Cover not available

In:Children's Cultures after Childhood
Edited by Justyna Deszcz-Tryhubczak and Macarena García-González
[Children’s Literature, Culture, and Cognition 16] 2023
► pp. 1–17

Get fulltext
PDF logo with download linkDownload Chapter PDF

Chapter 1
Ethics, epistemologies, and relational ontologies in researching children’s cultures

 | University of Wrocław
 | University of Glasgow
Open Access logo
Available under the Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivatives (CC BY-NC-ND) 4.0 license.

For any use beyond this license, please contact the publisher at rights@benjamins.nl.

Published online: 8 August 2023
DOI logo with link
https://doi.org/10.1075/clcc.16.01des
Abstract
This chapter argues for a new materialist and posthumanist understanding of children’s cultures as formed by naturalcultural assemblages destabilizing anthropocentric notions of childhood, adulthood, agency, age, creativity, and text. The chapter provides an overview of recent developments in childhood studies – in particular around the decentering of the child (Spyrou 2017, Diaz-Diaz & Semenec 2020) and the “after childhood” approach (Kraftl 2020) – to propose that they may enable new methodological openings in textual and empirical work with texts and media (co-)created for/by/with young audiences.
Article outline
  • The porous field of children’s cultures
  • Children’s culture as intra-actions
  • References
References (86)
References
Secondary sources
Aloi, Giovanni & McHugh, Susan (eds). 2021. Introduction: Envisioning Posthumanism. In Posthumanism in Art and Science: A Reader, 1–21. New York & Chichester: Columbia University Press.Google Scholar logo with link to Google Scholar
Ariès, Philippe. 1962. Centuries of Childhood: A Social History of Family Life. New York: Vintage Books.Google Scholar logo with link to Google Scholar
Arnott, Lorna & Duncan, Pauline. 2019. Exploring the Pedagogic Culture of Creative Play in Early Childhood Education. Journal of Early Childhood Research 17(4): 309–328. Google Scholar logo with link to Google Scholar
Bainbridge, Jason. 2010. Fully Articulated: The Rise of the Action Figure and the Changing Face of ‘Children’s’ Entertainment. Continuum 24(6): 829–842. Google Scholar logo with link to Google Scholar
Bal, Mieke. 2003. Visual essentialism and the object of visual culture. Journal of Visual Culture 2(1): 5–32. Google Scholar logo with link to Google Scholar
Barad, Karen. 2003. Posthumanist Performativity: Toward an Understanding of How Matter Comes to Matter. Signs 28 (3): 801–831. Google Scholar logo with link to Google Scholar
. 2007. Meeting the Universe Halfway: Quantum Physics and the Entanglement of Matter and Meaning. Durham, North Carolina & London: Duke University Press. Google Scholar logo with link to Google Scholar
Beach, John D. 2015. Do Children Read the Children’s Literature Adults Recommend? A Comparison of Adults’ and Children’s Annual “Best” Lists in the United States 1975–2005. New Review of Children’s Literature and Librarianship 21(1): 17–41. Google Scholar logo with link to Google Scholar
Beauvais, Clémentine. 2015. The Mighty Child: Time and Power in Children’s Literature. Amsterdam & Philadelphia: John Benjamins. Google Scholar logo with link to Google Scholar
Bernstein, Robin. 2011. Racial Innocence: Performing American Childhood from Slavery to Civil Rights. New York & London: New York University Press.Google Scholar logo with link to Google Scholar
Braidotti, Rosi. 2013. The Posthuman. New Jersey: Wiley.Google Scholar logo with link to Google Scholar
Buckingham, David. 2011. The Material Child: Growing up in Consumer Culture. Cambridge & Malden: Polity Press.Google Scholar logo with link to Google Scholar
Carter, Marcus, Moore, Kyle, Mavoa, Jane, Horst, Heather & gaspard, luke. 2020. Situating the Appeal of Fortnite within Children’s Changing Play Cultures. Games and Culture 15(4): 453–471. Google Scholar logo with link to Google Scholar
