean, mountains, bush, agricultural areas, or other beings and things influencing the place, such as animals (for which children potentially need to care or have spiritual connections with), and so on. By elevating the affective impact of such diverse influences, these examples complicate any simple “human” definition of rights, social justice and of agency. They blur boundaries between human and nonhuman relationalities, and they highlight the critiques of a traditional childhood studies lens raised already, by challenging normalising discourses. Smith (2013) elaborates that childhood studies have “tended to ignore bodies and human nature in order to emphasise children’s social and cultural lives” (p. 20). In drawing together conceptualisations of children as only one of many species and things entangled in the current “multispecies urgency” to which Haraway alerted us in her quote earlier in this chapter, means to move beyond conventional humanist definitions. It means to further blur not only levels of knowledge or stages of development that are considered to be “fully human”, but notions of the body, as introduced through the feminist work of Judith Butler, Luce Irigaray, Julia Kristeva and many more. This means developing conceptions with but beyond what Alderson (as cited in Smith, 2013) calls for, as “children’s embodied needs and self-expression” (p. 20). It means thinking about how not only children, but all related matter and materialities, and other subjects/objects, “embody needs and selfexpress” shared agency with, around, and even without children. Children’s agency, then, needs to be elevated in such blurrings as arising through their relationships with/in their wider environment, as we return now, to rethink its meaning through a posthuman lens.

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Complicating Agency Through a Posthuman Lens Conceptualising agency is not simple. It might be, for example, that although children are constantly embedded within the context of their social and cultural milieu, for a number of reasons, this milieu might not be clear, consistent or easily understood (Tesar, Tong, Gibbons, Arndt, & Sansom, 2019). It might shift often, or include various (adult or other older) actors that portray confusing or shifting messages, as their ways of being and behaving may change often, even be abusive. Furthermore, children are mostly embedded not only in one, but in several contexts, and these might overlap, and vary, in the ethical and moral beliefs that they portray, or in the ways that they are enacted, or consider it appropriate for children to enact them. These might include very different home contexts, communities, even different parts of the family (maternal and paternal extended families, for example). Through a posthuman lens, children’s agency becomes even more complicatedly affirmed, as entangled with multiple, intricate relationships (Tesar & Arndt, 2018). It reflects a “vibrant materiality that runs alongside and inside humans”, as argued by Bennett (2010). Rather than formulating the human as a subject who is separate from and powerful over nonhuman objects, adopting a posthuman lens rejects such dualisms or separations. It challenges human exceptionalism, surpassing the critiques of childhood studies raised by Smith above, for example, by shifting beyond and deelevating the human. Using for example Braidotti’s (2013) posthuman and Barad’s (2003) intra-relationality ideas, children instead are seen as vibrantly and agentically entangled. Ceder (2018) explains Barad’s idea of intra-relationality as shifting our view on ontologies to one of the multiple ongoing becomings. This helps us to see ontology as relational, rather than as concerning particular truths, individuals or things. The concept arises from Barad’s (2003) notion of intra-action, where the encounters between things, beings and forces are constantly, actively reconfigured as a result of their relationships with each other. Agency, then, arises from within these relationships, in what Braidotti (2013) calls an “ontological relationality” (p. 100). From this perspective, agency emphasises the fundamental and intrinsic dependencies arising from within relationships as constitutive of entities or constructs, which already exist, but which are often ignored, looked away from, or, as in Haraway’s earlier quote, purposely “not known”. These concepts are a crucial part of allowing us to think differently. They oppose the dichotomies stressed in the humanist thinking outlined in our earlier chapters, including cause and effect expectations, elevations of individual agency and distinct subject-object positionings. They push us beyond the humanist, social and cultural view of formulaic definitions of entities and constructs, for example, defining what a child is, and what things, people and places a child is surrounded by, and then observing how these independent humans/objects interact. Unsettling our preconceived humanist ontological reasonings about defining concepts and beings, such an intra-action and intra-relationality elevates the entangled beings and becomings of all visible and invisible actors and actants in a child’s life and world. What is more, it displaces not only what we think should or could happen, and what a child should or

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could act agentially on, it distributes responsibility among all actors and actants, as it arises from within the constantly shifting intra-relationality of their entanglement. The complexity of these thoughts, where we sense agency intra-relationally not only invites us, it forces us, to let go of fixed borders or definitions, of human and others. It also infers what can be seen as a metaphysical perception. To better understand this connection, Bonnett (2004) outlines metaphysics in a way that is useful in conceptualising children’s shared agency. He says metaphysics seek “not to set up ossified fixtures, but to reveal the primal motives and relationships which are working themselves out in the various epochs of human existence”, these are relationships “which therefore shape our lives—the complexion of our lived relationships and understandings—in the most fundamental of ways”, where “the working out of these motives provide the realities in which we exist” (p. 14). They depend on and reflect the intra-relationality of a context or situation and offer a way to see children’s agency as something that is underpinned by our sense of, our orientation to and our insights about our realities and how we understand them. Reflecting children’s entangled materialities, such a metaphysics is “thoroughly conditioned by our projects towards (and within) the world” (p. 14). From a posthuman perspective then, children’s agency is shared with, and in a fundamental and already existing way is intra-dependent with, all else—thing, matter, subject—with which they are enmeshed in their worlds. St. Pierre’s (2014) insights endorse this shift from humanist to posthuman conceptions of agency. She suggests that this shift can be usefully supported by thinking through a poststructural lens to unsettle not only the dominance of the human, but the expectations of certainty, that some of the earlier theorisations rely on. Arguing for increasingly ontological as well as epistemological engagements with new materialist thinking, “that is quickly spreading through the humanities and social sciences as scholars insist we engage the ontological”, St. Pierre (2014) claims that the messiness of relational engagements is “too often ignored in the epistemological rage for meaning that centers the Cartesian knowledge projects privileged in the academy” (p. 3). Rereading and rethinking children’s agency through a posthuman lens, then, propels us into a realm of uncertainties. Offering a useful “bridge” towards a posthuman way of thinking, Kristeva’s (2008) poststructural, feminist philosophy, for example, implores us to engage with the idea that we can never really, completely, know ourselves, let alone others around us. She argues that we are always in constant construction, “open and evolving” (p. 2), and that our forming human subjectivities become challenged and unsettled in both conscious and knowable, and unconscious and unknowable, ways. We all have a certain foreignness within ourselves, she claims. We are, as she says, always subjects in process, and always foreigners, even to ourselves. Applying a posthuman lens to the notion of agency pushes us to conceptualise what or who acts on the world beyond the knowable, and beyond the human. It reveals agency itself as always in process: a vibrant relational emergence in human/nonhuman assemblages (see also work by Kraftl, 2020).

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Rethinking Agency When agency itself is rethought as both human and nonhuman, children’s agency becomes de-reified, contingent and uncertain. It could arise, for example, not on the basis of knowing who they are within a particular certainty, or on the basis of children seeing themselves in particular moral rules, rituals, routines or attitudes portrayed from a human perspective. Rather, children’s agency might arise in the face of many encounters with difference, that is with the diverse human or nonhuman rules in the many contexts of their lives, or of people or things from other contexts, that are very different from themselves. The idea that it is still (surprisingly) common, to see cultural diversity in early childhood settings, for example, as a “problem” (Baldock, 2010), is precisely one of the reasons that pushes us to try to understand children’s power and agentic contributions to their lives in much more complicated and critical ways. In an effort to provoke a broadening of attitudes beyond the human, our interest is not in suggesting attitudes aimed at solving the “problem” of diversity, or offering a particular (and then arguably equally problematic) solution. Rather, our argument is for attitudes and orientations that inspire further openness, including our own. At the root of this aim, and to further our discussion, it is useful to turn again to Kristeva (1991), who strengthens the idea that we all are always at least to some extent foreigners to ourselves, by arguing that “[t]he foreigner comes in when the consciousness of my difference arises, and … disappears when we all recognise ourselves as foreigners” (p. 1, emphasis added). In other words, the sooner we recognise that there will always be elements that we do not know within ourselves, the sooner we stop seeing others’ differences as a problem. Insisting that we “engage the ontological”, activates our rethinking of what we know, to support an openness towards complex multispecies and thing entanglements among ourselves, children and nonhuman others. One way to consider knowledge as more of a sense, than a certainty, involves Haraway’s insistence on thought: “Think we must” Haraway (2016) urges, “we must think” (p. 40). Thinking in this way about agency raises the question of whether we might sense agency, rather than knowing, determining or defining it. Haraway (2016) continues, that thinking “means, simply, we must change the story; the story must change” (p. 40), so that we no longer look away, no longer pretend that not knowing is sufficient. “What used to be called nature” she cautions, “has erupted into ordinary human affairs, and vice versa, in such a way and with such permanence as to change fundamentally means and prospects for going on, including going on at all” (p. 40). Changing the story to one of bringing nature into ordinary human affairs might mean, to return again to the example of the Amarasi people in Indonesia, seeing the bananas, the coconut palms and the dirt, as equally powerful and agentic in everyday life, as shading, ripening nourishment, sucking moisture from the earth, while simultaneously the earth provides nourishment to the plants. This de-elevates, but does not remove, human agency, as merely one of many agentic elements in the local and wider Amarasi assemblage. Importantly, it elevates the generative nature

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of the intra-relationalities mutually affecting and being affected in entangled human and nonhuman assemblages, which perhaps, as humans, we might sense, rather than know. Perhaps returning to Bennett’s (2010) notion of thing-power is useful to rethink our human knowing. We have already begun to discuss this notion in Chap. 3. Thingpower takes our thinking beyond the “life-matter binary” as a “dominant organizational principle of adult experience” (p. 20). As the term “thing-power” may however also “overstate the thinginess or fixed stability of materiality”, we, like Bennett, aim for a more open theorisation, where materiality is “as much force as entity, as much energy as matter, as much intensity as extension” (p. 20). Through an openness to emergences, to what might arise in intra-actions, we, and children, may see or experience something that was invisible, or a void, before the experience. Becoming more open, we are pushed to think differently, and become “no longer the self [we were] before” (Davies, 2014, p. 24). Using Kristeva’s (1998) poststructural philosophy as a bridge towards this thinking, we could see this as inhering already in what she terms the semiotic, which acts in the unconscious and constantly forms us as subjects even without us realising it. Further, if we adopt, as Davies (2014) does, a Deleuzian perspective, a strategy of emergent listening falls within this realm of not knowing. “Emergent listening” she says “is not a simple extension of usual practices of listening”. As we are constantly evolving, “[i]t involves working, to some extent, against oneself, and against those habitual practices through which one establishes ‘who I am’” (p. 21). It involves, perhaps, surpassing the limitations of the conventional rules of our cultural or social milieu, referred to earlier. And it involves also confronting the “unprecedented looking away” which Haraway laments.

Thing-Power Agency Thinking of agency as a thing-power is a major challenge to sociological, humanist ways of thinking. It challenges who we, and specifically who children, are, and how they fit into and become constantly “judged against an imagined ideal” (p. 21). A story from Davies (2014) offers an insight into how a very young child’s agentic engagement with her life disrupts Davies’ constructions of the child, pushing her to “become no longer the self [she] was before”. The story unfolds with Davies sitting on a bench in a local café, minding an 8-month-old girl, Clementine, who is playing on a pile of pillows beside her. When Clementine suddenly jerks forward and bangs her head on the wall, she pulls back, sits quite still and again leans forward “slowly, carefully”, and “bump[s] her head softly against the wall,” then draws back. Clementine repeats this movement repeatedly at different speeds, “none of them fast enough to cause a painful repeat of the first encounter” (p. 22). Resisting what might have been an expected adult reaction to protect Clementine, to reach out, prevent her bumping her head again or reassuring her, Davies sits back and observes— listening—for indicators of what Clementine’s actions might mean, do or be. In which ever ways Clementine’s actions were perceived by herself (which of course

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we as adults can never actually know), Clementine seemed to be in charge: her actions appear purposeful, powerful, in a humanist sense: agentic. However, when we think through a posthuman lens, they arise not only from herself, but out of the encounters and her relationships with the material and forces around her, with which she is entangled. To change the story to think through a posthuman lens, it is not important whether or not Davies, or we, are able to articulate exactly what occurred. It is not important whether anybody else understands it, sees a purpose in it, has a category for it, or judges it. Neither is it important whether anybody judges or praises Davies, or any other adult, for not intervening. What is important for us engaging in this encounter, is the openness, to what Davies takes from Deleuze as the notion of grace, or haecceity (p. 24). Haecceity can be described as the particular “thisness” of a thing, that is, its qualities, which emerge as Davies (2014) reflects on the experience, outlining Clementine’s agentic actions: The child jerking forward in an apparently random way, apparently not yet in control of her bodily movements, becomes the child who is developing an exquisite control of her body, who willingly takes risks, who experiments, and who rapidly acquires new knowledge and new relations between herself and others (p. 24).

The others with which Clementine was in relation in this situation were not only human beings, but other places and things, the bench, the cushions and the wall, and the other people, the adult sitting watching her, and the spaces between each of these things and herself. From a human-centric perspective, we might consider if, had the cushions had a different feel, different fabric, for example, that might have affected, or acted on, the ways in which Clementine carried out her performance. Perhaps she sensed from the cushions a sense of safety, or of beauty, or something else? A vital materialist perspective such as Bennett’s (2010), where the human is decentered, removes our thinking from the ways in which “cultural practices produce what is experienced as the ‘natural’” and introduces the idea that agency also arises in the “material recalcitrance of such cultural productions” (p. 1, emphasis in the original). In other words, it recognises the agency of the things, the cushions, the bench, of the ground, the wall and other materials surrounding Clementine, in her world with her. Describing her idea of “thing-power”, through Spinoza’s notion of conatus, Bennett emphasises the fundamental nature of every thing to strive to exist, where, “every nonhuman body shares with every human body a conative nature (and thus a ‘virtue’ appropriate to its material configuration)” (p. 2), elevating the productive nature of all things. Productive here is used in the sense that nothing is static, but rather, there is always movement. We might see the same action variously as either of these—as things, materials and objects act and react to and with each other. From this perspective, it is the thing itself that acts, rather than the us (humans) acting on the thing.

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Back to Clementine We may or may not be aware of a thing’s acting, in a conscious way. The bench itself, and the material of which it is constructed, the nails, screws, hinges with which its parts are connected, each, then, have their own conative nature, affirming themselves, to us, to Clementine. Depending on what the bench is made of, the metal, wood, glue, screws, each have a life, a cycle, a material tendency to react and respond to other materials, or to forces and elements (heat, cold, water, electricity, gases and so on) with which they come into contact. They each have agency (Fig. 4.3). Thing-power agency reminds us again of the story raised in Chap. 3, about Little Otik. This tree stump story elevates thing-hood acts and agency. Such objects as the wooden stump, we said earlier, speak to us, in our materialist entanglements, because they have agency that is both political and ethical-moral in nature. In that fairy tale, Little Otik’s thing-hood was presented as an illustration of Bennett’s explanation of shifting thinking from being solely about think-power to raising the importance of thinking also of thing-power, for taking the performance and affects of things seriously. Things have a vitality and a capacity, so there is no ontological hierarchy in Bennett’s thinking about matter and subjects. In other words, embedded in this insight is an urge to more carefully pay attention to the nonhuman vitality. When we postpone any definitive critique of or elevated status of humans over objects, and linger instead “in those moments during which [we] find [our]selves fascinated by objects, taking them as clues to the material vitality that [we] share with them” (Bennett, 2010, p. 17) recognises that through thing-power we come to treat nonhumans, materials, “more

Fig. 4.3 Bench relationalities, affirming themselves. Credit Sonja Arndt

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carefully, more strategically, more ecologically” (p. 18). Many questions arise in our human conceptions of material vitality: • What agency and responsibilities can we see arising for Little Otik, the wooden– stump–baby, through his/its intra-actions in relationship with surrounding things/beings—while he/it was in the forest, or after he was “adopted”? • What material vitality is enacted by other tree-stumps in the forest, or by other doll–baby–things for which children outside of the fairy tale care? • Might children quite often experience this fascination and lingering, as they share an agentic vitality with the material things and objects around them? • In what myriad ways does Little Otik demonstrate a thing-power and affect—on humanity and on the world—intra-relating with children’s agency? • In what other ways could trees/tree stumps/forests demonstrate the productive nature of intra-relational vitality and capacity? (Fig. 4.4) To conceptualise children’s agency as shared with the thing-vitalities around them as a lingering fascination, rather than certainty and definition, can be seen

Fig. 4.4 Trees–tree–stumps–forest things–beings. Credit Sonja Arndt

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as deeply philosophical. Both Little Otik’s influence on/with children, and Clementine’s actions reveal an example of Deleuze and Guattari’s (1991) understanding of philosophy, which they claim involves “the art of forming, inventing, and fabricating concepts” (p. 2), where concepts are “not discursive” (p. 22). We might say, then, that philosophical concepts can quite capably and agentically be explored and acted upon by very young children, in ways that, again, might easily evade, elude and mystify an adult human desire for knowing. Thing-power agency and philosophical explorations might be seen as posthuman intra-relationalities, exuding power in definable and indefinable ways, over the non-hierarchical entanglements of children, matter, things, life and being. In the final sections of this chapter, we raise two more potentialities in shared agency: the notions of deep history and freedom.

“Deep History” and Shared Agency The non-hierarchical nature of shared, intra-active agency returns us to Haraway’s opening quote of this chapter once more. Thrust by concerns with disasters, death, extinctions and catastrophes, into a “multispecies urgency” as she states, evokes what Braidotti (2013), citing Chakrabarty, thinks of as a deep history. This is an “interdisciplinary combination of geological and socio-economic history that focuses both on the planetary or earth factors and on the cultural changes that have jointly created humanity over hundreds of thousands of years”. It is a “post-anthropocentric configuration of knowledge that grants the earth the same role and agency as the human subjects that inhabit it” (p. 160). In being affected by and affecting the material forces in children’s human–thing–being–materiality assemblages, there is a levelling, where, for Clementine, for example, there might be a vitality in the forces emanating from the very thisness of the pillows, or any other thing around her that reflect and act on their geological or socio-economic pasts. For us, this involves changes in our understanding of the temporality of history because we are contemplating the possibility of human and other species extinction and hence the end of recorded historical human time, and also the end of the future. The collapse of the divide between human and natural histories is a very recent phenomenon and, prior to this fundamental shift, geological time and the chronology of humans were unrelated, at least within the discipline of history (Braidotti, 2013, p. 160).

In what ways might children, then, have their own conceptions of the “social ambience of fragility”, and in what ways might we create openings, rather than limitations, for their experiences of such an ambience, and take them into a nonhuman, more-than-social realm (Arndt & Tesar, 2016)? Malone’s (2016) encounters with children’s experiences of the social and environmental—human and earth—ambience of radiation reflect multiple senses of children and their place within the world, where children are entangled in an ecological community and where their dailiness of “common worlding” is exposed through their relations with dirt, dust and radiation, that seep in and through bodies. Through the fundamental shift to this posthuman

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orientation, “[t]here is no distant place anymore”, as Latour (2014, p. 2) asserts: we all are implicated. We are all in relation, in and with the world. And, Latour emphasises, the earth too, has agency. Another example that affirms a sharing of agency in relation to nature and the world reflects again the idea that we may sense, but not know, agency. It comes from a New Zealand indigenous M¯aori lens. Here land and water have long had and shared deep history and agency, as Young (2017) illustrates in describing relations with the Whanganui River in the North Island of the country: The tribes of the Whanganui take their name, their spirit and their strength from the great river which flows from the mountains of the central North Island to the sea. For centuries the people have travelled the Whanganui River by canoe, caught eels in it, built villages on its banks, and fought over it. The people say, ‘Ko au te awa. Ko te awa ko au’ – I am the river. The river is me.

In 2017, the Whanganui River was granted the rights, responsibilities and liabilities of a legal subject, further confounding humanist expectations of subjectivity, through the intra-relationality of river-water becoming-subject. This legal process fundamentally challenged Western notions of river being human/human being river, as an interchangeable interconnection of relational subjectivities. At the same time, it affirms the anthropocentric exceptionalism of human power where being human is a desirable, agentic legal state. And all the while, the earth too responds, reacts. It “moves” (Latour, 2014, p. 3), in relation to what occurs on, in, and around it.

Freedom and Shared Agency In bringing together notions of their implicatedness with the wider world, of the dailiness of common worlding, seeing children’s shared agency through a new materialist and posthuman lens leads us to question the notion of freedom, as a politics of agency. In what ways can the feminist and justice-oriented concerns with the right to freedom arising, for example, in the rights discourses perpetuated by the UNCRC, differently inform conceptions of children’s agency? How can contemporary concerns simultaneously enhance children’s agency, to express, to act, to benefit, when conceptualised within their wider worldly entanglements? And what impact do patriarchal systems or societies, where minority groups remain oppressed, marginalised and lacking in the freedoms of dominant rule-makers of society, have on shared non-hierarchical agentic intra-relationalities in human and nonhuman entanglements? Reaffirming a posthuman urgency, Grosz (2010) offers a philosophical, ontological challenge to what she describes as a “mantra of liberation” (p. 139), that is, through a moral ideal aroused by the feminist concepts of “autonomy, agency, and freedom” (p. 139). Elevating the centrality of matter, rather than of human understandings of identity, subjectivity or consciousness, Grosz suggests that freedom and agency, rather than being only socially or culturally determined, must be seen as arising from “outside the subject” (p. 140). Freedom, then, as seen by Grosz, is the

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very “concept of life, bare life”, “where freedom is conceived not only primarily as the elimination of constraint or coercion”, which she sees as a negative, seeking of “reason, rights, and recognition”. Rather, she urges a move towards a more positive framing, where freedom is “the condition of, or capacity for, action in life” (p. 140). Freedom, from this perspective, necessitates a shift to being a “freedom from … the elimination of constraint”, to “freedom to” (p. 140), having, for example, the capacity to act. In arguing for a move beyond the humanist, feminist conception of “freedom from”, Grosz (2010) highlights its inadequacy. Despite the need for recognitions of past wrongs, she argues that such a conception of freedom seems to expect some kind of automatic autonomy to arise in their wake, where the now free subject is able to act, live and engage freely. Drawing on Bergson in her argument for what she calls a “feminism of difference”, Grosz (2010) suggests that Bergson might help to rethink how subjectivity and freedom are always and only enacted within and through the materiality that life and the non-living share, a materiality not adequately addressed in alternative traditions that have until now remained so influential in feminist thought (p. 142).

Children’s agency, then, can be seen as a free act, when their actions arise from the child in its relational connectedness with the materialities of its world. That is, they originate in or through the child, and “express all” (p. 144, emphasis in the original) of the child. They are “integral to who or what the child is” (p. 144), in that moment, in those relationships that are known or unknown. Bergson’s work, Grosz claims, emphasises the free eruption of acts of the subject, as unexpected and unplanned, as springing “from our whole personality” (p. 145). And when we reread children’s agentic engagements with and in their childhoods, such as Clementine’s, through this lens, the whole “personality” of the materialities and matter, the energies and forces, by which she is surrounded and in which she is relationally engaged, then also erupt, from pillows, benches and humans, in humanly unexpected and unplanned ways. Both agency and the unexpected acts are shared, and according to Bennett (2010), they are also political.

Political Agency From the very outset, the concerns expressed throughout this book are undoubtedly political. Intra-relationalities of human-thing-matter-worlds, that are interconnected, are entangled assemblages that Bennett (2010) challenges as political theories that “assume a world of active subjects and passive objects” (p. 108). If humans and nonhumans are so closely implicated, and, as we have argued throughout this chapter, share agency within their worlds, then it would be appropriate to argue, Bennett continues, for “neither the individual human nor an exclusively human collective but the (ontologically heterogeneous) ‘public’ coalescing around a problem” (p. 108). Since all actants have agency, they all have the political capacity to act within their heterogeneous public or common world.

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Concluding Comments Children’s agency is an ethically and politically messy but crucial imperative. Taking up the challenges that Haraway and Bennett highlight as being wrought on humanity at large, this chapter has turned a posthuman and new materialist lens onto conceptualisations of children’s agency. As in the earlier chapters, in this chapter we have recognised that conceptions of children and childhood differ from context to context. In diverse contexts, ideas about and values attributed to, children and childhoods, as those who will inhabit and experience a future beyond those of us who are now adults, already to some extent shape how children’s agency might be seen, arise and play out. From our Western philosophical and research world, we acknowledge that we cannot be or know inherently the perspectives of other countries or peoples, and much less, of nonhuman beings or things. In this sense, in furthering the argument of this book, it is not our intention to elevate Western, adult or human constructs. Our key intention not to misrepresent or misappropriate views from other perspectives which we may neither understand, nor fully know. For this reason, agency has been explored by foregrounding its messy and unknowable nature, through a posthuman and new materialist lens. The chapter has followed concerns with conventional, rights-based approaches towards children’s agentic participation in their lives, with a rethinking towards a posthuman view on their intra-actions with, in and through their worlds. The complex relationalities of more or less knowable beings that shape the world in and with children have illustrated what Bennett (2004) offers us by way of a concluding thought. They offer “occasions in ordinary life when the us and the it slipslide into each other” where “we are also nonhuman and … things too are vital players in the world” (p. 349). Children’s agency is thus indeterminately human and nonhuman, messy and political. In what ways does such messiness play out in policy and curriculum documents, guidelines or frameworks? Te Wh¯ariki (Ministry of Education, 2017), the recently revised curriculum framework for early childhood education in Aotearoa New Zealand, offers an example. It specifically calls for a recognition and fostering not only of children’s “language, culture and identity” but, “increasingly, to agency in their own lives” (p. 12). Reflecting its strongly interconnected socio-cultural and bicultural grounding in Western and indigenous M¯aori theories, the document goes on to state that “These rights align closely with the concept of mana (p. 12)”. Mana is a M¯aori word which among other things reflects children’s agency, their power, including in a spiritual sense, their prestige, “authority, status and control” (p. 66). It is a concept that reflects the entangled freedom, power and agency that Grosz outlines above, where children are recognised as powerful, but not as more powerful than, the other things and beings, equally valid but heterogeneous, agentic actants in their worlds. In the next chapter we reread the curriculum guidelines to explore what they could add to conceptualisations of childhoods through a posthuman lens. This rereading leads into further questioning of the entanglements of materialities, curriculum and objects, challenging the desire for certainty in children’s wider, complex ecologies.

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References Arndt, S., & Tesar, M. (2016). A more-than-social movement: The post-human condition of quality in the early years. Contemporary Issues in Early Childhood, 17(1), 16–25. https://doi.org/10. 1177/1463949115627896. Baldock, P. (2010). Understanding cultural diversity in the early years. London: SAGE Publications Ltd. Barad, K. (2003). Posthumanist performativity: Toward an understanding of how matter comes to matter. Signs: Journal of Women in Culture and Society, 28(3), 801–831. https://doi.org/10.1086/ 345321. Barad, K. (2015). Transmaterialities: Trans*/matter/realities and queer political imaginings. GLQ: A Journal of Lesbian and Gay Studies, 21(2–3), 387–422. https://doi.org/10.1215/10642684-284 3239. Bennett, J. (2004). The force of things: Steps toward an ecology of matter. Political Theory, 32(3), 347–372. Bennett, J. (2010). Vibrant matter: A political ecology of things. Durham, NC: Duke University Press. Bonnett, M. (2004). Retrieving nature: Education for a post-human age. Malden, MA: Blackwell Publishing. Braidotti, R. (2013). The posthuman. Cambridge, UK: Polity Press. Ceder, S. (2018). Towards a Posthuman theory of educational relationality. London, England: Routledge. Davies, B. (2014). Listening to children: Being and becoming. Oxon, UK: Routledge. Deleuze, G., & Guattari, F. (1991). What is philosophy? (H. Tomlinson & G. Burchell, Trans.). New York, NY: Columbia University Press. Grosz, E. (2010). Feminism, materialism, and freedom. In D. Coole & S. Frost (Eds.), New materialisms: Ontology, agency and politics (pp. 139–157). Durham, UK: Duke University Press. Haraway, D. (2016). Staying with the trouble: Making kin in the chthulucene. Durham, UK: Duke University Press. Heywood, C. (2018). A history of childhood: Children and childhood in the west from medieval to modern times (2nd ed.). Cambridge, England: Polity Press. Kraftl, P. (2020). After childhood: Re-thinking environment, materiality and media in children’s lives. London: Routledge. Kristeva, J. (1991). Strangers to ourselves. New York, NY: Columbia University Press. Kristeva, J. (1998). The subject in process. In P. Ffrench (Ed.), The Tel Quel reader (pp. 133–178). London, UK: Routledge. Kristeva, J. (2008). Does European culture exist? Paper presented at the Dagmar and Václav Havel Foundation VIZE 97 prize, Prague Crossroads. Retrieved from https://www.vize.cz/wp-content/ uploads/2016/05/laureat-julia-kristeva-en-speech.pdf. Lareau, A. (2003). Unequal childhoods: Class, race, and family life. Berkley and Los Angeles, CA: University of California Press. Latour, B. (2014). Agency at the time of the anthropocene. New Literary History, 45(1), 1–18. https://doi.org/10.1353/nlh.2014.0003. Malone, K. (2016). Posthumanist approaches to theorising children’s human-nature relations. In K. Nairn, P. Kraftl, & T. Skelton (Eds.), Space, place and environment (3rd ed., pp. 1–22). Singapore: Springer. Malone, K. (2020). Re-evolution: Disrupting education. In G. Latham, K. Malone, M. Blaise, S. Dole, & J. Faulkner (Eds.), Learning to teach (Chap. 1). London, England: Oxford University Press. Ministry of Education. (2017). Te Wh¯ariki he wh¯ariki m¯atauranga m¯o ng¯a mokopuna o Aotearoa Early Childhood Curriculum. Wellington, New Zealand: New Zealand Government. Smith, A. B. (2013). Understanding children and childhood: A New Zealand perspective (5th ed.). Wellington, New Zealand: Bridget Williams Books.

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Snaza, N. (2013). Bewildering education. Journal of Curriculum and Pedagogy, 10(1), 38–54. https://doi.org/10.1080/15505170.2013.783889. St. Pierre, E. (2014). A brief and personal history of post qualitative research toward “post inquiry.” Journal of Curriculum Theorizing, 30(2), 2–19. Tesar, M., & Arndt, S. (2018). Posthuman childhoods: Questions concerning ‘quality.’ In M. Bloch, B. B. Swadener, & G. S. Cannella (Eds.), Reconceptualizing early childhood education and care: Foundational debates, new imaginaries, and social action/activism (pp. 113–128). New York, NY: Peter Lang. Tesar, M., & Jukes, B. (2018). Childhoods in the Anthropocene: Re-thinking young children’s agency and activism. In N. Yelland & D. Bentley (Eds.), Found in translation: Connecting reconceptualist thinking with early childhood education practices (pp. 76–90). New York, NY: Routledge. Tesar, M., Tong, Z., Gibbons, A., Arndt, S., & Sansom, A. (2019). Children’s literature in China: Revisiting ideologies of childhood and agency. Contemporary Issues in Early Childhood, 20(4), 381–393. https://doi.org/10.1177/1463949119888494. United Nations Human Rights, O. o. t. H. C. f. H. R. (1989). Convention on the rights of the child. Retrieved from https://www.ohchr.org/en/professionalinterest/pages/crc.aspx. Young, D. (2017). ‘Whanganui tribes – Ancestors’, Te Ara – the Encyclopedia of New Zealand. Retrieved from https://www.TeAra.govt.nz/en/photograph/2176/tamateas-cave.

Chapter 5

Posthuman Pedagogies in Childhoodnature

Abstract This chapter explores posthuman pedagogies as relational ontologies in childhoodnature. It situates the reconceptualization of children and childhoods in the Anthropocene, as with nature rather than outside of nature, to present a range of ways to think about humans, and particularly children and their encounters, relations and response-ability with the nonhuman world. The chapter engages with definitions of childhoods and childhood studies as a field to illustrate the blurring of the boundaries between children and nature, to acknowledge that children are nature, that we human/animals are always part of the ecosystem in which we are entangled. This chapter maps out the philosophical and pedagogical notions that underlie these ideas and their implications for a new lens on childhood studies. Using children’s images, texts and relations the chapter illustrates a pedagogical framing of child/nature by children that moves beyond human exceptionalism as a further response to the Anthropocene, and to living childhoods differently in the world. Keywords Posthuman pedagogies · Relational ontologies · Childhoodnature · Beyond human exceptionalism · Childhoods in the Anthropocene In this chapter we explore posthuman pedagogies that support relational ontologies in childhoodnature. Located at this time of the Anthropocene where we are seeking to expand our sense of ourselves with nature rather than outside of nature, the chapter presents a range of ways to think about humans, and particularly children and their encounters, relations and response-ability with the nonhuman world. Central to the chapter are questions about how to reconsider and reconfigure the role of human/nonhuman relations in children’s lives and how our thinking about children, childhoods and education may be central to this. We may also ask about whether definitions of childhoods and childhood studies as a field have been open enough to create the spaces around the edges for relational thinking and knowing? Frayed and loose at the borders, a posthuman reading of children and their relation with “nature” is always about connection rather than disconnection, seeking complexity by dissolving boundaries, rather than reducing knowing. Childhoodnature is used in this chapter to illustrate this blurring of the boundaries between children and nature,

© Springer Nature Singapore Pte Ltd. 2020 K. Malone et al., Theorising Posthuman Childhood Studies, Children: Global Posthumanist Perspectives and Materialist Theories, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-981-15-8175-5_5

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to acknowledge that children are nature, that we human/animals are always part of the ecosystem in which we are entangled. This chapter begins by mapping out the philosophical and pedagogical notions that underlie these ideas and their implications for a new lens on childhood studies. Then through children’s images, texts and relations the chapter engages in illustrating how a pedagogical framing of child/nature by children can provide new ways for all humans to consider how to move beyond human exceptionalism as a further response to naming the Anthropocene. The question this chapter raises in relation to children and childhoods is: “What would a world be that did not insist on human superiority or dominance and that did not disavow the human’s ecological entanglements?” (Snaza & Weaver, 2015, p. 3) and, it asks how could we come to know and let children be children and live childhoods differently in that world?

Time and Temporalities of Childhood(s)nature The idea of the Anthropocene asks hard questions of us. Temporally, it requires that we imagine ourselves as inhabitants not just of a human lifetime or generation, but also of “deep time” – the dizzyingly profound eras of Earth history that extend both behind and ahead of the present. Politically, it lays bare some of the complex cross-weaves of vulnerability and culpability that exist between us and other species, as well as between humans now and humans to come (Robert Macfarlane in The Guardian, April 2016).

In our earlier chapters we introduced the implications of naming the epoch of the Anthropocene. In this chapter we have the opportunity to take these implications and consider them more deeply, particularly in light of the impact of a precarious future for children and childhoods, and to address the question of what and how children/childhood respond to it. While the term “Anthropocene” (the epoch of the human) has been accepted in the geological discipline, there has been much debate about where the boundaries lie that would mark the arrival of this new epoch. Was it the Industrial Revolution in the eighteenth century, or the “great acceleration” of the mid-twentieth century, with its increasing population growth, carbon emissions, biodiversity loss, plastic production and nuclear bombs spreading detectable radiation to every level of the planet’s strata (Davies, 2016)? The Anthropocene may be a signifier for all of these geological markers, but for “childhoods” and “children” its purpose is more than a timeline of human degradation or technological hubris. It is a seismic tremor, an upheaval in our “business as usual” approach to living in the world with others. It illuminates the insatiable desire for humans, especially those entangled in capitalist manifestos, to consume and strip the planet of all its resources while pumping toxins into the earth’s systems. Humans who have mostly come to view human beings as separate, outside of nature, have a choice, to either respond to the crisis or continue looking the other way. Settler colonial stories often depend on views of humans as “independent” of the “world”, existing outside of the earth’s entangled enmeshed ecological systems.

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Recognising the Anthropocene opens up and reveals the destruction of such views and practices. It allows us to question what it means to live, to be human with the host of other beings that simultaneously inhabit the world. Nonhuman beings are beings that we have much in common with. We are more the same, as many of them, than different, and this refers to systems of beings outside of and inside our bodies. It brings into question the mantra that to be human is to be positioned within a universal story. Such questioning reveals that there is no such thing as a homogeneous human species that the scale and speed of anthropocentric ecological impacts are unequal, unethical and unjust, and that people of colour, females, those in poverty, children and nonhuman entities are deeply embedded in and disaffected by it. The Anthropocene as a rupturing force brings attention to our human animalness. That is, it emphasises that we are neither exempt from the ecological world nor exceptional, to those we are acting/being/dying in relation to. As an unsettling relational ontology, the concept of the Anthropocene disrupts a persistent separatist ontology. Dominated by a humanist paradigm in disciplines and fields of study such as childhoods, nature, or education, the Anthropocene and its onto-ethico-epistomology companion posthumanism allow spaces for new conversations to emerge, to disrupt human-dominated paradigms (Lloro-Bidart, 2015). In particular, as is explored in this chapter, it creates spaces for questioning how to reconfigure new childhoodnature possibilities. This focus on shifting away from a romanticised or humanistic view of the humanculture/nature relationship has been a feature of scholarship in a range of disciplines evolving over many years/centuries (Head, 2016; Malone, 2016a, 2018). Disciplines, such as environmental education, childhood sociology, urban planning and urban studies, landscape architecture and environmental psychology, have been slow to contest human-culture/nature binaries and human exceptionalism in particular. The outcome has been a strong humanistic and deterministic paradigm that has been influential and resulted in the conception of the childhoodnature field. The resurgence of a “childhood and nature” education movement has the potential to be influential; however, the key message promoted by organisations and people supporting this movement relies heavily on the currency of adult sentimentality about children’s apparent loss of nature connections (Malone, 2016a). This loss is often attributed to the consequences of growing up in contemporary—often white middle class—urban society and the implications of this for children’s lives. But where do these views come from? Are they true for all children, not just those living in US (where the main influencers reside)? And how do these views influence how educators and researchers come to believe what it means to be a “child” in/with/as “nature”. Particularly, it is interesting to contemplate the implications on these discussions when they are underpinned quite liberally by a number of key anthropocentric views (Rautio, 2013b, p. 449), such as that (1) human societies used to be closer to nature (2) our current way of life is unnatural or distant from nature (3) proximity to nature is a question of learning (and teaching)

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These sentiments support the perception that humans are not nature and that it is possible for humans to be connected or disconnected from nature. Rather than continue to reinforce these views we are considering what possibilities exist to challenge these enduring perceptions, to explore how posthuman and materialist approaches could unsettle mainstream binaries such as nature/culture, human/nature, object/subject and allow possibilities for a relational childhoodnature to emerge. Taylor (2013), who has worked extensively on unpacking these new approaches for childhood educators writes: … such conversations have constellated around the challenge of thinking differently about nature, as well as what it means to be human. Those involved have undertaken to reconceptualize what counts as nature outside the bounds of the nature/culture divide, to build connections rather than rehearse separation” (p. 66).

