Speculative Child Figures at the End of the (White) World

Abstract

The child-future join is pervasive in childhood studies and popular culture. Instead of disavowing the relation, I consider what might be generated if we “stay with the trouble” of its cocomposition in the making of worlds. To do so, I turn to a zombie child named Melanie from The Girl with All the Gifts to grapple with how the end of the world might not be a cause for mourning, how fiery landscapes can allow for species regeneration, and how viruses might incite counternarratives of community amid contagion.

(Un)finding childhoods in citational practices with postdevelopmental pedagogies

“…We quite literally enliven and erase childhoods based on with whom, how, why and with what pedagogies (and worlds) we do citational practices, be these citational practices directly citing child development literature or citational entanglements grounded in or in denial of developmental logics. This is especially true in the context of interrogating how citational practices perpetuate the logics of child development: citing with the certainty, status, violences and spurious interpretative validity assumed by developmental psychology shapes childhoods differently than doing citational practices with speculation (Ashton, 2020), refusal (Nxumalo, 2021b), anti-colonial futurities (Tuck and Gaztambide-Fernández, 2013) and in the collapse of child development's image of the romanticized, apolitical child (Garlen, 2021; Nxumalo et al, 2018; Templeton and Cheruvu, 2020). Burman (2022: 274) continues: ‘[found childhood] identifies childhood as both constitutive of, and as a critical practice of reading and critically reflecting upon, such sociomaterial practices’.…”

(Re)Envisioning Childhoods With Mi’kmaw Literatures

“…Toward suggesting a mutuality between Indigenous and posthumanist concepts, I now turn to childhoods and pedagogies. Little Thunder's becoming Thundermaker can be seen as a child-becoming-adult (Ashton, 2020a), and his particular path of becoming evokes both Indigenous and posthumanist pedagogies in early childhood education (e.g., Nxumalo, 2017;Taylor & Pacini-Ketchabaw, 2015). In a well-known article from 2014, Michi Saagiig Nishnaabeg scholar Leanne Betasamosake Simpson shows the way Land 9 can be thought of as pedagogy in Indigenous worldviews (see also Hanson et al, 2020).…”

“…But those futures speak loudly today. They offer visions of the not this, the not yet, and the what if (Ashton, 2020a) made uniquely tangible through their having been. This paper engages these very old stories brought to life in contemporary children's literature and points to the value of those very old futures to theory, literature, and pedagogy.…”