Ceder, Simon. 2018. Towards a Posthuman Theory of Educational Relationality. Abingdon & New York: Routledge. Google Scholar logo with link to Google Scholar
Chapleau, Sebastien. 2007. Childist Criticism and the Silenced Voice of the Child: A Widening Critical and Institutional Re-Consideration of Children’s Literature. In Stories for Children, Histories of Childhood. Rosie Findlay & Sébastien Salbayre (eds), 85–106. Tours: Presses universitaires François-Rabelais. Google Scholar logo with link to Google Scholar
. 2009. Work in Progress: Children’s Literature and Childist Criticism – Towards an Institutional Re-consideration. PhD dissertation. Cardiff University. [URL].
Chawar, Ewa, Deszcz-Tryhubczak, Justyna, Kowalska, Katarzyna, Maniakowska, Olga, Marecki, Mateusz, Palczyńska, Milena, Pszczołowski, Eryk & Sikora, Dorota. 2018. Children’s Voices in the Polish Canon Wars: Participatory Research in Action. International Research in Children’s Literature 11(2): 111–131. Google Scholar logo with link to Google Scholar
Coats, Karen. 2013. The Meaning of Children’s Poetry: A Cognitive Approach. International Research in Children’s Literature 6(2): 127–142. Google Scholar logo with link to Google Scholar
Conrad, Rachel. 2019. Time for Childhoods: Young Poets and Questions of Agency. Amherst & Boston: University of Massachusetts Press. Google Scholar logo with link to Google Scholar
Conrad, Rachel & Kennedy, L. Brown (eds). 2020. Introduction: Literary Cultures and Twentieth-Century Childhoods. In: Literary Cultures and Twentieth-Century Childhoods, 1–10. Cham: Palgrave Macmillan. Google Scholar logo with link to Google Scholar
Coole, Diana & Forst, Samantha (eds). 2010. New Materialisms: Ontology, Agency, and Politics. Durham & London: Duke University Press.Google Scholar logo with link to Google Scholar
Cutter-Mackenzie-Knowles, Amy, Malone, Karen & Barratt Hacking, Elizabeth. 2020. Childhoodnature: An Assemblage Adventure. In Research Handbook on Childhoodnature: Assemblages of Childhood and Nature Research, Amy Cutter-Mackenzie-Knowles, Karen Malone & Elizabeth Barratt Hacking (eds), 1–15. Cham: Springer. Google Scholar logo with link to Google Scholar
Deszcz Tryhubczak Justyna. 2019. Thinking with Deconstruction: Book-Adult-Child Events in Children’s Literature Research. Oxford Literary Review 41(2): 185–201. Google Scholar logo with link to Google Scholar
Deszcz-Tryhubczak, Justyna, Marecki, Mateusz, Chawar, Ewa, Kaczkowska, Magdalena, Kowalska, Katarzyna, Kulawik, Aleksandra, Ożlańska, Maja, Palczyńska, Milena, Parcheniak, Natalia & Pszczołowski, Eryk. 2019. Productive Remembering of Childhood: Child–Adult Memory-Work with the School Literary Canon. Humanities 8 (2): 74. Google Scholar logo with link to Google Scholar
Deszcz-Tryhubczak, Justyna & van Bergen, Charlotte. 2022. Arboreal Entanglements: Childrenforest and Deforestation in Ecopoetry by Children. In Plants in Childrens’ and Young Adult Literature, Melanie Duckworth & Lykke H. Alara Guanio-Uluru (eds), 115–129. London & New York: Routledge.Google Scholar logo with link to Google Scholar
Deszcz-Tryhubczak, Justyna & García-González, Macarena. 2022. Thinking and doing with childism in children’s literature studies. Children & Society. 00, 1–15. Google Scholar logo with link to Google Scholar
Diaz-Diaz, Claudia & Semenec, Paulina. 2020. Introduction. In Posthumanist and New Materialist Methodologies: Research after the Child, Claudia Diaz-Diaz & Paulina Semenec (ed.), vii–xii. Singapore: Springer. Google Scholar logo with link to Google Scholar
Feixa, Carles & Figueras-Maz, Mònica. 2018. Emergence of (Hybrid) Youth Cultures. Communication Theory 28 (2): 224–228. Google Scholar logo with link to Google Scholar
