Thinking and doing with childism in children's literature studies
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Date
2023
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Abstract
In this article we share our reflections on how childism has enabled us to navigate theoretical assumptions shaping our field and develop new positions and research practices fostering child-adult interdependencies. Justyna Deszcz-Tryhubczak has relied on childism as a framework for the introduction of participatory research with young readers as a way for advancing child-adult collaboration. Macarena Garcia-Gonzalez has deployed childism to think about adultism and its analogies to sexism. Although we offer a critique of childism as an essentializing concept, we also show how for both of us it has served as a gateway towards other approaches, and especially post-anthropocentric understandings both of texts, readers and the world and of our critical engagements. Finally, we argue that childism may remain a productive starting point for further openings in children's literature and culture studies and childhood studies if it becomes a plural and messy notion that questions the discourse of hope for a better future as defining children's lives.
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childist criticism, children's literature and culture, new materialist feminism, participatory research, posthumanism