A Future “After Childhood”: Engaging the Anthropocene in Early Childhood Education

Abstract

Peter Kraftl’s work After Childhood: Re-thinking Environment, Materiality, and Media in Children’s Lives (Routledge, 2020) demands a strenuous exercise in reading, thinking, and imagining new ways of seeing and becoming within the field of childhood studies. Broadly speaking, this is a methodological experiment that mostly uses the theoretical positioning of new materialist and posthumanist thinking to unlock the potential for further interdisciplinary research. In this pursuit, Kraftl relentlessly breaks open scholastic silos, humanist languages, and widely agreedupon ways of knowing to present a carefully curated hodgepodge of disciplinary endeavours that reimagine the child and the world. At its core, this is the motivation for thinking with after childhood.