Deconstructing child–nature–culture binaries using posthuman theories have in recent times become the focus of work by a number of childhood authors (LenzTaguchi, 2010; Rautio, 2013a, 2013b; Taylor, 2011, 2013). The work of these authors provides important foundations for structuring how we came to think firstly about the purpose of Western education and to question its contribution to stories of human exceptionalism. They inform considerations of how education, namely, posthuman education, could blur distinctions between human and nonhuman; living and nonliving. Posthuman scholars emphasise blurring of disciplinary borders and binaries and have called for a new form of attentiveness that challenges divisive compartmentalising of “hard” and “soft sciences”; “natural” and “life sciences”; “social sciences” and “humanities” (Snaza, 2013). These artificial divides in childhood studies and education have reiterated battles over territory and temporalities and locate debates about meaning making in silos. Taylor (2011) proposed a challenge to childhood educators to open up spaces for more generous opportunities for interconnectedness as a step towards an attentive posthuman politics: … in encouraging childhood scholars to engage with geography’s hybrid nature/culture analytic, I am not seeking to provide an answer to the ‘nature’ of childhood but to open it up to a new form of political enquiry which attends to the interconnectedness of the human and more-than-human world (p. 432).

Childhoodnature was a term devised by Cutter-Mackenzie, Malone, and Barratt to signify this impossibility of a childhood disconnect from nature that Taylor (2011) alludes to in her early writings and Malone (2016a, 2016b, 2018, 2019a) further unpacks and discusses in her reconfiguring of the child and nature debate. Childhoodnature acknowledges this history of understandings, ideologies and philosophies around children, childhood and nature including indigenous, queer and ecofeminist, that have argued for children to be reinserted into the life of the planet as co-relational beings with all things. The International Research Handbook on Childhoodnature was compiled as a means to consolidate the field of childhoodnature research and provide an avenue for considering the terrain that lay ahead to continue to build the influence and impact of the field. As the editors of this handbook argue:

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The use of the new concept “childhoodnature” reflects the editors’ and authors’ underpinning belief, and the latest innovative concepts in the field, that as children are nature this should be redefined in this integrating concept. The book will therefore critique and reject an anthropocentric view of nature. As such it will disrupt existing ways of considering children and nature and reject the view that humans are superior to nature (p. 3).

Childhoodnature Disconnect Redefining the role of nature in children’s lives has had a significant resurgence in education, particularly in Western countries. In recent times this attention has primarily been orchestrated around a fear that children are lacking opportunities to be “connected to nature”. The consequence of advancing technology and urbanisation and changing “childhoods” are often cited as the reason that previous generations had more freedom, more time and more immersion in natural environments. Arguments supporting the implications of this disconnect on children’s health and well-being have been substantial and a significant array of cross-disciplinary research studies are now available (Gill, 2007, 2011; Louv, 2005; Malone & Waite, 2016). The reports mostly focus on the impact of social fears and risk taking on teachers’ and parents’ decisions to decrease children’s freedom to play and be in nature (Malone, 2007, 2013a; Malone & Tranter, 2003; Tranter & Malone, 2004). Nature as an object or resource for improving a child’s life has been specifically connected directly to a long list of ongoing health implications for children’s growing up in sedentary lifestyles. Medical experts have over the past few decades shown ongoing concern about increased levels of obesity in children and adults as an epidemic in Western society (Stubbs & Lee, 2004; Waters & Baur, 2003), with a lack of exercise, obesity and sedentary lifestyles being linked to diseases such as Type II diabetes. Natural environments have been seen as an essential component of supporting healthy human lives and reports document positive links between nature and human health, social and psychological functioning. A range of research studies have identified that human (child) benefits from exposure to green environments (parks, forests, gardens, school grounds) and conversely, that humans (in particular children) with less access to green places report having more medical symptoms and poorer health overall. Researchers have argued a move away from children being active in play and leisure activities in the outdoor places as a product of challenges facing families in contemporary Western society. Beyond the health implications of sedentary lifestyles there have been many claims made in the literature about the importance of children spending time outdoors for their emotional health. According to Kuo and Taylor (2004) contact with the natural world can significantly reduce symptoms of attention deficit disorder in children as young as five years old; green plants and vistas reduce anxiety levels among highly stressed children. Wells and Evans (2003) argued that locations with a greater number of plants, greener views and access to natural play areas show even more significant results. Research studies have revealed that access to natural spaces, and even a view of nature, enhances peace, self-control and self-discipline within inner city

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youth, and particularly in girls. They are more likely to feel confident and connected to others rather than anxious and depressed. What these studies have argued over a number of decades is that children losing the freedom to play, explore and be physically active in their environment has had a significant impact on children’s capacity for developing healthy bodies and healthy lifestyles (Gill, 2011; Kearns et al., 2003; Malone, 2007; Malone & Waite, 2016; Prezza et al., 2005). Gill (2011) stated in his review of evidence: “Taken as a whole, the studies confirm that spending time in nature is part of a ‘balanced diet’ of childhood experiences that promote children’s healthy development, well-being and positive environmental attitudes and values” (p. 8). Gill’s review also provided some indication that specific types of outdoor experiences are associated with different outcomes. Even though these are all pervasive arguments, they are essentially anthropocentric, as nature is denigrated to a mere resource for human consumption, in this case a remedy to improve the quality of child human lives. At times even the medicalised language used is central to the arguments, nature deficit syndrome, nature as a prescription drug, “vitamin N” for children with ADHD. What we are interested in though is not this constructed epidemic of fear and deficit of children’s lives, but a focus on the potential to consider new ways of thinking about “childhood” and “nature” that are productive and provide openings for new reconfigurings. After the release of his book Last Child in the Woods, Louv (2005) contributed significantly to discussions around children’s disconnection with nature and argued it was a “modern” childhood condition. He coined this disconnect through the pseudo-medical term, nature deficit disorder. Although this term has sometimes been mistaken as a real medical condition in one of his lectures in Australia he described how the term came from the publishers, who felt it would be a good way to market the book, as it responded directly to the public concerns at the time around the diagnosing of ADHD and other deficit conditions and the prescribing of drugs to very young children. Building on the work of Kahn and Kellert (2002) and those progressing Wilson’s (1984) notion of Biophilia, Louv argued in his books that children had an innate desire to be connected to “nature” and unlike generations before them modern society was denying children this inherent yearning to have a nature-filled childhood. According to his book (Louv, 2005), wild or pure nature is ultimately the best type of nature for children and nature is the “the outdoors, anything that is natural—not human-made in the physical environment” (p. 9). He writes “… when I use the word ‘nature’ in a general way I mean natural wilderness, biodiversity, abundance—related loose parts in a backyard or a rugged mountain ridge. Most of all, nature is reflected in our capacity for wonder” (p. 9). Nature is mostly positioned as an “object”, a “resource” available to humans who are outside of nature, not nature. Louv’s (2005) book and the subsequent publishing by the children and nature network have been criticised for reiterating a romantised view of nature (Malone, 2016a, 2016b, 2018). They depict nature as a restorative, wonderous “place” that nurtures and supports children. Dickinson (2013), for example, claims Louv’s book reiterates a fall-recovery narrative. Fall-recovery narratives according to Dickinson is a form of reminiscing, where the past is always seen to be “good” and “virtuous”. Dickinson (2013) wrote: “Fall-recovery narratives can be problematic in how they

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reify the human-nature split, obscure environmental justice, influence irresponsible behaviour, and normalise contemporary conditions and relationships” (p. 7). Childhood potential becomes a utopian dream where in the past all children were safer, had more freedom to be “children”, and were left to explore nature (particularly wild nature) without adult interference (Malone, 2016a, 2018). This emphasis on romanticising these past lives of children normalises a “perfect” universal childhood—a kind of Disneyfied childhood (Taylor, 2013) where nature as object, as resource, becomes accessible to all, where the wild means freedom and where the dominant shared parenting style is “benign neglect” (Gill, 2007). This romanticised position obscures any new imagining of children’s encounters with the nonhuman world, and instead focuses on “… a reunion of humans with the rest of nature” (Louv, 2011, p. 3) where human is still “master” and in control of this situation. This child-nature reconnect is reliant on a socially shared belief that past generations had a closer and more intimate relationship with the planet. It “de-emphasises”, according to Dickinson (2013), “a long history of environmental degradation and disconnectedness” (p. 7) where being in “nature” may have represented a diversity of possibilities, some not positive (Malone, 2015, 2018). This utopian white middleclass Western model makes experiences of children in less developed nations or in disadvantaged communities in Western countries, renders invisible children who grow up in environments that were less than ideal (see Malone 2019 on walking-with children in blasted landscapes). It silences children’s desires for potentially different relations with the nonhuman world no matter how challenging that may be. For Dickinson (2013, p. 7): “Fall-recovery, then, is a subjective cultural creation in how it positions the kind of nature and childhood to which humans should return” a kind of nature dreamed up by, “ … white, middle class, male, heterosexual cultural past that obscures race, class and gender politics”. The argument being purported is that children in the twenty-first century are being limited in their opportunity to access “nature” due to: fears about children’s safety in general across broader society (evidenced in traditional media and social media); the absence of natural places close or in their homes; the challenges of negotiating growing up in busy middle-class families where time is no longer available to play; the increase of traffic in congested city spaces; and shorter, more structured outdoor times during school times because the business of schooling is about learning literacy and numeracy in the classroom (Malone, 2007, 2016a). According to ongoing research, time set aside for free-play has been markedly reduced for children over the last few decades (Burdette & Whitaker, 2005; Muñoz, 2009) yet at the same time an alternative growing body of literature has argued for free-play in natural environments for children (Bragg et al., 2013; Gill, 2011; Malone & Waite, 2016; Wells & Evans, 2003). It is generally viewed there has been a downward trend in children’s time in natural environments and that this is the universal experience of children. But this is not the reality. Children in many low-income nations spend a lot more time out of doors and can, but not always, have more free time to play, than children in Western high-income urban spaces (Malone, 2018). Recently, evidence has emerged on Australian cities that contests the past claims of children’s movements being more restricted now than in past decades. Instead,

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this research argues that there have been some positive trends showing children are experiencing more freedoms, not everywhere, but certainly in some pockets of Australian society, where parents are recognising and encouraging children to play outdoors more, and walk to school (Schoeppe et al., 2015). It is argued by some that the advent of forest schools, bush kinder and publicity over the value of these learning styles has contributed greatly to a more sympathetic view by educators and parents to rethink their fears of children being outside. Overall though, any universalising of a child/children’s life experiences can be very detrimental to understanding a non-universal relational childhood (this was explored in Chap. 2). Therefore, these discussions about the child-nature disconnect continue to highlight that when “child” or “childhood” becomes itself a narrow disconnected concept, clearly identified by statements starting with “all children”, the individual and diverse experiences of children are lost to a universalised notion of child/childhood and a “normalised” iconic view of the world. This iconic figure is mostly based on the imaginary life of a middle class, Westernised idealised childhood. This focus on “reconnecting” children to nature also reiterates the power of binaries and a human-nature divide, that positions human as “exceptional” and outside of nature, while all the time seeking to invite nature in, but only under a colonising domination (Cronon, 1995). Clarke and Mcphie (2014) share in these concerns and identified that in the fields of outdoor and environmental education research many authors still do not realise: “…the impossibility of a ‘disconnection’”, quoting from the work of Morton (2007), they state that we cannot mourn for the loss of a connection to nature “because we are so deeply attached to it—we are it” (Clarke & Mcphie, 2014, p. 11).

Posthuman Pedagogies Posthuman pedagogies are educational practices and possibilities for being with and learning through shared ways of knowing, being and becoming worldlings. Haraway (2016) refers to becoming with as “worlding”—the way in which earthlings/living beings/entities/forces make and remake the world by affecting each other. To affect and be affected by the world, sensing and knowing through our bodies means to be located within, not outside of the ecological systems of our planet. Ecological communities, where “beings”, “objects” and “subjects” exist together, means we humans cannot be exempt from the consequences of being in this common world with others. We are no longer the master of a nonhuman and human destiny that we have solely designed (Braidotti, 2013). Haraway (2016) urges for us to join forces with our kin species. Our promise of a posthuman pedagogy and philosophy of childhood starts with a recognition that we are animal, we are nature and we carry the ghostly tracings of this shared past. As adult [white] privileged human beings, we have become estranged, othered, from the planet and from our bodies, the ghosts of our past we hold within exposes us. But we are tied together by a genealogy, a history of our bodies entangled on this landscape with others. Noticing attunes us

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to worlds otherwise unrecognised and reconfiguring our sensing of bodies forces us into a new recognition of our histories. To reconfigure childhood in the Anthropocene is to consider what it means to be in the world sharing life with others. A pedagogy of posthumanism as illustrated in the writings of Malone (2016a, 2016b, 2018), for example, provides a paradigm shift that can change the lens through which childhood has been understood. She argues that the notion of “posthuman ecological communities”, which she has adopted from the writing of Smith (2013), is not the same as calls for “environmental collective action” emanating from political ecology or deep ecology, and some of the more activist branches of sustainability education that she has been aligned within the past. The position emanates from an understanding that the “collective” has always been constituted by humans and nonhumans alike. Posthuman ecological communities, then, decentre the human, in a collective approach that is largely rendered invisible in traditional developmental, critical and socio-cultural readings of childhood. Indigenous, First Nation, Aboriginal approaches and pedagogies strongly emphasise humans as embedded with all entities and objects in the world, in deeply relational ways, as reflected in M¯aori beliefs and understandings of ontology and epistemology, for example (Jones & Hoskins, 2016; Roziek, Snyder, & Pratt, 2019). In a similar way, posthuman pedagogies always come back to relationality, how we come to be together in the world with others, a host of others, in awkward uneasy encounters, that help us understand our own humanness, while always pressing us to look outside of our humanness. Such an approach calls for an openness that means “attending more closely to understandings of nonhumans garnered from the practice and experience of co-relationality” (Johnson, 2002, p. 19). To illustrate the potential for a new way of considering how pedagogies might operate in a posthuman learning space the following key concepts frame the posthuman pedagogical approaches: sensorial, encounters, relations and responseability. They support imaginary possibilities for encountering children’s experiences of being nature and shared worlding. By walking with children in landscapes using photographs, video captures, drawings and stories they explore their world as speculative possibilities, a life recognised as messy entanglements with others. In what follows, we illustrate through a number of diverse narratives of children’s relational encounters with the nonhuman world, examples of posthuman pedagogical practices. The photographs, drawings, body gestures, silences and conversations presented were all collected during walking-with activities in public places with children aged from 2 to 15 years old (Malone, 2018, 2019a, 2019b).

Sensorial as Pedagogy “The body is a profusion of sensory experience. It is absorbed in the movement of the world and mingles with it through all its senses”, argues Le Breton (2017, p. 1). Children’s bodies are a contested domain. Whether through biological determinism or social constructivism, diverse approaches to researching children’s bodies take on

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a certain mode of analysis that focuses on the external ways that children’s bodies either act, are acted upon or act with other humans. The study exploring this pedagogical practice was built on a long history of research in environmental education that has focused on children’s experiences of natural environments and the unique opportunities that rich sensory interactions with the environment can provide (Abram, 1996; Beery & Jorgensen, 2018; Carson, 1965; Chawla, 1994, 2002; Cobb, 1993; Lekies & Beery, 2013; Nabhan & Trimble, 1994; Rautio, 2013a; Sobel, 2001, 2008; Wells & Lekies, 2006). Bodies sensing ecologically is a pedagogical practice that allows an imagining of how children engage and communicate with the nonhuman prior to “human language and naming”. In the process of acquiring “humanness,” particularly through discursive languages, adult humans can often disregard child’s embodied sensitivities and sensorial forms of communication. Sensorial communication is a dominant form of communication for human babies and toddlers (Hackett & Rautio, 2019) and for many nonhuman mammals. We propose that a desire to focus on supporting the “naming of objects and experiences” reiterates and imposes a humanist pedagogical project and neglects the potential for affirming children’s ways of being with nonhuman animals; plants; the weather; water; and materials through their bodies. To embark on sensorial ecological pedagogies with children we must be attentive to the very subtle encounters and sensitivities of a child with her/other bodies. The writings of Hultman and Taguchi (2010) engage with such ideas, where the child is emergent in a relational field, “a space in which nonhuman forces are equally at play and work as constitutive factors in children’s learning and becomings” (p. 257). Such a pedagogy challenges “anthropocentric ways of seeing and doing analysis of educational data” (p. 257). Meaning that through bodies, sensual knowing emerges as the means for making sense of things in the act of sensing. In Le Breton’s (2017) recent book “Sensing the World” he describes the shift in his thinking from an engagement with the anthropology of the body to an anthropology of the senses. Emerging from the work in the 1970s from scholars such as Foucault who focused on the “body” as an object, Le Breton (2017) is interested in how the body is the existential ground for perception and being, where “before thought there is feeling” (p. 1). A sensorial ecological pedagogy reclaims the presence-ing of the body as the in-between. It recognises the assemblage of knowing and being, sensing and sense-making, as, for example, in the following child–dog encounters (Fig. 5.1). Animal but not only rollings over rollings over encounterings mimicry free grasses greening stretching scratching

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Fig. 5.1 Animal but not only. Credit Karen Malone

bodies shadowing deepening recognition grasses greening grasses greening not only entwined joys tangled knowing rollings over rollings over Kin Child–dog encounters in this series of photographs taken from a 3-min video on Malone’s iPhone attune us to the joy of being animal in relation with another animal (Malone, 2019b, 2020). The child engaging in dog body mimicry experiences the joy of rollings over through her body with the dog, scratching, being body with grass in the sunny field of an urban park. Wren, 2 years old looks over to see “are we still worlding this moment together”, then continues on. The dog looks to her and notices

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“we are being together in our grassy rollings over” and barks and begins rolling over some more. Massumi (2015) explains that attending more closely to understandings of nonhumans garnered from the practice and experience of co-relationality allows us to be open to learning to be “affected” by what we experience rather than documenting what we observe. Snaza et al. (2014) suggest that bodies as sensorial objects can attune to our relationality with others; while Ingold (2010) speaks of attending to it. Luc Nancy (1997) identifies beings-in-common as the means for acknowledging our coexistence in the world with a range of others and Marisol de la Cadena (2015) draws on her work with Indigenous peoples in the Andes to propose that we are all “more than one—less than many”. The purpose of being or making “kin”, according to Haraway, is to recognise the coming together of different entities who may not be tied purely by ancestry or genealogy. She argues that the stretch and re-composition of kin represents the understanding that earthlings are all kin in the deepest sense— kin becomes the purest of entities in assemblages of the human, more-than-human, and other than human, and by the fact that “all earthlings are kin in the deepest sense, and it is past time to practice better care of kinds-as-assemblages” (Haraway, 2015, p. 162) (Fig. 5.2). Child–duck bodies Can I come with you? Will you wait for me? Follow us, follow us, come this way. We will wait for you. We are walking being with water We are hopping up on to this smooth surface, higher Can you climb up? We will wait Walk along with us Follow us, follow us, come this way

Fig. 5.2 Child-duck bodies. Credit Karen Malone

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The child–ducks encounter arises within the coolness of the water spraying from the fountain into the air, breathing in and breathing out. We are all in the shadow of a large tree whose branches sweep across the dirt. As observers, we watch her outstretched hand in her desire to be within relation. She speaks to them but no words are used. They walk pausing, as if to check that she is coming. They hop up on to the ledge of the fountain. Just a couple of steps behind, she follows them, crawls cautiously up on to the ledge of the fountain with them. The ducks are looking back seeing that her body is now on the ledge with them. They start to walk on again, in unison, ahead of her, she follows, eye keenly watching. She seems to be knowing how to be close, to be in relation. They move across the circular patterning of the fountain ledge; child–duck in rhythmic imitation. We quietly accompany her, standing just behind to help her if she needs support. But she only looks our way briefly. She is sensing we are there. She walks slowly and cautiously, emulating the traces of the ducks on the concrete ledge, those who are so experienced at navigating these watery edges. In this example, child sensorial body experiences as a pedagogical practice emphasise a longing to communicate with the nonhuman world through sensorial knowing, flowing potential. Child bodies become an “open-ended swirl of extensions and supplementations” (Hultman & Lenz Taguchi, 2010, p. 531) emerging in these narratives through stones, dogs, water, ducks, sand and the sky. Hultman and Lenz Taguchi (2010) alert us to the ways in which the child is emergent in a relational field, “a space in which nonhuman forces are equally at play and work as constitutive factors in children’s learning and becomings” (p. 257). Looking for pedagogies outside of learning that is observation and language focused. We seek to disrupt and unlearn pedagogical practices that focus on naming the world, engaging with predetermined objects or phenomena that are structured with limited sensorial possibilities. We propose instead a pedagogy of noticing and attuning to a young child’s sensorial ecological encounters. Bodies sensing ecologically allows for a pedagogy of walking, slowing, deepening, foraging and attuning as pedagogical practice. This work requires an unlearning of anthropocentrism, a troubling of the privilege of language, where text is central to child–body–knowing.

Encounters as Pedagogy Research has illustrated that children’s place encounters are not always based on the specific qualities of landscapes, but on the meanings and opportunities the materials in places had during the encounter with the child/children. The above two illustrations demonstrate such temporal-place encounters as human geographer Massey (2005) calls “throwntogetherness”, describing it as “the politics of the event of place” (p. 142). She argues that places pose particular questions of our ability for living together with humans and others, and what being in this place as other reveals. This thinking draws on philosophers like Gilles Deleuze, who are concerned with different “modes of encounter” that elaborate meanings of “difference” and “multiplicities”. Deleuze’s work suggests that what is presented through research is not something

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that can be analysed through texts, linguistic methods or representations, but that the focus turns, rather, towards how encounters with difference make bodies feel; the nonrepresentable that churns your stomach, draws your attention, makes you look again, to wonder or be surprised (Aitken, 2010). Children, by virtue of their both biophysical and socially and culturally constructed existence, often seem to apply what is described as an aesthetic-affective openness towards material surroundings. That is, they show “an attentiveness to and sensuous enchantment by nonhuman forces, an openness to be surprised and to grant agency to nonhuman entities” Rautio (2013a, p. 2). When Richard (age 6) opens up his packet of photographs during the workshops in Brimbank (Malone, 2008), a working-class suburb in Melbourne, Australia, he is instantly drawn to the photograph below that he had taken from sitting in his parents’ car. Malone (2008) asks him why he had taken the photograph, to which he responds “I like clouds they look like love hearts and they hold me” he ran his finger around the clouds (Figs. 5.3 and 5.4). Maverick (age 13) is walking along the steep ravines of the valley around where he lives in Cotahuma La Paz and takes this photograph. He shares it with Malone (2013a, 2013b) during her study of children living in these communities in the high reaches of the valley. He sits with her and explains: “My favourite walk is through the forest I am one with the trees, I like the shade and mountain views”. While some may read this as a romanticised view of his relations with trees and mountains, the sensual joy of becoming one with trees could be described more as a sensorial “affective” relation. Sensorial ecological encounters lead to new possibilities for

I like clouds they look like love hearts and hold me-Richard age 6 –Brimbank Australia

Fig. 5.3 Cloudy Love hearts. Photo taken by Richard (age 6), Brimbank, Australia. Credit Karen Malone

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Fig. 5.4 My favourite forest walk. Photo taken by Maverick, (age 13), Cotahuma, La Paz. Credit Karen Malone

imagining a relationship with the nonhuman that recognises an ecological entanglement; a knowing that to feel and know a tree we must look outside of our everyday abstract representations of tree and come to know it as intimate lively companion. The commentary the children provided about their photographs and drawings show evidence of an aesthetic-affective openness as the means through which children describe their encounters with the nonhuman objects around them (Fig. 5.5). Logan (age 10) took this photograph while walking in her neighbourhood during a research project in her local primary school. She explains to Malone (2011) the focus of the photograph was to capture the farmhouse as one of her favourite places to play. And like Maverick she also explains the affective encounter of being with the trees as a sensorial experience: “The old farmhouse is a good place to build cubbies and climb trees because I can just be”. Lachlan who also lives in the same neighbourhood as Logan describes how he also has encounters with the mountain as a sensorial experience, “My place has beautiful nature. The mountains whisper to me in my dreams” (Malone, 2011) (Fig. 5.6). And across the other side of the planet in a totally different landscape Rodrigo (age 6) also explains again the joy of living with mountains as a sensorial emotional encounter, “The Illimani mountain is in this photo and a view over the city of La Paz. I can see Illimani from my house when sunshine hits the snow it fills me with joy” (Malone, 2013a, 2013b) (Fig. 5.7). This notion of aesthetic-affective openness by children through their encounters with nonhuman entities might be akin to “old ways” that we considered and described encounters as creating a sense of wonder. Childhoodnature encounters though are not always restorative, healthy or as spiritually uplifting as nostalgic romanticised views provided by champions of the nature education movement like Louv might

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Fig. 5.5 The old Farmhouse. Photo taken by Logan (age 10), Dapto NSW. Credit Karen Malone

Fig. 5.6 Whispering Mountains. Photo taken by Lachlan (age 11), Dapto, NSW. Credit Karen Malone

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Fig. 5.7 Snow fills me with Joy. Photo taken by Rodrigo (age 6), Munyapata, La Paz Bolivia. Credit Karen Malone

suggest. Hordyk et al. (2014) reporting on immigrant and refugee children in Canada recently revealed: “Nature was not a utopian ideal waiting to be experienced by children” and “human and animal predators made walks in a forest dangerous pasttimes” (p. 6) for these children. The world “outdoors” for these and many children in both so-called developed and developing nations is a potentially harmful place. How children engage with these spaces differs enormously from children growing up in middle-class suburbia, and it is this universalising of childhood experiences that is seldom discussed in the pedagogies of childhood research. Anna (age 11), who lives in Kazakhstan, after showing her drawing to Malone (2015) talks about her love for mountains, “I love mountains because there is no mountains in our city. I love nature and animals. I would like to walk in the mountains, which would be interesting. I want to take pictures of healthy animals. I would want to explore the underwater world. And I would want to dance because of being happy to be breathing fresh air and be away from the pollution and the polygon”. The polygon is the nuclear testing site near where she lives that has been decommissioned, but its history as a site for testing bombs during the cold war period seeps into children’s thoughts and crowds their experience of everyday encounters with the earth (Fig. 5.8). In Semey, Kazakhstan, walking-with children means going into neighbourhoods where dogs are encountered differently (Malone, 2015). The children recognise the fragility of human and nonhuman life and its link to the contaminated earth. Children speak often of the dust, the dirt, the air—the way it infiltrates everything. “There are dead dogs in the streets they say with cancerous tumours” says one of children while walking. Timur finds a dead dog and takes a photograph of it: “I am afraid of the street dogs on the way home. The dead dogs stink” (Malone, 2015) (Fig. 5.9).

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Fig. 5.8 Breathing Fresh air. Drawing by Anna (age 11), Semey, Kazakhstan. Credit Karen Malone

Fig. 5.9 Dead Dogs. Photo by Timur (age 13), Semey, Kazakhstan. Credit Karen Malone

In Dapto, NSW, Australia, Peter shares the places where he can’t go and takes a photograph of an area of land not far from his house. He walks there with his big sister. Peter (age 4) states he would not normally be able to visit this place but because he was taking photographs for the project his mother let him; “This place is

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Fig. 5.10 Can’t go here. Photo taken by Peter (age 4) Dapto, NSW, Australia. Credit Karen Malone

near my house but I can’t go there to play it is scary – I would still like to go though but my mum won’t let me” (Malone, 2015) (Fig. 5.10). In drawing on the affective openness of children challenging encounters of being in deadly relation with others in cities like Semey in Kazakhstan and in the out of bounds areas of a suburban housing estate in Australia, reveals the lively matter of such materials such as dirt, dust, air, radiation, as significant entities in child–nature–bodies encounters.

Relations as Pedagogy Decentering the human subject, by blurring boundaries to engage with and through “other relations”, builds a sense of belonging. It recognises ways of already being worldly with others, disrupting conceptions of the human as bounded, closed and instead as always in relation to other things and beings. “Humans are nature in relation to and constituted by all other animate or non-animate co-existing entities” argues Rautio (2013a, p. 1). Humans like all animals know the world through moving and acting in it. They exist in dynamic relational systems with their surroundings. Humanity has relied on this system of human–nonhuman place relation longer than this short epoch of the Anthropocene, where we have sought to reconstitute human as separate/outside of nature. Animals and humans stand in “systems” or “ecological” relation to the environment, such that to adequately explain these relations it was necessary to study the environment or niche in which the encounters took place.

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Utilising the conceptual tool of intra-action as proposed by Barad (2007) our diffractive theorising provides an opportunity to view interdependent entities such as human/nature as co-emerging. Following this way of thinking, we are always emerging, in and because of relational encounters as and with ourselves and other things and beings with whom we are in relationship. This section illustrates relational knowing as co-existing with and through bodies (Fig. 5.11). A posthuman reading of child–dog encounters in La Paz by Malone (2013b) helps to unpack further the political, ethical and ontological questions of nonhuman encounters that are connected to a deep sense of intra-species interdependence. The posthuman reading of children dog stories exposes the physicality of the relationships, “the tactile and embodied reality of knowing animals” and what it “means to live as child in oneness with dogs” (Malone, 2013b, 2018) (Fig. 5.12). During her visit in La Paz, Malone (2018) noted in her field notes a conversation with Juan: Juan hands me a photograph and describes his relationship with Coco, and states “Coco was my best friend. He was near me, always he was near me. He hears me, he was always with me. He understands the things I want. He always comes with me into the forest to play. He is my play mate. He was the same as a human friend, it was no difference between us as friends” child-dog bodies, and “being together” in co-habitation (see more on this in the section on response-ability) in La Paz is more likened to Donna Haraway’s (2015) notion of “making kin” (Fig. 5.13).

Fig. 5.11 My Best Friend. Photo taken by Ricado (age 10), Cotahuma, La Paz. Credit Karen Malone

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Fig. 5.12 Child-dog forest walks. Photo taken Juan (age 10), Cotahuma, La Paz. Credit Karen Malone

Fig. 5.13 Child-dog shared relations. Photo taken Diego (age 12), Cotahuma, La Paz. Credit Karen Malone

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Fig. 5.14 Chasing grubs. Matt’s drawing of “Sally and him chasing grubs in the gardens”. Credit Karen Malone

Diego’s (age 12) from Cotahuma, La Paz, had taken a number of photographs of stray street dogs, the ones who often accompanied him as he also walked around the streets. Diego hands me a photograph … where I can see a dog high up on a roof alone looking down he explains: “This photograph is of a dog that I take care of because it doesn’t eat. The dogs are badly treated and the people beat them for no reason [pause] a bit like the children [he giggles as he looks at his photograph] sometimes we hide on the rooftops to be off the streets with the dogs”. The other photograph in your hand? “That is the dog that sometimes gets beaten, the streets are dangerous for us, children and dogs I mean”. Kin relationships emerge in this study of childhoodnatures in La Paz as a deep sensitivity by the children when describing child–dog relations (Malone, 2013b, 2018) (Fig. 5.14). Similarly, Malone (2016b) observes the following child-insect relations: Sally, Matt and another boy, Lachlan watch the grubs. Matt observes the grubs and explains, “Most witchetty’s sniff their butts”. Matt wraps a worm around his finger and says, “It’s tight, like a real snake.” Pam comes over to see what they are doing. They show her the “worm snake” as they call it. Pam states that worms do not like being squashed. After Pam leaves Jackie comes over. They give her a grub. She says “Ewe!” and throws it back. But she stays and watches. Matt says “Who wants me to kill a worm?”. Three children answer “Me”. Ed and a boy are saying “Kill the butchie boys.” Ed says “Every bad spider you should kill.” He says that they found a white tail and Sally killed it. Violence towards the more-than-human world by the children can be contradictory and ambiguous. Sally and Matt say they love “nature” and at other times they want to “kill it”. They collect the grubs so they can explore possibilities, including crushing and killing worms and witchetty grubs, swinging them to scare others and show their power in controlling their bodily behaviours. Throughout the grub encounters the children simultaneously love, hurt, help, free and take captive the animals. What do the grubs do to the children? The notion of the co-emerging encounters to be and know interspecies relations allows us to consider that grubs are doing/producing children and in the same way researchers/adults are producing stories about these material encounters.

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Reflecting on Matt and Sally’s grub relations Malone (2016b) is interested in the question of “bad relations”—this is a concept given to her by an Aboriginal elder who talks of “bad relations” as the times when the relations are right, uneasy messy relations that need to be considered deeply, we need to stay with them, not to discard them. Children’s relational learning is not always harmonious and pleasant, is not always equal, and it does not offer us the “moral certitudes or simple escape routes” (Taylor, 2013) from the messy world in which we often find ourselves. By reimagining in a materialist manner these mattering of relations, we can seek to explore what Braidotti (2013) states is “the intricate web of interrelations that mark the contemporary subjects’ relationship to their multiple ecologies, the natural, the social, the physic” (p. 98). A feature of this new relational ontological perspective is that “it shifts from conceptions of objects and bodies as occupying distinct and delimited spaces, and instead sees human bodies and all other material, social and abstract entities as relational” and that these “…assemblages of relations develop in unpredictable ways” (Fox & Alldred, 2014, p. 3) (Fig. 5.15). Alana age 5, draws her dream place; “there are only apple trees and caterpillars and butterflies to eat the apples”—“and the children?”, Malone (2008) asks her as she points to the caterpillar. And Alana replies, “children they are caterpillars, both children and caterpillars that become butterflies”. These images conjure up uneasy questions. What does it mean for children to take up multiple subject positions human/nonhuman … children co-existing, co-mingling with animals, being animal,

Fig. 5.15 Caterpillars and Butterflies. Drawing by Alana (age 5), Brimbank, Australia. Credit Karen Malone

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Fig. 5.16 Dreaming Cows. Photo by Logan (age 10), Dapto, Australia. Credit Karen Malone

being nature, blurring boundaries of who and what they can be and what they have become? (Fig. 5.16). Logan (age 10) is also dreaming about the possibilities of being in relation with other nonhuman animals, “This is the rough bush where we aren’t supposed to go. Part of me is there a cow, I dream of them”. Although she is not allowed to go into the area behind her house and be with the cow she can become in relation with cow in her imagination. She can be in relation through a sensorial connection, as a hoof sliding across the dusty track, sharing the sounds of the cockatoos screeching in the trees above them (Fig. 5.17). Brendan who lives close to Logan but is a little younger walks along the river banks with his mother and brother, says: “I feel the best when I go see the frogs at the river with my mum and brother, I saw a tadpole once that was almost a frog and it had three legs—sometimes I am a frog—so I use to be a tadpole”. Malone (2011) records Brendan taking this photograph in order to share his imagining of being with frog, or even becoming, frog (Fig. 5.18). Dane (age 5) from the Brimbank research study draws a picture which he calls “becoming whale”. He explains his drawing to Malone (2008) as she sits quietly in the classroom after the others have left, “This is a blue whale. It is the biggest in the world. We need to stop people killing whales. I am becoming a whale; I need to eat more. Blue is my favourite colour. But my family don’t like me”. Becoming animal is a strategy for the radical repositioning of the subject—it requires a form of estrangement, a shift away from hierarchical relations that privilege the human, to look for another way of engaging in relational understandings. How does Dane know about whales? His drawing is so detailed, so beautiful, the flow and

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Fig. 5.17 Sometimes I am a frog. Photograph by Brendan (age 6), Dapto, NSW, Australia. Credit Karen Malone

Fig. 5.18 Becomming Whale. Drawing by Dane (age 5), Brimbank, Australia. Credit Karen Malone

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Fig. 5.19 Growing with Tree. Drawing by Adaw (age 6), Brimbank Australia. Credit Karen Malone

form brings us into being with whale, illustrating his relational whale knowing. The use of becoming animal by Braidotti has been adopted from the work of Deleuze and Guattari who state (Fig. 5.19): “Becoming animal does not consist in playing animal or imitating an animal,” … “it is clear that the human being does not ‘really’ become an animal any more than the animal ‘really’ becomes something else…What is real is the becoming itself, the zone of becoming” (p. 237).

“This tree is growing; the flower is growing. The little thing in the grass is growing. There is a garden, but if a child wants to play soccer there, they can if they are growing with the tree”, Adaw (age 6) tells Malone (2008) as she draws this picture of her dream place. She is doing the work of difference, sensing where and how she is in relation with nonhuman—it is a dynamic active relation “growing with the tree” (Fig. 5.20). Caroline (age 5) sits besides the researcher, to discuss the contents of her dream drawing. “In my dream place I went to the park with friends. I took photos of the flowers. You can see me, I am dancing now I am so happy as a flower”. Malone (2008) recalls that sitting and talking about Caroline’s dream drawing. Caroline asks: “do you have my photographs?”. As she sifts through images, she takes out a number of them and lays them out. This is the “Being in the park” group she says. She has taken the photographs laying close to the earth, plants and flowers, immersing herself in the playground—she is blurring boundaries and bodies revealing intimate relations with park kin (Fig. 5.21).

