Towards the human, after the child of Man: Seeing the child differently in teacher education

Kromidas, Maria

doi:10.1080/03626784.2018.1549924

Cited by 19 publications

(17 citation statements)

References 47 publications

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“…Scientific and developmental approaches to childhood similarly position children as 'not fullyformed humans' (Murris 2018, p. 80), imbricated in a linear process of maturity towards the ultimate goal of attaining adulthood, and thus full humanity. This process, reflected in the 'ages and stages' approach of Piaget and other developmental psychologists, echoes recapitulation theory in which the child moves in fixed stages from 'savage' towards civilisation (Kromidas 2019). The figure of Mary Poppins troubles this one-directional notion of knowledge and skills accumulation via the 'conversations' between John and Barbara, baby twins, and a starling who regularly visits their nursery.…”

Section: Becoming-with the Starlingmentioning

confidence: 93%

Deleuze Becoming-Mary Poppins: Re-Imagining the Concept of Becoming-Woman and Its Potential for Challenging Current Notions of Parenting, Gender and Childhood

Carlyle

Sidebottom

2021

Humanities

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In this paper, we consider the major and controversial lexicon of Deleuze’s ‘becoming-woman’ and what an alternative re-working of this concept might look like through the story of Mary Poppins. In playfully exploring the many interesting aspects of Travers’ character, with her classic tale about the vagaries of parenting, we attempt to highlight how reading Mary Poppins through the Deleuzian lens of ‘becoming-woman’ opens up possibilities, not limitations, in terms of feminist perspectives. In initially resisting the ‘Disneyfication’ of Mary Poppins, Travers offered insights and opportunities which we revisit and consider in terms of how this fictional character can significantly disrupt ideas of gender performativity. We endeavour to accentuate how one of its themes not only dismantles the patriarchy in 1910 but also has significant traction in the twenty- first century. We also put forth the idea of Mary Poppins as an icon of post-humanism, a nomadic war machine, with her robotic caring, magic powers and literal flights of fancy, to argue how she ironically holds the dual position of representing the professionalisation of parenting and the need to move beyond a Dionysian view of children as in need of control and regulation, as well as that of nurturer and emancipator. Indeed, in her many contradictions, we suggest a nomadic Mary Poppins can offer a route into the ideas of Deleuze and his view of children as de-territorialising forces and activators of change.

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Section: Becoming-with the Starlingmentioning

confidence: 93%

Deleuze Becoming-Mary Poppins: Re-Imagining the Concept of Becoming-Woman and Its Potential for Challenging Current Notions of Parenting, Gender and Childhood

Carlyle

Sidebottom

2021

Humanities

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“…Schooling and its systematic devaluing of Black life produces racial human-ness in the ever-lurking spectre that haunts the US educational system-the so-called achievement gap. 9 Confronting the stark chromatics in the empirical fact of the gap is a key way that subjects are hailed into the deathly apparatus of race in the neoliberal era (Kromidas 2019). Here I show how the neoliberal education complex proliferates school ratings in public, redoubles their mapping onto an already racialised urban landscape, capitalises ratings into property values that rely on and reproduce race, to ultimately reproduce the racialised value of life itself.…”

Section: Reproducing Racialised Value Of Life Itselfmentioning

confidence: 94%

“…This project emerged from my quest to merge my experiences as an ambivalent participant in the maternal labours discussed herein with the ethico-political and intellectual concerns guiding my research of how childhood and schooling function as important sites of race-making (Kromidas 2016(Kromidas , 2019. Like many of my participants, I am a middle-class mother struggling to do well by my child, navigating the material and ideological contexts of educational scarcity in NYC.…”

Section: Ethico-political Groundings and Methodsmentioning

confidence: 99%

Mothering and the Racialised Production of School and Property Value in New York City

Kromidas

2021

Antipode

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This article explores middle-class mothers' labours associated with relocating for a "good school" in NYC as they navigated the material and ideological structures of scarcity related to its highly unequal school system. Based on ethnographic research with a diverse group of women in a middle-class area, I document the multiple ongoing labours associated with this "choice", and trace how the neoliberal education complex (that includes testing and real estate industries, and school rating websites) compels women to perform them. Through the lenses of Marxist feminism and racial capitalism, I demonstrate how these labours produce school and property value that reinscribe race onto space. While middle-class women are disciplined and their labours coerced, their labours are routed to dispossess working-class communities of colour, and reproduce the racial hierarchy of human-ness on which capital depends. This article underscores the role of gender and race-making in middle-class reproduction, and their linkage to elite accumulation and working-class dispossession.

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“…In this endeavour, we try to work productively with Murris and Osgood (2022), who suggest that to do this we also need to call into question how we configure the human so that we can refigure the category of the child. Following Castaneda in Lindgren (2020), we will use the term the ‘figure’ of child to distinguish it from the fixed and categorical notion of the child of Man (Kromidas, 2019). Accordingly, the concept of figuration can both help us to understand how child ‘is figured as the adult’s ontological origin, as a not-yet subject’ (Kromidas, 2019: 916), as well as to give form to new figurations.…”

mentioning

confidence: 99%

“…Following Castaneda in Lindgren (2020), we will use the term the ‘figure’ of child to distinguish it from the fixed and categorical notion of the child of Man (Kromidas, 2019). Accordingly, the concept of figuration can both help us to understand how child ‘is figured as the adult’s ontological origin, as a not-yet subject’ (Kromidas, 2019: 916), as well as to give form to new figurations. Considering the figure of the toddler alongside that of clown, we explore how the dimension of not-fully-subject might be seen as productive, rather than as a lack.…”

mentioning

confidence: 99%

Clowns, fools and the more-than-Adult toddler

Arculus

MacRae

2022

Global Studies of Childhood

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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.

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Towards the human, after the child of Man: Seeing the child differently in teacher education

Cited by 19 publications

References 47 publications

Deleuze Becoming-Mary Poppins: Re-Imagining the Concept of Becoming-Woman and Its Potential for Challenging Current Notions of Parenting, Gender and Childhood

Deleuze Becoming-Mary Poppins: Re-Imagining the Concept of Becoming-Woman and Its Potential for Challenging Current Notions of Parenting, Gender and Childhood

Mothering and the Racialised Production of School and Property Value in New York City

Clowns, fools and the more-than-Adult toddler

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