After Childhood

Re-thinking Environment, Materiality and Media in Children's Lives

Peter Kraftl

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2020
• eBook ISBN: 9781351614801
• Topic: Physical Sciences
• Subtopic: Geography
• Index: Geography

This book offers a new approach for theorising and undertaking childhood research. It combines insights from childhood and generational studies with object-oriented ontologies, new materialisms, critical race and gender theories to address a range of key, intractable challenges facing children and young people.

Bringing together traditional social-scientific research methods with techniques from digital media studies, archaeology, environmental nanoscience and the visual arts, After Childhood: Re-thinking Environment, Materiality and Media in Children's Lives presents a way of doing childhood research that sees children move in and out of focus. In doing so, children and their experiences are not completely displaced; rather, new perspectives on concerns facing children around the world are unravelled which dominant approaches to childhood studies have not yet fully addressed. The book draws on the author's detailed case studies from his research in historical and geographical contexts. Examples range from British children's engagement with plastics, energy and other matter, to the positioning of diverse Brazilian young people in environmental and resource challenges, and from archaeological evidence about childhoods in the USA and Europe to the global circulation of children's toys through digital media.

The book will appeal to human geographers, sociologists, anthropologists, education studies scholars and others working in the interdisciplinary field of childhood studies, as well as to anyone looking for a range of novel, interdisciplinary frames for thinking about childhood.

1
Introduction

Thinking and doing after childhood

São Paulo

In 2011, the World Bank published a Case Study Overview reporting on the challenges facing the urban poor in terms of climate change and disaster risk. The city is experiencing a changing climate with heavier rainfall events and higher maximum temperatures alongside temporary decreases in air humidity that are, somewhat paradoxically, leaving some areas desertified. Nearly one million homes are at risk of flooding or landslides, especially in the favelas (poorer, informal settlements). In conjunction with a Mayor’s Task Force from the city, the report highlights a number of intersecting challenges facing these communities (World Bank, 2011). Vulnerable groups often lack the resources to deal with the changing climate and, especially, the risks of flooding and landslides that are most acute on the steep hillsides where many homes are situated. Indeed, it was estimated in 2011 that around 5% of such areas were at severe risk of landslides in the subsequent 12 months. Meanwhile, in these impoverished communities, access to basic services such as electricity, water and sanitation is patchy, if present at all. What infrastructure does exist is hugely vulnerable to extreme weather events and other disasters. This includes public transport, which, in combination with the irregularity of electricity supplies, means that, especially at night, vulnerable residents feel unsafe. As a result – and because in some areas gangs control access to energy and other services – it can be difficult for children to travel to work or school, further compounding the social and economic marginalisation faced by families (especially because these areas host the highest proportions of residents aged under 19 in the city and the greatest number of child-headed households). Finally, the report highlights that children (along with the elderly) are particularly vulnerable to these compound problems – for instance, to drowning or physical injury during flooding or landslides, to going hungry or to missing out on education.

Denmark

In August 2019, the Guardian newspaper reported on a study demonstrating the links between growing up with air pollution and a range of mental health issues – including schizophrenia. The piece references two studies (in fact comparing the United States and Denmark) and found that the emergence of such issues in later life could not be explained by genetics alone (Khan et al., 2019; Chang et al., 2019). Comparing (somewhat bizarrely, on the face of it) insurance data, the authors found that rates of bipolar disorder were 27% higher in those counties with the poorest air quality than those with the best. Moreover, given that individuals in lower socio-economic groups are less likely to have insurance, and more likely to live in areas with poorer air quality, they suggested that the prevalence of bipolar disorder and other mental health issues was likely to be even higher amongst those populations. There are a number of possible physiological reasons for why air pollution might cause mental health issues – alongside a range of more established health problems. However, the Guardian (2019) also notes that, in addition to research with those in lower-income groups, further research is required to explore how air pollution intersects with a range of other potential drivers – including genetics, family circumstances, bullying and (in)formal sources of support.

