Neoliberalism, Embodied Literacies, and Posthuman Childhood

• In Event: Becoming Response-able: Mapping Embodied Assemblages With/in Childhood Literacies

Abstract

Narratives of capitalism have significantly altered landscapes (Tsing, 2015) and possibilities by producing bodies (humans and otherwise) in a multitude of different ways. A great deal of these stories materialize children as future subjects that are not-enough-yet (Moss, 2014; sims, 2017). Therefore, it is important to turn our attention to the ways capitalism is entangled with the educational policies and practices we embody by asking the question: what kinds of stories does capitalism allow and disallow in our classrooms, our communities, our worlding?

In an attempt to engage in this question specifically, this paper explores the ways neoliberal stories of childhood produce children as economic bodies and how those productions become embodied literacies (Author, 2014, Enriquez, Johnson, Kontovourki, & Mallozzi, 2015). Starting with a series of tweets sent out by a U.S. state-wide prekindergarten governing organization, I think with theories (Jackson & Mazzei 2011) of feminist new materialism (Barad, 2010; Braidotti, 2014) and affect (Ahmed, 2004) to trace the material-discursive constructions of childhood in a variety of educational documents (i.e. tweets, policies, curriculum) and the ways many of those constructions feed into a hyper-capitalist or neoliberal (Harvey, 2007) understanding of young children and thus crafting young bodies as commodities and economic subjects. When schools continue the narratives of capitalism through their own embodied literacy practices (such as linking Prekindergarten with quality job performance and economic advancement), they craft a particular way of becoming literate as well as a particular way of understanding childhood. By tracing the phenomenon of neoliberalism and its multiple ghosts (past and future) and its multiple implications and multiple entry points in these prekindergarten contexts, educators may have a better understanding of the ways these neoliberal stories craft young bodies as commodities and economic subjects, as well as how these stories become embodied over time. I conclude by inviting educators to find other ways of narrating early childhood, opening pathways for a more ethical educational practice.

Author

• Jaye Johnson Thiel, University of Georgia - Athens