VIRTUAL EVENT: Reimagining childhood studies: liberalism's erasures

For quite some time now, critical scholarship around race, indigeneity, disability, feminism, neo-Marxism, de-colonialism and postcolonialism have productively interrogated liberal certitudes.

These theorisations coalesce in their attempts to historicise liberalism’s moral assertions, politicise its ethics of neutrality and recognise, as well as rework, its ongoing devaluation of particular lives.

The aim of this conversation is to explore the potential and utility of these critiques of liberalism to reimagine certain key assumptions within childhood studies. Some of the questions that our panellists have been asked to address include:

• How does these frameworks powerful historicising of liberalism’s cultural, social, psychic and material practices in settler and non-settler colonies compel us to critically open-up childhood studies’ understandings of children’s subjectivities, including the dehistoricised valorisation of ‘agency’?  
• Given how these theorisations highlight the exploitation of marginal non-white childhoods as neither contingent nor haphazard, how might a more politicised framing of liberal settler and post-independence states, politics of accumulation, racialised capitalism and ‘slow violence’ fundamentally complicate existing understandings children and futurity?
• How might we work to epistemically include marginal children’s cultivation of everyday forms of knowledge – including their ‘refusal’ – as that which often exceed and fail to neatly fit within their representation within 'narratives of pain'?

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

• Paula Austin (Boston University): Fistfights, swimming, and street protests: what (Black youth) politics looks like when politics are foreclosed
• Veronica Pacini-Ketchabaw (Western University): Speculative gestures in childhood studies
• Karen Wells (Birkbeck, University of London): Liberalism and the erasure of non-productive futures

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: Life of Pix via Pexels