Theorising Posthuman Childhood Studies

1. Front Matter

   Pages i-xvii

   PDF

2. History and Philosophy of Children and Childhoods

   • Karen Malone, Marek Tesar, Sonja Arndt

   Pages 1-27

3. Reconfiguring Childhoods and Theories

   • Karen Malone, Marek Tesar, Sonja Arndt

   Pages 29-55

4. Cartographies of Materialism: Thinking with Child(hood) Theories

   • Karen Malone, Marek Tesar, Sonja Arndt

   Pages 57-80

5. Rethinking Childhoods and Agency

   • Karen Malone, Marek Tesar, Sonja Arndt

   Pages 81-101

6. Posthuman Pedagogies in Childhoodnature

   • Karen Malone, Marek Tesar, Sonja Arndt

   Pages 103-142

7. Entangling Childhoods, Materials, Curriculum and Objects

   • Karen Malone, Marek Tesar, Sonja Arndt

   Pages 143-164

8. Children’s Worlding of/in Learning Environments

   • Karen Malone, Marek Tesar, Sonja Arndt

   Pages 165-186

9. Performing the Posthuman

   • Karen Malone, Marek Tesar, Sonja Arndt

   Pages 187-211

10. Re-searching with Children in Posthuman Worlds

    • Karen Malone, Marek Tesar, Sonja Arndt

    Pages 213-236

11. Glossary Key Posthuman Childhood Studies Concepts

    • Karen Malone, Marek Tesar, Sonja Arndt

    Pages 237-251

This book is a genealogical foregrounding and performance of conceptions of children and their childhoods over time. We acknowledge that children’s lives are embedded in worlds both inside and outside of structured schooling or institutional settings, and that this relationality informs how we think about what it means to be a child living and experiencing childhood. 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. It recognises that while such dominant approaches have long been shown to limit the complexity of what it means to be a child living in the contemporary world, the traditions of many Eurocentric theories have not addressed the diversity of children’s lives in the majority of countries or in the Global South. 

• children in contemporary society
• children and the everyday
• sociology of childhood
• theorizing children and childhood
• philosophy of childhood
• teacher education and childhood studies
• early and middle childhood
• childhoods in the Pacific, Asia and the global south
• educational philosophy and childhood studies
• children and the Anthropocene

“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

• School of Arts, Social Sciences and Humanities, Swinburne University of Technology, Melbourne, Australia

  Karen Malone

• Faculty of Education and Social Work, The University of Auckland, Auckland, New Zealand

  Marek Tesar

• Melbourne Graduate School of Education, University of Melbourne, Melbourne, New Zealand

  Sonja Arndt

Dr. Karen Malone is Professor of Education and Research Director, in the School of Arts, Social Sciences and Humanities at Swinburne University of Technology.  Professor Malone researches in urban ecologies, science and environmental education, childhood studies with a specific focus on children’s encounters of damaged urban landscapes. She has received over 2.4 million dollars in funded research projects during her career and authored 9 books and over 100 other publications. Her most recent sole-authored book Children in the Anthropocene explores her research interest in child/hoods entangled in messy urban ecologies in South America and Kazakhstan. It was published in early 2018.  She is co-author of the International Research Handbook on Childhoodnature and first named author of an edited collection Reimagining Sustainability in Precarious Times.


Dr. Marek Tesar is an Associate Professor of childhood studies and earlychildhood education, and the Associate Dean International at the University of Auckland. His current scholarship is in early childhood education in New Zealand as well as in cross-country contexts. His work focuses on educational policy, philosophy, pedagogy, methodology and curriculum, and draws on his background as a qualified teacher as well as his extensive knowledge of international education systems. Marek's research and scholarship is underpinned by notions of a fair and democratic society, in which creative thinking and disciplines shape professional practice, and where the child's voice and participation, particularly in early childhood, are taken seriously.


Dr. Sonja Arndt is a lecturer in the Melbourne Graduate School of Education at the University of Melbourne and is the Vice President of the Philosophy of Education Society of Australasia (PESA). Sonja’s teaching and research are grounded in a long history in early childhood education in New Zealand andinternationally, with a particular focus on the formation of the subject, cultural and professional identity, otherness and relationality, nature and human and more than human relationships with it, and what it means to be other, even to oneself. With her methodological elevation of philosophical thought her aim is to inspire encounters with and through critical theoretical and every day engagements with children and childhoods.

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