Authors Karen Malone, Marek Tesar and Sonja Arndt
Presents posthuman and new materialist theorising of children and their childhoods
Combines theory and practice in complex and everyday ways using postanthropocentric approaches
Draws on a vast set of contemporary research and deep rich stories that express childhoods differently
Explores children and childhoods outside of Euro and Western-centric perspectives
Positions the question of being a child within the bigger story of the impending implications of the Anthropocene on the planet
This book is a genealogical foregrounding and performance of conceptions of children and their childhoods over time. The 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 childhoods.
“This is an incredibly well-written, thoughtful, scholarly and timely book. The first few chapters offer a genealogy of ‘how we got to posthuman theorizing in childhood studies’, with the latter offering more empirically-informed accounts of what those studies could and should look like with a very welcome series of nuanced and important reflections on methods, ethics and, as the authors put it, ‘performing’ posthuman childhood studies. The book also offers an important analysis of how an attention to the posthuman could be entangled with critical questions of social difference.” – Peter Kraftl, University of Birmingham, UK
Citation: Malone, K, Tesar, M, and Arndt, S. (2020) Theorising Posthumanist Childhood Studies, Springer, Singapore.
Environmental Sustainability in the Anthropocene 