Global Studies of Childhood

Childhood states are commonly invoked by adult humans in derisory ways and as put-downs. While infantile and clownish ways of behaving are often met with insult, we argue that these ways of being could instead be seen in terms of their productive potential. Drawing on posthuman and feminist theories and invoking clownish qualities of Haraway’s Bag Lady, we explore affinities between the figures of clown and toddler. This challenges a history of childism that constructs child as a less-than-adult, proposing instead, that the figure of child as inherently developmental and progressive is inextricably linked with how we conceive of the category of human. Making the case for the more-than-Adult toddler, we explore ways that clownish antics intersect with toddler ways of be(com)ing. This helps us to reframe the less-than child (not-yet human subject) as a figure of potential through animistic becomings-with the world that spill beyond the bounded individual and self/other binaries. We use this as a decolonising strategy to undo bounded and linear constructions of early childhood. The common antics of both toddlers and clown are explored in terms of how they might productively inform the co-production of improvisational pedagogic practices with young children.

With the Donald Trump Baby Balloon as a provocation, this work utilizes philosophy as a method and cinema-as/in-philosophy to multi-modally interrogate the particular images of giant babies. Deleuze and Guattari’s conceptions of molarity and molecularity and Bakhtin’s conception of grotesque bodily images are put to work alongside several cinematic portrayals of giant babies and their social material contexts, including the animated fantasy Spirited away, the family comedy Honey, I blew up the kid, the independent short Las Palmas, and the Disney-Pixar superhero franchise Incredibles. Within this constellation of images and texts, the giant baby emerges as a specific entanglement of developmentalism, humanism, and neoliberalism. Furthermore, the ways in which images of giant babies materialize particular notions of monstrosity, consumption, and destruction might disrupt some commonsense notions of time and bodies. This kind of destabilization of concepts furthers the argument for employing a philosophical, cinematic axiology within the realm of childhood studies.

Often used in the plural, tantrum denotes an uncontrolled outburst of anger and frustration, typically in a young child. In this paper we attempt to enact a feminist project of reclamation and reconfiguration of ‘the toddler tantrum’. Drawing on a range of theoretical traditions, this paper investigates the complex yet generative possibilities inherent within the tantrum to argue that it can be encountered as more-than-human, as a worldly-becoming, and as a form of resistance to Anthropocentrism and childism. We propose that the tantrum might be reappraised as a generative form of (child) activism. By mobilising the potential of arts-based approaches to the study of childhood we seek to reach other, opened out and speculative accounts of what tantrum-ing is, what it makes possible, and what it might offer to stretch ideas about, and practices with very young children. We undertake a tentacular engagement with children’s literature to arrive at possibilities to resist smoothing out, extinguishing or demonising the uncomfortable affective ecologies that are agitated by child rage. This paper brings together a concern with affect, materialities and bodies as they coalesce in more-than-human relationalities captured within ‘the tantrum’. In doing so, the unthinkable, the unbearable, the uncomfortable and the unknowable are set in motion, in the hope of arriving at a (more) critically affirmative account of childhood in all its messy complexity.

Sustained shared thinking dialogues which focus on teacher talk with preschool learners have long been considered an important route to learning progression. Toddlers, however, seldom engage in dialogues through talk alone, and their encounters are often fleeting. As a consequence, they are often positioned on the periphery of learning dialogues that are granted primacy in the Capitalocene, because they must first acquire adult forms of communication and their meanings before thought becomes possible. Viewed from a dialogic standpoint, however, toddlers offer important clues to co-constituted meaning-making through subtle, fleeting, embodied and interconnected language acts. When stitched together across time and space and in speculative, apperceptive, contemplation of their strategic orientation, these seemingly random utterances can act as a source of shared thinking through interanimating chains of thought that implicate teachers as well as toddlers. In the paper that follows, utterance chains are brought to life through curated video and dialogue with Aotearoa New Zealand teachers who, sought to ‘think with’ toddlers in ECE settings. Paying attention to interconnecting links in meaning across language acts over time and space, utterance chains invoked apperceptive engagement with language and thought. These discoveries invite teachers to expand communicative repertoires to ‘think with’ young learners as optimistic encounters of ‘making-with’ bestowals in and for the Chthulucene.

By troubling notions of time-as-progress and human exceptionality, this paper considers what shifts in conceptualisations of children’s literacies and futures might be possible in the context of faltering of capitalist logics of progress. The paper draws on a 3 year ethnographic study with families and young children in northern England, which asked what might be learnt about young children’s literacies by starting with the everyday in communities. Arguing for the interconnection between notions of human exceptionalism, human/planetary relations and literacies and language, the paper offers some alternative directions for sorely needed imaginaries about the role of literacies in how young children relate to their worlds.

Toddlers contribute to early childhood education and care (ECEC) environments in unique ways in contrast to older children and adults. In this article, we explore early childhood teachers’ stories about toddlers, thinking, and time. We follow a moment with a toddler’s story told with his fingers, and discuss it through teachers’ stories. Our focus is on what ideas about toddlers, time, and thinking these stories produce, and how these ideas affect toddler’s possibilities to contribute to daily life in ECEC. We use Barad’s concepts spacetimematter and temporal diffraction; and Haraway’s concept Capitalocene and storying, to explore toddlers thinking and time in ECEC. We argue that the dominant concept of time in the Capitalocene can produce thoughtlessness, connected to children and children’s opportunities to participate. Through a process of “storying,” we hope to generate more and maybe different knowledge about toddlers, thinking, and time.

The 2018 anti-Trump protest in London is dominated by an effigy, in the form of a balloon, that morphs President Donald Trump and childhood. Whilst this can be interpreted as a humorous act to ridicule Trump, a critical reading of the scene through a postmodern lens suggests that the image is an appropriation and manipulation of childhood. Trump masquerading as a baby becomes the ‘vagabond’ who is denied citizenship; she is a focus for negativity and fears, symbolising the values of hate and intolerance. The Trump Baby is vexing in the way it obscures knowledge of the agentic and competent child known within the nursery. The protesters exercise power as they mock and humiliate the Trump Baby in the protest and on social media. Such actions legitimatise hostile acts against children and prompt questions about the interdependency between children and adults in the both the construction of values and the realisation of children’s citizenship. This paper considers a range of positions that adults could adopt in order to co-construct values with children and respect their status as citizens. In this way, nurseries can become forums where children’s citizenship is both defended and nurtured.

Mainstream images of “toddler” tend to serve a humorous purpose in mass media, most often presenting children of this age (18 months–3 years) as out-of-control. This assumed “barbaric” toddler promotes early childhood as a time for intervention, expecting adults to be the shapers of behavior and knowledge within discourses of social regulation which delineate possible childhoods. Within the Capitalocene, possible childhoods are inextricably linked to future adulthoods where this intervention is desired early to prepare children for future schooling and thus, future work to further industrial progress and consumption. This article revisits narrative, self-reflexive data from a larger study to identify and deconstruct mundane, acceptable teaching practices that promote the positioning of very young children as “lesser beings” through the constant control of children’s bodies, ideas, and subjectivities. Through this deconstruction of practice and in turn adult-child power relations, ruptures in habitual ways of knowing and teaching lead to a reimagining of toddlers’ actions in an effort to build counternarratives. Practices of disruption and resignification aim to challenge the positions of classroom subjects as they are continuously reproduced through discourses of development and the neoliberal agenda.