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Fig. 5.20 As Happy as a Flower. Drawing by Caroline (age 5), Brimbank, Australia. Credit Karen Malone

Caroline then points at one photo: “This is the final one I call that ‘My dancing feet’”. Caroline’s photographs of “being in the park” provide a messy account of what Massey (2005) names as a “throwntogetherness” of living entities (Fig. 5.22). Another vignette from Malone’s (2008) notebook during her study in Brimbank: We are sitting together on a set of table and chairs constructed for small children. I feel uncomfortable, unstable, my knees are bent. I am slightly hunched over so I can watch attentively at the actions of the small child next to me, without getting too close. Sara (age 4) has the packet of developed photographs from the disposable camera she handed to me a week ago. She had run up to me with an air of excitement when I had arrived in the Kindergarten room. She wouldn’t be disappointed. I had the photographs. She opens the packet and starts to methodically pull each one out. She pauses at each, looks at it for a while, then places it on the table in front of her. She stops at one photograph and holds it in her hands. Putting aside the packet with the unviewed photographs still contained inside, she holds the photograph in both hands. From where I am sitting I can see the photograph she is holding has the trunk of two trees and the perspective is as if it was taken looking up into the tree from the ground. I pause and allow her to guide the process. “I took this in the park” she says quietly, almost like she is speaking to herself. I nod my head. “I am a leaf fallen from the tree”. She turns her head to see my reaction. I nod again. She pauses, still looking at me, “from that tree”, she says and points to the tree on the right of the photograph. She then gets off the chair on the floor beside me and lays down on her back. She is once again becoming a leaf. I sit still, quietly watching. She is still, quietly being a leaf. She is being and becoming leaf. Sara is exploring human and the nonhuman body as connected embodied, dynamic, relational. This discussion leads to the final key posthuman ecological pedagogical concept: the practice of response-ability.

130 Fig. 5.21 Being in the Park. Photographs taken by Caroline (age 5). Credit Karen Malone

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Relations as Pedagogy Fig. 5.21 (continued)

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Fig. 5.22 I am a leaf fallen from the tree. Source Photograph by Sara, aged 4 years, Brimbank. Credit Karen Malone

Response-Ability Sharing habitations with the nonhuman animates the posthuman predicament. It means becoming something new, being something different through the encounter, intra-acting at the level of bodies, sharing responsibility, belonging. In Chap. 4 we discussed the importance of shared agency as dependent on cultivating our capacity of response-ability. To cultivate response-ability we need to learn to live together well, where our “throwntogetherness” and not knowing becomes a strength rather than an inconvenience. Co-habitation always comes with this sense of response-ability, when we are kin together, we must also care, have a shared sense of belonging and responsibility for our nonhuman kin. Haraway (2016) writes: “Response-ability is both about absence and presence, killing and nurturing, living and dying—and remembering who lives and who dies” (p. 73). We are not alone even in our beds, we share beds, refrigerators, skin, bodies, histories and futures. The human story is always partial, it is always a-part of the storying of the world and all things. Just as Taylor (2013) wrote of children, we all need to come to know this new relational storying: … twenty-first century children need relational and collective dispositions, not individualistic ones, to equip them to live within the kind of world they have inherited …They will need a firm sense of shared belonging and shared responsibility … They will need to build upon a foundational sense of connectivity to this same natureculture collective (p. 117).

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How can our environmental concerns and responsibility be expressed as a shared sense of ethical justice and investment of all things; where children have collectively intra-acted with the multiple pedagogical and political ecologies of the planet. Considering new forms of co-habitation with and through these multispecies ethnographies of child–nonhuman relations supports the ongoing curiosity into possibilities for an ecological ethics that disrupts human exceptionalism: in the everyday and in our future dreaming-imaginings (Fig. 5.23). Diego (age 12) from La Paz draws a picture of his dream for a child friendly city: “I want the world, not just La Paz, to be a better place, so that there is not so much poverty for children or dogs. I want parks and places for everyone to play. Where we can fix up the mess adults have made”. He comes to that place in the middle, the response-ability of his humanness bares heavily on his desire to live in a world where there is a shared ethics and justice around all things. It is a shared multispecies troubling of who lives, who suffers and who dies in order to cultivate conditions for sustainability of all species. According to Haraway (2016), a feminist ecological ethic of response-ability takes seriously different forms of life in a multiple view of ecological relationality. Such a relationality can be seen in growing concerns over accelerating CO2 emissions. Response-ability was demonstrated in the children’s school strike movement across the globe, championed by teenage Swedish activist Greta Thunberg. Greta gave the following speech to MPs in the UK in April, 2019:

Fig. 5.23 Fixing up Adults Mess. Source Drawing by Diego (age 12), Cotahuma, La Paz. Credit Karen Malone

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I was fortunate to be born in a time and place where everyone told us to dream big; I could become whatever I wanted to. I could live wherever I wanted to. People like me had everything we needed and more. Things our grandparents could not even dream of. We had everything we could ever wish for and yet now we may have nothing. Now we probably don’t even have a future anymore. Because that future was sold so that a small number of people could make unimaginable amounts of money. It was stolen from us every time you said that the sky was the limit, and that you only live once. You lied to us. You gave us false hope. You told us that the future was something to look forward to. And the saddest thing is that most children are not even aware of the fate that awaits us. We will not understand it until it’s too late. And yet we are the lucky ones. Those who will be affected the hardest are already suffering the consequences. But their voices are not heard. Is my microphone on? Can you hear me? We children are not sacrificing our education and our childhood for you to tell us what you consider is politically possible in the society that you have created. We have not taken to the streets for you to take selfies with us, and to tell us that you really admire what we do. We children are doing this to wake the adults up. We children are doing this for you to put your differences aside and start acting as you would in a crisis. We children are doing this because we want our hopes and dreams back.

The school strikes created controversy in Australia, New Zealand and overseas. Many educators, parents and government authorities debated whether children should be allowed to strike, to take the response-ability into their own hands and argue for ecological changes. During the strike in Melbourne there were an estimated 50,000 young people marching along the streets. When asked, the young people said many of their teachers had indirectly supported them to come. Not by condoning their actions, but by being silent. One teacher at the strike had her class of year 4 (aged 9–10) students with her. She decided that as an educator it was an important learning experience and took a field trip to the city so the children could see and participate in the march if they wanted to (Fig. 5.24). Across Australia views were divided about whether children should take a day off school to protest. Many school Principals supported the march and encouraged children to attend saying it was important for children to be politically aware. “Young people should be politically aware and I’m delighted to see them speaking up about their future” (Mosman School Principal Elizabeth Stone ABC News 15/3/2019). The NSW Department of Education spokesperson made it clear schools should not be encouraging students to march when it released the following statement: “Any student not in class will be marked absent and unexplained absences may be subject to the schools disciplinary code” (ABC News 15/3/2019). The Prime Minister of Australia, Scott Morrison, added his voice to the fray when he stated: “Each day I send my kids to school and I know other members’ kids should also go to school but we do not support our schools being turned into parliaments. What we want is more learning in schools and less activism in schools” (The Guardian, November 26, 2018). What does response-ability mean for children’s learning? Will Facebook, Instagram, Twitter, Tik-Tok, Snapchat and other forms of social media become the sites for supporting a collective childhood voice, where a shared belonging and a shared response-ability for responding to the ecological crisis will be played out? Or alternatively, will children take over and drive curriculum content through their shared

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Fig. 5.24 Living on the Planet as if we have another one to go to. Climate Change School Strike, March 2019, Melbourne. Credit Karen Malone

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agency and concerns? How will education respond to this active rejection of traditional narratives of schooling by children? Posthuman pedagogies are critical in considering new ways of thinking about the educational encounters. Maybe, similarly to Greta Thunberg, it will be the children who will champion posthuman narratives and reconstruct considerations of what education is, what it looks like and how education can support children. Perhaps, as Snaza (2013) notes, when education “does not know where it is headed” that “is not its failure, but its virtue” (p. 49). Through the photographs and stories in this chapter, children explore their relations to the real and imagined spaces they co-inhabit with others. Noticing and attending to themselves and their lives through intra-actions with others has opened up a new form of political enquiry and interconnectedness of the human and the nonhuman. This chapter has expanded understandings of “ecology” beyond a hierarchical concept that positions the human at its pinnacle, to instead uncover a whole world of new material relations. These insights could be the new narrative for children/childhoods/nature and education that is not a heroic story of the human “saving the planet”, but a deep, slow pedagogy that seeks to be and know the world differently. They might position as possibilities for new imaginings, what Princess (age 5) reminds us of, in: “a world where children and animals are free” (Fig. 5.25).

Fig. 5.25 Aworld where children and animals are free. Source Dream world Drawing by Princess (age 5), Brimbank, Australia. Credit Karen Malone

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Learning with Childhoodnatures Posthuman pedagogies raise questions about what or who is viewed as nature, what is valued about nature and what happens when children are in nature relations with others (Malone, 2016a, 2016b). Learning to understand the complexity of our environments especially during these precarious times of the Anthropocene is critical for imagining a different type of future than the one presently predicted (Duhn, Malone, & Tesar, 2017; Malone, 2015; Taylor, 2016). We liken this to a question that Massey (2005) presented when she considered how we imagine the “spaces-ofbetweenness”. Spaces-of-betweenness, the in-between, does not allow for closure, there is no place where relational encounters of childhood otherness in, with, or as nature comes together without disruption or interrogation. We are multiple, always human, animal, nature, there is no “either—or”. A narrow focus on only the human subject to the detriment of “other” possible agentic subjects in the children and nature debate has seen a very limiting view of the potential for childhoodnature relations to be collective, expanding and unknowing. Taylor (2013) describes the recent conversations to expand the view of the childnature relation: … such conversations have constellated around the challenge of thinking differently about nature, as well as what it means to be human. Those involved have undertaken to reconceptualize what counts as nature outside the bounds of the nature/culture divide, to build connections rather than rehearse separations (p. 66).

Applying a posthuman pedagogy, engaging in open and broad concepts such as sensorial knowing, encounters, relations and response-ability as pedagogical principles, allows an opportunity for paying close attention, attuning to and noticing the everydayness of children’s lives, of being in relation, good or bad, with all other livings things. It involves looking for and seeking to capture complexity, following potential new ways of knowing and sensing; grappling with old ways of thinking and deepening our understandings, rather than narrowing them or reducing them to codes, categories or simple ideas. It means considering a vast array of forms of what comes to be co-mingling and co-habitation in childhood landscapes as the sites for reconstituting/reconfiguring the possibilities for posthuman pedagogies. These posthuman pedagogies are central for locating children and childhoods within, rather than outside of the natural ecologies. These pedagogies provide the openings to dismantle nostalgic, moralistic and aesthetic attitudes to nature that focus on the romantic protection of childhoods. Such reconfiguring and returning seeks to restore an onto-ethico-epistomological ecology that takes into account that children are of the world, they are nature, moving with and in relation with a host of other natures, and are never outside of nature.

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Concluding Comments The impact of urbanisation coupled with such global phenomena as climate change, toxic contaminations, waste, natural disasters, war and poverty means that many communities will face significant barriers to developing sustainably. The only way forward for many will be to embark on a process of rethinking how to address these Anthropocentric impacts as we consider new ways of being with the planet. We need to move away from an explanation of children’s environmental encounters from a humanist perspective where we: “… understand and act in the world on the basis of our separation from it – articulated in the constraining, alienating and often resentment-filled modernist divides of human/nature, subject/object, culture, environment” (Chandler, 2013, p. 516). A posthuman approach embedded in a relational ontology allows a consideration of new ways in which to develop our understandings around our attachment to the world. Posthuman pedagogies as relational ontologies reject “that humans are the only species capable of producing knowledge and instead create openings for other forms/things/objects/beings/phenomenon to know” (Ulmer, 2015, p. 834). This is a key point, as it troubles traditional and scientific ways of knowing by opening up “a wealth of research possibilities… when humans are decentered as the only possible knowers” (Ulmer, 2015, p. 834). Posthuman childhood studies allow us to think with children as they go about their everyday encounters, where they take response-ability in order to produce new knowledges and new ways of thinking with the nonhuman world. In this paradigm, education and schooling become the opening through which to think differently, and we can start addressing the question we were left with at the end of Chap. 2: “What happens when human exceptionalism and bounded individualism … become unthinkable in the best sciences, whether nature or social? Seriously unthinkable: not available to think with” (Haraway, 2016, p. 23). Finally, in this chapter, the urgency of the Anthropocene has led us to grapple with the ecological ethics of the question of epistemic justice (Fricker, 2007). When adult humans are not listening and thinking with children in these precarious times, then inevitably children have the most to lose. According to Fricker (2007) knowledge is gained through epistemic practices. The evolution of our social identity and our social power is reliant on two key forms of epistemic practices, “conveying knowledge to others by telling them, and making sense of our own social experiences” (Fricker, 2007, p. 1). Epistemic injustices are the means through which children can be rendered invisible, without identity or power. It is when children are not listened to because of their very being (onto), and when a child is unable to make claims to knowledge or to be knowledgeable, because it is, “assumed that they are (still) developing, (still) innocent, (still) fragile, (still) immature, (still) irrational (still) becoming” (Murris, 2013, p. 2). Reconfiguring pedagogies will be central to a shift in paradigms so desperately needed in the world and even more directly in education. It would mean questioning the centrality of “human” (universal man as the Western middle-class trope) as being superior, being unnatured and the measure of all things. Boundaries between human and nature in posthuman pedagogies would no longer

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have a place in our shared knowledges of how ways of knowing come into being. Schools could be a mirror of our ecological, entangled worldviews, where “neither biology or philosophy any longer supports the notion of independent organism in environments”—and nor should we in childhood studies. A sympoietic view of new knowledges, of all things being relational, co-producing and taking response-ability for sharing in this worldly co-habitation would be central to such a re-framing of children and childhoods.

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Malone, K. (2008). How child-friendly is my community? A study of the child friendliness of the City of Brimbank. Research report for the Smith Family and the City of Brimbank, University of Wollongong, Wollongong. Malone, K. (2011). Dapto dreaming: A child friendly report about Dapto. Wollongong, NSW, Australia: University of Wollongong. Malone, K. A. (2013a). “The future lies in our hands”: Children as researchers and environmental change agents in designing a child-friendly neighbourhood. Local Environment: The International Journal of Justice and Sustainability, 18(3), 372–395. Malone, K. (2013b). Child friendly Bolivia: Researching with children in La Paz. Sydney, NSW, Australia: Bolivia, Centre for Educational Research, UWS. ISBN 978-1-74108-301-9. Malone, K. (2015). Researching with children in four Kazakh cities to support child friendliness recognition. Bankstown, NSW, Australia: University of Western Sydney. Malone, K. (2016a). Theorizing a child-dog encounter in the slums of La Paz using posthumanistic approaches in order to disrupt universalisms in current ‘child in nature’ debates. Children’s Geographies, 14(4), 390–407. Malone, K. (2016b). Posthumanist approaches to theorizing children’s human-nature relations. In K. Nairn et al. (Eds.), Space, place and environment. Geographies of children and young people (Vol. 3). https://doi.org/10.1007/978-981-4585-90-3_14-1. Malone, K. (2018). Children in the Anthropocene: Rethinking sustainability and child friendliness of cities. London, England: Palgrave Macmillan. Malone, K. (2019a). Re-turning childhoodnature: A diffractive account of the past tracings of childhoodnature as a series of theoretical turns. In A. Cutter-Mackenzie, K. Malone, & E. Barratt Hacking (Eds.), Research handbook on childhoodnature. Springer international handbooks of education. Cham: Springer. Malone, K. (2019b). Walking-with children on blasted landscapes. Journal of Public Pedagogies, 4, 155–164. Malone, K. (2020). Worlding with Kin: Diffracting childfish sensorial ecological encounters through moving image. Video Journal of Education and Pedagogies, 4. Malone, K., & Moore, S. J. (2019). Sensing ecologically through kin and stones. International Journal of Early Childhood Environmental Education, 7(1), 8–25. Malone, K., & Tranter, P. (2003). Children’s environmental learning and use, design and management of school grounds. Children, Youth and Environments, 13(2). Malone, K., & Waite, S. (2016). Student outcomes and natural schooling: Pathways form evidence to impact report 2016. Plymouth: Plymouth. Washington University Press. Massey, D. (2005). For space. London: Sage Publications. Massumi, B. (2015). The politics of affect. London: Polity Press. Morton, T. (2007). Ecology without nature: Rethinking environmental aesthetics. Cambridge: Harvard University Press. Murris, K. (2013). The epistemic challenge of hearing child’s voice. Study of Philosophy of Education, 32, 245–259. Muñoz, S.-A. (2009). Children in the outdoors: A literature review. Moray, Scotland: National Sustainable Development Centre. Retrieved from Scotland. Nabhan, G. P., & Trimble, S. (1994). The geography of childhood: Why children need wild places. Boston, MA: Beacon Press. Nancy, J.-L. (1991). The Inoperative Community. Minnesota: University of Minnesota Press. Nancy, J.-L. (1997). The Sense of the World. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press. Prezza, M., Alparone, F., Critallo, C., & Luigi, S. (2005). Parental perception of social risk and of positive potentiality of outdoor autonomy for children: The development of two instruments. Journal of Environmental Psychology, 25(4), 437–453. Rautio, P. (2013a). Children who carry stones in their pockets: On autotelic material practices in everyday life. Children’s Geographies, 11(4), 394–408. https://doi.org/10.1080/14733285.2013. 812278.

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Rautio, P. (2013b). Being nature: Interspecies articulation as a species-specific practice of relating to environment. Environmental Education Research, 19(4), 445–457. https://doi.org/10.1080/135 04622.2012.700698. Roziek, J., Snyder, J., & Pratt, S. (2019). The new materialisms and indigenous theories of nonhuman agency: Making the case for respectful anti-colonial engagement. Qualitative Inquiry 26(3–4), 331–346. Schoeppe, S., Tranter, P., Duncan, M., Curtis, C., Carver, A., & Malone, K. (2015). Australian children’s independent mobility levels: Secondary analyses of cross-sectional data between 1991 and 2012. Children’s Geographies, 14(4), 408–421. Smith, M. (2013). Ecological community, the sense of the world, and senseless extinction. Environmental Humanities, 2, 21–41. https://doi.org/10.1215/22011919-3610333. Snaza, N. (2013). Bewildering education. Journal of Curriculum and Pedagogy, 10(1), 38–54. https://doi.org/10.1080/15505170.2013.783889. Snaza, N., & Weaver, J. (Eds.). (2015). Posthumanism and educational research. New York: Routledge. Snaza, N., Appelbaum, P., Bayne, S., Carlson, D., Morris, M., Rotas, N., Sandlin, J., Wallin, J. & Weaver, J. (2014). Toward a posthumanist education. Journal of Curriculum Theorizing, 30(2), 39–55. Sobel, D. (2001). Children’s special places: Exploring the role of forts, dens and bush houses in middle childhood. Detroit, MI: Zephyr Press. Sobel, D. (2008). Childhood and nature: Design principles for educators. Portland, Maine: Stenhouse Publishers. Stubbs & Lee (2004). The obesity epidemic: both energy intake and physical activity contribute. Medical Journal of Australia, 181(9), 489–491. https://doi.org/10.5694/j.1326-5377.2004.tb0 6406.x. Taylor, A. (2011). Reconceptualising the nature of childhood. Childhood, 18(4), 420–433. https:// doi.org/10.1177/0907568211404951. Taylor, A. (2013). Reconfiguring the natures of childhood. Oxon and London: Routledge. Taylor, A. (2016). Romancing or Re-configuring Nature in the Anthropocene? Towards Common Worlding Pedagogies. In K. Malone, S. Truong, & T. Gray (Eds.), Reimagining Sustainability in Precarious Times. Singapore: Springer. Taylor, A., Blaise, M., & Guigni, M. (2013). Haraway’s ‘Bag Lady Story-Telling’: Relocating Childhood and Learning Within a ‘Post-Human Landscape’. Discourse: Studies in the Cultural Politics of Education, 34(1), 48–62. Tranter, P., & Malone, K. (2004). Geographies of environmental learning: An exploration of children’s use of school grounds. Children Geographies, 2(1), 131–156. Ulmer, J. B. (2015). Embodied writing: Choreographic composition as methodology. Research in Dance Education, 16(1), 33–50. Waters, & Baur. (2003). Childhood obesity: Modernity’s scourge. Medical Journal of Australia, 178(9), 422–423. https://doi.org/10.5694/j.1326-5377.2003.tb05280. Wells, N. M., & Evans, G. W. (2003). Nearby nature: A buffer of life stress among rural school children. Environment and Behaviour, 35(3), 311–330. Wells, N. M., & Lekies, K. S. (2006). Nature and the life course: Pathways from childhood nature experiences to adult environmentalism. Children Youth and Environments, 16(1), 1–24. Wilson, E. (1984). Biophilia. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press.

Chapter 6

Entangling Childhoods, Materials, Curriculum and Objects

Abstract Considering the entanglement of materials and objects in children’s lives through a posthuman reading of curricula, this chapter follows on closely from Chap. 5 to investigate children’s relationships with materials and nonhuman objects. Its focus is on how children’s lives are shaped by regulatory documents, and as our first example, we examine Aotearoa New Zealand’s internationally acclaimed early childhood curriculum Te Wh¯ariki. As a national curriculum this document moves away from a developmental approach to adopt a holistic, relational and bicultural focus, that is closely aligned with potential posthuman pedagogies. The chapter illustrates how the curriculum might be read through a posthuman lens, and how such a reading could support pedagogies built on insights into the critical relationships that children have with materials and objects. Two further case studies then illustrate how rules, regulations and policy can shape conceptions of childhood, to postulate what this might look like through a posthuman lens. Throughout, our focus is on children’s intra-relationships with the people, places and things in their lives. Keywords Entangling childhoods · Posthuman pedagogies · Materials and objects · Children’s intra-relationships · People, places and things

Introduction In this chapter we consider the entanglement of materials and objects in children’s lives, by activating early childhood curricula through a posthuman lens. This chapter follows on closely from Chap. 5 where we explored posthuman pedagogies and childhoodnatures. In this chapter, we investigate children’s relationships with materials and nonhuman objects with a focus on how children’s lives are shaped and conceptualised through regulatory documents. As our first example, we examine Aotearoa New Zealand’s internationally acclaimed early childhood curriculum Te Wh¯ariki. It was the first national curriculum to move away from a developmental approach; adopting a holistic, relational, bicultural focus, which now in hindsight could be viewed as closely aligned with principles evident in posthuman approaches to pedagogy. In this part of the chapter we illustrate how the curriculum can be read through © Springer Nature Singapore Pte Ltd. 2020 K. Malone et al., Theorising Posthuman Childhood Studies, Children: Global Posthumanist Perspectives and Materialist Theories, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-981-15-8175-5_6

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a posthuman lens, and how it can support developing insights into the critical relationships that children have with materials and objects. We then examine two further case studies, to illustrate how rules, regulations and policy can shape conceptions of childhood, and to postulate what this might look like through a posthuman lens. Throughout, our focus is on children’s intra-relationships with the people, places and things in their lives. To set the scene for our discussion we therefore begin with the curriculum statement that has been part of the Te Wh¯ariki for over 25 years. It affirms children’s engagements in relationship with “people, places and things” (Ministry of Education, 2017, p. 12). Similar aspirational statements are present in other curriculum documents and frameworks in various countries around the world. Statements like these affect adults’ attitudes towards and treatments of children’s environments, and thus shape children and childhoods, and their relationality with people and places, as we have illustrated in the previous chapter, and also with objects, materials and the inorganic. In this chapter we examine how such curriculum statements might affect how we think about children and their childhoods through a posthuman lens. To do so we begin with a theoretical examination of how we can understand and conceptualise this and similar statements, to demonstrate how policy and regulatory documents can be reread to rethink children and childhoods through a posthuman lens. The recognition of children’s relationships with “people, places and things” focus on relationalities. Interrogating what such a statement in Te Wh¯ariki may mean lets us examine children’s relationships with objects and materials, and the entanglement of their presence with children’s lives and worlds. The statement “people, places and things” is critical to rethinking conceptualisations of children and childhoods in a way that recognises the nonhuman relationships in which they are enmeshed: People, the human subjects, are part of children’s narratives, whether as adult subjects or child subjects. Place (or space) where children are growing up is part of our planetary environment, as outlined and discussed in Chapter 4 through shared agency, and in Chap. 5 through childhoods and/in nature. And finally, things, relate to nonhuman materials and objects.

Why Curriculum? First, however, let us ask: why should we care about curriculum frameworks in a book that reconfigures childhood studies? National or local curriculum frameworks or guidelines are important policy documents, which in a traditional way of thinking would be considered to serve and to govern children, include all stakeholders, and ultimately shape and provide aspirations for children’s learning, being and becoming. Curriculum is traditionally analysed in childhood studies, as discussed in Chap. 2, through the notions of power, agency and human-focused governance. This approach has, in the past, governed curriculum and policy studies, and analyses of discourses which shape and mould childhoods. However, a posthuman childhood studies lens

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such as that which this book traces and through its chapters introduces offers an opportunity to reread the curriculum framework and to show what curriculum does when we look at it differently. For example, it demonstrates how it is entangled, when such statements as those referring to “people, places and things” bring to the fore the performances of materials and objects and their shared agency, as part of young children’s posthuman intra-relationalities. A crucial element in our reconfiguration of childhood studies through a posthuman lens, then, is reconfiguring the orientations and pedagogies that curricula can promote, and how we think about curricula’s effect on ourselves and our pedagogies. How materials and objects that are entangled with children’s lives are conceptualised, shapes adult ideas and practices. When we examine these entanglements through a curriculum lens it allows for a radical problematisation of what it means to be a child and what is conceived of as childhood in any given context or learning environment. In the following section we use Barad’s (2014) notion of diffraction, to read and reread, turn and return, to differently activate Te Wh¯ariki, showcasing some of the openings that it offers to rethink the multiplicities of entanglements of materials and objects in children’s lives. In this first part of the chapter we recognise the dominant role that children’s learning environments play in shaping their lives and relationships, and so we refer to early childhood and/or school learning settings.

Understanding Te Wh¯ariki’s Posthuman Potential Te Wh¯ariki is one of the oldest and most-well known Western early years curriculum frameworks. It is also the first curriculum to be bicultural, as it elevates the importance of not only respecting but presenting the curriculum through Indigenous perspectives. As such it not only offers considerable curricular considerations, when it comes to views on children and childhoods, but it also emphasises that Indigenous thinking has for centuries incorporated “new” materialist views and more-than-human approaches into their understanding of ontologies (Jones & Hoskins, 2016). The curriculum, then, presents both Western and non-Western approaches, and one part is written in the Indigenous language of New Zealand, M¯aori. In addition to a holistic and relational focus, it represents a global, educational neoliberal agenda in its humanist and Western focus on individuality. The global drive for economic growth, as evident in the growing numbers of early years centres built for profit worldwide, in response to calls for higher enrolments of very young children; and the much debated focus on growth in “participation”, rather than on “quality” internationally, shapes young children’s learning environments through policies and regulations that reflect neoliberal and neo-colonial practices. Similarly to the ways in which posthuman and new materialist thought can be seen as a resistance to dominant humanist thought, Te Wh¯ariki (Ministry of Education, 2017), too emerged as a resistance. Its influences on shaping childhoods arise

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in its attempts to resist dominant colonising or neoliberal practices, both in the nonprescriptive nature of its framework, that creates opportunities for various interpretations and responses to the economic and political contexts, and in its grounding in bicultural philosophies (May, 2013; Tesar, 2015). As a policy document, its flexibility and openness can be seen as an affirmation of the non-compulsory sector of pre-school education. Importantly for this examination, we need to consider what role curriculum plays in relation to objects and materials, if read through a posthuman perspective. Thinking with Te Wh¯ariki and with local and global complexities could perhaps be satisfactory if we were able to fully understand the educational world and constructions of children and their childhoods, as they are outlined in Chaps. 1 and 2. However, given the discussions about complexities in the prior 5 chapters, it is becoming clear that human-centric thinking about curriculum and pedagogy is limiting our understanding of the complexities of children and childhoods, and that it may not offer us the full potential to engage with new paradigms of thinking. As such, in order to complicate and think with the curriculum, we consider Barad’s (2014) work as an entry point to help us with an “interactive reconfiguring of patterns of differentiating/entangling” (p. 168). In other words, we use a diffractive method of rereading. We have already introduced some of the thinkers who will be useful in this diffractive thinking—Haraway (1985, 2007) and Barad (2007, 2014). Through their work, we see the method of diffraction as not only useful, but as a method that leaves us no choice but to look at curriculum through a lens that goes “beyond the human”. Diffraction is a useful way of thinking and being with the curriculum document. It allows us to push against the humanist optics of sameness, singularity, and prescription that the notion of “curriculum” often implies, to instead focus on and embrace productive differences. Diffraction encourages us to be in motion, to move in multiple ways while utilising diverse theoretical and philosophical foundations from our relational intra-actions within the curriculum framework. Entering and being within a diffractive mode in the curriculum allows us to attend to what differences are produced, what childhoods are present, what notions of child are produced and what people, places and things do in these ongoing processes. This chapter thus offers a diffractive engagement that opens up ways of thinking about how curriculum, children, childhoods, materials and objects thinking can disrupt linear, ordered systems or “common sense” ways of being or becoming a child and having a childhood. It offers another opportunity to disrupt, navigate and de-territorialize different terrains and conceptions within early childhood spaces. And, as has been evident in the thinking in other chapters in this book, a diffractive rereading of the curriculum can produce more uncertainties than clear-cut answers.

Contextualising Te Wh¯ariki’s Influence To understand the landscape within which we discuss these concerns we need to understand the context. The curriculum Te Wh¯ariki was developed collaboratively,

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against all odds, at the height of neoliberalism in New Zealand, through a collaborative “ground-up” approach. Te Wh¯ariki argues that all children are “competent and confident learners and communicators, healthy in mind, body and spirit, secure in their sense of belonging and in the knowledge that they make a valued contribution to society” (Ministry of Education, 2017, p. 5). Currently, younger and younger children enter early childhood settings, as both parents return back to work earlier and earlier. As elsewhere around the world, in Aotearoa New Zealand, the early childhood world is under pressure from rising schoolification, and such universalising assessments as IELS (International Early Learning and Child Well-being Study by the OECD) testing (Moss et al., 2016). In 2017 the “updated” version of Te Wh¯ariki was released, and while substantial and in-depth analysis is still needed, initial reports indicate that the new document incorporates, unsurprisingly, traces of international pressure and globalisation, including in expectations for accountability for investment, and a narrowing of expected outcomes for children. A famous quote from Rose (1999), claiming that children and their childhoods are “the most intensively governed sector of personal existence” (p. 123), becomes increasingly applicable and helps to shape the argument in this chapter. The dominant neoliberal ideology governs childhoods in contemporary Aotearoa New Zealand (and very much worldwide), and positions the child as a competitive, individualistic consumer subject. Although affected by these pressures, the early childhood curriculum Te Wh¯ariki also resists them by positioning the child as a biculturally aware, relational subject. Both discourses exercise forms of governmentality, albeit in very different ways, and produce very different kinds of child-construct. The specific bicultural agenda of Te Wh¯ariki has been largely subverted by the forces and effects of neoliberalism and neo-colonialism. May (2013), for instance, notes, “the statistics … reveal that not all children are beneficiaries of past policy initiatives. Government policy has classified some of these children as potentially ‘vulnerable’; a ‘risk’ to society and a ‘priority’ for ECEC” (p. 154). Childhood studies have a lot in common with a curriculum framework which aspires for children to be or become “confident and competent learners”, and at the same time considers and defines the idea of curriculum to be the “sum of all experiences” (Ministry of Education, 2017). Adding a reading of the curriculum through a posthuman childhood studies lens responds to calls for “new and revised theorisations” to further “illuminate, challenge and expand scholarship and debate about children and childhoods in different spaces and places across the globe” (Konstantoni & Emejulu, 2017, p. 7). Konstantoni and Emejulu highlight as intersectionality what this rereading aims to do, to think across paradigms. To reread curricula and other policy documents through diverse lenses offers an example of thinking across paradigms. In this chapter (and book) we took up the call for revised theorisations of children and childhoods to build on historical developments. This means including the contemporary philosophical and theoretical shift in philosophies of the subject, identity, education and global relationality, towards a posthuman, new materialist focus which decentralises and de-elevates the human. These philosophical developments play down, or de-essentialise, human exceptionalism in the curriculum framework,

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and re-vitalise an openness to materialist and more-than-human influences in and on children and childhoods, thus expanding the field of childhood studies. In return, they will also allow us to see children’s lives as being entangled with materials and objects. This intersectionality allows us to see the potential of relationships with “people, places and things” through a posthuman lens.

A Posthuman Childhood Studies Lens Adding a posthuman lens to the study of childhoods allows us to see Te Wh¯ariki and other curriculum and policy documents without essentialising or mainstreaming children or their childhoods. The plurality offered by thinking through such a lens also enables a radical openness to relationality, with “Relationships” as one of the core principles of this curriculum. It elevates the importance of science in the conception of human relationships and growth, drawing on quantum physics, through Barad (2014), for example, or inter-species relationships through Haraway (2007), and for breaking down the nature-culture binaries that traditionally separated human children and childhoods from nonhuman others (see references to Malone’s work in Chap. 5, for example). One way in which Te Wh¯ariki faces the questions that Chap. 2 has raised in its reading of the new sociology of childhood are in its constructions and reconstructions of childhoods through metaphors that present children as “taonga” (treasures/gifts). This highlights the bicultural nature and intent of the curriculum and reflects the unique positioning of children and childhoods in Aotearoa New Zealand, as already entangled in relationships with human and nonhuman, with people, places and things. Te Wh¯ariki’s structuring of sections for “infants, toddlers and young children” illustrates also a traditional model of thinking as we have critiqued in this book. Just to remind, by traditional we mean developmental psychology, which uses tables and universal definitions of developmental stages and milestones. It omits an understanding of the influences of culture and society, of individual subjectivities and differences, or of the complex influences of ideology, globalisation and technology, and most importantly it omits the complex relationalities brought to the fore in a posthuman reading. It is this tradition that new sociology of childhood set their agenda to depart fromTe Wh¯ariki’s approaches to children and childhood are linked to the notion that childhood is neither universal, homogeneous, nor does it exist in and of itself. We have already discussed in this book that childhood cannot be clearly (or universally) defined, but rather it is seen as a construct. Through the course of history, childhood has been invented and re-invented, in different times, societies and cultures, within diverse philosophical frameworks. There are different perspectives on the history of childhood in relation to education and to society, as we have discussed in Chap. 1. There we have argued that historical analyses often pinpoint childhoods as undefined or non-linear and comprised of and influenced by complex interactions of individual experiences with ideologies and notions that challenge singular and easily understandable views on childhoods (as plural). Te Wh¯ariki’s

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children and childhoods are grounded in the (relatively young) history of Aotearoa New Zealand, and undoubtedly, children affected by Te Wh¯ariki today are “experiencing a very different world and a very different childhood from that experienced by previous generations” (Freeman & Higgins, 2013, p. 13). This section has given us some insights into the contextual background to a rereading of this particular curriculum, through a posthuman lens.

Posthuman Curriculum In order to foreground the notion of materiality, objects and things, Te Wh¯ariki (Ministry of Education, 2017) reads as an affirmative challenge. Already in its original iteration released in 1996, it moved beyond a dominant humanist focus, to elevate children’s complex relationships not only with people, but with other things, materialities and nonhuman subjects as highlighted by posthuman, new materialist or more-than-human thinking. The curriculum framework situates children and their learning within the complex entanglements of their early childhood setting and the deeply relational context with which they are surrounded. In the principle of Relationships, for example, “children” are seen to “learn through responsive and reciprocal relationships with people, places and things” (p. 21), and furthermore, teachers are provoked to allow children to do so by trying “out their ideas and refin[ing] their working theories” (p. 21). Conceptualised from an environmental sustainability perspective, arguably one of the most critical and urgent for us to become familiar with, Malone (2017) argues that: Despite perceptions that associate sustainable development mainly with a nonhuman environment, the broader focus of sustainable development is one of the ways the global community can meet the natural, social and economic needs of humans within the planetary boundaries and resource limits - so that human and planetary development can be both sustainable, and be sustained (p. 410).

Such sustainability concerns implicate today’s children in such life decisions that we may not even be able to imagine at this time. In expressing concern about worldly interdependencies, Bruno Latour (2014) laments the lack of preparedness within the general population to recognise the deeply related ways in which we are all interconnected with other people, places and things, and with such crises that are linked through these interconnections. Connecting children in their early years with such concerns requires a shifting attitude, and a recognition that “there is no distant place anymore” (p. 2). We are all interdependent, and we are all implicated. What happens in other places in the world is intrinsically connected to localities in which children live their childhoods. Such an inextricably connected positioning of young children within global concerns and global relationships requires a new form of ethical and moral thought, decision-making and reading of policy. It implicates children’s human and nonhuman relationalities, when we consider the people, places and things by which these concerns are affected. Moving childhood studies

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scholarship towards posthuman and new materialist perspectives pushes us to reread Te Wh¯ariki, and also policies and other regulatory structures, in a way that pays attention to the entanglements with objects and materials in children’s lives and in the world.

