Introduction
Michelle S. PĂ©rez
Part 1 of the handbook is comprised of childhoodsâ scholarship that spans the globe and that comes from a range of ontological, epistemological, and axiological positionings. The section purposefully begins with Indigenous worldviews, as they are foundational to discussions on global childhoods. Across the chapters, contributors unmask the traumas of white settler colonialism, complicate the situatedness and hybridity of childhoods, constitute children as active subjects of political socialism, and reimagine childhoods through relational mapping and notions of spatial agency. The section ends with a call for early childhood studies to reckon with the past in order to envision the future. A multiplicity of lenses are enacted throughout the chapters to theorize childhoods, including Indigenous knowledges, postcolonialism, women of color feminisms, Asia as Method, posthumanism, and new materialism. While many of the chapters in this section and throughout the handbook are situated around notions of the Global South/North, and East/West, the very complex ways in which the world and its vast communities and nations have been constituted geographically and directionally, and as existing among and within human-made borders, are recognized.
To begin the section, Mere Skerrett juxtaposes MÄori Indigenous childhoods from the Global South alongside contemporary tropes of northern, âuniversalizedâ and ânormalizedâ childhood/s. With a critical anti-colonial Indigenous lens, Mere Skerrett dismantles developmental frameworks that stratify childhoods, positioning MÄori childhoods in the margins. This has resulted in the socio-cultural disruption to MÄori children's lives, loss of Indigenous language and identity trauma. The author urges that MÄori Indigenous worldviews are needed to unmask the genocidal histories which continue to shape current day MÄori experiences of Britain's settler colonialism, and to disrupt the racialized inequities that white settler privilege produces.
Next, in Chapter 2, Bekisizwe Ndimande challenges narratives about South African childhoods, and how they are largely dominated by Global North conceptualizations, which have been deeply rooted in colonialism and racism. Focusing on a South African Indigenous worldview of childhoods, Bekisizwe Ndimande analyzes childhood experiences during the precolonial, apartheid, and post-apartheid eras. This reveals how structural racism and cultural marginalization inflicts intergenerational trauma on the childhood experiences of Black children.
Chapter 3 is authored by Amita Gupta, who frames the notion of a socially constructed childhood within the context of globalization in urban India. She argues that with access to a wide spectrum of knowledge, Indian parents of young children are acutely aware of not only their own socio-culturally traditional views on child rearing and parenting, but also views that are global and western. Subsequently, the author offers insights into how parents are adjusting their parenting styles and their ideas on childhood in order to ensure their children will possess the values, skills and knowledge required to succeed in the competitively globalized world of the twenty-first century.
Through the analysis of childhood memories that belong to the socialist and postsocialist time spaces, in Chapter 4, co-authors Zsuzsa Millei, Nikolai Jeffs, Petar Odak, Iveta Silova, Anikó Vargåné Nagy, and Anel Kulahmetova, explore everyday politics of children's lives. By taking into account both macro- and micropolitical levels of childhood experiences, the chapter aims to account for children's agency and the nuanced ways through which they participate in the political sphere. Drawing on memory stories from the Soviet Union, socialist Hungary, and the former Yugoslavia, the authors illustrate how the assemblages of materialities, affect, and emotions, enable children's actions through a variety of political acts and becomings, as well as explicit resistance.
In Chapter 5, Radhika Viruru and Nazneen Askari review historical and contemporary studies in the field of early childhood studies through the framework of postcolonial theory. In particular, the chapter draws from the work of the postcolonial scholar Edward Said to deconstruct and re-theorize the us/them dichotomy that underpins much contemporary scholarship in the area of childhood studies. An overview of the theoretical issues that the field is currently grappling with is presented as well as justification as to why postcolonial theory continues to be a source that can enrich disciplines such as childhood studies. Research that has centered around the binaries of standard/non-standard childhoods and human/non-human philosophies are reviewed and then deconstructed through presenting works that talk across and through these binaries.
