Our member, Prof. Erica Burman (University of Manchester, UK), talks about her new book, Child as Method: Othering, Interiority and Materialism (Routledge, 2024).
Child as Method: Othering, Interiority and Materialism synthesises conceptual and methodological work I have been developing over the past decade connecting discussions of development (in Deconstructing Developmental Psychology, Routledge, 3rd ed., 2017; Developments: Child, Image, Nation, Routledge 2nd ed., 2021). It elaborates a new approach generated from postcolonial, feminist intersectionality, and migration studies.
Complementing other elaborations published elsewhere, Child as method is here mobilised as a lens to specifically interrogate how ‘child/childhood’ work within models of othering (including racism and racialisation), as a key signifier of subjectivity or interiority within Anglo-US and European contexts, historically and currently. This can be traced through shifting cultural representations of child-animal relations, as also indicative of discretionary allocations and evaluations of human-animal relations.
Part II of the book explores slippages in developmentalist discourses between academic, therapeutic, popular, and policy arenas informing early intervention approaches, models of developmentalism, and policy and technology as creators of discourses of child development.
The final part offers a distinctive approach to re-evaluating current ‘new materialist’ or posthumanist approaches, providing innovative and challenging analyses of core educational research debates.
Overall, childhood, as a material practice, is interrogated through literary and popular, as well as academic and policy, representations to challenge Eurocentric origins of globalised models of development, prompt evaluation of structures of emotion and affectivity that surround children and childhood, and offer indicators of resistance and alternatives.
I had a collection of as-yet-unpublished papers exploring racism and child-animal relations historically and currently – that’s the focus on Othering, which drives the whole book.
This frames what I experienced as an urgency to challenge rampant and continuing developmentalism within social policy, with ‘child’ playing a key role in eliding different kinds of development – individual, national, global, and economic.
Even those conceptual or theoretical resources that are sometimes seen as antidevelopmentalist often resort to developmentalist assumptions, so I wanted to offer a critical evaluation as well as indicate what antidevelopmentalism might look like – hence Interiority.
Further, and perhaps provocatively, I wanted to question the orthodoxy I perceived in childhood and educational studies around ‘new materialist’ or posthuman approaches. So Part III, on Materialism, draws on explicitly textual resources to highlight cultural and representational framings models of child and childhood. Detailed analysis of two texts that deal with human-nonhuman relations, Georges Perec’s (1967) Things: a story of the sixties and José Saramago’s (1978) The Lives of Things, puts Child as method to work to highlight the implicit - but thereby perhaps even more significant - role of the figure of the child in securing racialised as well as classed generational orders.
Finally, by asking what’s ‘new’ about ‘new materialism’ and how it relates to other (‘older’?) varieties, I offer an analysis that (I hope) can revitalise core current frameworks and also - playfully - motivate for further resources to help shift unhelpful binaries and norms within our debates about children and childhood.
Child as method focuses on both the political and psychic economies mobilised by, and in the name of, children and childhood. Posing its project in this way highlights its three related concerns. First, the role of the child within political economy. Second, how child figures within psychic economies, understanding the psychic as both social and individual, with the notion of economy topicalising its dynamics as well how the latter play out in, and play into, sociopolitical agendas. Third, how child and childhood works as a specific arena by which to interrogate and evaluate practices engaging both psychic and political economy, and the consequences of this. This theme of specificity runs throughout the book, exemplifying calls for geomaterialist analysis, with child functioning here as the specific exemplar from which to tease out an understanding of these dynamics. Hence, the aim is to intervene in arenas in which children figure in two directions: first, to demonstrate how and with what effects wider geopolitical issues are reflected and enacted in childhood and related (psychology, education, psychotherapy) studies and social theory, while correspondingly, second, to demonstrate how and with what effects analyses of and about childhood can contribute to and enrich wider geopolitical concerns.