Child ↔ Materialities ↔ Curriculum Child ↔ Materialities ↔ Curriculum is a way we use to represent entanglements that are critical. In this book, we are focused on the elevation of the idiosyncrasies of discourse-materiality entanglements, and on how posthuman childhood studies can break down binaries, including how established and well-regarded traditional knowledges can be complicated. The Child ↔ Materialities ↔ Curriculum entanglement lets us rethink the traditional governance in the curriculum document, and the passive way objects and materialities are often positioned within in. What this rereading calls forth is the vibrant action of the things, materialities and vitalities on and within each other. We have already discussed before, that the theories and provocations of, for instance, Barad (2003), Latour (2004), Bennett (2010) and many other thinkers used in this book allow us to rethink Child ↔ Materialities ↔ Curriculum relations, to move from their traditional, mostly humanist and new sociology of childhood groundings. Reframing this entanglement also importantly allows us to anticipate shifts which involve thinking with the curriculum, exploring what “posthuman subjectivity” might look or feel like with young children, and how relationality, agency and an ontology of materialities and objects can be seen to be performing differently within the contemporary anthropocentric time. At the heart of the Child ↔ Materialities ↔ Curriculum entanglement are ethical relations with pedagogical thought. A greater awareness of this entanglement causes us to question how theories and philosophies enter educational practice, and how educational practice shapes them. It also concerns us with how teachers’ teaching and being with children and understanding of their childhood gain traction, and how “thinking” or “doing” curriculum links with how we as adults perceive children’s relations with materialities and objects, both in and outside of educational settings. Traditional human-centric thinking about curriculum has accepted children and objects as performing functional roles within the curriculum, with a particular focus on their usefulness and importance in pedagogical processes. Often these approaches to the curriculum miss the very idea of the world as shared with other than human and nonhuman entities. The ethics of reframing pedagogical thought by de-centering human practices occurs as we enter this space of relationality. Using Te Whariki as a framework of the Child ↔ Materialities ↔ Curriculum entanglement urges us on the one hand to pass on and value the traditional pedagogies of the Euro-American white, male-centric world, which have equipped parts of the globe with philosophies, theories and paradigms to shape contemporary childhoods (see, for example, Chap. 1). On the other hand, it offers openings to challenge these ideas through this entanglement in ways that could potentially slow down if not stop

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the crippling effect on the pedagogical capacity to engage with other than human and nonhuman entities. This is a challenge that curricula around the world face. While in this chapter we interrogate Te Whariki’s capacity to deal with these challenges, it is important to note that this may be relevant to other curricula and policy frameworks around the world. The force of things in this entanglement allows diverse philosophies and thoughts to act in more complex ways. Child ↔ Materialities ↔ Curriculum entanglements are conceivable if the governance and implementation and the translation to pedagogical practice accepts a basic code of mutual co-existence with other than humans and nonhumans and creates a kind of shared common minimum ontological and ethical grounding code for curriculum. Yet such a code will not stand a chance, and will not make any sense, if it is merely the product of an idea which is not seen as relevant in practice. As such, it is up to adults to see the curriculum as having the capacity to present exciting openings; not to force them, not to advertise them, not to push them, not to preach them, but to perform them in our daily existence with children, materialities and objects, within and outside of learning settings. And furthermore, it is up to us, adults, who read these ideas to look around and see how such curriculum can be enacted and activated in everyday life and practice, or at least not to squash these ideas from the outset. If we do not do so, such a code can hardly be expected to stand or make a difference in any profound way for anyone, let alone to meaningfully help us understand what the posthuman condition of the curriculum is, and how and why Child ↔ Materialities ↔ Curriculum entanglements are important. At this stage we hope that you understand our proposal for the rationale for the shift in lenses that we are trying to implement and portray: to perceive educational settings as governed by curricula that are read in particular ways. Others may feel that this posthuman lens has no capacity to enter the complexities of everyday and mundane pedagogical processes, and perhaps see such an undertaking as merely a hopelessly utopian goal for Child ↔ Materialities ↔ Curriculum entanglements to take place. In response, we argue that histories and philosophies of childhoods (see Chap. 1), and the sociological lens that we used to outline shifts from a developmental view of the child (see Chap. 2) demonstrate that complex entanglements of relations lie dormant in the deepest roots of humankind. We argue that the need for a new code that recognises these complexities, in the form of seeing Child ↔ Materialities ↔ Curriculum entanglements, is firmly anchored in the current theoretical directions (see Chaps. 3, 4 and 5). Shifts such as this one can challenge the dangerous, linear, superficial achievements of our educational field and existing curricula, developed in the best interests of the “human” “child”. An ontological, epistemological and ethical rethinking offers the potential to avoid narrow, linear views that reify humans, but simultaneously impoverish, diminish and destroy us as humans and our fragile relations and wider ecologies. Without acknowledging these entanglements curricula that continue to espouse positivist, humanist paradigms may simply not allow us to see the more-than-human relational complexities as imperative. Perhaps we have become enslaved by existing narrowing curricula. Perhaps, though, instead of developing identities and conceptions of children and childhood

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in cognisance of fragile Child ↔ Materialities ↔ Curriculum entanglements, maintaining a human-centered focus would shatter and diminish the possibilities for children to learn and develop in a relational way. Child ↔ Materialities ↔ Curriculum entanglements can divest people of their egotistical anthropocentrism, of their deep habitual conceptions of themselves as those determining relations as linear and one dimensional.

Rethinking Curricular Relationalities As we have noted above, Te Wh¯ariki was revised in 2017. It states in its foreword that its revision aims to reflect “changes in the early learning context, including the diversity of New Zealand society today, contemporary theories and pedagogies” (Ministry of Education, 2017, p. 2). Such a revision offers a potentially important opportunity to reframe early childhood education in powerful ways that elevate children and their childhoods beyond traditionally challenging ideologies and conceptions. However, any attempt to eradicate the limitations of particular theories, thoughts, discourses, tensions and problems itself, of course, may also have its own limitations (Holmberg, 2018), and any conclusive assertions would be the complex philosophical groundings of a childhood studies orientation. We note that, like many other curriculum frameworks, this curriculum does not name or mention the posthuman approaches, thinking or ideas explicitly. We do not aim to engage here in thinking whether or not earlier disciplinary boundaries marginalised children or childhoods, as claimed during the emergence of what is known as the “new sociology of childhood” (as per Chap. 2). We note though, that those approaches have in recent decades driven the interdisciplinary approach to studying children and childhoods towards researching with and by children, resulting in increasing openness and acceptance of uncertainties, as adults relinquished some of their control to children. Rethinking Te Wh¯ariki in a way that opens up pedagogical ontologies and epistemologies offers two hopeful positionings: (1) it creates openings for a hopeful recognition of children’s entangled relations with/in their worlds, materials and objects; and (2) it raises levels of uncertainty within the curriculum, teaching plans, assessments and evaluations as these must necessarily reflect the increasing complexities that come with thinking through this posthuman positioning. As the foreword continues, positioning “our children as twenty-first-century citizens, learning how to learn in a fast changing and globally connected world” (p. 2) takes on crucial meaning through the thinking illustrated in this chapter. Creating openings, as in the first of these points, is one that seems easy to welcome. Its complexity arises when we acknowledge the fear that also comes with letting go, of adopting an increasing sense of openness. But it is a hopeful one, and one that we ourselves and others need to embrace. The second point, of increasing uncertainty, is more difficult, but also necessary. Becoming increasingly comfortable with a sense of discomfort is deeply embedded within the childhood studies field, as it is

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itself evolving in multi-disciplinary ways, to move beyond developmental theories and studies, and potentially also beyond the new sociology of childhoods position. Rethinking Te Wh¯ariki through some of the lenses that have more recently emerged in the confluence of disciplines in childhood studies, particularly help us understand posthuman and new materialist childhoods. Rethinking Te Wh¯ariki re-affirms the importance of activism within the early childhood curriculum, and what that might mean when we move beyond the discursive realm. This requires a (re)activation of its fundamental principles of: Empowerment, Holistic Development, Family, whanau (extended family) and community and Relationships. Each principle is a call for action. Rethinking Te Wh¯ariki through a posthuman childhood studies lens is a cross-disciplinary, multi-layered imperative. It is a deeply moral and ethical undertaking that implicates children’s early childhood education settings, families, communities, societies, policy and government. This undertaking is not only complex and often difficult, but also urgent. It retraces some of the “bridges” between humanist understandings and posthuman understandings in our previous writing (Tesar & Arndt, 2016), as we posit children as merely one part in the human and more-than-human relationships in which they are entwined with other things, forces and energies. Further studies on the nature of childhoods and sustainability education are crucial to strengthen this argument. That is, further examinations are necessary for surfacelevel engagements with humans and nature, to promote deep understandings of what we have earlier outlined as our intra-relationality with and in ours and our children’s worlds (Ceder, 2018). Through such further examinations increasing possibilities can be opened up to continue to re-activate Te Wh¯ariki in ways that allow children to determine their understandings of the human and more-than-human worlds in which they live and learn, and their entanglement with materialities and things. Activating Te Wh¯ariki through a critical and engaged posthuman childhood lens with all beings might elevate recognitions of inter-species relationships, and of children’s crucial relationships with food and its worldwide production and sustainability, nature and nature-culture constructions and influences on climate and life. We will now use two case studies to show how this “activating” of the curriculum framework can be perceived while children’s lives are becoming entangled with materials and objects. The examples below are excerpts from case studies from prior studies conducted in Auckland, New Zealand (see Tesar, 2017; Tesar & Arndt, 2020).

Case Study #1: Children’s Entanglement with Materials In the past decade there has been some important thinking that has brought attention to children’s relationships with materials. In Australia, two important thinkers are Somerville (2013), for example, in her thinking through water as a point of entry to work with concerns of the Anthropocene through Indigenous culture, and Taylor’s (2013), whose work on nature-culture assemblages theorises and reconfigures relationships between nature, culture and childhood. In the Finnish context Rautio’s

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(2013) work on the relationships between child subjects and objects in environments, and the interrogation of their discursive and material relationships is another recent contribution to thinking through and utilising a posthuman childhood studies lens on materiality (Rautio, 2013; Rautio & Winston, 2013). It is important to recognise non-Western traditions, including Indigenous ontologies and epistemologies, when disrupting Western exceptionalism and human-centric practices, particularly towards objects. In Aotearoa New Zealand, Jones and Jenkins (2016) argue that … Indigenous (M¯aori) ontologies always already assume a profound sameness, and therefore sense of recognition, between the abilities and sensibilities of objects and those of humans. For Indigenous scholars, the struggle is to find a way to enable these ontologies to be recognized and reproduced in their academic work. For Western researchers intrigued by new materialist arguments, the ontological struggle is different. Within/against Western ontologies, it becomes necessary to create a new vocabulary and to trouble the familiar language of empiricist or interpretivist social science in order to open up a space where objects can express their vitality or, at least, where humans can experience their (objects’) vitality (p. 78).

Building upon these foundations, these Indigenous ontologies can be carried over as concerns and explorations of the notions of “belonging” (Mana Whenua) and “wellbeing” (Mana Atua), and what these notions might mean for children and nonhuman objects in their learning environments. These notions are two of the Strands of Te Wh¯ariki (Ministry of Education, 2017). One project that highlights such complex entanglements with objects and materials in children’s lives is the celebration of Matariki. Matariki is the name of the constellation that signals the M¯aori New Year. It illustrates how elements of Indigenous epistemologies and spirituality are embedded within the everyday practices of early childhood centres in Aotearoa New Zealand. In celebration of Matariki, one teacher described how it is a time for children to plant crops, that is, to touch, play and engage with soil. In this story, they touch the ground, and let the soil touch their hands. During one Matariki children’s movement slowed down as there was pleasure and considerable concentration required to enjoy the moment of encounter with the soil, as children concentrated and engaged with tools to work with the soil. Soon after, the children sprouted a kumara (sweet potato) and then potted up the shoots, so each child could take one home. These descriptions lead us to question: what do these encounters mean as performances of relationships with things and materials? Maybe the kumara becomes the mother to the shoots that are taken home and looked after by the children, inserting a politics of food into this process, as if contesting the unsustainable food industry? (Fig. 6.1). There are also other forces at play in this narrative, however, indicating ways in which the children impact upon the urban environment around them, as the environment impacts reciprocally upon them. The material—the soil—is at one and the same time a “thing”, but also it is the “place”, and a mixture of organic matters. The elements that are in soil (gases, liquids, organism, minerals) are both agents for life and also habitats for life. The children’s entanglement with soil thus supports the revitalising lifeforce that is in place, thing, land, dirt. In another part of this project, Hinekura too is drawn to be in the garden, working with plants, with her Grandmother. There is something very special about Hinekura’s

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Fig. 6.1 Photos from Auckland Urban Project, Auckland, New Zealand. Credit Marek Tesar

garden at her home. Hinekura is just over 4 years old and she spends a lot of time in her garden with her grandmother in the heart of an inner-city suburb. They both engage with play and care in the garden, growing food and looking after the plants. The plants and garden feed the whole family, and there is a reciprocal relationship in which Hinekura understands that the plants are edible. The plastic grass off-cut next to the deck is a crude plastic juxtaposition, and perhaps a reminder of the ideal lush greenery that the garden is striving towards. What are the forces that pull Hinekura to act upon the plants and objects in the garden, and how do plants and objects act on Hinekura? (Fig. 6.2). The forces and power at play in the garden can be explored through the lens of new materialism. As discussed in prior chapters, thinkers that theorise and utilise this lens contest the reduction of everything to the discursive. Their argument is for other ways of seeing, being and relationships, rather than the postmodern governance of the “discursive” over matter and thing-hood. While postmodern thought has been

Fig. 6.2 Photos from Auckland Urban Project, Auckland, New Zealand. Credit Marek Tesar

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articulated and related to as the linguistic turn, posthumanism and new materialism offers not its denial, but yet another turn towards the material, the matter and a move beyond the discursive. A new materialist, posthuman lens allows relations between organic subjects to be explored and further complicated through the lens of the object, matter, the inorganic. Bennett (2010) argues that matter is not necessarily passive but has an active and productive capacity, which she refers to as vibrant. Traditionally, matter is a form that science has described as something objective, as something that we can observe, and touch, play with it, feel it and further work with it, and as such use our senses to register it. Matter can be measured, evaluated and moulded. Bennett however argues for the complexity of “things”, “matters”, “objects”, as active, vibrant organisms and beings. These complexities operate as implicitly observed by Grosz (2008) in art: “Art enables matter to become expressive, to not just satisfy but also to intensify— to resonate and become more than itself” (p. 4). This raises the question of how children have opportunity for art, “territory” or “space”, for the “objects”, “things” and “matter” to act, intensely. Perhaps Matariki and kumara sprouts in soil, and children’s work with soil in the garden, and their relations between plastic and real gardens in childhood outdoor spaces, could be re-imagined as art, art that young children perform in their own capacity, if they are given the chance with a different binding force in their childhood landscapes (Fig. 6.3). The next case study helps us to illustrate further the complexities of children’s relational entanglements with objects from different cultural, contextual and paradigmatic realities.

Fig. 6.3 Photos from Auckland Urban Project, Auckland, New Zealand. Credit Marek Tesar

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Case Study #2: Children’s Entanglement with Objects This case study is a rereading of an ethnographic study conducted in multiple urban early childhood settings. The study aimed to rupture the notions of one kind of intensive governance of children that Rose, as we cited earlier in this chapter, refers to. This plays out by challenging and unsettling contemporary early childhood “business as usual”, offering a glimpse into a kind of childhood underground, exhibiting the key concepts of the new sociology of childhood: agency, participation and power. Here these concepts are reread through a posthuman childhood studies lens, to show how the theories of past years are still relevant even when viewed from this perspective. While “underground” and “resistance” with young children may be referred to by some as “childish” subcultures, their ability to crack the veneer of the dominant “adult” culture offers a space of resistance that can potentially reach beyond the human child and childhoods. Childhoods are governed by curriculum and other policies in their educational settings, however, this case study shows how children can resist this governance, and how we can witness the performances of different, other, entanglements with materials and objects. As such, these “childhood undergrounds” can perform and perhaps offer glimpses of hope in their resistance to the system and to its governance. They can help us to understand how Child ↔ Materialities ↔ Curriculum entanglements operate. This case study was conducted in educational settings where Te Wh¯ariki is at the heart of the “action”, and where the mantra of relationships with “people, places and things” is present in the everyday discourse. This project initially focused on researching with and by children, on how their well-being and their voice are present in their early years classroom. In addition, the focus was on how children understand their being and becoming local and global citizens, how they exercise their capacity to influence policy, and how these young citizens become responsible and responsive governors of their own local spaces. Moreover, it aimed to uncover an in-depth understanding of childhood in the contemporary neoliberal panorama of everyday life. The focus thus was not only on understanding childhood from children’s perspectives, but also on tracing notions of activism, and working with children to allow and support an environment where children’s participation, power and agency are ever-present and children’s voices are taken seriously in decision-making. In this space, children were encouraged to challenge the governing system of the institution—the early childhood education and care centre. To perform and experience this, children went on neighbourhood walks to experience their places, shape their local environment and to establish their ownership of/in their setting and world around them. One of the outcomes of this project was children’s submissions on how to alter the local park and playground and children’s contributions to improving sustainability in their local spaces during the local council’s consultation process. One early childhood centre established a “children’s governance board”, which allowed young children to perform their agency, shifting the power balance away from adults and giving voice to their opinions, as part of the centre’s decisionmaking. The children’s governance board consisted of all children and teachers. As

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part of the governance board, the children were consulted in a non-tokenistic way to agree or disagree with changes to their educational settings and to co-produce and activate their curriculum. Their choices were not always to the liking of the adults and teachers, for instance, when they expressed views that challenged and re-structured the ways that rooms are organised, or the current design of the centre, or separations between under 2-year old and over 2-year old children in the setting. Children also became architects, that is, they were consulted, drew and modelled, and entangled their hands and bodies with materials, as they constructed and shaped their ideas into creations that made sense to them but not necessarily to adults. They shared their ideas in a material way about how the development of a new early childhood centre should look, to best fit with their wishes and needs. These governing boards negotiated changes and curriculum issues, ranging from those that may seem unimportant to adults, to issues that require contacting local agencies, as they cannot be resolved in the centre alone. Their views concerned materials and objects. A sociological analysis of this project might argue that children challenged the established ways in which young children are often conceived as powerless, and not able to perform their agency, especially at a very young age. However, looking differently at this project through children’s posthuman Child ↔ Materialities ↔ Curriculum entanglements sheds a different light on the case study (Fig. 6.4). As part of this ethnographic research project, children were given cameras to record their experiences and environment in mundane everyday situations, both in and outside of their education setting. Children could choose to photograph what they wanted and to share, or not to share, the images they took with their teachers. Children became the researchers, and some were very proud of their roles and shared their images with adults, while others, running and taking many pictures, opted out and decided to keep their pictures just to themselves. Often these photographs were taken outside of the gaze of the teacher, or outside of the teachers’ preferred lines of “visibility”. Teachers commonly are positioned in the centre to maintain “visibility” of children within the institutional space, partly because of a concern

Fig. 6.4 Photos from Auckland Urban Project, Auckland, New Zealand. Credit Marek Tesar

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for children’s safety and partly for governance reasons. This means that teachers— adults—feel compelled to create an environment in early years centres where children are continuously watched and observed, regulated and pushed to obey the governing ideologies and to develop mechanisms for self-governance. Throughout this project, teachers started to observe that some images that children shared with adults featured various “objects” and “materialities” that teachers did not recognise and that were not resources from the centre. These objects in photographs appeared in children’s hands, rested in children’s open palms for another child to take a photo of. Teachers became puzzled, as similar photographs—of foreign objects in children’s hands—appeared in photographs almost daily. This experience was repeated over a period of a couple of weeks: one child taking a photograph of another child’s hand, holding a foreign, unknown object. The objects—a plastic toy, a damaged small doll—led to vivid discussions among teachers. The adults could not understand what those materialities and objects were, why they were important to children or why children would build such a relationship with these objects. Teachers observed that children clearly had visibly strong relationships with these objects that the teachers had never seen. The teachers felt that they had lost control over the children and the centre. Suddenly, the teachers realised that they did not have such perfect visibility or oversight of the children’s actions and development, and of what children were doing or playing with, as they had expected. Care, as a form and mechanism of control, ceased to operate to their advantage, in the children’s resistance that played out in this shift in power relations. The objects became entangled with the children, the children were entangled with the objects and their shared agency was entangled in teachers’ view of the curriculum that was being challenged. Teachers’ initial response was to uncover these secrets and to suppress the resistance, no matter how insignificant it was. They could accept resistance when it occurred in a public forum—for example, through the children’s governance boards. However, they could not accept this secret, uncontrollable resistance to the surveillance and visibility policies of the centre. Teachers started checking children’s backpacks, to enquire whether these objects were being carried in and out of the centre, and they planned searches around the classroom, under the guise of “discourses of safety”. In their interviews, teachers shared that they felt threatened in their position of power. These objects in children’s hands represented snippets of a childhood underground, which ceases to exist once adults infiltrate and expose it. What does this tell us about Child ↔ Materialities ↔ Curriculum entanglements, as discussed above? The photographs, we could say, give us glimpses of the children’s childhood underground, and of children’s intentions—of performing their power and agency— and the images of objects in their hands are their voice. They are the secret objects of their own mundane world and of their secret play, that they allowed adults to peek into, yet the actual objects that were photographed were never found by the teachers. These secret objects from the children’s play represent a material engagement, that, as Van Manen and Levering (1996) argue, have:

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pedagogical significance because they are able to create multiple layers and inner/outer space … The power of these “ordinary” stories of secrecy lies not in a fact that they are abhorrent, unbelievable, strange, or bizarre, but precisely in that they are recognizable, common, and continuous with everyday experiences of secrecy that we all may have had and still have (pp. 8–9).

They offer us a glimpse into the relational worlds of children, of how children engage with materials and objects, and how the materials and objects engage with children. Of course, there are spaces of childhoods that arise out of their own play, rules and experiences, which challenge the dominant discourses. This is not new knowledge in the field of childhood studies. However, what about the agency or vibrancy of the inorganic objects? What do these objects do; how do children’s hands become entangled, almost inseparable, from these objects that on a surface-level bear almost no meaning? In Rautio’s (2013) seminal paper “children who carry stones in their pockets” the exploration of children-objects-material relations describes such an experience: When we carry stones, for no particular reason, we engage with a practice that celebrates also being in the present rather than only knowing for the future. We have a vantage point into a mode of being that requires no words, no particular rationale and no rules. In carrying stones just like our children do, we know ourselves as part of the world: simultaneously interdependent and unique (p. 406).

Rautio perceives such material entanglements as political. Similarly, neoliberal ideology, through curriculum and policies such as Te Wh¯ariki, and acts of governance of children in early childhood settings, has a very strong influence on the way children grow up, play, learn and engage with materials as what might be acts of resistance and agency, or otherwise relational acts, in their educational settings. Policy and curriculum can potentially be both repressive and activating in the ways that it relates to these entanglements of children and objects (Fig. 6.5). It seems then, that hegemonic discourses are challenged by equally powerful resistances, and that every dominant childhood culture, in any ideology, is challenged also by a resistant childhood underground, punctuated by specific secrets, stories and play

Fig. 6.5 Photos from Auckland Urban Project, Auckland, New Zealand. Credit Marek Tesar

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through conceivable or inconceivable relationalities. If adults lose control and visibility, trust in children’s voices and play and allow them to have their secret places and spaces, perhaps they fear that children will develop in uncontrolled ways. What if having secrets—secret play and games—is the final frontier, and an essential part of children’s playing out of material and object relations? What if children’s relations with objects and materiality contribute to a deeper planetary outlook? Should and how could such relational engagements be encouraged under curricula and policy frameworks? What if these Child ↔ Materialities ↔ Curriculum entanglements are positioned alongside, entangled with traditional approaches to pedagogy or childhoods? Or if teachers understood the power of objects and materialites, the vibrant force, the relationality and the more-than-human intra-actions that occur in such relationships, would they think differently about their engagement with children and childhoods? Here we do not suggest that a sociological analysis has no place in an analysis of the curriculum; however, we do argue, through decentring the human we are able perceive the full potential of posthuman pedagogies. That is there is further curriculum potential when pedagogies occupy a posthumanism and new materialism space and are embedded as a continuation of, and alongside a rereading of the new sociology of childhood. And as such, to enable these theoretical perspectives to open up the complexities of what is happening in our centres or classrooms; to offer possibilities we may have not been aware of; it is imperative that we offer posthuman readings of curriculum and policy.

Concluding Entanglements In this chapter we have explored views on young children’s entanglements with materials and objects through a posthuman lens using the Aotearoa New Zealand curriculum framework Te Wh¯ariki as an example. The way young children encounter and relate to adults’ understandings of sustainability, including what these understandings might mean to young children, and how they perform their own understandings in their places and spaces, are critical to implementing a posthuman childhood studies lens. In particular, this chapter has argued for uncovering forces that are at play in children’s relationships with materials and objects, through a rereading of curriculum and policy. It has argued for a re-negotiation of a philosophical framework that uses not only a discursive analysis, but also a rethinking of children’s experiences and relationships from a posthuman and new materialist perspective. The curriculum framework, under which children live, learn and play, is the umbrella under which an opening to these new investigations can occur. It represents how matter becomes the embodiment of sensations, affects and aesthetics. Through a posthuman and new materialist lens it becomes obvious that this is not only about how children act, but also about how they are interlinked with the environment in responsive and reciprocal ways where forces push and pull, and where complex relationships between organic and inorganic, and other than human subjects already exist. Posthumanism and new materialism involve a vast range of diverse approaches, and an intricate, distinctive

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and nuanced web of disciplines, thinking and being, that may be political, ethical, epistemological and ontological in nature. This chapter has brought young children’s relations with objects and materials to the heart of these inter and intra-actions. Rereading curricula such as Te Wh¯ariki through a posthuman childhood studies lens has illustrated the multi-disciplinary focus that this document puts on children and their childhoods in a new way. This chapter has introduced the notion of a Child ↔ Materialities ↔ Curriculum entanglement into the interdisciplinary nature of childhood studies. This is in part captured in the social and cultural constructions on which Te Wh¯ariki is based, hinting at the diverse orientations which Te Wh¯ariki and other curriculum and policies might open up. Multiple disciplines add various forms of epistemology, ontology and axiology to the notion of childhood, including challenging discursive and social constructions as the only way to understand childhoods. Thinking with posthumanism, new materialism and morethan-human relationships in this rereading of Te Wh¯ariki has enabled us to open up possibilities for children’s lives to be seen as always already entangled with materials and objects, wider worldly concerns of the Anthropocene and the sustainability of our planet. Rereading Te Wh¯ariki through a posthuman childhood studies lens urges us to acknowledge that the field is not dominated by one discipline, but that it instead encourages interdisciplinary thinking and relations, engaging openly with the not-yet-known. Viewing Te Wh¯ariki through the lens of posthumanism and new materialism means rereading it diffractively. It also means activating diverse possibilities for rethinking curricula, and reworking the mantra of “people, places and things”. This involves thinking through theoretical perspectives, to consider what the document might look, feel and act like when considered in relation to particular children, particular childhoods, in particular contexts, localities, times and places. It also means conceptualising not only the obvious, surface-level implications on children and their posthuman childhoods and our attitudes towards them, but also giving thought to that which may so far be unthought. In other words, rereading any curriculum or policy document through a posthuman and new materialist childhood studies lens means being open to possibilities, surprise and uncertainty. An example of this might be to return to the contemporary theorising by thinking beyond a human conception of the principles and strands, through a posthuman lens. Posthuman thinking, which decentres the human in conceptions of childhoods and educational relationships, reinforces not only the interdependencies of our relationships across the planet, but also it highlights the importance for teachers of developing an increasing sense of comfort with letting go of the need for certainty. It pushes us to think beyond the humanist need for control, guided and challenged by a new way of thinking of curricula and policy such as Te Wh¯ariki, to interrogate children’s relations with materials and objects.

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References Barad, K. (2003). Posthumanist performativity: Toward an understanding of how matter comes to matter. Signs: Journal of Women in Culture and Society, 28(3), 801–831. https://doi.org/10.1086/ 345321. Barad, K. (2007). Meeting the universe halfway: Quantum physics and the entanglement of matter and meaning. Durham, NC: Duke University Press. Barad, K. (2014). Diffracting diffraction: Cutting together-apart. Parallax, 20(3), 168–187. https:// doi.org/10.1080/13534645.2014.927623. Bennett, J. (2010). Vibrant matter: A political ecology of things. Durham, NC: Duke University Press. Ceder, S. (2018). Towards a Posthuman theory of educational relationality. London, England: Routledge. Freeman, C., & Higgins, N. (2013). Children in Aotearoa New Zealand. In N. Higgins & C. Freeman (Eds.), Childhoods: Growing up in Aotearoa New Zealand (pp. 13–28). Wellington, New Zealand: Otago University Press. Grosz, E. (2008). Chaos, territory, art: Deleuze and the framing of the Earth. New York: Columbia University Press. Haraway, D. J. (1985). A manifesto for cyborgs: Science, technology, and socialist feminism in the 1980s (pp. 173–204). San Francisco, CA: Center for Social Research and Education. Haraway, D. (2007). When species meet. Minneapolis, MN: University of Minnesota Press. Holmberg, L. (2018). The future of childhood studies? Reconstructing childhood with ideological dilemmas and metaphorical expressions. Childhood, 25(2), 158–172. https://doi.org/10.1177/090 7568218759788. Jones, A., & Hoskins, T. K. (2016). A mark on paper: The matter of indigenous-settler history. In C. A. Taylor & C. Hughes (Eds.), Posthuman research practices in education (pp. 75–92). London, England: Palgrave Macmillan. Konstantoni, K., & Emejulu, A. (2017). When intersectionality met childhood studies: The dilemmas of a travelling concept. Children’s Geographies, 15(1), 6–22. https://doi.org/10.1080/14733285. 2016.1249824. Latour, B. (2004). Politics of nature: How to bring the sciences into democracy. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press. Latour, B. (2014). Agency at the time of the anthropocene. New Literary History, 45(1), 1–18. https://doi.org/10.1353/nlh.2014.0003. Malone, K. (2017). Child friendly cities: A model for sustainable development. In K. Bishop & L. Corkery (Eds.), Designing cities with children and young people: Beyond playgrounds and skate parks (pp. 11–23). New York: Routledge. May, H. (2013). The discovery of early childhood (2nd ed.). Wellington, New Zealand: NZCER Press. Ministry of Education. (2017). Te Wh¯ariki he wh¯ariki m¯atauranga m¯o ng¯a mokopuna o Aotearoa Early Childhood Curriculum. Wellington, New Zealand: New Zealand Government. Moss, P., Dahlberg, G., Grieshaber, S., Mantovani, S., Pence, A., & Swadener, B. B. (2016). The organisation for economic co-operation and development’s international early learning study: Opening for debate and contestation. Contemporary Issues in Early Childhood, 17(3), 343–351. https://doi.org/10.1177/1463949116661126. Rautio, P. (2013). Children who carry stones in their pockets: On autotelic material practices in everyday life. Children’s Geographies, 11(4), 394–408. Rautio, P., & Winston, J. (2013). Things and children in play—Improvisation with language and matter. Discourse: Studies in the Cultural Politics of Education, 36(1), 15–26. https://doi.org/10. 1080/01596306.2013.830806. Rose, N. (1999). Powers of freedom: Reframing political thought. Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press.

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Somerville, M. (2013). Water in a dry land: Place-learning through art and story. London, UK: Routledge. Taylor, A. (2013). Reconfiguring the natures of childhood. London, UK: Routledge. Tesar, M. (2015). Te Wh¯ariki in Aotearoa New Zealand: Witnessing and resisting neoliberal and neo-colonial discourses in early childhood education. In V. Pacini-Ketchabaw & A. Taylor (Eds.), Unsettling the colonial places and spaces of early childhood education (pp. 145–170). New York, NY: Routledge. Tesar, M. (2017). Tracing notions of sustainability in urban childhoods. In K. Malone, T. Gray, & S. Truong (Eds.), Reimagining sustainability in precarious times (pp. 115–127). New York, NY: Springer. Tesar, M., & Arndt, A. (2016). Vibrancy of childhood things: Power, philosophy and political ecology of matter. Cultural Studies↔Critical Methodologies, 16(2), 193–200. https://doi.org/ 10.1177/1532708616636144 Tesar, M., & Arndt, S. (2020). Re-reading and re-activating Te Wh¯ariki through a posthuman childhood studies lens. In A. Gunn & J. Nuttall (Eds.), Weaving Te Wh¯ariki: Aotearoa New Zealand’s early childhood curriculum document in theory and practice (pp. 181–194). Wellington, New Zealand: NZCER Press. Van Manen, M., & Levering, B. (1996). Childhood’s secrets: Intimacy, privacy and the self reconsidered. New York, NY: Columbia University.

Chapter 7

Children’s Worlding of/in Learning Environments

Abstract Exploring possibilities and potentialities arising out of the comprehensive, all-encompassing movements of life and matter in and through children’s learning environments is the focus of this chapter. It brings together the theoretical shifts outlined in Chaps. 1, 2 and 3 with the focus on people, places and things in the curriculum from Chap. 6, into the everyday entanglements of children’s learning environments. The idea of place and what it means in terms of children’s learning environments is central to this engagement as we explore through scenarios and possibilities offered by a posthuman conceptualisation. The examination frames hopeful, ethical ways to live in environmentally, economically and politically challenging times, among, with and as species, places and energies. In this chapter, we unpack some of what such intra-relationships might mean and look like, as they are intra-actively and ongoingly created and recreated by humans and other things and forces. Keywords Children’s learning environments · Worlding · Children’s intra-relationships · Posthuman children

Introduction This chapter explores possibilities and potentialities arising out of the comprehensive, all-encompassing movements of life and matter in and through children’s learning environments. It builds on the focus on “people, places and things” and the Child ↔ Materialities ↔ Curriculum entanglement which we discussed in Chap. 6. The idea of place and what it means in terms of children’s learning environments is critical in this chapter, as we engage through the “hopeful possibilities” offered by a posthuman conceptualisation. Our hopeful approach is a reflection on Deborah Bird Rose’s manifesto written a month before she passed, where she argued for the need to embrace an attitude of Yes! Yes! is the great powerhouse of life on earth. With Yes! life moves, it acts, it comes bursting forth. Amongst flying-foxes, as with many humans, I encountered this affirmation as it conveys the desire to participate in the great flow of life’s own desires and ways of becoming. © Springer Nature Singapore Pte Ltd. 2020 K. Malone et al., Theorising Posthuman Childhood Studies, Children: Global Posthumanist Perspectives and Materialist Theories, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-981-15-8175-5_7

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‘Yes!’ travels, it is interactive and relational, and it invites us to investigate how mutualisms circulate. For humans, saying yes to life is a profound ethical choice. It is a passionate embrace of the living world, a grateful response to the gifts of life, a pledge of solidarity with earth life, and a commitment to participation in the complexities of mutuality. ‘Yes!’ is our continuing commitment to ontological-ecological terrains of reality: the affirmation that conveys our desire to join other creatures in participating in the great flow of life’s own desires and ways of becoming (Deborah Bird Rose, 2018).

Adopting an attitude of “Yes!” calls for increasingly conscious ethical ways to live in environmentally, economically and politically challenging times. We have already lamented in earlier chapters this lack, in the time of the Anthropocene. “Life on earth, that moves and acts, … comes bursting forth”, as Bird Rose (2018) exclaims, could be what we see as children’s learning environment, diffractive, “interactive and relational”. What if, in this process, we considered not only the major (adult-human), but also the minor players, beyond children, beyond well-known animals, to think of the flying foxes, the forces exuded by beings and by affects, as they shift and move in their worlds and ours? Bird Rose argued for a recognition of “deep and abiding mutualisms” among species, places and energies. In this chapter, we unpack some of what such mutualisms might mean, for children and for us in the learning environments that adults create for children, and that children and other matters, things and forces create intra-actively and intra-relationally. We continue where we left off in Chap. 6, to conceptualise diverse learning environments as places in which children spend their time, learning in the myriad ways that human beings assimilate and accumulate knowledge. But in addition, we recognise that the complexities of mutuality within children’s learning environments are likely such that we may have no control, nor perhaps knowledge over what they include and what they don’t. Indeed, we may only sense their complexity, or perhaps not even that. This chapter affirms the message in this book of seeking a sense of comfort with the discomfort, of perhaps not being able to know. It pushes us to let go of the very human desire for certainty. Attempts to re-define, rethink or shift from the scholarship of a new sociology of childhood outlined in Chap. 2, and the developmental approaches to which it responds, do not ask for a total break from tradition, however. Instead, they inspire yet another reading, another way of thinking, that adds a further layer to the complexity of understanding, theorising and acting in relation to children in their early learning environments. Our thinking in this chapter is motivated by contemporary worldly concerns. These concerns include global migrations and the struggles of children and their families from non-Western and also Western parts of the world; the globalised, often standardised conceptions of childhood in an era punctuated by uncertainty (Arndt, 2016; Urban, 2015); and the ecological threats of the Anthropocene that drive policies to disadvantage the youngest citizens (Duhn, 2014; Malone, 2016). Similarly, placing ourselves within the earthly concerns in Bird Rose’s quote opens us up to such anxieties as Haraway (2016) reminds us of, as she cautions: The Great Dithering was a time of ineffective and widespread anxiety about environmental destruction, unmistakable evidence of accelerating mass extinctions, violent climate

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change, social disintegration, widening wars, ongoing human population increase … and vast migrations of human and nonhuman refugees without refuges (pp. 144–145).

