VIRTUAL EVENT: Reimagining childhood studies: childhood’s refusals?

Refusal, in the work of political anthropologist and indigenous studies scholar Audra Simpson, is both a research sensibility and decolonial act that presses the limits of a liberal politics of recognition. 

With the help of three distinguished scholars, this webinar will consider: 

1. What does refusal mean in the context of critical childhood studies, given the thorny problem of power-laden generational relations and oppressive infrastructures of listening? 
2. In taking up refusal’s challenge to shift our unit of analysis away from marginalised peoples and pain narratives, what are the institutions, modes of power, and mutating forms of capitalist realism that demand exploration, interrogation, and reimagining in childhood studies?

This event is organised by Spyros Spyrou from European University Cyprus, Rachel Rosen from the UCL Institute of Education and Sarada Balagopalan from Rutgers University.

Speakers

• Valeria Llobet (National University of San Martín): Everyday violence and child care in the Global South. Refusal as useful theoretical and methodological tool
• Fikile Nxumalo (The University of Toronto): Cartographies of Black refusal in early childhood studies
• Nadera Shalhoub-Kevorkian (The Hebrew University of Jerusalem): Unchilding Interrupted: Reflections from Palestine

Reimagining childhood studies seminar series

This seminar series takes the challenge posed by the recent publication of ‘Reimagining Childhood Studies’ (Spyrou, Rosen and Cook 2019) to collectively rethink, innovate, and reimagine our field of studies in an effort to offer a substantive, renewed, and inspiring agenda for the years to come. 

The series envisions becoming a platform for childhood studies by reinvigorating debate within the field and opening it up to new ways of thinking, finely tuned to the ethics and politics of this scholarly field.  

Links

• Childhood, Gender and Society
• Social Science Research Unit
• Social Research Institute

Image: Jessica West via Pexels