As I discuss extensively elsewhere, Child as method’s conceptual-political inspirations come from cultural, postcolonial and migration studies, especially Asia as method (Chen, 2010), and Border as method (Mezzadra & Neilson, 2013). Readers who want to know more about those conceptual-political underpinnings are invited to read these other accounts (Burman, 2019a, 2019b, 2023a). These are read from and with a feminist commitment to intersectionality and queer theory. The notion of ‘method’ informing these is as an analytical framework to guide inquiry, rather than a set of techniques (Burman, 2017 2019a, 2022). Specific methodological approaches and methods therefore arise via that engagement, and so I offer comments about these in the context of each inquiry undertaken.
A significant point, already flagged up earlier, is worth further noting here. The analyses presented here sometimes involve overt, and so naturalised, constructions of child and childhood that demand critical interrogation precisely because of their assumed obvious or banal status. Yet other constructions discussed in this book are implicit or else take close reading to excavate, interpret and evaluate what work they do. Contestable as such interpretations undoubtedly are, they illustrate also what I believe a Child as method analysis is for: to resist the dynamics of abstraction and apparent depoliticisation usually characterising childhood tropes, instead to pressurise the interplay and mutually constitutive elaboration of models of child and childhood with wider axes of power. Hence, a particular focus of this book is on the multiple articulations of constructions of child and childhood with modes of racialisation and colonialism discernible within the specific texts taken for analysis.
Hence, Child as method can be taken, and is being taken, in all kinds of directions. I myself have so far drawn on the approach to explore the colonial imbrications of core, widely accepted psychological models, including cultural-historical approaches (which are often seen as the most ‘radical’ or democratic of these) (Burman, 2019a); to generate readings of the corpus of writings by Frantz Fanon, the anticolonial theorist and psychiatrist, in terms of the various psychoaffective politics of childhood his revolutionary texts invite (Burman, 2019b); combined it with mobile urban autoethnographic approaches for an empirical study of photographical records of the debris of childhood – or what I have called ‘Found childhood’ (Burman, 2022, 2023c); and, together with Zsuzsa Millei and colleagues working on memories of growing up in former communist countries (Millei et al., 2022; Silova et al., 2018), as an analytic tool to explore the political temporalities and narrative tensions within the biographical accounts (Burman & Millei, 2022; Millei et al, 2021). I have also mobilised the approach to inform critical analysis of conceptualisations of children’s rights (Burman, 2022; Burman, 2023d), as inflecting cultural practices of memorialisation of political economic traumas (Burman, 2023e), and as a means of interrogating transformations of colonial and neoliberal dynamics in parenting practices (Burman, 2023f).
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To clarify, in its focus on interrogating relations between various actors and entities articulated through discourses of child and childhood, Child as method is both nonchild-centred and non-developmentalist in approach. This prefix ‘non’ topicalises some kind of suspension or interruption qualifying the expected formulations mandating being child-centred and developmental, while characterising the approach as non-developmentalist invites a distinction between these that could allow for being developmental without being developmentalist, a politically fruitful possibility that I return to in the book.
Overall, the topicalisation of child is a social category. As is addressed in the substantive sections of this book, notions of child and childhood are often considered in temporal, chronological – including biographical, including autobiographical, and generational – terms. Child as method works to attend to, rather than assume, the meanings and efficacies of these (see also Millei et al., 2021). In this sense, how child and childhood figure in national and transnational policies, in literary and popular culture, in political theory as well as in developmental psychology and psychoanalysis become resources arenas for inquiry, especially insofar as they reflect broader cultural developmentalist themes and, even more so, if they allow for antidevelopmentalist perspectives. For Chen’s (2010) geomaterialist cultural analysis, this means shifting focus from East-West binaries to local, regional dynamics, which may both reflect historical colonial relations but also in particular geographical, historically specific forms of these, which are also forged anew or may even mitigate and change them. Notably, Chen’s text has inspired the field of Inter-Asian Studies as a frame for postcolonial studies that focuses on regional relations. Thus, Child as method, informed by Asia as method, and the conjoint feminist, migration and queer studies focus on borders and bordering practices after Anzaldúa (1987) (e.g. Hall, 2015; Icaza Garza, 2017) orients to and attends how the local reflects but reworks the global.