Next, in Chapter 6, Luting Zhou, Erica Burman, and Susie Miles, use Chen's âAsia as method', to analyze educational debates on âlearning through play.â By mobilizing the postcolonial strategies of inter-referencing and cultural syncretism, the chapter highlights how local culture is integrated into pedagogical concepts and practices. By such means, this rearticulates both Western and Eastern notions of âlearning through playâ and demonstrates how a hybrid of them works in practice. Wider challenges to binary thinking about West versus East in pedagogical ideas and practices are also addressed, in addition to how this may have the potential to advance alternative and multiple forms of pedagogical models and concepts in other early childhood education settings.
In Chapter 7, Peter Kraftl, Sarada Balagopalan, and Gabriela Guarnieri de Campos Tebet provide a critical introduction to the burgeoning sub-discipline of children's geographies. In order to do so, they focus on the concept of spatial agency, or how children experience and make spaces in adult-dominated societies. The chapter discusses three cutting-edge developments in how children's geographers view spatial agency: infant geographies; postcolonial childhoods; and agency âbeyondâ the human. In so doing, and in foregrounding work from beyond English-speaking contexts, the chapter also seeks to decenter the Anglophone tradition in children's geographies, and childhood studies more generally.
Iris Duhn, Karen Malone, and Linda Knight are authors of Chapter 8, in which they engage in collective thinking, researching and imagining childhoods across places, species and encounters, with particular emphasis on cities. The authors explore multifaceted perspectives of childhoods, including non-representational approaches to childhoods, in three research-based relational mappings. These mappings, which are not fixed, offer insights into how childhoods emerge within specific relationalities in different places, moments, and with diverse actors. The authors suggest that these contingent relational mappings can provide important insights into the specificities of the entangled nature of childhoods across the globe by generating new knowledges to make visible those fragile alliances that support local flourishing.
The first section of the handbook concludes with a chapter by Paty Abril-Gonzalez and Michelle Salazar PĂ©rez, who engage in plĂĄticas to reflect upon and theorize early childhood and bilingual education. Using a women of color feminist lens, the authors discuss the foundations of these fields, making connections between them, including ways in which they have been conceptualized through white patriarchy. The authors then discuss the US contemporary context, while connecting it to global issues around Covid-19 and a reckoning with anti-Blackness and racism, and how this has constituted childhoods. The authors conclude with plĂĄticas that envision the future, urging readers to remember to inspire new pathways that are decolonial and center the brilliance of young children who are minoritized.
1 The Descendants of the Gods: MÄori Indigenous Childhoods
Mere Skerrett
Introduction
To juxtapose MÄori Indigenous childhoods1 as text alongside more contemporary tropes of northern, âuniversalizedâ and ânormalizedâ tropes of childhood/s through a critical anticolonial Indigenous lens refracts the power plays and violence of colonization in all its racialized, gendered, sexed and developmental relations. It deflects dominant white malestream understandings of childhood/s into worlds of diversities. That is an important part of healing and transcending colonial violence for Indigenous peoples. Understanding this provides the impetus for pressing research agendas which seek to explain how registers of northern universalism simultaneously operate, and are resisted, in society.
Typically, the developmental frame within which universal (northern) versus particularized (southern) childhoods are discoursed is a frame where âoneâ body politic presumes the power to define (control) the âother'. The use of the term northern and southern in this context is not a fixed north/south geographical fixture as was similarly argued by Saavedra and Perez (2017), but rather a metaphor for Euro-settler colonialism (the north) and Indigenous subjugation (the south). Moreover, in the context of Aotearoa New Zealand, the developmental frame underpins dominant/subordinate power relations through the establishment of political/economic power to European settlers (PÄkehÄ) whilst simultaneously exploiting and marginalizing MÄori. It is argued here that in colonized societies such as New Zealand (NZ) the dominant mobilizations of childhood stratify society, positioning MÄori children as shadows inhabiting the margins of society. But, as Burman (2017) puts it, âthe child can represent a site of resistance to colonialism as much as the raw material for colonial exploitation âŠâ (2017: 42).