Thinking and doing, after childhood

This book seeks to set out a range of ways for thinking about children, and doing childhood research, after childhood. Taken as a whole, the book offers concepts, methods and modes of narration for scholars of children and childhood from a range of disciplines, but especially the social sciences. Without wishing to claim that it constitutes a ‘radical’ departure from the conventions of childhood studies – not least because it draws to an extent on already existing literatures in what is a large, diverse, cross-disciplinary field – the book nevertheless puts forward and exemplifies a range of novel frames that might feel challenging, uncomfortable but hopefully exciting and generative for childhood scholars. In one sense, the book’s principal reason for existing is to attempt to push even further the notions of ‘child’ and ‘childhood’ than even some of the most recent new materialist, post-humanist literatures have done. On the other hand, and despite my attachment and commitment to the field, it is born of a sense of frustration with some of those literatures, and with childhood studies more generally. Whilst social-scientific studies of childhood have achieved much in the past few decades, there is still much to do: not least in developing theories, methods and forms of interdisciplinary collaboration that might broach the kinds of challenges – and the injustices, illnesses and traumas associated with them – so briefly indicated by the two cases that began this chapter.

The examples from São Paulo and Denmark are intended to be indicative of two key problems, which this book seeks to broach. On the one hand, they nod to the complex, knotty, intractable challenges that affect particular communities in particular places, wherein it is not particularly clear where one would even begin in attempting to address them. In São Paulo’s favelas, although singled out as a key cause, climate change is not the only driver of poverty, or lack of safety, or vulnerability: the challenge is multifaceted, encompassing urban immigration, education, gang cultures, the provision of infrastructures in informal urban settings, the interactions between slopes and ad hoc housing structures, and far more besides. In Denmark (and the United States), the drivers of mental health issues are complex, taking in genetics, the interactions between environmental pollutants, the respiratory tract and the brain, transport planning and reliance on the car, socio-economic inequalities, bullying and, again, far more besides.

On the other hand, this book does not purport to ‘solve’ these intractable, complex challenges. Yet it seeks to look again at how children are positioned within them – as I ask in Chapter 3: where are children located, precisely, in complex nexuses of resources, institutions and more-than-human interactions? Moreover, it seeks to construct an argument that one of the best ways to understand, analyse and respond to these intractable challenges – and children’s position within them – is to recognise that, sometimes, we cannot start with children (or childhoods) at all. For, in a very simplistic sense, the two examples that began this chapter are not just about children or childhoods. As I argue, this means, to differing extents, a loosening of control: perhaps decentring childhoods (Spyrou, 2017); perhaps allowing childhoods to move out of focus; perhaps engaging (after Tsing, 2015) in arts of (not) noticing; and, ethically and politically, as I argue throughout the book and especially in conclusion, holding apparently contradictory conditions such as silliness and trauma in productive tension. For conceptual, methodological, political and ethical reasons, as I argue, this does not mean going beyond childhood. Rather, as I demonstrate in Chapter 9, it means engaging with the ethical and political possibilities (both speculative-playful-silly and marginalising-violent-traumatic) constituted by thinking and doing, after childhood.

At this early stage, I want to be clear that I see the idea of thinking and doing, after childhood, as at once a starting point for a series of (sometimes perhaps esoteric) thought experiments and a way of responding, differently, to the very real challenges experienced by diverse children and young people, in different places, in different ways, around the world – without making any claims to universality. Thus, before moving on, it is helpful to clarify just some of the ways in which I seek to understand and theorise the term ‘after childhood’, which are in turn woven through this book.

Firstly, and most straightforwardly, the term ‘after’ denotes a series of temporal logics. Although diverse, the notion of childhood is – and arguably always has been – characterised by a temporal logic that places children in generational orderings (Alanen and Mayall, 2001; Punch, 2002). Herein, children have often been viewed as future adults – as becomings – upon whose shoulders rest a range of hopes and fears (Uprichard, 2008; Evans, 2010). In these logics, even if any given children’s childhoods come ‘after’ those of the previous generation’s, childhoods are most frequently understood to come ‘before’ adulthoods and are defined by what adulthood is not (maturity, physical size, status, etc.).