These anthropocentric and globalising concerns represent an environmental crisis of all who inhabit and act on/in/through the planet. And they deeply implicate children’s learning environments. Natureculture entanglements in learning environments, such as discussed in Chap. 5, alert us to problems as highlighted by Latour (2014). Latour laments people’s lack of an adequate “mental and emotional repertoire” (p. 1) to cope with massive uncertainties, destructions and injustices playing out in the Anthropocene. These issues are compounded by other contemporary cultural and educational concerns such as the marginalisation of indigenous rights, readiness discourses surrounding young children’s’ learning, power dominations, and governmentality (Cannella, Pérez, & Lee, 2016). Indeed, these concerns are both human and nonhuman, and they affirm an indigenous perspective, where existence itself is a constant state of reconstruction (Mika, 2017). Recognising these often-unfathomable complexities, this chapter furthers the reconstruction of conceptions of children as beings in multiple human and nonhuman intra-relationships, within their worlds and within their learning environments. We bear in mind children’s many and varied learning environments, and the potential considerations impacted by that term. Considering that children learn all the time in their daily lives, they may learn what adults intend for them to learn (for example, through curriculum prescriptions and set activities—see Chap. 6). They most certainly also learn what was not “intentionally taught” “prescribed” or “planned” for them. This chapter throws open preconceived, simple or prescriptive ideas on place, time and educational experience. Taking up the challenge of our re-reading of the Aotearoa New Zealand early childhood curriculum Te Wh¯ariki in chapter 6, a posthuman and new materialist perspective pushes us to let go of the need for certainty, and for predictable pathways. It dethrones us from the position of the “all knowing” “controlling” “powerful” exceptional human being, that creates the teaching plan. In this chapter, we re-elevate the relational complexities of educational settings, where children intra-act with things, matter and other beings around them, both with and without having a conscious intention. This chapter creates a space, then, for what Massumi (2015) has elevated as the importance, from a Deleuzian perspective, of “mattering-on”. That is, honouring the impact of matter within/on learning environments. Mattering-on returns us to Bennett (2010) and to the idea that the vibrancy and power of things and matter, that is, of thing-power, are in line with considerations of the “curious ability of inanimate things to animate, to act, to produce effects dramatic and subtle” (p. 6, emphasis in the original). The process of matter and power can be seen as operating through reconceptualizing learning environments using diffraction, assemblages and rhizomatic thought, to reshape understandings of young children and their learning environments using examples to illustrate more complex, more-than-human layers of mutual complexities. In this chapter, we offer a range of speculations, rather than solutions, where conceptualizing learning environments is a precarious and uncertain act.

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Learning Environments as Precarious Moving beyond the human offers a useful affirmative re-turn to engage with contemporary “advances” and concerns in children’s learning environments. Figure 7.1, like others throughout this chapter, is from Campus Creche at the University of Waikato, where Sonja Arndt served on the Trust Board for a number of years. They illustrate ways in which environments offer precarity, uncertainty and change in human and nonhuman conditions. Barad (2003), like Massumi above, affirms that a human focus matters, that is, “Language matters. Discourse matters. Culture matters” (p. 801). And yet, she worries, that “there is an important sense in which the only thing that does not seem to matter anymore is matter” (p. 801). Where is matter, in conceptualisations of learning environments through Te Wh¯ariki or other curriculum documents? What contribution do local or global assessment, regulatory, statutory or other aspects of the policy environment make to the matter in children’s learning environments? That matter raises further concerns in relation to conceptualisations of learning environments in the fluid negotiation and renegotiation of human responses to global ecologies and conditions. What does a recognition of the vibrancy and critical connection of matter and its forces and energies add, when we think about children’s learning in the early years? And in what ways does such thinking connect to environmental anxieties and to the ethical/political commitments implicated? Complex intra-relationalities push us beyond disciplinary boundaries and beyond the boundaries of human-centric theories and subjects. They even push us further, to propose a dissolution of clearly defining learning environments in the early years. Considering that we may not even know which elements of the environment provoke “learning”, places us as adults in a precarious position. As we have already discussed in Chapter 4, increasing calls in recent times for the elevation of children’s voices, already places pressure on learning environments with and for children. Pushed further, a posthuman argument beyond the social realm means that children are already implicated in creating their own learning environments, as these environments arise from their intra-actions with/in their relationships in the place (Arndt & Tesar, 2016). But how does this work, and what does this mean? If children are in place, what do they create, that is more-than-human, or more-than-social? To revert to Bird Rose’s quote, how do we slow down and step away from the comfort of knowing what the next step or process will be? What does this new ontological or epistemological terrain mean, for the children, and for the others in their nature-culture-child relations? For Barad (2014) such a rethinking may be a diffractive re-turn, which, she says, is a turning [it] over and over again – iteratively intra-acting, re-diffracting, diffracting anew, in the making of new temporalities (spacetimematterings), new diffraction patterns. We might imagine re-turning as a multiplicity of processes, such as the kinds earthworms revel in while helping to make compost or otherwise being busy at work and at play: turning the soil over and over – ingesting and excreting it, tunnelling through it, burrowing, all means of aerating the soil, allowing oxygen in, opening it up and breathing new life into it (p. 168).

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Fig. 7.1 Precarious, complex learning environments. Campus Creche, Hamilton, New Zealand. Credit Sonja Arndt

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Exploring children’s learning environments as posthuman spacetimematterings calls for iteratively intra-acting with recent theoretical shifts in what and how we think about children. In involves “turning and re-turning” to notions of space, of time and of matter, all together, thrown together, in learning environments. Such turning and returning respond to recent critiques of childhood studies, where they are seen as failing to distinguish between ontology (being) and epistemology (knowing). Highlighting this “epistemic fallacy”, Smith (2013) explains that this “means that while thinking about childhood in certain ways does influence what children experience, it is not the same as what they experience” (p. 20, emphasis added). This thinking is pertinent in many areas, including in relation to children’s learning environments, and has implications for micro and macro orientations to the spaces and places, and to the children within them. Teachers of young children are placed in tension when they are expected to engage with their learning environments—for example as outlined in our earlier rereading of Te Wh¯ariki (in Chap. 6)—as, if we take this fallacy on board, adults planning for children can never know what children experience and learn in, or outside of, learning environments. A diffractive reading of posthuman relationalities in children’s learning environments reveals ethical and post-anthropocentric implications for children’s learning, their environments and their futures (Smith, Myers, & Tesar, 2017). It entwines Western and Indigenous thought with worldly relationalities, as promoted for example by Te Wh¯ariki, where. Kaiako (teachers) support mokopuna (children) to engage respectfully with, and to have aroha (love) for, Papat¯ua¯ nuku (the earth mother). They encourage an understanding of kaitiakitanga (guardianship) and the responsibilities of being a kaitiaki (guardians) by, for example, caring for rivers, native forest, and birds (Ministry of Education, 2017, p. 33, our simple interpretations of te reo M¯aori, the M¯aori language, added).

Having concerns for diverse cultural and indigenous perspectives bring different onto-ethico-epistomological inspirations towards the land, the earth, or water, to our diffractive reading of learning environments. Water, for example, diffracts by challenging normative structures. It offers the potential for fluidity in methodologies that diversify, do seemingly nothing, in or on time, and can simultaneously seem serene, pure, dark, innocent, dangerous, or wild. Water is an element with a life-giving force. Water gives power, and exerts power, in the assemblage of environments where each element intra-relates and affects itself and the other elements. In Chap. 4 we alluded to the recent case in Aotearoa New Zealand, where the Whanganui River was even given its own legal power, being granted the rights of a human subject. In this act, epistemologies of and with water became closely linked as well as questioned through Western and Indigenous cultural ways of knowing and being. The concept of water assemblages opens up possibilities for multiple conceptions of environments. In other words, rivers offer a relational and ethically concerning opportunity for further rereading, re-turning, for diffracting physical environments, through diverse cultural legends, food practices, contaminations and leisure activities. The braided rivers of New Zealand’s South Island offer a useful metaphor to illustrate the fluid boundaries between acts, orientations, knowledges, affects and responses. Their variously

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Fig. 7.2 Braided river: Kawerau River, Queenstown, New Zealand. Credit Sonja Arndt

gushing, trickling, mini or major streams, running alongside each other, sometimes entwining, sometimes not, seeping into the silt, earth, clay, porous river sands and stones in, on and through which they pass (Fig. 7.2).

Learning Assemblages: Meaning, Power and Circumstances Seeing young children’s learning environments through a posthuman lens invites us to return to the notion that has been translated from Deleuze and Guattari’s writing (in French) to the English word “assemblage” (Buchanan, 2017). An assemblage is a multiplicity (Deleuze & Guattari, 2013). As a multiplicity, it can be viewed as a rhizome, as “[m]ultiplicities are rhizomatic”, that is, they continually “establish connections between” meaning, power and circumstances in relation, for example, to “the arts, sciences and social struggles” (p. 6). When we see young children’s learning environments as rhizomatic, then, we see them as non-static

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multiplicities, always shifting, changing and becoming something different—akin, perhaps, to braided rivers. This way of thinking opens us up to seeing the many different connections established and continually establishing and re-establishing themselves within the learning environment. It shows that there are multiple ways of understanding meaning, of viewing diverse “organisations of power” (p. 6), and in particular of creating spaces for the multiple shifting and changing circumstances that we need to allow for as experienced by and “powered” by children and their intra-relationalities. Through this multiplicity, that is, through these constantly shifting, evolving, changing outlooks, the constantly reorganising learning environment emerges as an assemblage. This way of looking at learning environments introduces complexities that we may not have considered previously, it is the “increase in the dimensions of a multiplicity that necessarily changes in nature as it expands its connections” (Deleuze & Guattari, 2013, p. 7). This view of assemblage exemplifies two key challenges to conventional thought on children and their learning environments: having linear expectations, and hierarchies. Let us re-turn to explore these two elements a little more closely.

Questioning Linear Expectations When the learning environment is seen as an assemblage, and as a rhizomatic multiplicity, the constant connections that are made within it and by it do not—cannot— follow a linear path. Deleuze and Guattari (2013) alert us to the rhizome as having “no beginning or end”. Instead the rhizome “is always in the middle, between things” (p. 26). The idea of the rhizome, as assemblage and multiplicity, then, among other things, shakes up our conceptions of children’s development as a linear process. This shake up implicates the development not only of ideas about a learning environment, the layout of a learning environment, the resources provided, or the ways in which teachers might interact with the environment, but of the sense, of it, its effect, of its relationality. In this way, this conception shakes up also understandings of curriculum. Rather than providing for children’s learning that might follow a linear process, both the learning environment and what is “done” “taught” “provided” there, become part of the assemblage of relations, between the people, places, things, forces and energies, which we may see or not see, which may be metaphysical, affective, noticed and felt. An example for challenging the linearity of expectations through issues of place in learning environments is offered by M¯aori Professor Wally Penetito (Te Kete Ipurangi [TKI], n.d.), of Ng¯ati Hau¯a descent. Penetito describes place-based education as a complex interconnectedness. It connects people, but mostly conceptions, affects and intra-relationalities. A focus on place, he says, has three strands: • a place-based curriculum that lets students examine knowledge and events from where their feet stand;

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• a place-based pedagogy that takes into account the tikanga (practices) of where you are teaching; • the idea of challenging your own “taken-for-granted” world (TKI, n.d.). As an assemblage, these strands illustrate a rhizomatic state where none is the beginning, nor the end: they all arise, continue to evolve, from the middle. They are and inhere in the middle, affected by and changing, because of their relationships with each other, with the people, places and things with which and through which they are related. They offer a major challenge to linear conceptions of learning, and of the “provision” of learning environments. Here, the learning environment is imbued from the outset with deeply meaningful and affecting notions that establish “where their feet stand”. For the humans involved, this might relate to a place of origin, or a place of deep meaning, a birthplace for example, representing an event, or significant sense, a belief. It might also relate to a standing of nonhuman, nature, matter or force, which we may sense, arising as spacetimematterings, in which agency and responsibility are shared, but not necessarily humanly knowable. A place-based environment that takes into consideration the “tikanga (or practices) of where you are teaching” calls on teachers to engage with local environments, meanings, cultures, that is, with people, places and things. It challenges not only a linear approach, but Western domination, in its openness to the influence of the place, on humans. Contemporary non-indigenous Australasian thinkers such as Somerville (2012) and Ritchie (2015) have picked up on indigenous calls like Penetito’s, to promote and attempt to describe what we might see as an embodied, localised, deep place knowing. This is a knowing that questions certainty, as it connects a sense of place with care, empathy, and the ethical and moral imperatives with which they are imbued. The “tikanga of where you are teaching” refers to the complex knowable and unknowable practices that arise from being deeply ingrained in a place and its past, present and future relations. Immersing learning environments in local stories draws in the third strand of Penetito’s conceptions of place-based education: of challenging taken for granted worlds. From a posthuman perspective learning environments, just like the relationships through which they emerge, are constantly shifting. Conventional methods employed in creating children’s learning environments must be questioned then, as the certainty of their “effectiveness” or “value” becomes precarious. Whereas teachers might typically seek some kind of ‘evidence’ and make a judgement call which determines children’s learning, a posthuman perspective calls into question the taken for granted, challenges even that we might “know” what we observe— to re-turn to Smith’s caution above about children’s experiences—and purposely complicates beings and their relationships. It refutes such a simple approach. Using singular or narrow assessment data, as a foundation on which teachers decide what the “next step” should be, and which teaching strategies should be employed, falls into what St. Pierre (2017) sees as conventional empirical research methods that are taken for granted.

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When viewed within current worldly, environmental anthropocentric anxieties, the connections between what is observed by adult observers may be far from comprehensive, or even far from accurate, in terms of what is happening for children, and what they are learning (Arndt & Tesar, 2015). The shock of a changed focus that shifts our thinking beyond the human has not been felt yet, according to St. Pierre, and linear assessment and planning questions within learning environments require, as Penetito asserts, an altogether different pattern of thought—way, way beyond what we take for granted. How might everyday learning environments such as those at Campus Creche below provoke such different patterns of thought? And in what ways can we “feel the shock” of the shift to recognising what occurs beyond—but alongside—the human (Fig. 7.3)?

Hierarchical Power Hierarchical power in children’s learning environments traditionally lies with dominant groups or individuals: global decision-makers, local regulatory bodies, community chiefs, teachers and so on. How hierarchies play out in children’s learning environments develop over time, within and beyond spaces, politically, humanly and in worldly ways. In places like Australasia and other colonised countries, colonial powers introduce further complexities and inequities into the human and morethan-human assemblages in children’s learning environments, bringing political and also very personal relations, experiences and shifting responses and powers together in local communities. Economically driven power can also have further reaching impacts, for instance, in Aotearoa New Zealand the first recorded, official children’s learning environment, is a public kindergarten. It opened in Dunedin in 1889, as an initiative to save children from running wild in the streets, after the gold in the land surrounding the city had been depleted and it had turned into slums and, behind the façades of former progress, economic recession and overcrowding took hold of families’ dreams and futures (May, 2015). Contemporary hierarchical power derives from many sources and is but one kind of power that governs young children’s educational settings. Two examples of conceptualising children’s learning environments can help us to rethink power as colonisation and domination in learning environments. They challenge expectations and hierarchies in children’s learning environments, through stories and picture books, reflecting in particular, Penetito’s call for recognitions of place (Fig. 7.4).

Picture Books and Learning Environments Using local stories (in oral storytelling or picture books) is one way to reflect the tikanga of a place, to which Penetito referred us earlier. Through narrations of place, space, nature and culture in stories to which children can relate, which they know

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Fig. 7.3 Non-linearity in learning spaces and places, Campus Creche, Hamilton, New Zealand. Credit Sonja Arndt

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Fig. 7.4 Rethinking expectations of place, Campus Creche, Hamilton, New Zealand. Credit Sonja Arndt

and which they feel connected to in their local environment, can be a powerful way to develop relationships with their own localised histories and affective worldly physical and metaphysical relations. Countering the globalisation of picture books and stories can be a rhizomatic step to the middle of the learning assemblage, that draws us away from the universalisation of stories through the dominant provision of, for example, Western European stories, of snow, wolves and European celebrations, to non-European countries where there is little relation or relevance of such seasonal or cultural events (Tesar, 2016). Local stories, using local languages, seasons, animals, events and myths, draw children’s minds and their very beings into ways and imaginings of local ways of being and knowing. They offer images, narrate events, beings, ethics and aesthetics, which go beyond having explicit meaning and relevance, as they connect with children in metaphysical ways, in implied, sensed levels. One example of such local storying of place is the use of place-specific M¯aori creation myths in children’s learning environments. Stories of the M¯aori cosmology legends that relate to a particular place offer multiple teachings and guidance for children (and arguably for teachers too) (Royal, 2005). The Koru, representing the unfurling of the fern frond, “conveys the idea of perpetual movement” (Royal, 2005), variously representing the idea of growth, developing knowledge and learning. Through such notions, M¯aori

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legends “foster empathy with the land and all who are dependent upon it” (Ritchie, 2015, p. 51) (Fig. 7.5). Re-turning to local stories rose to the fore in a recent programme involving teachers from isolated early childhood settings in the Kupang Regency in Nusa Tenggara Timur, Indonesia. Inspired by retelling local stories to each other, 30 teachers immersed themselves in developing their own picture books. Having lamented the lack of locally relevant picture books in young children’s learning environments, these teachers delighted in the memories and senses evoked by their local stories. Remembering narratives from their childhoods and local experiences, that had been retold over generations, they narrated, revised and then drew and recreated their stories. These stories had not previously been available in children’s picture books. Rather, books that were available in their children’s learning environments were either from Western countries, or from larger Indonesian cities and islands such as

Fig. 7.5 Koru. Credit Sonja Arndt

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Java, where the stories, images and meanings were different, and most often not related to the local context. Over a period of months, these teachers inspired others in their district also to create picture books, leading to an overwhelming engagement with their histories, stories and environments, as teachers narrated and illustrated the local stories of their childhoods. With the support of local dignitaries, the New Zealand Ministry of Foreign Affairs and Trade (MFAT), UNICEF and the Indonesian Ministry of Education and Culture, 30 of these books have now been published, and made nationally available as a teaching resource for early childhood teachers (Education Central, 2019). Many of the previously available picture books had been written in English or in Bahasa Indonesia, the nationally, politically agreed upon Indonesian language. In their own picture books, teachers used the diverse locally known and used languages, which have become marginalised by the dominance of the use of one national language. Apart from being an immense source of pride for the teacher-authors, the teachers’ recently published books offer a rich provocation to engage in the natureculture of local ways of being and knowing. They draw in the land, the people, the local animals and the knowings that arise out of and within the shifting and evolving local past, present and future assemblages. During this process, words and meanings seeped into each other, ruminating in and through the teachers, as they challenged linearity, over-turned hierarchies—of aid organisations and NGOs, of dominant Western teacher training models, and of prior local expectations of the Western expert imparting “knowledge” to local learning environments. Teachers became immersed in the constant iterations of their intra-active relations and encounters within themselves, their scrap books, their pastels and narrations, their place and in their children’s learning environments (Fig. 7.6). Early childhood teachers’ identity and feeling of belonging are emerging in recent research as fundamental to the overall wellbeing and sense of belonging of children in their learning environments. Given the complexities of such environments as intra-acting assemblages, giving attention to teachers’ sense of belonging and to their cultural groundedness in their local place and space, as the picture book writing experience was doing, offers insights into possibilities for rethinking the idea of teachers’ locatedness and their abilities to strengthen and engage with children’s complex relationalities. The in-betweenness of the middle arises here in an intra-action between the place, the teachers, children, families, histories and the spacetimematterings of all else by which they are surrounded in their learning environment (Tesar & Arndt, 2019). Early childhood teachers’ significant influence on children, their families and, ultimately, society is affected by a common lack of focus on their cultural identity and belonging—often pushed by the dominant expectations of narrowly focused learning outcomes or international benchmarks. Such reconceptualizations as offered by the experience in Kupang during this teacher development programme are necessary, and lead to an urgent need for further research. We outline some aspirations towards such research in Chap. 9. In any further research diffracting and fundamentally shifting thought requires a new language, new concepts and new thinking. It opens up a liminal conceptual space in between traditional, conventional humanist thought, when we add the posthuman

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Fig. 7.6 Book launch of teachers’ published local language picture books, Kupang, Nusa Tenggara Timur, Indonesia. Credit Sonja Arndt

challenges and conceptions provoked by contemporary thinking in this field, and by this and other books in this book series. Placing in tension the problem and possible values of what she calls the great dithering, Haraway (2003) urges us to act. Swedish teenager, Greta Thunberg is responding in force, with her incredible strength and activism spreading around the world. At the same time Haraway alerts us to the importance of taking time, to develop an awareness of critical “relations of significant otherness” (p. 8) across somatic, technical, human and wider intrarelationalities. Perhaps to follow influential thought in Haraway, or actions in Greta Thunberg, to act in this liminal space might become a part of a “new tradition”? Dolphijn and van der Tuin (2012) outline a new metaphysics as such a possibility: A new metaphysics is not restricted to a here and now, nor does it merely project an image of the future for us. It announces what we may call a “new tradition,” which simultaneously gives us a past, a present, and a future. Thus, a new metaphysics does not add something to thought (a series of ideas that wasn’t there, that was left out by others). It rather traverses and thereby rewrites thinking as a whole, leaving nothing untouched, redirecting every possible idea according to its new sense of orientation. “New materialism” or “neo-materialism” is such a new metaphysics. (p. 13).

In traversing and rewriting conceptions of children’s learning environments, a posthuman lens is a part of this new tradition. This orientation urges us to more closely investigate both human and nonhuman complexities. It involves traversing the

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unknowability of pasts, presents and futures of particular ways of thinking, as both a conscious and an unconscious imperative and outcome. This means reconfiguring our bodily and non-bodily relationalities and sensibilities to approach and engage with human and other concerns in learning environments (Arndt, 2018; Koro-Ljungberg, Loyt ¨ onen, ¨ & Tesar, 2017). A “new tradition” causes an awkwardness that is necessary, leads, and even calls for, risking a little of what may appear to be the dithering against which Haraway cautions, in the thinking and rethinking process (Arndt & Tesar, 2019). Arguing alongside Haraway in calling for thought, and for staying with the multiplicities of recent events and trouble, we are constantly torn in the tension of the challenges of unthinking what we have previously thought, and dominant concepts in contemporary politics and society. Perhaps a temporal dithering that is conscious and considered is necessary, as we rethink, unravel, re-ravel, dig and overturn our orientations towards children’s learning environments (Arndt & Tesar, 2020).

Learning Environments as Relational Encounters Children’s learning environments do not represent any one or other kind of universal relationship, but rather multiple relationalities, as demonstrated in the picture book scenarios above. Taking Braidotti’s (2013) notion of becoming as a central concept, the child, children, human, are not singularly nor individually constructed, but, as she stresses, they are being continually constructed on the basis of and through relationships, that is, “… the priority of the relation and the awareness that one is the effect of irrepressible flows of encounters, interactions, affectivity and desire, which one is not in charge of” (p. 100). Children’s learning environments play out in such multiple “irrepressible flows”, not only between the individuals—the man-made and natural things, other humans, nonhuman others—but also between and within these relationships themselves. That is, the learning environments are imbued with the energies, affectivities and desires “which one is not in charge of” that inhere in in-between spaces. This includes the liminalities between the encounters, affecting and being affected, the relationalities of the things, the beings, and the places and all that occurs around, to and in them. In the assemblages that are children’s learning environments, recognising these liminal spaces moves beyond traditional divisions that remain dominant in contemporary conceptions of young children and their environments. It questions age-related sectioning of the environment, divisions between one kind of learning and another, temporal divisions in timetabling, inside time or outside time, and so on. It moves beyond thinking that that which is not human, the things or matter, are considered as “passive stuff, … raw, brute, or inert” and where we ourselves, humans, and children, are considered as the sole experience of “vibrant life” (Bennett, 2010, p. vi), and as somehow more capable, developed, or feeling. Recognising irrepressible flows in learning environments calls for an openness to the emergences and cross overs, between classifications (of learning, age, levels, times).

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Such a messy fluidity in learning environments affirm the kinds of intrarelationships and connectednesses in that fundamental shift that Dolphijn and van der Tuin outline as a new tradition. In this vein, Somerville (2019) has found that in considering young children’s early learning environments, key issues come to the fore when seen through a posthuman lens. At the root of these issues are intra-actions, of “all matter having agency emerging through relationship in which different bodies of matter mutually change and alter in their ongoing intra-actions” (Somerville, 2019, p. 107). They encompass not only child-nature-environment assemblages, but also all of our fundamental orientations, towards self, other, land, place and all that is in-between. Posthuman relationalities, then, are always already a matter of ethics. When we think of the matter of children’s learning environments this has obvious implications for the actual spaces where children learn, and for the children themselves. As posthuman subjects, Braidotti (2013) notes, we are “materialist and vitalist, embodied and embedded … firmly located … multifaceted and relational” (p. 188). Thinking with Braidotti (2013) helps us to see ourselves, teachers and children within their learning environments, as actualized by the “relational vitality and elemental complexity that mark posthuman thought itself” (p. 189). It resets the fundamental grounding of thinking of young children’s learning environments as unequivocally, already, situated in a particular town, street, place, building, with particular rooms allocated for particular purposes. But at the same time its relational dependence and entanglement with forces and energies emanating from what lives and acts in and around this space, mean that it is constantly changing and being changed. What of the materiality of the picture books referred to above, for example, or the feel of sitting on a teachers’ lap, close to a friend, or on a lovely soft carpet, whilst listening to the story? And what of the ethics of the ways in which we might unwittingly alter the experience, without even being aware of its affect? Our very thought on what ethics is, when it moves beyond a purely inter-human consideration, changes. When we consider the vibrancy of things and materialities as an ethical imperative, the need for openness to intricate ways in which humans and nonhumans affect each other is again reinforced. The ethics of posthuman relationalities in children’s learning environments might be more akin to a sense, as Braidotti (2013) expresses in an interview on thinking of new materialist social encounters. This sensing implicates the already complex political, material and social relations of bodies, power and the marginalisations and subjugations that occur within them. In the interview, Braidotti defines such powers through a Deleuzian lens, as a “moving horizon of exchanges and becoming, towards which the non-unitary subjects of postmodernity move” and “by which they are moved in return” (Dolphijn & van der Tuin, 2012, p. 23). There remains again a liminality within the intra-relationships of “moving horizons” perhaps, again, out of our (adult, human, powerful) reach. The following scenario from an early childhood setting where one of us was teaching gives a further outline of expectations, hierarchies and powers in children’s learning environments.

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Patty’s Learning Environment Patty’s story illustrates another example of the throwntogetherness to which Massey (2005) refers. Her story represents what could be similar to many children’s encounters within their learning environment. For Patty, her experiences take place in a seaside town in northern New Zealand. The teachers in this centre work hard on challenging some of the traditional, taken for granted assumptions about teaching and children’s learning. They focus on ethical and inclusive practices and on blurring the seemingly limiting boundaries of social and cultural views of what children should be able to do at particular ages, as particular genders, or at particular times of the day. Like many children in the centre, 2-year-old Patty’s parents are from two different cultures. Patty always arrives in immaculate, feminine dress, shoes and hair accessories in her long, silky hair. She is usually dropped off by her mother, who often voices her concern that Patty should not engage in rough “un-girly” activities, that she should not take her shoes off or get (herself or her clothes) dirty or wet. Once her mother has left, Patty’s favourite activities are digging in the sandpit, working at the carpentry table and helping out in the garden. The carpentry area at this centre consists of a large carpentry table, with adjacent storage spaces at which children can access small, but adult version, saws, hammers, screwdrivers and nails, screws, and hot glue guns. Children are free to work at the table throughout the day except at meal, rest, or story times, and frequently do so. Patty always seems comfortable at the carpentry table, except that sometimes she has to remove some layers of her clothing so that she can move with less restrictions. The carpentry table is high for her and comes all the way up to her chest. Navigating the saw energetically backwards and forwards through a block of wood to work on her latest construction, she has to place herself carefully in line with the table to manage the saw, using both hands, backwards and forwards. Discarded items of her clothing usually end up on the ground, and her long hair becomes dishevelled, as Patty persists, drawing her 2-year-old arms back and forth, resisting offers of help with her sawing, concentrating hard on her work. When she is in the garden a similar challenge occurs in terms of her mother’s instructions: restrictive clothing comes off, shoes come off, hands dig into the soil, what clothing remains on becomes immersed in the dirt-plant-water enjoyment, and a wide smile invariably spreads across Patty’s face. Patty’s verbal language is only just developing, and she can only say a few words in English. Her body language however is expressive, and her actions purposeful. What is at work in the spacetimematterings of this environment similar and dissimilar to other learning environments; with elements and their throwntogetherness being unique. What inheres in this multiplicity, where Patty’s learning environment reflects a constant “moving horizon of exchanges and becomings”? Patty can be seen as becoming in some traditional, developmental and sociological sense: she is becoming more proficient with her sawing skills, more confident in discarding “unnecessary” clothing all by herself, becoming agentic in her world, as discussed in Chap. 4. But when we ruminate in thinking on the assemblage of Patty’s being, in the

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liminal spaces of her human and other multiplicities, her very being is precarious— straddling the razor’s edge of social (parental) expectations and her own somatic, sensed, desirous irrepressible flows. She becomes with the wood at the carpentry table, the saw and the energies expended by herself and its sharp, jagged edges. She becomes with the soil in the garden, with the water, playing out Penetito’s sense of place-based being: Soil is Patty and Patty is soil. Soil becomes method, soil becomes data, Patty-soil intra-act and emerge in themselves and in and through each other. Patty is not necessarily in charge—as Braidotti (2013) argues—but is affectively and desirously engulfed within this multiplicity, in her learning assemblage, nomadic and non-unitary, in any moment acting alongside other visible (and more non-visible) actants: the saw, the soil, the sand and their surrounding space, air, trees, and so on, acting on Patty, and she on them (Tesar & Arndt, 2018; Tesar & Jukes, 2018). Nomadic and non-unitary, Patty and other humans and the non-humans in this and the picture book scenarios illustrated earlier demand our attention. They demand as Haraway (2016) says in her book with the same title, for us to “stay with the trouble”. Staying with the trouble means not to take situations at their surface value. It means paying attention to “unfinished configurations of places, times, matters, meanings” (Haraway, 2016, p. 1), just as the configurations of the teachers in Indonesia with their places and hi/stories, or Patty and her mother, teachers and place, are unfinished and continually forming. Rethinking early learning environments therefore calls for us to perpetually rethink conceptions, to “stay with the trouble”, among other things, by troubling the “human I” as all-important, and de-elevating the human subject. By troubling and de-elevating Patty’s human exceptionalism, and elevating instead the matter inherent in the environment, the materiality of the saw, and her intrarelationality with the soil, we reconfigure how we think about the environment. If we are to take Haraway’s (2016) notion of collective implicatedness seriously, we need to ground ourselves in the human and non-human experiences affected by and through children’s inseparable lives and relationships, within the entanglement of children-places-things. It brings into our conceptualisations also the weather, altering the consistency of the soil, affecting temperatures, making it hot or cold, at the carpentry table, for example. Through the locally evolving picture books and stories, conceptualising tensions and potentialities of posthuman positionings in the children’s learning environments implicate us in the middle, elevating the liminalities of human-jungle-story-land belongings, which were already there—but perhaps had gone unnoticed in the proliferation of Western oriented story books and foci.

Reconfiguring Learning Environments As we conclude this chapter on blurring boundaries between human and posthuman conceptions of young children’s learning environments, we return to Bird Rose and the introductory quote: With Yes! life moves, it acts, it comes bursting forth. Rethinking learning environments, as we have done through this chapter, destabilises the certainty, comfort and knowability of dominant human-centric theorisations and pedagogies. We have troubled the narrow anaesthesia of dominant demands

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for expediency in teaching practices, economically oriented, quick-fix solutions that emerge from the neoliberal educational mindset. To expose the complexity and vibrancy of which Braidotti, Bird Rose, Penetito, Ritchie, Somerville and others remind us, and we have espoused in this chapter, is an ongoing troubling of common oversimplifications and universalisations of pedagogies, and a dangerous lack of thought or attention to the co-dependencies in which children and teachers are enmeshed in their learning environments. Reorienting ourselves through and beyond humanist foundations as examined in Chaps. 1 and 2 enables us to entangle the human with that which is more-thanhuman. It offers a humbling de-elevation of ourselves, as mere open and evolving subjects. It enables us to conceive of potentialities to move beyond the human, not as a literal act of removing the human, but to think about what lies beyond. Orientations matter, and they also constrain. Orientations towards the possibility of non-meanings, non-knowing and uncertainty throughout this chapter have diffractively over-turned, re-turned and turned-to children’s learning environments in ways that have contested what is often taken for granted. Viewing children’s learning environments as precarious assemblages, that constantly ruminate in and emerge from the middle of things, fundamentally and radically challenges expectations of clarity and understanding. This way of thinking decentres clear, linear expectations on how to consider children’s learning environments. It unsettles predictable futures, and knowable hierarchies in the dominant neoliberal frames of many education sectors locally in Australasia and globally around the world. Like Braidotti (2013), we do not propose that the human be eliminated. Rethinking the human in children’s learning environments through this lens affirms suggestions of the already present invisible histories and diverse knowledges with which many Indigenous cultures are very familiar. It leads us to conceive of the unknown, or “unfathomable”. It helps us to think beyond Anthropocentric representations, where we may not expect to fully “understand” or see as “true”, particular events, learning or outcomes within children’s learning environments. Diffractively encountering children’s learning environments has been shown in this chapter as a turning and re-turning. Simultaneously, it energises us to desist from re-placing, re-naming, or re-appropriating into some kind of normality, those uncertainties and unfathomabilities with which we are too uncomfortable. Such shifts in our orientations towards children’s learning environments require us to develop a new kind of posthuman trust. That is, if we de-elevate the human in learning environments, as boss, supervisor, decision-maker, we embrace a positioning towards life as existing, in all its complexities, with or without us. So, Yes! Shifting conceptions open spaces and potentialities. Like the earthworms in Barad’s (2014) quote earlier in the chapter, reworking, rethinking, re-turning conceptualisations of children’s learning environments throughout this chapter have opened up spaces for new life and new ways of thinking. Those affective powers and agency of humans, animals, place and matter were always already present with/in/through children’s being and their shared learning environments.

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References Arndt, S. (2018). Early childhood teacher cultural otherness and belonging. Contemporary Issues in Early Childhood Special Issue: Interrogating Belonging in Diverse Early Years Setting, 19(4), 392–403. https://doi.org/10.1177/1463949118783382. Arndt, S., & Tesar, M. (2015). Early childhood assessment in Aotearoa New Zealand: Critical perspectives and fresh openings. Journal of Pedagogy, 6(2), 71–86. https://doi.org/10.1515/jped2015-0014 Arndt, S., & Tesar, M. (2016). A more-than-social movement: The post-human condition of quality in the early years. Contemporary Issues in Early Childhood, 17(1), 16–25. https://doi.org/10. 1177/1463949115627896 Arndt, S., & Tesar, M. (2019). Posthuman encounters in New Zealand early childhood teacher education. In A. Bayley & C. A. Taylor (Eds.), Posthumanism and higher education: Reimagining pedagogy, practice and research (pp. 85–102). Cham, Switzerland: Palgrave MacMillan. https:// doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-14672-6_5. Arndt, S., & Tesar, M. (2020). Risking a great dithering: Changing the story of otherness through revolt. Somatechnics, 10(1), 35–51. https://doi.org/10.3366/soma.2020.0299 Barad, K. (2014). Diffracting diffraction: Cutting together-apart. Parallax, 20(3), 168–187. https:// doi.org/10.1080/13534645.2014.927623 Bennett, J. (2010). Vital materialism. Vibrant matter: A political ecology of things Durham, NC: Duke University Press. Braidotti, R. (2013). The posthuman. Cambridge, UK: Polity Press. Buchanan, I. (2017). Assemblage theory, or, the future of an illusion. Deleuze Studies, 11(3), 457–474. https://doi.org/10.3366/dls.2017.0276 Deleuze, G., & Guattari, F. (2013). A thousand plateaus: Capitalism and schizophrenia (B. Massumi, Trans.). London, UK: Bloomsbury Academic. Dolphijn, R., & van der Tuin, I. (2012). New materialism: Interviews & cartographies. Michigan, MI: Open Humanities Press. Education Central. (2019). Kiwi researchers enhancing ECE in Indonesia. Retrieved from https:// educationcentral.co.nz/kiwi-researchers-enhancing-ece-in-indonesia/. Koro-Ljungberg, M., Loyt ¨ onen, ¨ T., & Tesar, M. (Eds.). (2017). Disrupting data in qualitative inquiry: Entanglements with the post-critical and post-anthropocentric. New York, NY: Peter Lang. May, H. (2015). Nineteenth century early childhood institutions in Aotearoa New Zealand: Legacies of enlightenment and colonisation. Journal of Pedagogy, N¯aku te rourou n¯au te rourou ka ora ai te iwi [New Zealand Perspectives on Early Childhood Education], 6(2), 21–40. Malone, K. (2016). Posthumanist approaches to theorising children’s human-nature relations. In K. Nairn, P. Kraftl, & T. Skelton (Eds.), Space, place and environment (3rd ed., pp. 1–22). Singapore: Springer. Ritchie, J. (2015). Social, cultural, and ecological justice in the age the Anthropocene: A New Zealand early childhood care and education perspective. Journal of Pedagogy, 6(2), 41–56. https:// doi.org/10.1515/jped-2015-0012 Royal, T. A. C. (2005). M¯aori creation traditions—Common threads in creation stories. Te Ara— The Encyclopedia of New Zealand. https://www.TeAra.govt.nz/en/photograph/2422/the-koru. Somerville, M. (2019). Posthuman theory and practice in early years learning. In A. CutterMackenzie-Knowles, K. Malone, & E. Barratt Hacking (Eds.), Research handbook on childhoodnature: Assemblages of childhood and nature research. Cham: Springer International Handbooks of Education, Springer. Somerville, M. (2012). Water in a dry land: Place learning through art and story. New York and London: Routledge. Smith, A. B. (2013). Understanding children and childhood: A New Zealand perspective (5th ed.). Wellington, New Zealand: Bridget Williams Books.

