Interrogating innocence: “Childhood” as exclusionary social practice

Abstract

Within the contemporary US context, the construct of childhood innocence is a powerful social myth that structures children’s social relations and culture and informs their rights and status in society. In this article, I interrogate the construct of childhood innocence to examine how it operates as an exclusionary form of social practice. By examining the emotional investments and social tensions that have shaped concepts of childhood, which define who is entitled to innocence and what it means to “belong” with/in childhood, I reveal how the doctrine of innocence has operated to maintain White supremacy. I explore the implications of a construct of childhood that works against the agency and dignity of most children by perpetuating silence about social injustices to illustrate the need for a reconceptualization of childhood that acknowledges and prioritizes the human rights of all children.

Beyond Window Rainbows: Collecting Children’s Culture in the COVID Crisis

“…Children’s window rainbows reproduce the dominant trope of childhood innocence ( Garlen 2020 ), a construct long celebrated despite being an exclusionary form of social practice ( Garlen 2019 ) that essentializes and obscures the highly variable and complex nature of children’s experiences. Specifically identified as a collecting priority by institutions like the New York Historical Society, the Museum of London, the Victoria & Albert Museum of Childhood, and the Portsmouth City Council’s Museums and Archives ( Cascone 2020 ; Portsmouth City Council 2020 ; Thompson 2020 ), the rainbow sign has become a ubiquitous form of children’s pandemic productions.…”

Playing Slavery in First Grade: When “Developmental Appropriateness” Goes Awry in the Progressive Classroom

“…This conceptual turn in childhood studies shifts away from what the child is (in)capable of knowing, including what is developmentally inappropriate, and instead, moves toward questions about the child's expression of the world and what events like playing slavery tell us about the inhibitions and difficulties of the adults who try to contain them. As noted by Julie Garlen (2018), constructions of childhood innocence and morality hint toward deeper emotional investments that operate as specific forms of social exclusion. These efforts disrupt the cultural devaluation of children in society while demonstrating how race relations come to be regulated by historically uneven distributions of childhood innocence (Bernstein, 2011), upholding Whiteness at the expense of those who may not be considered children at all (Dumas & Nelson, 2016).…”

“…Guided by critical childhood reconceptualists (Farley, 2018;Garlen, 2018;Walkerdine, 2009) and concepts of difficult knowledge (Britzman, 2000;Garrett, 2017;Pitt & Britzman, 2003), this reflective article explores how adults drew from developmental frameworks and used children as proxies to protect themselves from the complicated conversation of race and slavery. While masked as inappropriate for children, this event, and the reactions that issued from it, can be read for the way that the child figure became a malleable tool of the adult imagination, one that not only embodied the unresolved conflicts of race in the United States, but ignited a collective refusal to reconcile a subject that appeared too discomfiting and shameful to confront.…”

The Politics of Young Children through the ‘Epistemologies of the South’

“…Interestingly, it has a political element too. Childhood innocence is not universal, rather it's a social construct and it has been used to deny them their participation from family life to public life (Garlen 2019). This romanticized version of innocence has attained a durable effect, 'so durable in fact, that to question its logic seems tantamount to sacrilege' (Garlen 2019, p. 55).…”