These debates will be familiar to many childhood studies scholars; thus, throughout the book I ask what work the term ‘after’ might do in twisting some of these apparently simple, modernist temporalities. Certainly, several childhood studies scholars have sought to query and/or queer the teleologies inherent in the age-old ‘beings-becomings’ debate. Yet the possibilities for questioning these linear generational orderings and temporalities have not been exhausted. Thus, for instance, via concepts like ‘hyperobjects’ (Morton, 2013), I examine the phasing of material stuff and processes – like plastics – into human lives over a much longer temporal frame. This is in turn key to my concept of ‘infra-generations’ (Chapter 6), although I take a very different stance from those (like Postman, 1985) who write on the social status and experience of childhood over time. Mine is not an argument that childhoods are either changing or disappearing, although both might be happening, in different ways, in different times and places, as the final provocation in Chapter 9 makes clear. Rather (for example), drawing on archaeologies of childhood, and starting with found objects – which immediately bring to mind a much longer chronology than the usual frames of childhood studies – the term ‘after’ can be understood in a different light. Some of the ‘toys’ uncovered in Chapter 5 were played with by children after they had been thrown away by adults, reversing the usual ways of things (i.e. where adulthood comes ‘after’ childhood). The toys, bones and other objects found in ‘cuts’ were found after the death of the subjects who played with or were constituted by those objects, requiring rather different modes for deducing and analysing ‘childhoods’ than notions of voice or agency. Indeed, as I come to below, this latter observation, when taken to its most logical conclusion, imagines a world without humans (and, hence, without children). Using the term ‘after’ as a springboard, throughout the book I toy with various temporalities and chronologies – fast and slow, big and small, linear and, especially, non-linear.

Secondly, given its complex etymology in English, the term ‘after’ also implies something perhaps subtly, perhaps more radically different than the prefix ‘post-’, which extends beyond temporality. As a preposition it denotes repetition and circularity (‘time after time’) and attendant responsibility (‘clean up after yourself’) rather than only consequence and linear chronology. It signals that which comes behind (‘shut the door after you leave’) and is, like my deployment of the related prefix ‘infra-’ in Chapter 6, somewhat modest (‘play often comes after education and health in priorities for policies’) yet also a pursuit for something more (‘chasing after a dream’). ‘After’ implies allusion or imitation (‘after the style of this musician’): an impulse that finds expression throughout this book in the deployment of speculative fabulation (Haraway, 2011), listing (Latour, 2005), metaphor (Bogost, 2012) and a call for ‘radical’, experimental forms of interdisciplinary childhood studies (see, especially, Chapter 7). And, finally, it denotes a consistent double logic (sometimes referred to as a ‘pull focus’) throughout this book of the ‘after-all’: after all, the world goes on and will exceed childhoods (and all humans); but, after all, children and childhoods matter, in that ongoingness, in ways that require much more thought and action. Ultimately, unlike some brands of post-(humanist) thinking, mine is never a position that endorses a way of thinking and doing without humans (or without children) and the things that concern us (and them). That would be unsustainable in a book about childhood. Thus, in certain places I do stray far from children and childhoods and sometimes speculate about worlds without humans. However, my commitment to the ‘pull focus’ means that children and childhoods – and sometimes fairly conventional ways to understand their voice, agency or mobilities – are woven (back) into the narrative, even if in oblique or apparently belated styles (Chapter 8 being a case in point).

Thirdly, the idea of looking ‘after’ evokes decades of ‘post-’ thinking: of attempts to go ‘beyond’ (Bryant, 2014; Jackson, 2015). The prefix ‘post-’ does not just imply that which follows chronologically, but of attempts to complicate, exceed, subvert or question: to go beyond the – modern, the – colonial, the – structural, the – truth. Indeed, as discussed in Chapter 2, this book aligns with what some have termed a ‘new wave’ (Ryan, 2012) of childhood studies or, more explicitly, theories of the ‘posthuman child’ (Murris, 2016) or ‘post-child’ (Aitken, 2018) that are slowly gaining traction.