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St. Pierre, E. (2017). Deleuze and Guattari’s language for new empirical inquiry. Educational Philosophy and Theory, 49(11), 1080–1089. https://doi.org/10.1080/00131857.2016.1151761. Smith, K., Myers, Y. C., & Tesar, M. (2017). Diffracting mandates for reflective practices in teacher education and development: Multiple readings from Australia, New Zealand, and The United States. Journal of Early Childhood Teacher Education, 38(4), 275–288. https://doi.org/10.1080/ 10901027.2017.1389788 Te Kete Ipurangi. (n.d.). Place-based education, New Zealand Government. Retrieved from https:// maorihistory.tki.org.nz/en/programme-design/place-based-education/. Tesar, M. (2016). Timing childhoods: An alternative reading of children’s development through philosophy of time, temporality, place and space. Contemporary Issues in Early Childhood, 17(4), 399–408. https://doi.org/10.1177/1463949116677924 Tesar, M., & Arndt, S. (2019). Writing the human “I”: liminal spaces of mundane abjection. Qualitative Inquiry. https://doi.org/10.1177/1077800419881656 Tesar, M., & Arndt, S. (2018). Posthuman childhoods: Questions concerning ‘quality.’ In M. Bloch, B. B. Swadener, & G. S. Cannella (Eds.), Reconceptualizing early childhood education and care: Foundational debates, new imaginaries, and social action/activism (pp. 113–128). New York, NY: Peter Lang. Tesar, M., & Jukes, B. (2018). Childhoods in the anthropocene: Re-thinking young children’s agency and activism. In N. Yelland & D. Bentley (Eds.), Found in translation: Connecting reconceptualist thinking with early childhood education practices (pp. 76–90). New York, NY: Routledge.

Chapter 8

Performing the Posthuman

Abstract Re-positioning ways in which we see children’s entangled realities with and in the world, this chapter places a posthuman lens on children’s lives and their affective relationships with human and non-human entities and things. Throughout the chapter, we provoke the posthuman thinking which we have built up throughout the book by conceptualising how not only language, discourse and culture matter, but how matter itself matters. We rethink children’s performance of their lives as, and intra-relating with, beings and worlds, using scenarios and theorisations as illustrations of the shifts provoked throughout the book. Exploring various ways for moving beyond the discursive, beyond our linguistic thought, this chapter considers the question of whether or not language has been granted too much power. It offers ways of thinking of children and their childhoods that bypass the dominance of language, which continues to illustrate the strong reliance on social constructivist views. The chapter offers a posthuman performance of social, cultural, humanly inhabited and experienced community, built, natural and human reality, and world. Keywords Performing the posthuman · Affective relationships · Mattering of matter · Posthuman lens on children’s lives · Human and more than human

Introduction: Matters and Worlds This chapter re-positions ways in which we say Yes! to life (see Chap. 7), as it moves, acts and comes bursting forth, through children’s entangled realities with and in the world. It places a posthuman lens on children’s lives and their affective relationships with human and non-human entities and things. Barad (2003) claims that “language matters. Discourse matters. Culture matters. There is an important sense in which the only thing that does not seem to matter anymore is matter” (p. 801). In this chapter, we provoke this thinking by conceptualising how not only language, discourse and culture matter, but how matter itself matters. We rethink children’s performance of their lives as, and intra-relating with, beings and worlds. To do so, we ask Barad’s (2003) question:

© Springer Nature Singapore Pte Ltd. 2020 K. Malone et al., Theorising Posthuman Childhood Studies, Children: Global Posthumanist Perspectives and Materialist Theories, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-981-15-8175-5_8

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How does one even go about inquiring after the material conditions that have led us to such a brute reversal of naturalist beliefs when materiality itself is always already figured within a linguistic domain as its condition of possibility (p. 801)?

In this chapter, we ask in what ways can we move beyond the discursive? How might we conceive of the materialities in life, if we figure them only through our linguistic thought? When we consider the question of whether or not language has been granted too much power, as Barad claims, we realise that this is not a new idea. Barad (2003) herself reminds us that German philosopher Nietzsche already warned in the 1800s against the dangers of accepting linguistic structures as true representations of the world. Various critiques of linguistics have led to elevations of the body, simultaneously de-reifying language, even by poststructural linguistic theorists, such as Kristeva (1973/1986). A dominant reliance on language illustrates the reliance on social constructivist views, where representations are expected to mirror particular realities, truths, or experiences (Tesar, Tong, Gibbons, Arndt, & Sansom, 2019). Such constructions occur through what we know about the social, cultural, humanly inhabited and experienced community, reality and world. This chapter’s aim is to substantiate the blurring of the boundaries of such constructions. It turns our thinking towards children’s performances of their lives, to think of them as multifaceted, beyond-linguistic, beyond-discursive and beyondcultural. As we have espoused in other chapters, this positions children’s lifeperformances as always productive and dynamic, within and because of the intraactions with other things, beings, forces in their life. The chapter begins with a theoretical foregrounding of what performance could be from a posthuman perspective. It considers a productive and dynamic way of thinking of childhood, and affects usothers through views on and encounters with naturecultures (see Chap. 5). Viewing children’s performance of their lives through a posthuman lens traverses notions of time and place, things, art and technology, by considering the affecting assemblages in which they are.

Children’s Posthuman Performance To shift away from a concept of linguistic representation, we blur children’s performance of their lives. Such a move challenges a representational view of language and discourse. This shift also challenges the notion of performativity, as represented through linguistic expression or a simple gesture, and questions representations that convey supposed truths, such as identity (Tesar & Arndt, 2019a). Challenging representational performativity brings our thinking back to intra-relationality. The connections and relationships arise on the basis of and as created by the performances of relationships between (and within) subjects and forces in constant intra-action and evolution. Language, perhaps, has been given too much power, as Barad claims above. And so has the human.

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To consider children’s lives as posthuman performances of blurred and multiple realities, meanings and intra-relationships, suggests the need to de-reify language from its discursive pedestal. It means entwining the discursive, linguistic element as merely one aspect of the intra-relational mix, together with other performances and representations of objects, subjects, materialities, energies and forces, as Barad (2003) seeks to elevate in her earlier quote. Fiore (2018) highlights the failure of linguistic, discursive and material theories’ recognition of “matter’s dynamism”. She sees this as defrauding matter of “its capacity as an active factor in further materializations” (p. 360). Fiore (2018) describes posthuman performativity as matter and discourse working together, to refuse a “representationalist fixation for ‘words’ and ‘things’” (p. 360), and says: What is needed to understand power in the fullness of its materiality is to account for the ways in which matter and discourse entwine and co-participate in the definition and materialization of the human and its others, so as to account for the non-human forms [of] agency and matter’s implication in its ongoing historicity (p. 360).

Haraway (2003) helps us to shift our thinking away from being predicated on the “self-certainty” of humanist ideologies and their reliance on linguistic representations. They are “bad guides to ethics and politics, much less to personal experience” (p. 8), she claims, and all things and beings become involved in various relations. These include “relations of significant otherness” (p. 8), beyond humans, beings and things, and boundary projects. “When objects are constructed through boundary projects”, Ceder (2018) describes citing Haraway, “the universal essence of the object is nowhere to be found” (p. 41), or “the object does not have inherent essential qualities” (p. 41). Rather, object-subjects arise in “the performative aspect of intra-relationality” (p. 41). They do not depend on particular specificities, or essential qualities, of “child”, “thing”, or representation. Blurring object and subject boundaries in this way implicate children’s intra-relational performances with and through all the people, places and things with which they are enmeshed. To illustrate this, we might think about children’s ways of being in their world, as always engaging and acting within their lives and their surroundings through performances. This view is ontologically and epistemologically challenging to the dominant view of children as defined individuals. It challenges our ways of seeing things—buildings, places and other beings such as animals, as distinctly separate and as non-agentic. Our intention here is to push these challenges, to open up new ways of thinking about materialities, animals and things as mattering, as agentic, and as constantly materialising. One useful concept to do so is “cosmopolitics”.

Cosmopolitics Children and their childhoods become decentered when we see their lives as complex entanglements of mutual affect. There is an urgency of a diffractive reading and reconceptualization of children’s performances of their lives in a post-anthropocentric

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world: the idea that children’s lives will likely be affected for longer than ours, by those decisions, practices, habits and interrelationships formed and enacted now. Using Stengers’ notion of a cosmopolitics, Latour (2011) implores us to consider a politics of the cosmos, where it is important … to strike the right balance between those two Greek terms: ‘cosmos’ is what insures that politics will never be just for the benefits of isolated humans, and ‘politics’ is what insures that cosmos is not naturalized and kept totally apart from what humans do to it (p. 73).

Helping us to conceptualise a cosmopolitics of children’s performance of their lives as already a part of all life and matter by which they are surrounded, he continues what counts is … if you manage to protect humans from being defined without the cosmos that provides their life support, and nature from being understood without humans that have collaborated with non-humans for eons (p. 73).

Cosmopolitics, then, re-elevates the importance of what matters, and what matter matters, in these close interdependencies. To illustrate, Latour (2011) shares one cosmopolitical implicatedness through a story about his father, who: … was a wine grower … his whole attention was concentrated on the weather, on the rain, on the dangerous pests, on the earthworms, just as much as on the vagaries of the world market taste for Burgundy’s fine wines. Similarly, today, we constantly and more than ever look out for the state of the weather, for the fragility of our ecosystems, for the coming of monsoons, for the pollution of our air, for the very stability of our soils, for the height of our seas, for the quality of our vegetables, for the safety of our soft drinks (p. 74).

The urgency referred to above arises in this co-implicatedness of children in the world: of the cosmos, and matter, and specifically in recognising the constant and evolving reciprocity of mattering (Tesar & Arndt, 2019b). To continue with Latour’s (2011) thinking, we humans are not well prepared to deal with this complexity. With our diffractive readings of entangled performances and affect it is important to expose the ecological responsibilities. It is our hope and intention that rethinking children’s lives in such a way that elevates matter and the materiality of objects and children is both productive and dynamic, and that humans are considered as part of, not separate from, the cosmos.

Performance as Productive and Dynamic In a cosmopolitical way of seeing, children’s childhoods are constantly evolving and non-static, messy and unpredictable, as their relationships with matter and surroundings shift and evolve in emergent ways. One of the critical contributions offered by reconceptualising the nature of these relationships is that it enables us to elaborate on some of the myriad ways in which childhoods are constantly evolving: in twists and turns, visible and invisible, sensed, felt or anticipated, that we may or may not notice. Children and childhoods can then be more fully conceived of as integral to a

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wider ecology that is both social and more-than-social (Arndt & Tesar, 2016). That is, it is both human and beyond human, not discarding the social, but decentering it, as we have already outlined in Chap. 7. In thinking along these lines, Bennett (2004) posits, for example, the productive and dynamic nature of human and nonhuman life as an “ecology of matter”, where the human and the nonhuman are enmeshed in a way of being that de-elevates humans. Thinking through this lens does not create a new reality for children. Rather, a posthuman lens on children’s performance of their lives requires an ontological shift towards things and relationships that are already there. In this, what we might call a posthuman performativity, children’s everyday lives are already deeply enmeshed in inter- and intra-relationships with wider worldly, human and nonhuman forces, energies and things. The questions that constantly challenge us in relation to this shift in thinking are • How we can shift our own thinking about children and childhoods through this posthuman performativity lens? • How can we—adults—move beyond expecting certainty, or knowledge, to which we are accustomed, especially when we are required to demonstrate such knowledge-certainty in educational, planning or reports, assessments, research and other documentations? • How should we frame our posthuman thinking, to accept the complexity which is key to its productive and dynamic nature, when we are irrevocably also enmeshed in our historical learning of (human) thought and being (Braidotti, 2013)? Haraway describes in her Companion Species Manifesto (2003) cross-species relations where beings are “neither wholes or parts” (p. 8). In reframing our thinking on children, we may, then, decenter their separateness in “relations of significant otherness” (Haraway, 2003, p. 8). Instead this helps us to see children as merely a part of the whole, not separate from others and their surroundings. Malone (2019, p. 108) argues: To take back our personhood in relation to other species changes everything. Anyone who seriously engages in this task comes to realize that our planet is full of opportunities to form personal relationships with many different kinds of beings. Even if most of us end up forming bonds only with animals we share our lives with, it is just as important as acknowledging nonhuman animal species that exist in faraway lands, oceans, and skies.

Here we use Baxter the dog, as another species, to help us to shake the human certainty from knowing, through his Baxter-dog-relationship with a toy giraffe, in the photos below (Image 8.1). When children-humans perform their everyday lives with animals, what is made of the animal entanglements with things, matter or materiality (Malone, 2013, 2019)? What can or do we think of the intra-relationality of Baxter-giraffe, that involves Baxter seeking the toy out, purposefully positioning himself closely with it, seemingly protecting it? (Image 8.2). What causes Baxter to intermittently act as if relaxing with the toy, appearing to lovingly engage with it, only to be alerted, upright, again on guard? And what is

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Image 8.1 Baxter-toy giraffe “relations of significant otherness”. Credit by Sonja Arndt

Image 8.2 Baxter-toy giraffe “relations of significant otherness”. Credit by Sonja Arndt

it about the encounter that allows or causes him to re-relax, all the while retaining paw-contact with the toy, even then? (Image 8.3). Baxter’s dog-toy performances raise questions about the posthuman performativity of children’s everyday lives. What is, and what we think about what is, returns us to further engagements with power and natureculture. We will now discuss some of the conceptions of natureculture, when seen as a performance.

Image 8.3 Baxter-toy giraffe “relations of significant otherness”. Credit by Sonja Arndt

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Performing Nature Children and childhoods have been conceptualised as or in relationship with nature. Chapter 5 adopted a natureculture perspective and develops a number of key concepts that help to reconfigure a posthuman pedagogy and openness in childhood studies, to move forward into these times of the Anthropocene (Duhn, Malone, & Tesar, 2017). Other scholars, like Taylor (2013), acknowledge that this requires a considerable shift, away from an idealised, romanticised conception of both childhoods and nature. A romantic notion of childhood largely originated in the view of children as nature, for example, in Rousseau’s ideal nature child, Émile see Chap. 1. Taylor argues that upholding such a utopian ideal of any kind of “perfect, natural” childhood does not mean returning children to nature. It does not mean immersing, or involving them in any specific adult-organised way in nature. Nor does it rely on developing human-centric (dominating, baby-ing, or manipulative) relationships with animals, or nature-based excursions—which have become very popular in educational settings and groups for young children globally. Taylor (2013) argues such activities that see nature and the human as separate entities, that need connecting, continue to perpetuate a great divide between humans (children) and nature. This view underlies approaches to nature as a remedy for the myriad ills of a rushed, technologically driven, contemporary society and its childhoods, deemed otherwise to be “non-natural”. By removing children from the spaces that represent those ills: indoor spaces, institutions, cities, screens, and so on, and by immersing children into “nature”, or bringing “nature” into these spaces leads to such activities as using natural materials as collage items, tending indoor plants in educational environments, containing animals in cages to provide “safe” animal “experiences” for children, excursions to the bush or forest. In such activities “nature” is commonly seen as an antidote to the “ills” of society. “Nature” becomes seen as a separate entity, that can heal, or undo those so-called ills caused by society and contemporary ways of living. This view reflects the seductive and romantic notion that nature is a solution. It suggests that it is readily available, will cure all ills, if only children become re-inserted in it (Malone, Duhn, & Tesar, 2019). When we think of nature beyond this simplistic view and align it with a childhoodnature perspective as presented in Chap. 5, a posthuman entangled view emerges, where children and their childhoods are inextricably linked with their human and nonhuman surroundings. In this way a natureculture inclusivity alerts us to the notion of common worlds, first originating in Latour’s thinking through the composition of the world and the new dimensions that such thinking reveal to us. This reconnects our thinking with the complexity of learning environments, from Chap. 7, and significant relationships with place, stories, or with animals and things, as above. It reinforces that entangled naturecultures are messy and uncertain. And it affirms conceptions of childhoods as complex and nuanced. Such a thinking offers an alternative to the reliance on separating humans, nature, animals into distinct categories, and also an alternative to one-off treatments to remedy a “lack of nature” in children’s contemporary lives.

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When we think of children’s performance of their childhoods as how they “do” them, and how they “feel”, experience, and intra-relate to and with them, an entangled natureculture blurring refers to how children act within the assemblage of their lives, in relation to obviously and not obviously connected elements. When we become aware of the complicated natureculture entanglements that include forces and unknown elements in children’s lives, this affects the ways in which we see things and objects, with which children are already performing their lives. In this intra-relationality, they (children, forces, things and objects) co-define what we might see as a “universal essence”. Perhaps it is useful here to refer back to Ceder’s (2018) use of the idea of “border projects”, and to Barad’s essence of intra-relationality as a constantly shifting intra-action of entities to further explain this essence of togetherness. This essence explicates children as merely one of the entities that perform their lives together with, as an enmeshed part of, nature, matter, things and other beings in their worlds. The speculative nature of a common existence advances a critical posthumanism (Braidotti, 2013), that means thinking about children and childhoods is concerned with ethical and political becomings. It focuses on an “enlarged sense of inter-connection between self and others, including the non-human or ‘earth’ others” (p. 48). De-elevating the focus on human individuals, it enables a postanthropocentric view, where children’s living of their everyday lives involves shifting power, knowledge and control away from solely human power, to recognise the power of the things, beings, objects and forces involved. The essence of this “new ecological posthumanism” (Braidotti, 2013, p. 49), that shifts the sense of entitlement away from a humanist expectation to know and control. It means unlearning the dominant human need for knowledge (Kristeva, 1991), and it favours instead an acceptance of non-knowing. When discussing child-nature relations through her theorising of ecological posthuman pedagogies, Malone (2019) for example writes: By applying ecological posthuman pedagogy I seek to pay close attention and notice the everydayness of children’s encounters and relations in the world with others and then consider these forms of co-mingling and co-habitation as the site for reconstituting an ecological community into an ideology of environmental education. The task is to uncover humannonhuman relations while moving away from a heroic story of human endurance and restore an onto-epistemological ecological ethics that takes into account that we are of the world, not outside of it (p.110) (Image 8.4).

Such critical and ecological posthumanism introduce new understandings of childbecomings. In other words, they challenge directions that are predetermined by developmental or sociological theories, international benchmarks, assessments, or curricular expectations. Instead they provoke a view of children’s becoming that emerges through children’s doing and being—performance of their lives. This state is necessarily a state of impermanence, and what might be seen as a ‘becoming-with’.

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Image 8.4 Co-habiting the joy of park play. Credit Karen Malone

Becoming-With Rather than following a set of sequential levels, children then “become-with” (Lenz Taguchi, 2010) each other and with the other things, beings and forces around them. Shifting our own thinking means we might ask how we do this relinquishing of power: What do we need to let go of, and what does that involve? In what ways can we think of children’s performance of their everyday lives, when we remove our adult filter, screen, or domination? What remains, when we do not determine, but rather open ourselves to not understanding, not knowing what drives, affects or causes children’s performances? When we consider children as becoming-with all elements in their lives, it leads us to more questions than answers, like: • To what extent do adults actually determine children’s performances of their lives?

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• What is this common, entangled world, that is already there, when we think about the children that we know? • In what ways can we see children living their lives in the now and in the future, as both-and, not going by just one definition or another? When we think back to the example of Patty’s two-year old being in the early childhood centre (introduced in Chap. 7), we might see her becoming-with as beyond what we can observe with our eyes, write down in anecdotal notes, or include in assessments or learning stories. Her encounters with the carpentry equipment, the table, her restrictive clothing, may involve affective experiences of which we are not aware. We cannot necessarily observe these effects, that impact on Patty’s becomingwith, however when we open ourselves to this not-understanding, to move beyond the discursive, describable “learning”, it shifts our view on her performances of life. Succumbing to the uncertainty of this framing muddies the waters of the ethical and participation rights with which traditional humanist theories are often tied. It challenges the view that we adults powerfully influence all of children’s experiences within a particular setting (home, city centre, shopping mall or educational setting), and that we can therefore also protect children or childhoods. This realisation reveals that we will never notice all of the complexities of children’s realities and materialities, filtered as they are through our adultness. Delving into such questions reveals the limits of our influence, as always adult-human—and perhaps even damaging. It reveals how conventional, traditional and dominant conceptions merely perpetuate humans’ anthropocentric expectations of power and control. In what ways, then, can our thinking evolve differently when we decenter our human interests, towards a more ecological, cosmopolitical focus on children’s performance and affect in crossspecies and nonhuman assemblages? Two aspects that affect this thinking are how posthuman performativity is affected by time and place.

Time and Place Conceptualizing children’s performance of their everyday childhoods through a posthuman lens reveals among other complexities temporal, physical and geographical elements. The significance of physical or affective spaces as felt, sensed, acted on in relation to their own situatedness, for example, arises out of more than children’s social environments. In other words, the other forces or energies, metaphysical relationships to land, place, water, may have to do with time, for example, which is more than a linear, forward moving conception. Even when histories are considered, time may relate to more than the dominant focus on progress, and rather on a sense, of past, present and future. Place, too, becomes more than a delineated, identifiable, ownable overt positioning. Fiore’s (2018) outline of posthuman performativity draws on Barad, to emphasise that all matter is an “ongoing historicity, a congealing of agency” (p. 360), where matter and time intra-act. These intra-actions may be beyond what we can describe in language, or even imagine. In 2017 the New

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Zealand Government granted the legal rights of a human to the Whanganui River in New Zealand. Below Bollier (2017) uses the M¯aori phrase “I am the river, and the river is me” to reflect on the complexities of understandings such place-human-thing relationalities. The metaphysical reality that the law recognizes is one that remains quite alien to the western mind: “I am the river, and the river is me.” That’s how the Iwi express their relationship to the Whanganui; the two are indivisible, an utterly organic whole. The river is not a mere “resource” to be managed (Bollier, 2017).

Moving beyond humanly determined conceptions of time and place, viewing the self as the river and the river as the self, as “an utterly organic whole” reinforces the all-encompassing inseparability of individuals from time and place. It also challenges the dominant Western way of seeing humans and nonhumans (such as rivers, but also the earth, animals, and plants). Ceder (2018) explains the intra-relationality of entities entangled in each “being”, through what Barad terms relata. The notion of relata stresses the non-universality of children’s development over time, and disrupts many conventional developmental or staged theories on how children grow, what they learn at particular times in their lives, and what opportunities they should be given at particular times. The basis of relata is the closely entangled evolution, and the reciprocal affect of and within, intra-relationships that children have with all that is acting with and upon them at various times. This exemplifies a posthuman intrarelational view on children’s performance with, rather than a linear idea of their progress through, their lives. The intra-relationships occurring in these posthuman connectednesses lead to and become as assemblages of space–time.

Learning from Indigenous Perspectives Indigenous thought and perspectives can help us to think further in diverse ways about the temporal impact on place and children’s lives. Many elements coincide in this thinking, for example, what has previously occurred in a particular place in the past, can influence the “sense” that is gained from being there in the present. Or else, the evolution of place over time affects children’s lives and how they live them. Some historical implications can be illustrated through an example from Aotearoa New Zealand, and how indigenous M¯aori children’s lives are impacted through time, by relationships with place. Ritchie and Skerrett (2014) relate how the articles of the Treaty of Waitangi, the treaty signed by M¯aori Chiefs and the British Crown in 1840, continue to govern M¯aori relationships to place, and to ‘things of value’. Article Two of the Treaty promises that M¯aori would retain “their absolute chieftainship (tino rangatiratanga) over their lands, villages, and everything of value” (p. 3). Land and place hold deep meaning to M¯aori wh¯anau (families), bearing witness to the belief that the people are not only of the land, but that they are the land, and that the land is the people.

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The colonial history of New Zealand and others, including years of unrest and dissatisfaction with marginalising practices and loss of family land, have served to diminish the promised tino rangatiratanga. They have at times led and in some places still lead, to an almost complete loss of “things of value” including tangible and intangible “things”, such as the M¯aori language, and the right to live as M¯aori. Research that attempts to understand why a Euro-centric education system does not address M¯aori children’s learning needs or ways of learning, among others by Bishop and Glynn (1999), illustrates these points. Non-indigenous immigrants and locals too cannot be separated from their histories, carrying with them not only memories, but a sense of performing life, and treatments of children and childhoods. This includes the expectations, limits and environment provided for children, either following experiences in earlier childhoods, or reacting to them in performing their parenting and teaching roles and contexts in different ways. Children’s performances of their life and the way they affect the wider intra-relationalities within which they are wrapped up are strongly affected by far more, then, than the human context. According to Ritchie and Skerrett (2014), M¯aori children might perform their inter- and intra-connectedness with their physical and sensed surroundings, in their exercising of handed down thought, orientations, attitudes, being, behaving, doing. That is, they make relationships with their surroundings on the basis of the meanings and belief systems that they are imbued with over time. This involves metaphysical relationships and relationships evoked through mythological connections and storying over time and place. Mika (2017) elaborates on an indigenous education when he writes about a metaphysics of presence, as a holistic and “at times elusive” (p. 6), worlded philosophy. Mika affirms the idea that not all knowledge can be described, as reflected in Bollier’s (2017) blog above, and emphasises the “wellspring of infinite connections and co-constitutive realities that are beyond our perception but that we are nevertheless indebted to” (Mika, 2017, p. 7). Mika alerts us to the dominance of (Western) knowability, certainty and visibility in our relationships. When children respond or react to a particular memory, of a past experience, friend, idea or thing, or to a particular occurrence in their place, they perform these “infinite connections and co-constitutive realities”. When a thing or phenomenon acts upon the children, in the way that death might, or birth, beauty, or a sensed connection, we can connect Mika’s worlded philosophy with Haraway’s (2016). Children’s symbiotic relationships with their surroundings might be seen as a kind of worlding, that involves them acting upon and within their human and nonhuman worlds. Through this lens children’s performances of their lives embrace and embody what has already happened, is presently happening, as well as the hope of the still-to-come. It is a performance of histories, presents and futures. Such worldings are a performance of children’s everyday affective engagements. The images below are a reflection on a day on which children engaged in an art-piece, invited by the local council. In an act designed by adults, and enacted by a small local community, children were invited in, acting with and through pots of paint, brushes, their local street, a sunny Sunday… It was a performance of their lives, through the multitude of entanglements of which outsiders-adults may or may not have been aware: what did children sense about the street and its prior state, that

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might have led them to transform it—to paint our street green? Was it in the paint brushes, or the physicality of long green strokes, in the warm spring sunlight, that the allure arose to draw them in? Or perhaps the togetherness with other people, the place, the air and the wind affected them in particular ways on that day (Image 8.5). The questions asked above about the painting of the street illustrate how children’s affective encounters with and in their worlds become increasingly open to speculation when we take a posthuman perspective. As noted earlier, their interpretation, and, if we wanted to use this term, their truths, are difficult and multiple. Through multiple truths, then, children’s expressions and influence, for example, in the performance of relationships with street surface, paint and brush, or indeed the making of other art, dance, singing, or music, become difficult to interpret in any way that is separated from the rest of their entangled lives. We may be aware of or able to see some of the influences and nature of affecting elements on children’s expressions, the feel of paint brushes in hand, or the encounter with the wooden smoothness of a violin, perhaps, while most of them we probably won’t even be aware of. Even if we are aware of the influences, we will not know if we feel, sense or experience them in the same way as children do, or as non-human things or beings experience them (to return to Baxter the dog with his toy giraffe, for example).

Performing ‘Thing-Hoods’ Children’s expressions emerge through an intricate encounter of their own acts and the acts of other things or objects on them. We have already introduced children’s affective performances of Bennett’s (2010) idea of ‘thing-hood’. Seeing children’s everyday performance of their childhoods as a posthuman entanglement plays out Bennett’s (2010) idea of a complex “thing-power”. As already outlined in Chap. 3, this notion recognises the materiality not only of things, but of giving “a voice to a less specifically human kind of materiality” (p. 348, emphasis in the original). Such a thing-power, Bennett says, considers the political and theoretical work of recent feminist and philosophical thinkers in phenomenology, such as Merleau-Ponty, in relation to power through Foucault, and in sexuality and gender studies, in the work of Irigaray and Butler (Bennett, 2010). It advances the point that the forces and cultural conceptions with which they are concerned are themselves “material assemblages that resist” (p. 348, emphasis in the original). We may not be able to describe or know how assemblages act, or resist. In what ways the grass, road or any other surface on which children run act on, with, or through, a child or children; or how they feel, sense or experience trees by which they are surrounded, or the flat, smooth or rough surface of the asphalt in the street they painted (above). Through Bennett’s (2004) thing-hood, or what she also calls “thing-powermaterialism” (p. 348), she argues that humans become more attentive to the power that non-human things can have on humans. It is the beginning of what might become a sphere of knowingly not-knowing the affect of things on children and their childhoods. More importantly, it opens up to the idea that non-human things also sense,

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Image 8.5 Before and after: local children and adults paint their street green. Credits by Sonja Arndt

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are acted upon, and act upon themselves. Little Otik the tree stump, that emanates forces, arouses desires, imagination, hope and fulfillment as well as dread, fear and concern, was also introduced already in relation to thing-power in Chap. 3. This tree stump illustrates what it might look like when a piece of wood has and exerts its own vitality, like the materialisms which Bennett (2010) describes. This story continuously pushes us to ask how we can know, over time, how such a “thing”, as a tree stump, intra-relates with the materialities and matter with which it is surrounded. Perhaps the material of the clothing with which it becomes clothed, the blankets in which it is wrapped, soaps used to clean it up, or the heat and cold of the water that the humans used to clean it, act on and affect it in certain ways (see also Tesar & Arndt, 2016). Braidotti (2013) further expands thinking on the effects of things and materials, through the notion of “deep history”. In the example of children’s encounter of their worlds (through streets, or tree stumps, for example) intra-acting relationalities also implicate time, through the idea of a “deep history”. Using Chakrabarty’s argument, she states that this may involve an “interdisciplinary combination of geological and socio-economic history that focuses both on the planetary or earth factors and on the cultural changes that have jointly created humanity over hundreds of thousands of years” (p. 160). The potentialities offered by such a deep history mutually affects children’s performances. What has occurred in the past, for example, on and in the street prior to its painting, in history, and also in relation to the present community, influences its further creation of relations with the children now. Similarly, the effects between stories, tree stumps, materials and skin arise in the entanglement of time, past and present practices, and aligned attitudes and reactions.

Performing Art Each child and action is imbued already with past as well as present effective influences. It is not only their state of being but their sense of “deep history” that pre-exists and affects interpretations and expressions, of what this is or means for them in their own entangled childhoods. In a learning environment layout, the physical space of the room or any other human or non-human relationships in the overall assemblage affect children’s artistic encounters at any particular moment. Such influences as the temperature, the sun and all other human and material things and beings in the surroundings intra-act to affect children’s encounters, their expressions and the possible outcomes. The diverse affective impacts on a child’s being and doing impact on both conscious and unconscious experiences of the moment. The child’s becoming, in and through that moment of intra-action within the child-art materials-thing-being assemblage constantly influences the child’s art encounters and engagements. Already in the conceivable realm, the sun’s warmth may be ‘felt’ in a child’s bones, perhaps causing a deeply relaxed state, of connectedness with the surface on which she is sitting, the materials of the clothes she has on, warming against her skin in the sun, warming

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feet on the floor. Further, however, myriad other conditions, relationships and performances, might lead to feelings that the child—and certainly we—cannot describe, that cannot be related solely back to the sunny warmth, but that are productive in their emergent interplay with the other effects occurring simultaneously. Children’s art-making gives us one way of illustrating a deep history thinking, and calls us to question what we see as “art”. When we are informed by traditional developmental theories (see Chap. 2), children’s “artwork” might be analysed on the basis of the children’s ability to “correctly” use a particular expressive technique, to hold a pencil, crayon, paint brush, for example, and to apply the medium to the surface on which he or she is working. A developmental view may also compel the observer to adopt a representational lens, paying attention to the accuracy and detail of representation in the child’s artwork. However, if we see this narrative and the child through a posthuman lens, we will see the child as but one of many intra-connected and relationally affecting entities, where the possibilities for expression are not only endless, but quite likely unknown or imperceptible (to us). In this view, the matter matters. This is to say that every element in children’s entangled realities acts upon the others (Image 8.6). Children’s art encounters include encounters with public art. Adult and child humans often linger in the vicinity of the crocheted wool-post-wrappings in the photographs above, to touch, engage with their presence, with what hands, sun, rain and dust have created. Humans affect the local environment in their entangled roles, variously purposefully, desirously or inadvertently intra-acting both with what is imaginable and unimaginable. Taking a posthuman conceptualisation of the matter involved in this public street art, we are driven to call into question its materialities. We are drawn to the ways the metal street posts, for example, act on humans, their environment, and become simultaneously acted upon, by surrounding matter,

Image 8.6 Crocheted street art, Brunswick, Melbourne. Credit by Sonja Arndt

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weather, dirt, car fumes… and intrigued by the ways in which traditions, crocheting hands, yarn, fabric and tape once more illustrate the complexity of intra-relationships as these posts are transformed again closer to Christmas time (Image 8.7). Another transformation occurred with the posts in the face of the devastating bushfires around Australia in the Summer of 2020 (Image 8.8). Street art in many cities illustrates the engagement of people, places and things in complex intra-relationalities. The street art images below call us into diverse encounters, through associations past, present and emerging, with buildings, with pop icons, cities, colours and with aesthetics and ethics of encounters and connections (Image 8.9).

Image 8.7 Christmas transformations of crocheted street art, Brunswick, Melbourne. Credit by Sonja Arndt

Image 8.8 Credit by Sonja Arndt

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Image 8.9 Street art, Brunswick, Melbourne. Credit by Sonja Arndt

Viewing children’s performances of their childhoods through a posthuman lens disturb what has become a comfortable sense of human exceptionalism. Thinking through posthuman and new materialist theories reminds us that the present is always influenced and manifested on the basis of all of the child’s previous experiences, ways of being, languages and histories. In contemporary childhoods a critical element for us to consider further is children’s performances of and with technology.

Performing Technology Technology can easily become implicated in conceptions of boundary objects. In Chap. 7 we raised this idea which relates here to blurring lines between the child

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and the non-human machine or technological device. What happens when we orient our thinking towards elements that previously might not have been considered as influential on children’s lives, and on the notion of childhood? Technology broadly refers to many kinds of nonhuman tools and gadgets. To illustrate some of the shifts to which we are called in recent times, we consider children’s entanglements with a now seemingly inescapable and intricately influential area of digital technologies.

Performing with Digital Technologies Worldwide, technological advancements in the past century and particularly the past decades have changed children’s everyday lives to a sometimes unrecognizable extent. Just a few examples; the telephones with which some of us grew up are unrecognisable to young children in our present lives; televisions do much more than play a few local channels; and developments in biotechnologies save many lives, assist mobilities in unprecedented ways, while war and terror technologies have advanced at an astronomical pace. All of these points make personal computers, tablets, cellular phones and other smart devices integral parts of children’s everyday lives in both the Western and non-Western world. Conceptualising children’s engagements with digital technologies through a posthuman lens marks a shift beyond what Gibbons (2006) problematised as the measurable, quantifiable contributions that technological devices contribute to their development. It allows us to see technologies as active agents, acting and enacting, shifting the dynamics, performing with children and childhoods, by their very being and affects, as other vibrant materials do (Bennett, 2010). This intra-relationality, as a co-constitution of selves, others, things, machines, humans reflects Braidotti’s (2013) argument that the posthuman subject itself “is a complex assemblage of human and non-human, planetary and cosmic, given and manufactured, which requires major re-adjustments in our ways of thinking” (p. 159). Rather than limiting our thinking about children’s development, childhood, actions or behaviours through human-centric theories, children are, through Braidotti’s statement, both human and non-human, planetary and cosmic, given and manufactured.

IPad Encounters We can consider how this reciprocal emergence plays out in an example from a rural kindergarten in New Zealand. In this kindergarten, the teachers had committed to a nation-wide environmental education programme, designed to develop children’s awareness of and participation in ecologically sustainable practices in the kindergarten and in their lives. This is a popular programme in early childhood settings and primary schools in New Zealand, so this story could easily have taken place in many

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other settings. This particular kindergarten is in a low socio-economic area in a small rural community. The children and teachers worked hard together to learn about, cultivate, enjoy and eat the fruits from their orchard, vegetable and herb gardens. Surplus produce, and surplus eggs from their chickens, were taken home by the children’s families or donated to local community groups. The children’s lives and encounters in this kindergarten were very much focused on living together with, co-sustaining with, the natural world in their environment. Inside the kindergarten buildings, many of the activities involved working with the natural materials of their environment, talking about the local bush, mountains, rivers, their meanings to the local people, and their contributions to the animal and human world. There was a focus on the animal world too, and on sharing such multi-species relationships as Haraway (2008) refers us to, with farm animals, native animals, and with (so-called) pests, and their significance in children’s and their families’ lives, including the bird life that was abundant in the local bush. There was a focus on the mythical creatures of M¯aori legends, particularly those related to the local area, and the gods that would assist them with their gardens, of Papat¯ua¯ nuku, Mother Earth, Rongo m¯a T¯ane, God of kumara and cultivated food, and Haumia-tiketike, the guardian spirit of all wild foods. Such was their engagement with the local stories that the families painted them on the previously barren fences surrounding the kindergarten. For a visiting adult human, a sense of awe and protection emanated from this enveloping aesthetic and intimate storyline. The fence captured the visitors with its beauty, and it took hold of everyone in a deeply effective way, as they learnt how strongly it implicated the whanau (families) and their genealogies with children’s sense of themselves within their gardens, their place, and their wairua (spirit). Within this setting and context, they were made aware by the children of the one iPad within the Kindergarten. At first, this piece of digital technologies seemed to be a noticeable departure from the nature-based focus in the kindergarten. At the same time, it was very much a product of the same focus. The children proudly described how they had raised money for the iPad by selling the poos and wees from their worm farm, as parents and community members turned up with plastic bottles and purchased the precious liquid fertiliser. Already on the surface, the iPad in this kindergarten gives us a way of illustrating the re-theorisation of children’s entanglements with their world through a posthuman and new materialist lens. The iPad could, of course, be seen as an important developmental and educational tool, as technology is often promoted, when its benefits for use with young children are espoused. It provided a means for both children and teachers to have ready access to research about tending gardens, planting, harvesting and pruning. It enabled them to understand the ecological importance of bees, which they had discussed at mat time, sharing stories from home. In addition, this one iPad gave opportunity for promoting social behaviours such as turn-taking, collaboration with peers, and shared decision-making, about its use and about the information gained from it. All of these views make pedagogical, developmental and curricular sense from various humanist perspectives. However, they also raise questions:

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• What happens when our adult and human-centric filters prevent us from ever really opening up to children’s relational entanglements with and in their worlds? • Can we know in what ways the children felt drawn to the iPad, perhaps as a physical thing, that then gives entry to worlds that they can see only through its screen? • Is it those other worlds, worlds within their world and beyond it, which maybe extend, maybe excite, and maybe complicate, their physical, felt, everyday world, that draw children to the iPad? • Does the iPad not draw them in at all, maybe, or perhaps it does on some days and not on others, for some children but not all of them? The complexity of this thinking beyond the human raises more questions, than answers. It reveals how unsure, unsettled we are about how these significant relationships mutually affect children’s relationship with the technology and the thing, the iPad. Time and place are influential, as outlined earlier, and past and present localities, realities, histories, relationships and ways of being in which the children are embedded, mean that not only is the mutual affect and performance of this relationship likely different for each child, but it will alter for each child at any given moment, depending on all of the intimate and wider affecting multiplicities (Tesar, 2016).

