Rendering-Each-Other-Capable: Children's Rights, the Capability Approach, and Posthuman Child

• In Event: Marriott Roundtable Session 39
  In Roundtable Session: Moving Beyond Traditional Research Methodologies in Early Childhood

Abstract

With the South African National Curriculum Framework for Children from Birth to Four (NCF)(2015) as context, I use Karen Barad’s (2007, 2014) diffractive methodology of reading the children’s rights framework and the capability approach affirmatively through one another and although both are human-centred, through creative experimentation an ‘interference pattern’ (Barad, 2007) is produced which generates the notions ‘more-than-human development’ and ‘the posthuman child’ as inhuman be(com)ing. This reconfiguration of (child)subjectivity moves theory and practice from a focus on assessing the capabilities of individual children in socio-cultural contexts to the tracing of material and discursive entanglements (Barad, 2017) that render children capable (Haraway, 2016) as exemplified through examples from a local preschool in one of the townships.

Author

• Karin Saskia Murris, University of Cape Town