However, as implied above, the prefix ‘post-’ brings forth a range of connotations that are, admittedly, semantic – but which go beyond mere wordplay. On the one hand, it is loaded: it now implies a range of modes of theorising that, however generative and progressive, have also become associated with a continual search for newness, with a sometimes white, and/or masculine and/or middle-class and/or European impulse and aesthetic. As I highlight in the next chapter, in some forms, the impulse to go ‘beyond’ can – perhaps unintentionally – have the effect of reinforcing privilege and marginalisation. Although writing from the perspective of yet another white, middle-class, European male, I find the term ‘after’ – or rather I want the term ‘after’ – to feel somewhat more modest, humble and cognisant of, if not a challenge to, these modes of marginalisation. Thus, limited by both my positionality and skill, I attempt throughout the book to engage meaningfully and consistently with feminist, queer and critical race theorisations of difference and matter that sit alongside and in tension with certain forms of ‘post-’ child thinking (including deployments of actor-network theory (ANT) and new materialist theory).

On the other hand, the idea of the ‘post’ is both too much and not enough, all at once. When coupled with childhood, the effects of post-child thinking (especially in the most popular, feminist/new materialist/post-human brands) are to attempt to ‘decentre’ children and childhoods in favour of non-human animals and materials (Spyrou, 2017). This decentring is not enough: the very language implies an anthropocentrism that starts-with the human and with analyses and politics that “still preserve humanity as a primary actor” (Bryant, 2014: 7). It also tends to decentre childhoods for certain kinds of non-humans – animals and neatly bounded objects like toys – such that other messier, less tangible, less object- (or subject-)like stuff (like plastics, digital media and energy) is effaced. And this decentring is too much: at least as things stood when I wrote this book, it enabled a range of more generous stories but, bizarrely, seldom lived up to the promise that post-human approaches could have in broaching some of the intractable challenges facing children (such as the two that preface this chapter). Not only am I troubled by the prefix ‘post-’ and the concept of ‘decentring’ politically, then, but, as I argue throughout this book, that decentring is not (yet) sophisticated enough to grapple with children’s positioning in resource nexuses (Chapter 3), their visualisation and circulation in digital media (Chapter 5), or their knowledge and experiences of energy (Chapter 7). For me, this requires a double manoeuvre that both exceeds and is more modest than the notion of ‘decentring’: what I term a ‘pull focus’ or, following Tsing (2015), “arts of (not) noticing”.

Fourthly, the term ‘after’ brings with it a specific meaning when it comes to matter and materiality: the very stuff of new materialist or post-human childhood studies. Alongside the generative approaches of feminist, queer and critical race theorists, this particular interpretation of thinking and doing ‘after’ requires a foray into speculative-realist and object-oriented ontologies (OOO). ¹ These theories are introduced in Chapters 2 and 3 – but perhaps at this point three key contentions of OOO are important to note: that the world can exist after human finitude (i.e. the sense that the world has existed, and can exist again, without humans); that ‘objects’ can and do exist and operate outside of relationships with humans (i.e. a landslide can happen on a remote mountain without humans witnessing it, and it will have happened whether or not we discover the aftermath); and that the relations between objects do not exhaust their very being (i.e. a human could look at a mountain from many angles but never ‘see’ the whole mountain, insides and all, without totally dismantling it). OOO theorists are sometimes known as anti-correlationists because they push against the widely held view – central to both modernism and post-modernism – that the world only exists as humans perceive, understand and represent it (i.e. ‘reality’ only exists insofar as it correlates with human perception). For many conte...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half Title
• Series Page
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Dedication Page
• Contents
• Acknowledgements
• List of figures and tables
• 1 Introduction: thinking and doing after childhood
• 2 Childhood studies, after childhood
• 3 Nexus thinking and resource-power: cuts through childhood, cuts through the earth
• 4 Speculative childhoods: matters beyond materialities
• 5 Media: visibility, circulation and some stuff about childhoods
• 6 Infra-generations: after-lives, or, what lies beneath
• 7 Energy
• 8 Synthesis and stickiness: lives of plastics, metals and other elements
• 9 Conclusions: after childhood
• References
• Index