The current analysis pushes back against power elitism and the brutalities of colonialism, embracing divergences and convergences which seek to transform the lives of tamariki MÄori (Descendants of the Gods â MÄori children). This chapter defrosts historical positionings weaving in the histories of European expansionism into current day analyses in Aotearoa through a deconstruction lens. It traverses the colonial impact on Indigenous MÄori social structures of whÄnau, hapĆ« and iwi which are based on the collective principles of living with one another including in unison with the land, seas, skies and all things animate and inanimate. Further, unpacking colonial violence and the resulting language shift from Indigenous language/s to colonial language leads to an analysis of the power structures of universalization and subjectification, normalization and disempowerment. This chapter argues for the reversal of Indigenous language/s shift, the underpinnings of KĆhanga Reo for tamariki MÄori.
European Expansionism
The colonial history of New Zealand is, by association, as much a history of colonial British imperialism and European expansionism as it is anywhere and everywhere. A synopsis of the philosophical underpinnings of European expansionism is necessary to locate âusâ (Aotearoa) in the antipodes and the socio-political positionings which have shape-shifted MÄori children's lives. History is as important as futurity. It records experiences from multiple positionings.
Grosfoguel's (2015) exploration of Cartesian philosophy examined the conquest of the Americas in relation to three other genocidal processes: the Conquest of Al-Andalus (consolidating the nation-state of Spain); the enslavement of Africans (bolstering European economic expansion in America) and the killing of millions of European women accused of being witches in the rise of scientific-man. He argues that these genocidal progressions based on the socio-political experiences of small groups of European men gave rise to, and underpinned, the philosophy now referred to as Cartesianism. Grosfoguel further asks how is it possible that the canon of thought based on the knowledge produced by a few European white men achieved such epistemic privilege to the point where it is knowledge considered superior to that of the rest of the world? He problematizes the theories of these men emerging from conceptualizations based on their specific social/historical experiences and sensibilities as well as their worldviews, that is of a âparticularâ people in âparticularâ spaces. He argues they are merely provincial to unique parts of Europe, disguised under a discourse of âuniversal'. The flip side to such provincialism or universalism referred to as epistemic privilege, is epistemic disenfranchisement where, in the eyes of those few white men from Europe, the rest of the world is incapable of producing knowledge. How did this notion come about? He suggests a very tight relationship between philosophy and education.
Descartesâ Dualisms
The modern philosopher RenĂ© Descartes (1596â1650) coined the well-known term âI think, therefore I am', challenging the religious authority of God and replacing it with âI'. The new foundation of knowledge was produced through a Cartesian dualism or split between mind and matter, creating subjects and objects. Descartes draws on two arguments, the first being one of ontological dualism of mind and body, the second being the epistemological dualism of self and other/s.
Ontological dualism
The ontological dualism stems from the latter part of the classic Descartes phrase âI think therefore I am', the âI am'. This dualism is a separation between mind and body. Mind takes on a status and a whole new meaning, as it is dissected from the body. The white man God in heaven looking down with (his) God's eye view is replaced by white man mind, who can magically produce God's knowledge because âheâ has a âGod's-Eye viewâ of the world. I am the world and you are âitâ mentality. That is the magic. Burman (2019) talks about how âWestern cultural practices (from enjoying âmagicâ tricks to going to the theatre or other cultural events) rely on the pretence of belief, and a corresponding belief in, or attachment to, pretenceâ (p. 54). Cartesianism really derives from an invented make-believe pretence in the white-euro male view of the world where he is left, right and center; he is the whole world and the whole world is in his (Christian) hands. This leads us to Descartesâ second argument which is epistemological.
Epistemological dualism
The epistemological dualism stems from the first part of the classic phrase âI think therefore I am'. The âI think' part arises from a certitude of knowledge or a presumption of an ability to think âtrue superior knowledgeâ into being. It is achieved through an internal monologue of the subject within âhimself'. Grosfoguel argues that the âI think, therefore I amâ of the seventeenth century is preceded by at least 150 years of âI conquer, I exterminate, therefore I am'. The two lots of ideas are linked historically. The ensuing epistemic racism came to the fore in 1492 with European expansion into the Americas.
The Control and Manufacture of Knowledge
The deception put across epistemologically as God's universal knowledge in the I âthinkâ (and, by implication, control knowledge production), and ontologically in the I âamâ (because I am God), leads to a gods-eye, all knowing and powerful, view at every epistemological and ontological turn. The control and monopoly over knowledge production and dissemination are a pretence, a ruse carefully scripted over time and played out across the centuries in co...
