Taming Childhoods in Public Spaces

• In Event: Reconceptualizing the Making and Taking of Early Childhood Public Spaces

Abstract

This paper examines the spaces of childhoods in early years settings. In the line of a traditional critique of childhood (e.g. James, Jenks & Prout, 1998) this poses questions such as ‘what is children’s participation in public events’ and how do children participate in public spaces? Furthermore, it connects with the post-human turn (e.g, Taylor, 2013) and utilizes philosophy as a method. The paper questions how mundane childhoods are tamed to fit the governance of the early childhood space, and how subjects/objects are governed under the umbrella of democratic practices and regulations, in a multicultural early childhood center in a large urban, cosmopolitan space.

The paper builds upon Malone’s (2007) work about how children produce their subjectivities through their use of space in their environments, where they become transformative agents. In a Deleuzian sense, childhood/matter becomes the embodiment of sensations, affects and aesthetics: it is something that Bennett (2010) is intrigued with in calling for a political ecology. Bennett argues that the “... cultural forms are themselves powerful, material assemblages with resistant force” (p. 1) and for “the active role of nonhuman material in public space” (p. 2). Duhn (2014) claims that agency “is no longer the expression of sovereignty and of an autonomous, knowing self but a seeking of encounters with vibrant matter that force continual invention to maintain the relation between movement and rest”. Thus, through this lens the concern is not only how children act, but how they are interlinked with the environment in reciprocal ways, where forces push and pull, and create complex relationships between organic and inorganic, and other than human subjects.

The theoretical lens of a rejection of the human subject and the call for the connectedness in the world are complemented with data collected by children through images, videos and artwork. The study is positioned in children’s daily public experiences and relationships, and data emerge through concerns such as ‘How do these young children encounter their space and governance’, and ‘what does it mean to them and how do they perform it’? And ‘what forces are at play in urban childhood settings?’

Matter has agency that acts in non-predictable ways, as material bodies are assemblages, aggregates of powers, forces and ‘thing-hoods’, interacting with other forces and ‘thing-hoods’, and impacting upon each other, shaping and molding, with agency that plays out in non-predictable ways. The way these ‘actants’ operate is implicitly explored by Grosz (2008) in art: “Art enables matter to become expressive, to not just satisfy but also to intensify – to resonate and become more than itself” (p. 4); or, in other words we need a ‘territory’ for the ‘objects’, ‘things’ and ‘matter’. The paper argues for the re-imagining of young children’s performances of their own capacity to utilise the urban landscape to connect with the subjectivities of objects, and to produce democratic public settings.

Author

• Marek Tesar, The University of Auckland