Disrupting Antiblackness and Humanism in Early Childhood Studies

• In Event: Educational Research at the Intersection of Contemporary Black Studies and Posthumanism: Risks, Possibilities, and Purpose

Abstract

1. Purposes: This paper engages with the generative possibilities that emerge in bringing theories from Black studies into conversation with posthumanist theories in research that aims at disrupting both anti-Blackness and human-centrism in place-attuned early childhood research. The paper illustrates how selected theoretical concepts are helpful in thinking with everyday pedagogical encounters with Black children in affirmative ways that move away from theories of change centered on revealing racial injustice.
2. Theoretical frameworks: In illustrating the affirmative potentials of thinking with theoretical concepts from posthumanism in early childhood studies, I discuss what is opened up methodologically by working with material-discursive assemblages (Barad, 2007), and concepts as method (Lester, 2021; Lenz Taguchi & St. Pierre, 2017) alongside Black feminist conceptualizations of futurity and refusal (Campt, 2017). I also discuss the risks and tensions of this interdisciplinary work, holding close to Black feminist critiques of posthumanist theories that universalize the human while ignoring the effects of anti-Blackness on what it means to be human.
3. Modes of inquiry: The paper draws from a research project with young Kindergarten children that aimed to develop anti-colonial environmental pedagogies in relation to everyday encounters with a polluted creek. I focus on one Black child’s relational encounters with the creek bringing concepts of Black feminist concepts of refusal and futurity into conversation with a methodological orientation towards human/more-than-human assemblages in these encounters.
4. Data sources: I work with pedagogical documentation, images, memories and field notes from the research study described above, with inspiration from Black feminist Tina Campt’s (2017) work on speculative, creative, and multi-sensorial modes of listening to images for Black futurity and refusal. In the paper I also reflect on my experiences designing the study, enacting the study and engaging analytically with the pedagogical moments. I include a discussion of what was generated by my commitments to researching Black childhoods in relational and affirmative ways.
5. Substantiated conclusions: Black feminist theories as methodological concepts hold possibilities for researching Black childhoods in affirmative ways that refuse anti-Blackness. Brought into conversation with posthumanist theories brings further potentiality in simultaneously disrupting anti-Blackness and human-centrism. I discuss how both of these disruptions are necessary in environmental education research and practice. I also discuss the ways in which posthumanist theories have helped me to enrich a methodological focus on the mattering of quotidian, ordinary, small pedagogical place encounters.
6. Scholarly significance: The significance of this work is discussed in relation to the urgent need for early childhood research that does not begin with descriptive repetitions and representations of the oppressive conditions of Black life in educational contexts. Instead, I argue that more early childhood research is needed that engages with radically imagining and storying what liberatory early childhood places and spaces might feel like, particularly in relation to the creation of otherwise worlds (Crawley, 2020) that center relationality and reciprocity with the more-than-human.

Author

• Fikile Nxumalo, University of Toronto
  Presenting Author