Abstract
This chapter elaborates a rationale for posthuman approaches to early childhood education and development, albeit with some reservations. It traces how discussions of the posthuman build on critical theory and deconstructionist analyses of the limits of liberal bourgeois humanism. Such analyses have had considerable impact in psychology, since the liberal humanist subject clearly informs – in overt and covert ways – much modern developmental and educational theory and practice. As we shall see, a complicating factor is that – like its predecessor ‘poststructuralism’, for example – perspectives labelled as ‘posthuman’ vary and are not necessarily entirely convergent, since they are drawn from different disciplines and fields of practice. There are also considerable continuities and overlaps with previous critical frameworks, as well as newly emerging foci. Nevertheless, feminist, postcolonial and queer engagements with posthuman debates, in particular, provoke relevant re-evaluation of existing models and, beyond this, pose different research questions for early childhood education and development researchers. Taking in turn the key terms, ‘child’, ‘families’ and ‘communities’, that comprise the theme of this section of the book, the chapter indicates how frameworks associated with the posthuman reformulate each of these terms and their relationships with each other and also generate new conceptual and methodological agendas.
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Notes
- 1.
Hence whereas Latour (1993) suggested that ‘we have never been modern’ to topicalise and complicate the limits and reach of modernity, many feminist and postcolonial critics claimed (e.g. Jackson 1992) ‘We have never been human’, in the sense of oppressed groups not yet being accorded full subject status.
- 2.
In previous work (Burman 2013), rather than merely lament the limits of prevailing approaches, I explored what drives the desire for development, that is, to explore the emotional as well as economic investments and subjective attachments that fuel its repetition even amid so many obvious problems. Such a (psychoanalytic) focus usefully disrupts the progressivist linearity of the temporal perspective by which development is typically viewed by looking backwards rather than forwards. But despite its possible use as an intervention, this move too partakes of modernist assumptions even as it disrupts them. This chapter therefore attempts to move the arguments beyond such limitations.
- 3.
Not the question of potential, rather than an intrinsic claim. As Haraway herself often notes, many commentators in citing her ‘cyborg manifesto’ overlook its subtitle, which qualifies it as ‘ironic’. Indeed, Haraway’s address at that time was probably primarily to technophobic feminists. Thus, in elaborating a ‘socialist-feminist’ vision that engages with current material, technological developments, she was countering the then key current of cultural feminism. (Hence the refrain, I’d rather be a cyborg than a goddess.)
- 4.
Examples abound, but a key one would be the way debates over Muslim women wearing the hijab or even nikab come to stand in for wider discussions about national identity. So much of the debate fails to consider why such arguments are being played out over what women wear, so precisely both trivialising women’s own struggles and reiterating the elision between women and cultural representation.
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Burman, E. (2018). Towards a Posthuman Developmental Psychology of Child, Families and Communities. In: Fleer, M., van Oers, B. (eds) International Handbook of Early Childhood Education. Springer International Handbooks of Education. Springer, Dordrecht. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-94-024-0927-7_83
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