Affecting Performance Assemblages A posthuman lens removes the centrality of the human, and it recognises the various ways in which relational assemblages, of human and non-human, are vibrantly enacted through visible and invisible energies and forces. Conceptualised as a relational assemblage, a group of children entangled in relationship with an iPad then becomes more of sensing, of letting go of the desire for clear, explicit, articulable meaning. Assemblages, to think further through Bennett’s (2010) ideas, are: ad hoc groupings of diverse elements, of vibrant materials of all sorts. Assemblages are living, throbbing confederations that are able to function despite the persistent presence of energies that confound them from within (pp. 23–24).

In other words, not only the iPad, but every actor and actant in this relational assemblage is a “vibrant materiality” that has vibrancy and acts powerfully on all others in the assemblage. That is, they each exert a particular agency through their intentions, their “living and throbbing”, which “is like a pebble thrown into a pond, or an electrical current sent through a wire or neural network” (p. 32). In this way, as an intention, everything, force, or being, the actors and actants in the “throbbing confederation” of the assemblage, exudes agency that “vibrates and merges with other currents, to affect and be affected” (p. 32). The power to affect and be affected is held by humans, the children in the kindergarten, and their families and teachers, and non-human things, forces, energies, the

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iPad, the couch on which they are sitting, the ways that their clothes touch when they are close together, their emotional or temporal energies, as well as their intimate, perhaps intense, feelings towards and intra-relationships with each other, the trees, bees, chickens, plants and the Internet connection. The streaming of ideas through the physicality of the iPad, smooth on the back, the shiny screen, finger marks marring its clarity, smudged over images and the unconscious and conscious ripples of the kindergarten culture—such as turn-taking rules—surrounding the treatment and use of the iPad. The power of each of these elements might differ, arising in part from every child’s or family’s orientation to the notion of “iPad”, technology, ideas, the Internet, both in the past and in the present, and so on and on. In the process of blurring boundaries between nature and culture, human and non-human, eminent childhood studies authors and scholars, such as Prout (2005) use posthuman and new materialist theories to open up not just the possibility of an entirely wider ability to see, and to be comfortable with, what perhaps has not been, and perhaps can not be seen. Prout extends on childhood assemblages as “childgroup-street” or “parents-child-house” (p. 116) alluding to the wider muddying of conceptions into non-identifiable or non-nameable assemblages, for example, when children, childhood and technology engage in “living and throbbing” relationships with an iPad. Blurring boundaries create an opening for interdisciplinary thinking, as Prout argues, and we attempt, from our muddied stance, to reposition ourselves in relation to wider acknowledgements of such complex assemblages, including ethical concerns with identity, cyber safety, privacy and protection.

Ethics and Protection Guidelines for respectful use of information in online technology contribute to the formation of childhoods in the contemporary digitally infused times. An example is the popular online assessment tool “Storypark” and similar platforms. Storypark cautions on its website, that: Cybersafety is the safe and responsible use of information and communication technology. It is about keeping information safe and secure, but also about being responsible with that information, being respectful of other people online, and using good ‘netiquette’ (internet etiquette) (Storypark, 2019).

The Storypark website outlines various suggestions for keeping “safe”, any information about children, thus guarding their impermanent child-technology-learning assemblages. Not all children’s lives are safely protected by educational settings and policies, however, as various forms of technological surveillance and personal devices are inextricably enmeshed in the wider relationalities of their life assemblages. Renold and Ringrose (2017) map the entangled nature of how this plays out with older children, using teens’ digital sexual engagements with cell phones, sexting and tagging, as data read through a posthuman lens. While young children may not be engaged in quite the same activities, this kind of research creates an

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awareness of the affective performative assemblages and possibilities embedded in the risky behaviours associated with the technological devices. The “persistent presence of energies”, in Bennett’s description above, evolves through the “multimodal, multi-directional assemblage” (p. 1074) of teens tagging body parts, sharing, “owning”, shaming and pleasuring. Intra-relationalities with humans, objectified humanno-longer-human segregated body parts, and a wide world of non-human energies through which digital technological access and exposures flow. The teens interviewed by Renold and Ringrose (2017) reveal a purposeful use of technology, and the difficulty in separating materialities from realities, when relationships are conducted through images, texts and unreal-real online personas. The data reveals common practices of uploading images of body parts, texting them to others (girls to boys, boys to boys), and associating with particular images and online comments. A practice of “digital tagging as a phallic touch” (p. 1069) ensues, as “distributed sexual subjectivities of girls via their sexualized body parts metamorphose across more-than-human digital social networks” (p. 1069). Dealing of course with children beyond the years on which we focus in this book, the normality of these practices, as the images are distributed, commented on, re-uploaded, jeered at and re-introduced at later times illustrate a “flow of invasion, capture, merger, ownership and display” as “powerful … phallic force relations” (p. 1070). They reveal a little of the “space–time-body contractions” (p. 1075) possible in children’s digital technology assemblages, as images/messages entwine all who engage, view or respond to them. Digital media platforms become risky through some common elements, as Renold and Ringrose outline, that is: the persistence and longevity of an online presence. Even once an image is deleted by the sender, it may persist in many ways: • it can easily have been shared and saved by others; • the potential for visibility across a wide audience, who may or may not be known to the original sender; • the ease with which the online content can spread by sharing, tagging, liking or commenting; and • the ease with which it can be searched (boyd, as cited in Renold & Ringrose, 2017). The girls interviewed feared being tagged in images that were not of them, in practices that included boys “writing” their names across headless images of breasts or other body parts, in “felfies (fake selfies)” where it is not always clear who the body belongs to. This removal of the “self” the “I”, is theorised by the authors as an example of Braidotti’s explanation of “organs without bodies”, where particular parts, for instance, the breasts, operate as a prized organ. For us, the critical factor here is that technology-related images and text go beyond the human and implicate the human in affective ethical imperatives and performances which may or may not be desirable, conscious or knowable. The girls’ fears reflect potential risks with the longevity of images, search histories or unknown data distributions that could implicate young children’s performances of their lives in many dimensions.

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Concluding Comments The posthuman lens opens up a space for uncertainty, in which critical reconceptualisations occur. Posthuman conceptualisations of children’s everyday performance and affective encounters of their lives and childhoods in this chapter add possibilities to our thinking, theorizing, expectations, planning and assessments, of and for young children. Children’s performance and affective definitions of themselves and of their everyday lives play out in the ways that they conduct, experience, respond to as and with their environment. When children’s wider worldly and very local environments are seen as always already there, existing, transforming through the common and different confluence and existence of beings, things, forces and energies—regardless of the adult intentions and provisions of particular environmental additions, excursions, or features—we begin to open up to the complexities of affective influences on their performances of life. Even though we may rethink theoretical orientations towards children’s living of their lives and childhoods on our adult level, as much as we want to see things from children’s perspectives, our views, ideas and theorisations remain always filtered and shaped through our own adult lenses, histories and experiences. These may be very different from the realities that children actually experience, producing and reproducing what we can know, see, think and suspect. To borrow from Haraway (2016) once more, however, they remain speculative fabulations or speculative realisms. The idea of speculation critically calls into question our assumptions of ideals, of the universality of children’s performances of their lives, and of childhoods as simultaneously powerful and vulnerable. This conception leads us to our final chapter in this book, where we explore the influence on and of conducting research with, on and by children through a posthuman new materialist lens.

References Arndt, S., & Tesar, M. (2016). A more-than-social movement: The post-human condition of quality in the early years. Contemporary Issues in Early Childhood. 17(1), 16–25. Special Issue: Reimagining quality in early childhood. https://doi.org/10.1177/1463949115627896. Barad, K. (2003). Posthumanist performativity: Toward an understanding of how matter comes to matter. Signs: Journal of Women in Culture and Society, 28(3), 801–831. Bennett, J. (2004). The force of things: Steps toward an ecology of matter. Political Theory, 32(3), 347–372. Retrieved from http://www.jstor.org/stable/4148158. Bennett, J. (2010). Vibrant matter: A political ecology of things. Durham, NC: Duke University Press. Bishop, R., & Glynn, T. (1999). Culture counts: Changing power relations in education. Auckland, New Zealand: Dunmore Press. Bollier, D. (2017). I am the river and the river is me. News and perspectives on the commons. Retrieved from https://www.bollier.org/blog/i-am-river-and-river-me Braidotti, R. (2013). The posthuman. Cambridge, UK: Polity Press. Ceder, S. (2018). Towards a posthuman theory of educational relationality. London, England: Routledge.

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Duhn, I., Malone, K., & Tesar, M. (2017). Troubling the Intersections of urban/nature/childhood in environmental education. Environmental Education Research, 23(10), 1357–1368. https://doi. org/10.1080/13504622.2017.1390884 Fiore, E. (2018). Posthuman performativity. In R. Braidotti & M. Hlavajova (Eds.), Posthuman glossary (pp. 359–360). London, England: Bloomsbury Academic. Gibbons, A. (2006). The matrix ate my baby: Play, technology and the early childhood subject. NZ Research in ECE, 9, 137–144. Haraway, D. (2003). The companion species manifesto. Chicago: Prickly Paradigm Press, LLC. Haraway, D. (2008). When species meet: University of Minnesota Press. Haraway, D. (2016). Staying with the trouble: Making kin in the chthulucene. Durham, UK: Duke University Press. Kristeva, J. (1973/1986). The system and the speaking subject. In T. Moi (Ed.), The Kristeva reader. (pp. 25–333). Oxford, England: Blackwell Publishers. Kristeva, J. (1991). Strangers to ourselves. New York, NY: Columbia University Press. Lenz Taguchi, H. (2010). Going beyond the theory/practice divide in early childhood education: Introducing an intra-active pedagogy. Oxon, England: Routledge. Latour, B. (2011). Politics of nature: East and West perspectives. Ethics & Global Politics, 4(1), 71–80. Malone, K. A. (2013). “The future lies in our hands”: Children as researchers and environmental change agents in designing a child-friendly neighbourhood. Local Environment: The International Journal of Justice and Sustainability, 18(3), 372–395. Malone, K. (2019). Re-turning childhoodnature: A diffractive account of the past tracings of childhoodnature as a series of theoretical turns. In A. Cutter-Mackenzie, K. Malone, & E. Barratt Hacking (Eds.), Research handbook on childhoodnature. Springer international handbooks of education. Cham: Springer. Malone, K., Duhn, I., & Tesar, M. (2019). Greedy bags of childhoodnature theories. In CutterMackenzie et al. (Eds.), International handbook on childhood/nature: Assemblages of childhoods and nature research. New York, NY: Springer. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-51949-4_3-2 Mika, C. (2017). Indigenous education and the metaphysics of presence: A worlded philosophy. London, England: Routledge. Prout, A. (2005). The future of childhood. London & New York: Routledge. Renold, E., & Ringrose, J. (2017). Selfies, relfies and phallic tagging: Posthuman part-icipations in teen digital sexuality assemblages. Educational Philosophy and Theory, 49(11), 1066–1079. Ritchie, J., & Skerrett, M. (2014). Early childhood education in Aotearoa New Zealand: History, pedagogy and liberation. New York, NY: Palgrave Macmillan. Storypark. (2019). Our commitment to child safety. Retrieved from https://www.storypark.com/au/ child-safety/. Taylor, A. (2013). Reconfiguring the natures of childhood. Oxon, UK: Routledge. Tesar, M. (2016). Timing childhoods: An alternative reading of children’s development through philosophy of time, temporality, place and space. Contemporary Issues in Early Childhood, 17(4), 399–408. https://doi.org/10.1177/1463949116677924. Tesar, M., & Arndt, A. (2016). Vibrancy of childhood things: Power, philosophy and political ecology of matter. Cultural Studies ↔ Critical Methodologies, 16(2), 193–200. doi:https://doi. org/10.1177/1532708616636144. Tesar, M., & Arndt, S. (2019a). Writing the human “I”: liminal spaces of mundane abjection. Qualitative Inquiry. https://doi.org/10.1177/1077800419881656. Tesar, M., & Arndt, S. (2019b). Philosophies and ethics of the project archive. Educational Philosophy and Theory. 51(4), 434–444. https://doi.org/10.1080/00131857.2018.1476237. Tesar, M., Tong, Z., Gibbons, A., Arndt, S., & Sansom, A. (2019). Rethinking notions of ‘ideal’ child and childhood in Chinese early childhood literature. Contemporary Issues in Early Childhood. https://doi.org/10.1177/1463949119888494.

Chapter 9

Re-searching with Children in Posthuman Worlds

Abstract The final chapter of the book outlines some of the potential implications of the posthuman and new materialist framings of this book on researching the child and contemporary childhoods. It explores how using philosophy as a method of inquiry supports engaging with the complications of posthuman research paradigms and offers a range of perspectives on what this may mean. Throughout the chapter philosophical methods of inquiry are interspersed with a mapping of historical and then contemporary conceptions of researching the child, to illustrate some of the shifts from researching on, to researching with and then by the child. Keywords Researching children and contemporary childhoods · Philosophy as a method · Posthuman research paradigms · Research with children · Research by children

Introduction It matters what matters we use to think other matters with; It matters what stories we tell to tell other stories with; It matters what knots knot knots, what thoughts think thoughts, what ties tie ties. It matters what stories make worlds, what worlds make stories. (Haraway, 2011, p. 4). Haraway (2011) reminds us that the stories we choose and write to tie our stories together help us make sense of our worlds. She reminds us that these stories matter! This chapter maps how the posthuman and new materialist philosophical and methodological framing throughout this book have changed the ways that we engage with researching the child and contemporary childhoods. It adds a further exploration of using philosophy as a method of inquiry, that takes us into the depths of the kinds of complications that adding a posthuman lens to researching children and childhoods might entail (Tesar & Arndt, 2019). In this chapter, we offer a range of perspectives on what this may mean, by presenting philosophical thought as crucial in the conceptualization of posthuman research paradigms. To do this, we first consider some historical conceptions on © Springer Nature Singapore Pte Ltd. 2020 K. Malone et al., Theorising Posthuman Childhood Studies, Children: Global Posthumanist Perspectives and Materialist Theories, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-981-15-8175-5_9

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researching the child. We start early in the twentieth century, where the focus was on researching on or about children. Mirroring the conceptions of children and childhoods of the time, children during this period were the focus of the all-knowing adult researcher gaze. Drawing on developmental theories and quantitative methodologies, the child was merely the object of human research, following the view of the child as being in a state of becoming fully human. Developmental theorising inferred adult– child dualisms, where the child who is not adult is constructed as a partially formed subject. Researching children focused on the child as an object, who is not quite a lively, fully human, subject. The mapping of historical conceptions in this chapter is interspersed with examples that illustrate some of the contemporary thought on researching with and by the child. First, let us continue our stepping back into earlier views. In the later years of the twentieth century, fuelled by the introduction of the children’s rights movement and the development of the United Nations Convention on the Rights of the Child (UNCRC) in 1989, some innovative child researchers began to consider how they might represent children more authentically. If research outcomes were to be more applicable to and reflective of children’s needs, talking to children directly rather than mediated through the adult gaze seemed to be an obvious innovation. With a focus on children’s authentic participation, this breaking down of adult–child binaries came to be known as researching with children. Children with the support of adult researchers were invited to participate more actively in the research process, through such activities as taking photographs, drawing pictures and participating in research workshops and focus groups. It is notable that these practices and viewpoint remain common in contemporary research and evolution of how children are positioned at the margins of researching the child. Even though young children sometimes were given the status of “research collaborators”, for example, it was still clear in the majority of cases that researchers had their own preconceived agenda and that children had very limited opportunity to negotiate their roles and often their contributions. The way this research was structured varied considerably depending on the specific projects, but the premise was the same: to be researchers, children were “given” opportunities to participate, and these participatory opportunities were still prescribed and driven by adults. Research projects can be evaluated along a continuum, which starts from “none—low” to “authentic-high levels” of child participation present. At the beginning of the twenty-first century there was once again a shift in the story of researching children. Through a posthuman lens children became seen as one of many actors in the everyday research stories, and depending on the nature of the project, were engaged at a deeper level in many of the key aspects of the research creation. That included to design, organise and represent their lives in relation with those of a host of others. With a focus on epistemic justice and ecological ethics, and through the advent of new technologies that allowed children to self-organise, research shifted further from being seen as held and controlled only within the domain of the expert adult researchers. Increasingly, research supported through theoretical frames informed by posthumanism, new materialism, feminist, de-colonizing and

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queer theories have found ways to produce research that disrupts human-centered representations and relations of and with children and childhoods. While acknowledging the unknown is not new in research, sitting with, staying with, the unknown, without trying to label, classify, or reduce it, is the disruptive posthuman potential. To this end, the place of philosophy in the study of children and childhoods shifts the focus to help unpack and question the workings of children’s relations with others, animals, plants, weather, atmosphere and so on, through which they experience being in and with the world.

Shifting Childhoods and Research Objectives Prior to recent research-specific shifts to a posthuman paradigm, children had been narrowly defined first as biological entities, and then as social, historical, cultural and political artefacts (see Chap. 2 for a discussion on the shift from biological determinism to social constuctivism). Indeed, the label of “childhood” and “children” as a site for research is a relatively new concept in terms of the overall humanist story. Before the eighteenth century, children were seen as part of the collective capital of the human family, in the human village, where they were seen, heard and participating in the everyday life of the community as “human”. In Western society, by the nineteenth century, children were increasingly being excluded from this view of world/village production and granted the rights of child protection and inevitably child control. Children were often viewed as the “problems” of research, researchers were tasked with the purpose of understanding childhood and focused on questions of “who are they?” and “where do they fit in?”, with this remaining a common framing in some fields. Commonly, the researcher’s stance in this paradigm is seen as the detached observer. This is reminiscent of the infamous research on children by Margaret Mead, using ethnographic techniques that match those of observing animals in the wild. Writing on her work in New Guinea in the early 1930s Mead wrote: This investigation is based upon the assumption that the original nature of the child is so subject to environmental influences that the only way to arrive at any conception of original nature is to study it as modified by different environmental conditions. The repetition of such observations will in time give us a far better basis of generalisation than can be obtained by the observations of individuals within the confining walls of one type of social environment (Mead, 1963).

Notably located within psychological and developmental paradigms, this quote illustrates the attitude towards research carried out on children during this time. The dominant assumption was that children, compared to adults, were considered to be ontologically incomplete, in the process of becoming human, and therefore mostly incompetent, unreliable and developmentally unfinished. The goal of the researcher and ultimately the data collected was to construct and improve knowledge on children in order to advance them on their journey towards becoming a unified,

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complete human adult. Children’s contribution to the research was as a naturalised biological entity, to act “natural”, undeterred in their behaviour by the influence of the observing researcher or specific research conditions which frequently involved removing them from known surroundings. Children’s opinions, ideas or knowledge of their childhoods were not seen as data-worthy. To illustrate this, at a conference on children’s environments some years ago a researcher was explaining how they went about designing and implementing research on 3 to 5-year-old children utilising newly constructed play equipment in a local park. The equipment had been designed to enhance children’s fantasy and social play opportunities, and the funding body who paid for its construction wanted to evaluate if it had fulfilled the design brief. The research team designed a study to examine children using the equipment, including: where they played on the equipment; what props they used with the equipment; what they did on the equipment; and who they played with. The researcher stated in her presentation that she anticipated the study would not only provide the manufacturer with valuable information concerning the design of equipment for young children but that it would also be of interest to child development specialists on children and play. An observation instrument that researchers used to record children’s activities from a distance for six consecutive play episodes during 10 s periods was the key tool used for the evaluation. Additionally, the researchers noted the context of the play, the type of play or non-play behaviour, the social interaction involved in the play, and the teacher’s role in the behaviour. A copy of the “instrument” used is below (Fig. 9.1).

Fig. 9.1 Sample “Playground observations instrument”

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The presenter then noted to the conference participants that “any substantive outcome” from research was unfortunately sketchy in terms of drawing any conclusions about the child’s fantasy, or imaginary play. A discussion then evolved where the presenter and conference participants engaged in a conversation about the research methods. Issues of the weather, the inability to hear the children’s conversations from a distance (as the researchers didn’t want to “contaminate” the research site by coming closer), questions of how to distinguish children’s imaginary actions (is that child being an elephant or a dog?), and so the conversation went on mainly focusing on how to overcome the design issues that made it hard to record the details of what children were thinking during the play. At the end of the conversation, a question was asked “did you speak to the children?” To which the presenter responded, “About what?”. This anecdote is telling why we do need to consider researching with children in posthuman world. From a humanist perspective, we may critique the reductionist perspective of the “child as object” paradigm, as it does contribute significantly to the inherent failure of the research design. The researchers’ inability to record worthwhile data could be because of inadequate research training or a need to use different research technologies (i.e. children wearing microphones), but outside of minor tweaking, the example raises interesting questions. The research design and researchers’ failure to turn a complex place and childhood play-based experience into an external research laboratory, meant the assemblages of possibility, and the in-between vibrancy and interference of the “others” involved in it, interrupted the possibility for scientific clarity. They instead revealed the ambiguity and indeterminacy exposed by a posthuman view of childhood. To unpack this further it is useful to take a small detour for a discussion about the role of a philosophical turn influencing subject-object positions in posthuman research and posthuman views on childhoods.

Thinking Philosophically in Posthuman Research To address paradigm shifts in childhood research towards a posthuman paradigm we need to develop a dynamic philosophical frame. To begin this process we first need to consider what we actually do, when we “use” philosophy (Tesar, 2020). This question has arisen and is responded in various ways by thinkers in different cultures and parts of the world for centuries. We have explored some of them throughout this book and particularly around the role of philosophy and history in understandings of childhoods (see Chap. 1). In most of these instances, philosophy can be seen very broadly as examinations of life and how it is lived, including such aspects as what counts as knowledge, reality, fairness and existence. While Wittgenstein famously pronounced that when you are philosophising you have to descend into primeval chaos and feel at home there, Deleuze and Guattari (2013) assert that, indeed, the “world has become chaos” (p. 5). Using philosophy as a method of inquiry for researching children and childhoods pushes us to think to a deeper and more inventive level, ontologically and methodologically. Tesar (2020) argues that:

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Philosophy as a method differs from philosophical methods that are used in studies of how to do philosophy. These ‘how to do’ methods often relate to a particular body of systems, and either work with argument, scepticism, dialecticism and other ways of rationally teasing out what is philosophy in a way of answering of all questions of metaphysics - knowledge, reality, space, time and existence. However, for philosophy as a method – as an ethical relationship with thought – it is the axiological approach – the liminal space between ethics and aesthetics – that comes to play and causes us to formulate a question rather than give the answer (p. 2).

Thinking of philosophy as a research methodology and method may, from certain perspectives seem like a further turn in research paradigms. Historian of philosophy Harré (2001) however assures us, that to “do” philosophy might be seen as simple—and as complex—as it involves examining how we and others live life. He raises precisely the point, that unearthing pre-suppositions and assumptions, and challenging the taken-for-granted, can reveal paradoxical and conflicting positions. By pushing our thinking in further ontological and epistemological directions, such philosophical inquiry becomes deeply ingrained in examinations of the lives of children and their entangled childhoods within their wider worlds and intra-relationships. As indicated in Chap. 1, philosophy as a discipline draws on knowledge and thinking over many centuries and perspectives, as thinking continues to evolve. Indeed, as Tesar (2020) states above, philosophy involves thinking about topics as diverse and life-encompassing as ethics, aesthetics, politics and identity. It entails a process where “content and method are one”, as Standish (2009, p. i) claims. Thinking philosophically and using philosophy as a method pushes thought beyond singular truths, that could be acquired by giving some kind of proofs or evidence. It opens conceptual pathways for multiple truths, that have the ability to disrupt the perceived simplicity of recording data, coding it, transcribing or evaluating findings. Conceptions of what it means to engage in philosophy can lead to a blurring of conceptual and practical boundaries, as Deleuze and Guattari (1991) remind us, as “philosophy is the art of forming, inventing, and fabricating concepts” (p. 2). We might see philosophy as a thought process that moves beyond extrinsic examples or empirical circumstances, to acknowledge what occurs inside the thought process, considering possibilities arising within and through thought itself. Further, “every concept has a history” (Deleuze & Guattari, 1991, p. 18), that zigzags through various problems and depends on past concepts. So, every concept is also a becoming, as a result of circumstances, place, surroundings, occasions, that might be known, or slightly known, or even be unknown. This means that thinking of philosophy as a discipline is not merely a thoughtful playing around with concepts that already exist, as “[c]oncepts are not waiting for us ready-made, like heavenly bodies. There is no heaven for concepts. They must be invented, fabricated, or rather created and would be nothing without their creator’s signature” (Deleuze & Guattari, 1991, p. 5). Applied to our conceptions of research across the human-nonhuman assemblages of children enmeshed within their wider world, this view gives certain permission, indeed it demands, that we change our conceptions of research, as well as of ourselves as the researchers, and therefore of the “I”, of the “self” and of the

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“other”. As an example, Kristeva’s (1998) philosophy of the subject offers us an opening to engage in this process. Kristeva’s philosophy of the subject posits each of us as subjects-in-process. That is, as humans whose subjectivities are constantly in construction, sometimes consciously and sometimes unconsciously (Kristeva, 1998). Using her philosophical work, which emerges from her own rethinking of Lacanian phsychoanalysis, offers an entry point to increasingly complex examinations and articulations of the self and the other. It introduces and follows elements such as the notion of the semiotic, love, abjection and revolt (Arndt, 2015; Stone, 2004). Each of these elements alerts us to wider influences, connections and processes within and in relation to children and their ongoing formation as subjects. The particular usefulness of this thinking lies in Kristeva’s (1991) further argument, that we can never be fully aware or knowledgeable about ourselves and, that therefore, we are all always, at least to a certain extent, strangers to ourselves. Despite its human centric focus, Kristeva’s philosophy of the subject provides us with a useful example of how philosophy is both content and method. As both the thinkers and researchers and subjects and strangers, it locates us as always somewhat unknowable within the human realm, which we are simultaneously experiencing. In addition, it creates conceptual spaces of uncertainty in the human-knowing, within which the post- and more-than-human concepts which we are exploring in this book and in our research can arise. Using Kristeva’s philosophical thinking thus offers a way of illustrating the use of philosophy to situate our thought, and to identify openings of previously unrecognised conceptual spaces. Situating conceptions of life into our research thinking leads us to borrow from Braidotti (2013). A posthuman conception of life offers a way to proceed, not to disregard human subjectivities and their complexities—as we have reinforced throughout this book—but to dethrone them from their reified position. It helps to elevate a post-anthropocentric thinking on life, that recognises that. ‘life’, far from being codified as the exclusive property or the unalienable right of one species, the human, over all others or of being sacralized as a pre-established given, is posited as process, interactive and open-ended (p. 60).

Such thinking creates openings for us to use philosophy to conceptualise and articulate more seriously and also more playfully, the ways in which there is no one way of treating the child, being, voice, or children’s acts, which we may conventionally attempt to research, and “capture” as data. As MacLure (2013) aptly states: “The materialist critique of representation would also confound interpretation, to the extent that this implies a critical, intentional subject standing separate and outside of ‘the data’, digging behind or beyond or beneath it, to identify higher order meanings, themes or categories. This again is the logic of representational thought, operating under the ‘logic of instead’: instead of multiple instances, interpretation substitutes patterns or meanings” (p. 660). Conceptualising concepts as emerging calls into question even what counts as data and what counts as research, and how children are or could be part of it. Seeing concepts as still becoming, and as always dependent—on

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their origin, circumstances, histories and contingencies—opens new diverse applications and implications of data and research. We explore now in more depth what it means for research when children are included as knowledge-able research partners.

Children as Knowledge-Able Posthuman Researchers We, the children, are experts on being 8, 12, or 17 years old in the societies of today…. To consult us would make your work more effective and give better results for children. My proposal is that you make us part of your team. Girl, age 17, Norway (Schenk and Williamson, 2005).

Historically childhood culture was located within playgrounds, schools and within family shared spaces. In the public arena the child was regulated and monitored by adults, it was a mostly adult-mediated children’s culture. With the changing nature of childhoods, brought on by the advent of new technologies, and changing family structures, children’s cultural production in Western childhoods has often shifted in focus from the public into the private domain of technically mediated spaces such as the Internet, mobile phones, computer games. Concerns about the changing nature of childhoods—or indeed about their apparent “disappearance”—have become inextricably bound up with wider anxieties about the impact of technological change and this retreat. During the transition from the child-as-object to the agentic child it was often argued that childhood was “lost”. Simultaneously, many argued that it was adult humans’ role to manage, regulate and construct those childhoods that were seen as being eroded. Fuelled by the introduction of the children’s rights movement in the late 1980s, researchers were urged to represent children more authentically, as Scott (2000) argued, “the best people to provide information on the child’s perspective, actions and attitudes are children themselves” (p. 99). With this focus on authenticity and on meaningful participation by children in research, shifts in mainstream paradigms of child research expanded. For many child researchers this shift to researching with children not only provided the opportunity to position children as knowledge brokers, it also allowed researchers to be a catalyst for transformative practices through the process, with the children. Blaise (2005) talks of this intimately in her study of gender with preschool-age children: As praxis-oriented work or an act of consciousness-raising, this study was designed to turn critical thought into social action and as such has special and important relevance to the work of teachers and researchers who want to systematically interrogate and scrutinize their practices. This way of teaching and researching attempts to disrupt children’s existing practices. For example, instead of going into the classroom and researching on or about children, this inquiry is about researching with them. Additionally, researching with children provides opportunities to intervene or disrupt inequitable power relations that exist (p. 46).

Shifting to a focus on research with children provided the opportunity to value and respect children as knowledge producers and it was an imperative for the adult researcher to consider ethical and appropriate methods for conducting the research.

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The following short case study provides an example of researching with children in a village in Papua New Guinea. It gives an insight into the nature of some of the complexities of the power relations surrounding children and their evolving lives. Hanuabada was an urban village close to the National capital of Papua New Guinea and was targeted by the government for relocation of its indigenous people in order for a dry dock to be built in Hallifax Harbour, where the village was located. The Motu Koitabu people of Hanuabada Village are the traditional landowners of National Capital District (NCD), the city of Port Moresby. The coastal dwellers of this Indigenous group are the Motu (meaning island) and the land dwellers are known as the Koitabu. Motu Koitabu villages are spread throughout the NCD and the outskirts of Port Moresby. Hanuabada village is the biggest of the urban villages. Around 15,000 people live in the predominantly Motu settlement. The village is divided into 26 clans—18 Motu and 8 are Kiotabu. The majority of villagers live in sea houses built beside walkways. The accumulation of garbage on the shoreline, in the mangroves and under these houses built on stilts next to the piers, is one of the major problems facing the people of Hanuabada. It is not uncommon to see children swimming in a sea full of rubbish and human waste. When the tide goes out many of the houses are knee deep in raw sewage and mud—the smell is often unbearable, particularly in the wet season when the winds are often calm. Tidal flows, which have been constrained due to the development of the road out to Elevala Island, are not able to flush the mud flats. Consequently, the area is prone to infestations of malaria-carrying mosquitoes. The research project with the community and its “Big Man” Haraka Gaudi was developed to support a case for improvement of the village children’s lives and to illustrate the importance of valuing the village culture as part of a Humans Rights Submission. Research was conducted with Karo who lives in Hanuabada village, is 12 years old and in grade 5 at the local primary school. Walking-with children in a research creation using drawings, photography, mapping and storytelling, inform the possibilities for a posthuman reading of the complex sets of relations that Karo’s childhood offers. Below is the picture Karo produced when asked to draw her village. She included in her drawing the sea, the canoes and the house where she lives (Figs. 9.2, 9.3 and 9.4). Karo describes her drawing and photograph in the following way: The blue house is my house - I know all the other people in the other houses. The red house at the beginning of the pier is where my friend Maggi lives. She is younger and goes to school at Pari.

Karo took us on a walking tour of her village during which time she shared with us her connection to particular places. Photographs were taken during our tour and her description emerged from our conversations with her during the time together (Figs. 9.5 and 9.6). Karo took us on a walk around Hanuabuda village and as we walked with her, she described her experiences of living with her village buildings, environment, animals and other humans. My favourite places are the Church and Courthouse. The church because I go and pray there. It is Jesus’s house – I want Jesus in my life. My other favourite place is the courthouse. I

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Fig. 9.2 Karo with her friends on the village pier. Credit Karen Malone

Fig. 9.3 Karo’s drawing of the village. Credit Karen Malone

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Fig. 9.4 Karo’s photograph of her house. Credit Karen Malone

Fig. 9.5 Karo’s photograph of children swimming in the sea. Credit Karen Malone

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Fig. 9.6 Karo’s two photographs of rubbish under the pier. Credit Karen Malone

go there once a week. I go inside and listen to the talking. They are always fighting about the ground - this is my ground or this is our ground. I sit and listen and talk with my friends about who was right who was wrong. I walk to the courthouse by myself but there are always other children out the front who will go in with me. I also like to swim in the water near the pier, play sports, netball- seven girls sometimes 10 or even 12. Sometimes I play cricket with the boys who play on the road. Dangerous places are the gambling places – teenage boys play cards, drink beer. Also in town there are plenty of Rascals – older boys from other places who can hurt you. I am scared to go to town –sometimes I go with my parents, not by myself or with girls. I always stay in the village. The sea is very dirty and around the piers there is a lot of rubbish. There are lots of plastic bags everywhere. The rubbish stinks especially when the water level drops. Sometimes they spray a chemical around that is to help with the mosquitos – but it smells and we are told not to play where they have sprayed. We don’t have a toilet so everything goes into the sea. I hate this. I really like to play with my friends in the water especially when it is hot but sometimes it makes my skin itchy. I wish we had a vegetable garden close by so I could grow stuff- but we have to walk a long way to where the land is and it’s dangerous to go there by myself. There aren’t any animals here – not even fish, all dead. I wish I could fish from the pier that is part of our culture, you can only fish if you go out to sea along way on a canoe. It gets noisy at night – I can hear the drunk boys so sometimes I find it hard to go to sleep. The piers are very old and broken, they need to be fixed but‘ no one has any money to fix it. Sometimes they get very slippery when it rains and if it is dark I am scared I will fall off. I like to watch television but we don’t do that much. Sometimes the electricity gets broken and we can’t even turn on the lights. I like the quiet of the church, I often go in to the church and spend some time alone. Sometimes I get sick. This year I had to lay down for a week. I had chicken pox last year I was very sick and didn’t go to school for months. The kind of chores I do around the house include washing plates, carrying the water outside, putting things away, sweeping the floor, cooking rice, I do that every day. In the future – I want to worship and pray. I like living in the village and want to stay here. I would like to learn to dance and visit other places. Also I want to be with my friends and not worry about the boys drinking and taking drugs.

When Karo asked to provide a daily schedule of her activities, the detail in her photographs and story of the village, brings us into the posthuman and material world of her everyday life. Her responses provide entangled references to the sensorial and material objects that she encounters and her relation with them. Dirt, dust, dead

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fish, rubbish, stinky oceans, smelly, slippery piers and the dangerous encounters of walking and meeting up with friends. She also includes intimate information about herself, and how she feels about her relationships with her world, her hunger, the heat, sweaty bodies and her prayers. This is Karo’s daily schedule (Fig. 9.7). Unlike earlier generations, children connecting to the global world in these precarious times are exposed to a range of global planetary disasters: war, starvation, terrorism, environmental degradation. Research supporting new spaces for thinking need to be within this context of a changing unpredictable unsustainable future. Malone and Truong (2017) in relation to learning to live well with the planet in these times wrote. engagement with theoretical ways of thinking about sustainability in precarious times provides a new space for dialogue about our ‘complex’ relationships with the planet and allows ‘the stuff’ of the planet to emerge. It also illuminates entry points for reconceptualising teaching and learning in and around the role of sustainability as a call of the Anthropocene (p. 14).

Furthermore, in these examples below, we see a classroom-based research project involving young children in primary schools in Australia and the UK. They are exploring their own experiences of global issues (Figs. 9.8, 9.9 and 9.10). Children in the examples above illustrate a context of researching-with, where they are no longer the object of the researchers but collaborators who can provide deep and rich information that contributes to the evolving knowledge emanating from the research process. The methodological and theoretical work that informed much of this research with children emerged from a strong critical perspective, while mostly social-cultural, place-based methodologies, the work was situated within the everyday lives of children and when viewed through a posthuman lens challenges anthropocentric analysis. Hultman and Lenz Taguchi (2010) for example, in their seminal paper, Challenging anthropocentric analysis of visual data, provide an applied relational materialist approach in their analysis of children in a kindergarten. They explore the forces of the materials, sand and a girl, through Barad’s notion of intra-activity, ..the sand and the girl, as bodies and matter of forces of different intensities and speed, fold around each other and overlap, in the event of sand falling, hand opening, body adjusting and balancing, eyes measuring height and distance and observing the falling movement of the glittering sand into the red bucket. Thus, in a relational materialist understanding, the sand can be understood as ‘active’ and ‘playing with the girl’ just as much as the girl plays with the sand. They come into play. The girl is in a state of becoming with the sand, and the sand is in a state of becoming with the girl” (p. 530).

