Book Review: Theorising posthuman childhood studies by Karen Malone, Marek Tesar and Sonja Arndt

Theorising Posthuman Childhood Studies, by Karen Malone, Marek Tesar and Sonja Arndt, is a comprehensive study of how posthuman and new materialist perspectives are being activated in childhood studies to disrupt dominant developmental, social constructivist and theoretical conceptualisations of children and childhoods. However, rather than discarding these frames altogether, the book works to create a ‘critical bridge’ between historical and contemporary configurations of children and their childhoods, examining the ways in which these configurations inform one another. The sixth title in the Springer series Children: Global Posthumanist Perspectives and Materialist Theories, Theorising Posthuman Childhood Studies examines materiality (with artefacts, toys, homes, educational settings, landscapes, animals, food, popular culture, the air, the weather, bodies, relations, identities and sexualities as given examples) in the ordinary moments of children’s daily lives, giving special consideration to Māori, Pasifika, Australasian and Global South views of children and childhoods. By highlighting Global South childhoods and making underrepresented perspectives in childhood studies visible, the book challenges universalising discourses in childhood studies and shows the need for more complex understandings of the mundane everyday relationships in children’s lives. In the tradition of James et al.’s (1998) Theorizing Childhood, Malone et al.’s Theorising Posthuman Childhood Studies engages with the sociology of childhoods, effectively reconceptualising this framework for the shifting and uneven conditions of the Anthropocene. The introductory chapter maps the lines of relation between childhood studies, philosophy and education. The authors acknowledge that contemporary configurations of childhood are grounded in the ideas of predominantly white-male European philosophers. However, they argue that all philosophy holds implications for the philosophy of children and childhoods. The book argues that although ‘children’ and ‘childhoods’ are widely contested terms, they offer a conceptual lens that can be generative when approached through diverse and non-linear perspectives. In philosophy, it has been argued that childhood is a modern invention for which there was no conceptualisation in medieval times. From this perspective, ‘childhoods’ is a modern construct that has been created to serve the values and functions of adults and societies at large. Given the historical role of children as labourers with very little protection from abuse by adults, the United Nations Convention on the Rights of the Child was created to provide protection and provision to children by way of governance (Office of the High Commissioner, 1989). As this chapter points out, this Book Review