Children’s Radical Kincrafting: Pedagogies of Care Across Home and School

• In Event: Children’s Pedagogies of Care: Listening, Planting, Sensing, Dignifying, Playing, and Kincrafting

Abstract

Mariame Kaba (2021), an activist educator who focuses on ending youth incarceration, acknowledges that despite how care has been abused, she believes that to thrive, we must find ways to radically care for one another. I agree; and this paper considers how children care through crafting kinship webs. When addressing children’s ways, radical kincrafting shows how young people actively make caring, protective, and reverent relationships that inform transformative justice and healing for their kin and themselves. Kincrafting is not unique to children. Adults build family all of the time; yet, too often, the child is the “thing” or object that makes kinship but is rarely recognized as a contributing subject (Macharia, 2019). Often children’s ways of making kin remain invisible, undervalued, or are deliberately broken by the state.

My work argues children’s kincrafting as a pedagogical relational process that ebbs and flows, through teaching and learning (or the offering and receiving) of care, protection, and sustenance. Almost three decades ago, bell hooks (1994) explored “engaged pedagogy” as a way to heal and free one’s self and lineage. Engaged pedagogy integrates the mind, body, and spirit in knowledge production, within and outside the space of the classroom. bell hooks inspires my approach, as I focus on dignifying children’s subjugated knowledges, which is a way to care and inform social and racial justice. To explore kincrafting as pedagogical, I draw upon fieldwork and interview data from nine years of feminist ethnography with Black and brown youth and educators in a small “family-like” high school in Camden, NJ. I also look “at home” and reflect upon what I’ve learned autoethnographically with my daughter and our transracial “pod” that we kincrafted over two years (our children’s Pre-K years) of the COVID-19 pandemic. I will open pedagogical space through the symposium while sharing a fieldwork vignette (from the school) and an audio/visual example (from home). I will engage the audience in drawing out connections to their own experiences with children’s kincrafting, as well as their analyses regarding my shared examples.

Global childhood studies scholars have considered ethnographically how children shape intergenerational kinship relations through their carework (Balagopalan, 2014; Estrada, 2020; Garcia-Sanchez, 2018; Hunleth, 2017; Luttrell, 2020). This scholarship on children’s carework provides grounding for considering kincrafting, and children’s participation in making family includes the ways they influence and shape kin through the care they bestow and receive, their sense of responsibility, joy, and fear, as well as through their need for safety and belonging.

My scholarship signifies how children and youth intentionally create family, not in isolation from the state, misogynist, racist, ableist, and heteronormative power structures & intimate ties but rather, in relation. Centering young people’s strategies for creating and sustaining family across home and school explains how kinship shifts over time, context, and in relation to power. I argue against kinship as something that is structurally fixed or biologically/legally determined. Further, recognizing children’s kincrafting in its many diverse, subtle, and radical forms can lend support for more caring and just family formations.

Author

• Lauren J. Silver, Rutgers University - Camden