A reflective attentiveness is brought to the “lived experience” of the child as expressed through complex multispecies encounters of everyday lives. Visual, verbal and experiential methods allow for approaches that encourage what we might see as deep, rich data. A re-reading, re-turning to these data offers a useful opportunity to decentre the child and apply a relational materialist approach, such as that advocated by Hultman and Lenz Taguchi (2010). It elevates the potential for diffractive and

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Time

Activity

6-6.30am

Wake up. Wash hair and put on school uniform, brush hair – bread or tea.

7.00am

Walk to school. Leave by myself but see friends on the way walking and I meet up with them. I am walking to get to school. Plenty of dust - dirt road, lots of rubbish and cars. Dangerous walking – crossing the road cars can run you over. Some children have died on the road to school.

8.00am

Sit and wait for teachers to come into the class. Some kids will go outside and play in the ocean which is full of rubbish and stinks. It is always hot and sweaty.

9.00am

School work starts- English, mathematics

12.00

Go to play relay on school ground, volleyball/sometimes netball – nothing to eat. Then I walk home.

1.30 pm

No lunch yet – all friends come home – wash plates, help with chores around the house and cook the rice for everyone. Sometimes might go and play or visit the courthouse in the afternoon if I have time.

5.00pm

Pray before meal, share prayers – family then has a meal. I wash the plates after the meal on the smelly pier with my friends. We often see dead fish floating.

6-7.00 pm

Wash/bathe shower at the front of the house.

7.- 9.00pm

Watch television

9-10.00pm

Go to sleep

Fig. 9.7 Karo’s daily time schedule

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Fig. 9.8 Lakelands Public School, Dapto Australia. Text: we are lucky because we have transport to get to hospital. We have transport to get to far away places. We use cars to get us to doctors and medical centres. Or a hospital or a nurse. If you didnt have a car you get a job with lots of money from your job. You can buy a car so you can go on holidays or far away places. If you didn’t have no money get some money then your children can go to school then they can learn lots of things. Credit Karen Malone

Fig. 9.9 Katie, age 6, Dog Kennel Hill Primary School, South East London, UK. Text: I am lucky because we don’t have wars in these days. Because we didn’t have to go at war into the night like the olden days children when they went into the night when the bombs were falling. Credit Karen Malone

sensorial readings of the agentic bodies/entities/things entangled in these researchdata worlds. A “diffractive way of seeing” write Hultman and Lenz Taguchi (2010, p. 535) involves reading with, not against, data: allowing the data to work through us. It involves rethinking data, and rethinking research. Kohn (2013) in his book How Forests Think proposes an “anthropology of life”, one that embeds the complex potential of humans and more-than-human lifeworlds complete with “symbolic, iconic and indexical languages” (cited in Noorani & Brigstocke, 2018). Noorani and Brigstocke (2018) argue in their book More-than-human Participatory Research that: “Undoing

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Fig. 9.10 Sara, age 7, Dog Kennel Hill Primary School, South East London, UK Text: I am lucky in London because London is the biggest city and people are rich and we don’t drink from the seas and we don’t have bird flu in London and have lots of hospitals. Credit Karen Malone

the idea that humans are totally set apart from non-humans requires theorizing how to cross the boundaries between human and non-human communication” (p. 21). Such boundary-crossing involves a rethinking of data and a rethinking of research.

Rethinking Data and Rethinking Posthuman Research Using philosophy as a method for researching with/for/as children support the fundamental reconsideration of what we consider to be data outlined above. It alerts us to the notion that there is no pre-determined way to think about children, nor about what constitutes data about or on or by children. “[C]oncepts are not ready-made ‘givens’ and have no pre-existence: one needs to invent them, one needs to create them” (Deleuze, 1990, p. 32). Deleuze reminds us, urging a creative approach to conceptualise how and what we think about and do with concepts. Applied to research and to our thinking about data, this creates an opening for questioning and rethinking data, away from a research model that sees it as something (information, truths, knowledge) that is humanly able to be captured, as a representation of (children’s) lives, feelings, experiences or realities. As in our earlier arguments for a posthuman positioning, this does not eliminate the human element, but rather it enhances it (Arndt, 2017; Ulmer, 2017). It is precisely the complexity of the human element, intra-related with other matters and forces in the world, that necessitate such a move into the chaos and uncertainty of concepts—including that of data.

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To rethink what is or can be data calls for reconsidering associated concepts that we have dealt with in this book. To use one example, we might question the notion of voice. Reified in conventional empirical qualitative research as a representation of a person’s life story, reality, or experience, the notion of voice was famously elevated by Plato as the pure, true knowledge of an individual human. Methodologists have in recent years questioned such an elevation, and put forward proposals for conceptualising data as various encounters, human and otherwise, particularly applying post-qualitative and posthuman frameworks (Koro-Ljungberg, Löytönen, & Tesar, 2017). In the examples outlined earlier in this chapter, there might then be diverse ways of conceiving of rubbish and human waste as data, in the research with/by Karo, or the contaminated sea above. And in the research involving children documenting their local encounters, we might question how things, cars, roads, or other parts of their experiential encounters are data. By elevating things, matter and energies as vibrant, for example as Bennett (2010) does, we simultaneously de-elevate human voice. Using philosophy to rethink concepts of data helps us to examine more deeply the representative value of voice. Philosophers of language such as Bakhtin (1981), and also Kristeva (1984), argue against a simplistic reification of speech and language. What is uttered in speech, they argue, may already be incomplete and obsolete by the time it has been spoken, and in addition, what is made of voice or language is always also dependent on the listener’s own experiences, insights and interpretations. Inherently problematic from the outset, then, reifying voice as data that is seen by researchers or research funding bodies or institutions as “real”, “rich” or “true” in any sense, is no longer a useful framework. Further complicating the notion of voice as data, recognising the extra elements brought to the fore by a posthuman positioning, only further questions the reliability of recordings of field notes, videos or transcripts that claim to illustrate particular realities.

Complex Posthuman Data Relations The recent posthuman and new materialist shift in research builds on a range of new theoretical positions that includes but is not exclusive to non-representational theory, actor network theory, feminist ontologies and agential realism. Agential realism as used in this work is Barad’s term that reworks familiar notions around “performativity, discursive practices, materialization, agency and causality” (Fiore, 2018, p. 360), taking a quantum physics approach for bringing together the natural, social and scientific worlds. Unlike the earlier linguistic paradigm in poststructuralism (Tuck & Mackenzie, 2015), this new turn stresses, “instead the concrete yet complex materiality of bodies in social relations of power” (Braidotti, in Dolphijn and van der Tuin, 2012, p. 1). These approaches take into account the complexity of relations and embrace the potential of all entities (human and nonhuman animals, plants, technology, institutions, earth, air) to be active agents. New materialist and posthuman approaches are by nature interdisciplinary and “reject dualist separations of the mind

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from the body, and of nature and culture” (Tuck & Mackenzie, 2015, p. 14). Bradiotti reiterates the influence of feminist philosophies on new materialism. This includes the “centrality of the corporeality frame” (Tuck & Mackenzie, 2015, p. 15), where “the body or the embodiment of the subject is to be understood as neither a biological or sociological category, but rather as a point of overlap between the physical, the symbolic, and the sociological” (p. 33). The following study offers another illustration of young children researching their neighbourhood. The purpose was to inform local government decision-making around how to plan for the ecological, social and emotional needs of human and nonhuman entities. The children in this community meet regularly to plan their research activities in the local children’s play centre. In this example, they are engaging in a project where they are exploring opportunities to enhance the biodiversity of the neighbourhood through “pocket park” projects. The local council had been buying up vacant houses and creating small parks of a variety of types to create ecological play corridors for humans and nonhumans in the inner city neighbourhoods of Tokyo. The pocket parks encourage birds, lizards, water, sand, human bodies, food, fire and play equipment to come together and shape neighbourly communal life. The children’s research engages with a walking-with methodology (Malone & Moore, 2019), using their sensorial bodies to encounter and draw on their everyday relations with buildings, roads, plants, birds and animals. As Springgay and Truman (2017) argue, “walking is embodied because it is immediate, tangible, and foregrounds the bodily experience of moving” (p. 30). During their acts of walking-with each other they encounter places. The children then produce maps, drawings and photographs of their walking journeys and then return to the centre to create complex walking cartographies. They mark gestural experiences, lines of movement and spaces, atmosphere and weathering and their effects on bodies, buildings and imaginaries of the future. The theoretical frame informing this walking emerges from troubling a relational ontology. The posthuman child in their ecological community disrupts a persistent humanist paradigm by allowing new conversations to emerge beyond the human, where the human is intra-acting with and learning through encounters. As a diffractive theoretical thread, the walking-with children bring the past, the present and the future together, the walking encounters supporting a multi-modal research creation (Tsing et. al., 2017) (Figs. 9.11 and 9.12). The geological storying of neighbourhood assemblages with ethnographic attentiveness offer starting points for children’s curiosity, along with vernacular and indigenous knowledge practices and approaches. This research creation is a pedagogical practice of everyday life by children who are walking-with openness, circulating within sites of domesticity, publics, shops, schools, plants, bodies, cameras all mangled together. Such curiosity supports a paradigmatic shift against singular notions of the child. The researchers’ and children’s cameras, the pathways, the weather, the histories and the play-stops at parks are all intra-acting in the map making process. Lorimer (2010) writes that the use of the camera as witness sets up a complex set of relations and processes. Furthermore, as researchers we are always “learning to be affected both by the camera and by those you are filming (with). This takes time, training and skill and involves developing a repertoire of techniques that

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Fig. 9.11 Japanese children designing their walking and collecting data using cameras. Credit Karen Malone

Fig. 9.12 Mapping posthuman ecological encounters. Credit Karen Malone

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will not be familiar to many cultural geographers” (p. 244). He also notes that “the camera has a presence. It draws attention to itself” (p. 244), and when revisiting the footage after the walking-with events we are aware that both the child and objects of their encounters are for fleeting moments recognising the presence of the researchers and the camera. Focusing on paradigmatic shifts such as those outlined in the above examples repositions children from being merely passive objects of research, to being implicated “in knowledge production and the extent to which children are constructed as knowing subjects” (Balen et al., 2006, p. 31). It de-elevates adults into a position of being attentive to children as “epistemologically privileged in that they are better placed than adults to produce situated knowledge … of their everyday experience” (p. 32).

Children in Posthuman Worlds In the introduction Haraway (2011) reminds us that what stories we and the world tell and how we tell them matters. The stories told by the children in the above examples provide a poignant indication, as we rethink, “what matters we use to think other matters with”, by reconceptualising “what stories we tell”, listen to, or interpret, capture, transcribe and safely store as “data” “to tell other stories with”. Thinking through and using philosophy as a research and thought method of inquiry helps us to articulate “what knots knot knots”, particularly “what thoughts think thoughts”, and “what ties tie ties”. The stories of the world and how they are portrayed have always reflected the temporal, ontological and epistemological framing in which they arise, are researched, and conceptualised. As Haraway (2015) insists, “we need stories (and theories) that are just big enough to gather up the complexities and keep the edges open and greedy for surprising new and old connections”, if we are to imagine or embrace “flourishing rich multi-species assemblages” (p. 160). Utilising philosophical thought and content, where we draw on Western, Eastern and Indigenous philosophy is both the foundation of our thought and of our re-reading, re-analysing of our research. It makes a vital contribution to developing the depth of thought and criticality to deal with the shifts involved in posthuman research and scholarship that seeks to keep the boundaries open. Connecting philosophy with posthuman thought, Ferrando (2019) introduces her new book: Philosophical posthumanism, with the claim that: Posthumanism is the philosophy of our time. This shows in the great interest that is developing around the theme, in the multiplication of conferences, studies, and reflections around the world. “Posthuman” has become a key concept in the contemporary academic debate, to cope with the urgency for an integral redefinition of the notion of the human, following the onto-epistemological, as well as scientific and bio-technological developments, of the twentieth and twenty-first centuries.

Ferrando (2019) makes reference to the importance of urgently redefining concepts in relation to posthumanism, as a key contemporary debate and concern.

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This is particularly so in relation to research—and especially in relation to researching with children and researching childhoods. We need to consider the unabating pressure of local and global benchmarks and performance indicators in many disciplines, that depend on research evidence, outcomes and measurements. Using philosophical thought and content in re-inventing the concepts in the “stories [that] make worlds” helps us to reconceptualise “what worlds make stories”, and thus what becomes considered as acceptable as evidence, outcomes and measurements. It helps us to integrate human and nonhuman worlds and stories as assemblages, that exist and emerge, comprised not only of subjects in process, but of beings, matters, things and relationalities that are constantly enmeshed and constantly evolving in and through the process. Herein lie the interdisciplinary and ethical openings offered by the chaos and blurred boundaries of posthuman research, method, and thought. Murris (2013) nudges us to consider the ethics of humanist injustices. Injustices in research data are not just social but also ecological. Within this onto-ethicoepistomological turn, Murris urges that overcoming such injustices means disrupting the silencing of the child as a non-actor, as exempt from the ecological systems they are located within. By resisting past notions of the singular, agentic child that represents a humanist desire in thinking, a shift to rethinking, and to re-search, the posthuman child, is to imagine a view of agency that does not imply that a child can hold or be given agency. Instead, the role of research and agency in the way Barad (2007) speaks of it is as an enactment of worldly reconfigurings. To rethink research and agency as central to a relational ontology, means that we see it as acting within an assemblage of humans and nonhumans. In re-searching the posthuman child it is crucial to also consider the role that other traditional, decolonising and indigenous research has offered to counter the “white Western adult human” normative subject position. As Noorani and Brigstocke (2018) argue: Academic researchers in the field of more-than-human research have much to learn from decolonizing traditions of research on the one hand, and indigenous worldviews on the other. Contrary to extracting methodologies, concepts, or theories, this entails joining forces with decolonizing and indigenous ethics of care and responsibility (p. 16).

Conclusion This final chapter enriches this book with deep thinking and exemplars of how through research with and by children, there are new potentialities offered by a posthuman childhood studies lens. On the one hand, this chapter examines how children and their childhoods are deeply embedded in more-than-human relations, while on the other it acknowledges the uncertainties with which such an orientation comes. To return one final time to Braidotti (2019), the chapter, as the whole book, performs the multiplicity that is key to posthuman childhood studies scholarship. And we

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welcome you to further readings, and re-readings of this book, and the texts that came before and will come after this book. As we said in the introduction, this book is just a beginning!

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Harré, R. (2001). One thousand years of philosophy. Malden, MA: Blackwell Publishers. Hasluck, L., & Malone, K. (1999). Location, leisure and lifestyle: Young people’s retreat to home environments. In C. Shehan (Ed.), Through the eyes of the child (pp. 177–197). Greenwich: JAI Press. Hultman, K., & Lenz Taguchi, H. (2010). Challenging anthropocentric analysis of visual data: A relational materialist methodological approach to educational research. International Journal of Qualitative Studies in Education, 23(5), 525–542. Kenway, J., & Bullen, E. (2001). Consuming children: Education entertainment, advertising. Buckingham: Open University Press. Kohn, E. (2013). How forests think: Toward an anthropology beyond the human. University of California Press, Berkeley, USA. Koro-Ljungberg, M., Loyt ¨ onen, ¨ T., & Tesar, M. (Eds.). (2017). Disrupting data in qualitative inquiry: Entanglements with the post-critical and post-anthropocentric. New York, NY: Peter Lang. Kristeva, J. (1984). Revolution in poetic language (M. Waller, Trans.). New York, NY: Columbia University Press. Kristeva, J. (1991). Strangers to ourselves. New York, NY: Columbia University Press. Kristeva, J. (1998). The subject in process. In P. Ffrench (Ed.), The Tel Quel reader (pp. 133–178). London, UK: Routledge. Lenz Taguchi, H. (2012). A diffractive and Deleuzian approach to analysing interview data. Feminist Theory, 13(3), 265–281. Lorimer, J. (2010). Moving image methodologies for more-than-human geographies. Cultural Geographies, 17(2), 237–258. MacLure, M. (2013). Researching without representation? language and materiality in postqualitative methodology. International Journal of Qualitative Studies in Education, 26(6), 658–667. Malone, K., & Hasluck, L. (2002) Australian youth: Aliens in the suburban environment. In L. Chawla (Ed.). Growing up in an urbanising world. London: Earthscan. Malone, K., & Moore, S. J. (2019). Sensing ecologically through Kin and Stones. International Journal of Early Childhood Environmental Education, 7(1), 8–25. Malone, K., & Tranter, P. (2005). “Hanging out in the school ground”: A reflective look at researching children’s environmental learning (special school ground edition). Canadian Journal for Environmental Education, 10(1), pp. 196–212. Malone, K., & Truong, S. (2017). Sustainability, education and anthropocentric precarity. In K. Malone, S. Truong, & T. Gray (Eds.), Reimagining sustainability in precarious times. UK: Springer Malone, K., Moore, R., & Percy-Smith, B. (2005). Don’t just listen- do something! Lessons learned about governance from the growing up in cities project. Children, Youth and Environments, 15(2). https://www.colorado.edu/journals/cye/15_2/index.htm. Mayall, B. (2000). Conversations with children: Working with generational issues. In P. Christensen & A. James (Eds.), Research with children: Perspectives and practices. London: Routledge. Mayall, B. (2000). The sociology of childhood in relation to children’s rights. The International Journal of Children s Rights, 8(3), 243–259. McDonnell, K. (2005). Honey, we lost the kids: Re-thinking childhood in the multi-media age. North Melbourne: Pluto Press. Mead, M. (1963). Growing up In Papua New Guinea. UK: Penguin Books. Medved, M., & Medved, D. (1998). Saving childhood: Protecting our children from the national assault on innocence. New York: HarperCollins. Murris, K. (2013). The epistemic challenge of hearing child’s voice [Special issue]. Studies in Philosophy and Education, 32(3), 245–259. Murris, K. (2016). The Posthuman Child: Educational transformations through philosophy and picturebooks, Routledge, London.

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Chapter 10

Glossary Key Posthuman Childhood Studies Concepts

Abstract The glossary outlines some of the ways in which we have used key concepts throughout this book. Its intention is to be a useful guide, and by no means a conclusive or complete representation of the meanings of any of the terms listed. The glossary gives insights into particular meanings as they relate to the topics of this book and to our collective approach to conceptualising children and childhoods through a posthuman and new materialist lens. Where relevant, we allude to contemporary thinkers who inspire us in a particular use of the concepts in the ongoing evolution of our thinking on and treatment of children and childhoods.

Introduction This glossary outlines some of the ways in which we have used key concepts throughout this book. It is by no means to be seen as a conclusive or complete representation of the meanings of any of the terms listed. Its intention is to give insights into particular meanings as they relate to this book and to our collective approach to conceptualising children and childhoods through a posthuman and new materialist lens. Where relevant, we allude to contemporary thinkers who inspire us in a particular use of the concepts in the evolution of our thinking on children and childhoods.

Actant The term actant is adopted from Bruno Latour’s Actor Network Theory (Latour, 1997). It refers to any person or thing that acts upon another person or thing. The term actant removes the differentiation between human and nonhuman. Bennett (2010) explains it this way, an “actant can be either human or nonhuman: it is that which has efficacy, can do things, has sufficient coherence to make a difference, produce effects, alter the course of events” (p. viii). © Springer Nature Singapore Pte Ltd. 2020 K. Malone et al., Theorising Posthuman Childhood Studies, Children: Global Posthumanist Perspectives and Materialist Theories, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-981-15-8175-5_10

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Affect The term affect does not only denote feeling or emotion. Rather, Deleuze and Guattari (2013) explain, it draws on Baruch Spinoza’s affectus to describe “an ability to affect and be affected” (p. xv). That is, it is an intensity that involves “that body’s capacity to act” (p. xv). Houser (2018) uses Brian Massumi’s work to question affect in relation to the human, beyond the human and within the posthuman realm, and Bennett (2010) thinks on affect as broadly referring to “the capacity of any body for activity and responsiveness” (p. xii).

Agency The capacity to help shape the circumstances in which objects, entities and things live is agency. Agency is core to the cultural politics of childhood since it assigns children a degree of power to effect change. Agency is a call for children to be understood as social actors shaping as well as being shaped by their circumstances. The idea of children’s agency is sometimes rather vaguely articulated as anything from children having full control of their social environments to a weaker sense where children make some contribution within their social environments.

Agential Realism Agential realism is a contribution to posthuman thinking from Karen Barad’s quantum physics/philosophical perspective. Fiore’s (2018) description is useful for us here. She describes agential realism as an “epistemological and ontological framework” which helps us to rethink and reenact “familiar notions such as performativity, discursive practices, materialization, agency and causality among others” (p. 360) through a posthuman and materialist lens.

Anthropocene This is a term used to represent the contemporary epoch, as a geological time that brings together earth and human time and history. Coined by chemist Paul Crutzen in 2000, the term “anthropocene” has become a political, scientific, environmental representation of (damaging) human impacts on the earth, differentiated from natural variations that have occurred over time.

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Assemblage While the term “assemblage” comes from Deleuze and Guattari, Bennett (2010) describes it very well, as “ad hoc groupings of diverse elements, of vibrant materials of all sorts. Assemblages are living, throbbing confederations that are able to function despite the persistent presence of energies that confound them from within” (pp. 23– 24). An important point affirmed by Deleuze and Guattari (2013) is that all that occurs within an assemblage affects that which happens. It’s occurrences occur through and because of the relationships with and among all elements within the assemblage to each other.

Binaries When something has two parts, as a dualism or a dichotomy. Theoretically or conceptually speaking, it means that concepts are seen as having distinct boundaries, meaning that they can be viewed either in one way or another. In this book, our intention is to break down binaries, by arguing for a multiplicity of perspectives, viewpoints and truths.

Childhood Studies Childhood studies is an interdisciplinary field of study that contests a developmental view of children and childhoods. Rather than seeing children’s development as purely biologically determined, a childhood studies lens considers children’s growth and development from diverse disciplinary perspectives. It sees children’s development as occurring not in a linear, but rather in complex and unpredictable ways.

Conatus Here we use Bennett’s (2010) use of Spinoza’s concept of conatus. Bennett emphasises conatus as the fundamental nature of every thing to strive to exist, where, “every nonhuman body shares with every human body a conative nature (and thus a “virtue” appropriate to its material configuration)” (p. 2), elevating the productive nature of all things.

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Cognitive Developmental and Behaviourists Theories of Childhood Piaget’s cognitive developmental theory claimed that all children, irrespective of their cultural or social background follow set stages. This theory presupposes a modern Western model where children are seen as incomplete, as still needing to become complete adults or beings.

Deterritorialization This term comes from Deleuze and Guattari (2013), who use it to describe the process of rupture, which leads through the same process to reterritorialization as a transformed other. Deterritorialization and reterritorialization are always relative, connected and “caught up in one another” (p. 9). As constant becomings, each brings about both deterritorialization and reterritorialization as they “interlink and form relays in a circulation of intensities” (p. 9).

Developmental Theories Theories that follow predetermined or set developmental processes, expect a linear progression, such as through stages or milestones of development, which are the same for all children.

Dichotomy Any splitting of a whole into exactly two non-overlapping parts, partition of a whole (or a set) into two parts (subsets) that are mutually exclusive nothing can belong simultaneously to both parts, and jointly exhaustive everything must belong to one part or the other.

Diffraction A process of diffraction draws on the work of Donna Haraway, to refer to “a reading method that is neither negatively critical (dismissive) nor reflexive (identitypolitical)” (Van der Tuin, 2018, p. 99). It involves a constant reengagement with a thing, story or situation, where we reread, reaquaint ourselves and reconsider its

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meaning, affect and relationships from different perspectives. Barad (2014) explains diffraction through the example of earthworms, digging and redigging the earth, presenting different aspects to the light, reworking and reworking the same material (earth) again and again. “A diffractive methodology is a critical practice for making a difference in the world” (Barad, 2007, pp. 90–91).

Dualisms “Dualisms have become so powerful and deeply rooted in modern thinking that most of the time, those offering theories that carry them are rarely even aware of their existence” (Kessler, 2019, p. 24). When exploring human-nature, natureculture relationship theories, for example, such as ones we have been explored in this book dualisms can reduce more-than-human beings to passive objects with little or no visibility, eliminating the nonhuman as an active “subject”.

Entanglement Arising from quantum physics, Barad (2010) explains entanglement as more than being intertwined, connected or together. Ways of being together are called into question. “Duality, unity, multiplicity, being are undone” (p. 251), she says. Entanglement, then, is a state of “intra-activity, of agential separability—differentiatings that cut together/apart—that is the hauntological nature of quantum entanglements” (pp. 240–241). It is a disruption of temporal and ontological states of being, as it involves intra-actions and the non-linear emergence of being.

Haecceity Haecceity can be described as the particular “thisness” of a thing, that is, its qualities, that emerge from the thing’s encounters within its intra-relationships in its world. It is what makes a thing what it is. Deleuze and Guattari (2013) say, “haecceity has neither beginning nor end, origin nor destination; it is always in the middle. It is not made of points, only of lines. It is a rhizome” (p. 307).

Human Exceptionalism The raising of the human as superior and powerful, over other beings, matter or energies. Human exceptionalism is a feature of the Anthropocene and anthropocentric

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thinking, where the human position, viewpoints and benefit are elevated above those of other things or matters.

Intra-action Uses the concept from Barad (2003), where intra-action explains the encounters between things, beings and forces as they are constantly, actively reconfigured as a result of their relationships with each other. “In contrast to the usual ‘interaction’, the notion of intra-action recognises that distinct entities, agencies, events do not precede, but rather emerge from/through their intra-action” (Barad, 2010, p. 267). Intra-action pushes us to rethink the notion of causality.

Intra-relationality Intra-relationality follows Barad’s ideas, as Ceder (2018) explains. Ceder (2018) argues that intra-relationality shifts our views on the nature of being, to a more fluid view where a state of being becomes multiple ongoing becomings. The idea of intrarelationality helps us to see all of what is, as always in relation to and interdependent with the world, other individuals, matter, energies and things. The concept arises and builds on Barad’s (2003) notion of intra-action.

Kin A term reimagined by Donna Haraway in her kin-making work. It draws on the significant othernesses which Haraway uses as a productive idea to blur human/nonhuman entities and how they co-exist and co-create each other through their co-existence (Haraway, 2003). It describes entities—“not necessarily individuals or humans—that are capable of living and dying well with each other in a ‘thick presence’” (Klumbyte, 2018, p. 226).

Mutualism This term comes from the work of Australian ecofeminist philosopher Deborah Bird Rose’s (2018) use as an affirmation of life, in which beings, things and energies are mutually entangled, implicated and involved in the world.

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Natureculture Natureculture is a way for considering and challenging these enduring perceptions of the division of nature and culture which is deeply embedded in the social versus biological debate. To explore these divisions using a posthuman and materialist approaches means to unsettle mainstream binaries such as nature/culture, human/nature, object/subject and allow possibilities as discussed in this book in Chap. 5, for a relational nation of childhoodnature to emerge. Natureculture according to Malone and Ovenden (2016) is a synthesis of nature and culture that recognises their inseparability in ecological relationships that are both biophysically and socially formed (Haraway 2003).

New Materialism New materialism refers to the refocusing in recent times on the materialities and materialisms that have, for a long time, been taken for granted. Coole and Frost (2010) introduce their book on New Materialisms by outlining a dominant paradox when thinking about matter, that often led to such immaterial things as “language, consciousness, subjectivity, agency, mind, soul …” (p. 2). New materialism is intended to contest the privileging of “language, discourse, culture and values” (p. 3).

New Metaphysics Dolphijn and van der Tuin’s (2012) outline new metaphysics as a rethinking thought, that is “not restricted to a here and now, nor does it merely project an image of the future for us. It announces what we may call a ‘new tradition,’ which simultaneously gives us a past, a present, and a future. Thus, a new metaphysics does not add something to thought (a series of ideas that wasn’t there, that was left out by others). It rather traverses and thereby rewrites thinking as a whole, leaving nothing untouched, redirecting every possible idea according to its new sense of orientation” (p. 13).

New Sociology of Childhood The sociology of childhood evolved within the field of childhood studies in the late 1980s and early 1990s. New sociology of childhood is the term used to describe the work of retheorising childhood by James and Prout (2008) who argued that childhood could never be entirely divorced from other variables such as class, gender or ethnicity. They claimed that by understanding childhood as a social category

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that existed outside of adults, it allowed children to be represented in places where historically they had been invisible.

Onto-Ethico-epistemology We have taken this term as a reflection of the ontological, ethical and epistemological confluences of Barad’s (2015) quantum field theory where “perversity and monstrosity lie at the core of being” (p. 401), and disrupt the ontological foundations of classical physics, and of dominant ontologies.

Ontology Ontology is the philosophical study of the nature of being, existence or reality in general, as well as the basic categories of being and their relations. Ontology deals with questions concerning what entities exist or can be said to exist or are on the way to existing, and how such entities can be grouped, related within a hierarchy, and subdivided, according to similarities and differences.

Paideia A Greek concept, paideia denotes the transmission of cultural norms, in order to educate citizens of the polis in the right way. This idea of education incorporates both theoretical and practical subject-based schooling, and includes the intellectual, physical and expressive act of education (in traditional historical terms of mostly boys or males).

Participation The discussion on participation in childhood sociology has helped to unpack new ways of thinking about the ability of children to participate, how children exercise their agency to participate and their experiences of both being able to participate and being viewed as not participating.

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Performativity In this book we follow Lyotard’s (1984) seminal work The Postmodern Condition, where he understands postmodernity through the notion of performativity. Where we have used the term throughout the book it refers to the ways in which particular ideas are performed, and so produced and embody certain regimes: regimes of truth, regimes of knowledge and regimes of government.

Plasticity The adaptability of an organism to changes in its environment or differences between its various habitats, to give form. Neuroplasticity, for example, is the ability for the brain to form new neural connections throughout its life.

Postdevelopmental Theories Theoretical approaches that challenge and disrupt the notion of developmentalism as a reified ideal. The trajectory of childhood studies in this book presents postdevelopmental theories through Chaps. 1 and 2, in what are often seen as classical philosophical approaches to Western conceptions of childhood, through the new sociology of childhood. The posthuman and new materialist approaches in this book build on the postdevelopmental theories to take them beyond their humanistic focus.

Posthuman The posthuman movement redefines the notion of the human in the twenty-first century, the “human” becomes an open notion. For Bradiotti (2013), the posthuman is a zoe-centred approach that seeks to create an affirmative bond between all living organisms, and in doing so it challenges the distinction between the male subject and his human and nonhuman counterparts (p. 50).

Posthumanism(s) Francesco Ferranado identifies three ways to consider the Posthuman movement: posthumanism post-athropocentrsim, and post-dualism. Posthumanism addresses the topic of the posthuman. What does it mean to be posthuman? There are a number of

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philosophical thoughts of posthumanisms including: critical, cultural, philosophical. Ferrando writes: “‘Posthuman’ applies to a broad field of studies, including advanced robotics, nanotechnology and bioethics. ‘Posthumanist’ mainly refers to a shift in the humanistic paradigm and its anthropocentric Weltanschauung” (2012, p. 10).

Post-anthropocentrism “Post-anthropocentism”, Rosi Bradiotti writes her infamous book The Posthuman, “displaces the notion of species hierarchy and a signal common standard for ‘Man’ as the measure of all things” (2013, p. 67). Post-anthrpocentrism is the means within the posthuman movement that implores the need to no longer think of the human as the centre of everything, that in the current ecological condition there is an imperative to decentre the human. Post-anthropocentrism identifies that we now reside in the era of the Anthropocene where the actions of the humans species are having a direct impact all other species and all entities within the biosphere we inhabit.

Porosity The state or quality of being porous, it is a measure of the “empty” or openness in spaces within a material, and of the fluidity of matter and materials in their in intra-acting with each other. Permeability is a measure of the ease of entities to move between materials, for example, the capacity for water to flow through water or oxygen to be absorbed by a leaf. To be porous is to be “open” without set boundaries to barriers to not be closed means there is always openings no matter how small that allow a constant transfer of entities. From a new materialist or agential realist perspective porosity as concept for analysis recognises all matter is dynamic, vibrant, viscous and therefore always intra-acting with every thing else.

Posthumanist Theories of Childhood Theories of posthuman childhoods view the child as always part of an entangled, hybrid assemblage, being-with and a part of all living things. That is, the child as an entity is not separated from fluid categories of humans, animals, earthlings, energy, atoms and so forth. It is simultaneously both social and scientific, and it is all things constantly responding to and being in relation to each other. Each of us is human, is child but is also constructed of matter and materials that are constantly shaping and being shaped by our intra-actions in and with the world. Central always to this view of the posthuman child as hybrid assemblage is the disruption and fluidity of binaries. There is no separation between mind/body, child/adult, human/animal, nature/culture, subject/object.

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Postqualitative Research Postqualitative research is a term that many explore, as loosely referring to research methodologies that challenge conventional humanist qualitative methodologies. Lather and St. Pierre (2013) say it is a refusal of a neo-positivist research focus, and outline a range of ways that the postqualitative “turn” open us up to thinking beyond the human, complicating methodological ontologies that elevate human knowledge, to question what else? What more might there be, that confounds the seeming simplicity of methods and methodologies?

Power Power refers to the ability to effect change or exert control over either things or people. How we come to view children and childhood in the new sociology of childhood is dependent on how we view the construction of power and how and with whom that power is negotiated. Deleuze and Guattari (2013) use “power” in two ways. It can be used to describe the potential, or “capacity for existence” (p. xvi), that is, a virtual expectation of potential. The other meaning they give to power is an actual force, as in Michel Foucault’s notion of power, as productive.

Representation The process of representing children and childhood, according to the postdevelopmental theories, is core to understanding the diversity of children’s experiences within the different societies that they live. The importance of representation demonstrates that children are of the social and political world not just on the margins. It refers here to children being given the right to express their voice, be given opportunities to participate and make decisions about their lives in meaningful ways.

Re-territorialization Like deterritorialization, this term comes from Deleuze and Guattari (2013), who use it to describe the process of transformation that results from the rupture of a deterritorialization. Reterritorialization and deterritorialization are always relative, connected and “caught up in one another” (p. 9). As constant becomings, each brings about both deterritorialization and reterritorialization as they “interlink and form relays in a circulation of intensities” (p. 9).

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Rhizome A rhizome is a thought, concept or process, that, according to Deleuze and Guattari (2013) has “no beginning or end”. Instead the rhizome “is always in the middle, between things” (p. 26). “Multiplicities are rhizomatic”, that is, they continually “establish connections between” meaning, power and circumstances in relation, for example, to “the arts, sciences and social struggles” (Deleuze & Guattari, 2013, p. 6).

Sensorial Sensorial objects attune to the relationality of many forms of others through the senses. Snaza et al. (2014) suggested bodies as sensorial objects can attune to our relationality with others. Malone and Moore (2019) explore the idea of sensorial ecological knowing as means for explaining how non-verbal children communicate with and through their bodies intra-acting with other bodies, things and object. According to Hackett and Rautio (2019) sensorial communication is a dominant form of communication for human babies and toddlers and for many nonhuman mammals.

Social Constructivism Sociologists using a social constructivist theoretical framework within the new sociology of childhood are seeking to bring attention to and challenge the notion there is a close association between the physical or biological attributes of a child and the cultural features that make up childhood. They emphasise a separation between the biological and cultural nature of childhood.

Socialisation Theory of Childhood Socialisation theory supports assumptions about children as “persons-in-waiting”, although it provides possibilities for acknowledging the importance of children and childhood as being located with, and through an assemblage of “others” and supports an expanding view of a deeply influential social and cultural world. It positions the nuclear family unit as the primary and most significant location for socialisation. As the child grows the school is the next most significant social institution that introduces the child to the relatively fixed practices and procedures, routines, norms and practices that reinforce their “in process of becoming human” status, expectations and values of what it meant to be “fully human”.

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Spacetimemattering Arises in our application of Barad’s (2014) notion of diffraction, which involves iteratively intra-acting, for example, with recent theoretical shifts in what and how we think about children, by “turning and re-turning” to notions of space, of time and of matter, all together, thrown together, as one, in a space or a place. In Barad’s (2010) explanation, spacetime is a disruption to the common perception of time as a linear process, for example, what we refer to as history.

Structure Systems of social relationships (mode of power, production, domination, ideology, belief systems). Every act which contributes to the reproduction of a structure is also an act of production, and as such may initiate change by altering the structure at the same time as it reproduces it. In the new sociology of childhood, childhood is both a period in which children live their lives and a category or part of society, like social class. They are subject to the micro and macrostructures forces of a global and local world. While being childhood is a temporary period for children, it is a permanent structural category in society and has its own structural form.

Temporality The state of existing within or having some relationship with time. Temporalities in philosophy, is traditionally the linear progression of past, present, and future. In the social sciences, temporality is also studied with respect to human’s perception of time and the social organisation of time. This also extends to the concept of disrupting linear notions of time. “Understanding feminist theory”, argues Rebecca Coleman, “in terms of nonlinear temporalities would be helpful in disrupting ideas about how feminism either should progress or is failing. It seems to me that feminist theoretical trajectories and everyday practices are more complex than this”.

Vital Materiality The ways in which things, beings and forces that are not human act on, affect and shape other things, beings and forces. Such an insight fundamentally changes our orientations towards children’s agency, when, rather than focusing on their human ability to act on and have power over their lives, rights, and situations, we give “the force of things more due” (Bennett, 2010, p. viii, our emphasis).

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10 Glossary Key Posthuman Childhood Studies Concepts

Walking-with Methodology Engages researchers/participants in engaging their senses and using their bodies to encounter and draw on their everyday relations with the buildings, roads, plants, birds and animals on their walk. “Walking is embodied because it is immediate, tangible, and foregrounds the bodily experience of moving” (Springgay & Truman, 2017, p. 30).

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