Fernández-Ulloa, Teresa. 2021. La narrativa transmedia. Experiencias atractivas para una audiencia participativa. In Intermedia. Procesos e innovación mediática en televisión y otras pantallas, Nereida López Vidales, Leire Gómez Rubio & Elena Medina de la Viña (eds), 123–153. Madrid: Editorial Fragua Comunicación.Google Scholar logo with link to Google Scholar
Galbraith, Mary. 2001. Hear My Cry: A Manifesto for an Emancipatory Childhood Studies Approach to Children’s Literature. The Lion and the Unicorn 25 (2): 187–205. Google Scholar logo with link to Google Scholar
García-González, Macarena. 2020. Post-representational Cultural Memory for Children in Chile: From La Composición to Bear Story. Children’s Literature in Education 51: 160–178. Google Scholar logo with link to Google Scholar
. 2022. Towards an Affective Childist Literary Criticism. Children’s Literature in Education, 53 (3): 360–375. Google Scholar logo with link to Google Scholar
García-González, Macarena & Deszcz-Tryhubczak, Justyna. 2020. New Materialist Openings to Children’s Literature Studies. International Research in Children’s Literature 13 (1): 45–60. Google Scholar logo with link to Google Scholar
García-González, Macarena, Véliz, Soledad & Matus, Claudia. 2019. Think difference differently? Knowing/becoming/doing with picturebooks. Pedagogy, Culture & Society 28 (4): 543–562. Google Scholar logo with link to Google Scholar
Gubar, Marah. 2016. The hermeneutics of recuperation: What a kinship-model approach to children’s agency could do for children’s literature and childhood studies. Jeunesse: Young People, Texts, Cultures 8 (1): 291–310. Google Scholar logo with link to Google Scholar
Hains, Rebecca C. & Jennings, Nancy A. (eds). 2021. Critiquing Children’s Consumer Culture: An Introduction to The Marketing of Children’s Toys. In The Marketing of Children’s Toys: Critical Perspectives on Children’s Consumer Culture, 1–19. Cham: Palgrave Macmillan. Google Scholar logo with link to Google Scholar
Haraway, Donna. 1988. Situated Knowledges: The Science Question in Feminism and the Privilege of Partial Perspective. Feminist Studies 14(3): 575–599. Google Scholar logo with link to Google Scholar
Hickey-Moody, Anna, Horn, Christine, Willcox, Marissa, & Florence, Eloise. 2021. Arts-Based Methods for Research with Children. Cham: Springer International Publishing. Google Scholar logo with link to Google Scholar
Hohti, Rikka, Semenec, Paulina & Diaz-Diaz, Claudia. 2020. Interview with Riikka Hohti. In: Posthumanist and New Materialist Methodologies. Children: Global Posthumanist Perspectives and Materialist Theories, Claudia Diaz-Diaz & Paulina Semenec (eds), 157–224. Singapore: Springer. Google Scholar logo with link to Google Scholar
Höppner, Grit & Urban, Monika. 2018. Where and How Do Aging Processes: Take Place in Everyday Life? Answers From a New Materialist Perspective. Frontiers in Sociology 3:(7). Google Scholar logo with link to Google Scholar
Hunt, Peter. 1984a. Childist Criticism: The Subculture of the Child, the Book and the Critic. Signal – Approaches to Children’s Books 43: 42–59.Google Scholar logo with link to Google Scholar
. 1984b. Questions of Method and Methods of Questioning: Childist Criticism in Action. Signal –Approaches to Children’s Books 45: 180–200.Google Scholar logo with link to Google Scholar
. 1991. Criticism, Theory, and Children’s Literature. Oxford & Cambridge: Blackwell.Google Scholar logo with link to Google Scholar
Jacoby, Jennifer & Edlefsen, Karen. 2020. “I Love Paw Patrol!”: Book Selection and the Allure of Popular Media Characters Among Preschoolers. Journal of Research in Childhood Education 34: 1–15. Google Scholar logo with link to Google Scholar
James, Allison, Jenks, Chris & Prout, Alan. 1998. Theorizing Childhood. Oxford: Polity Press.Google Scholar logo with link to Google Scholar
Jenkins, Henry (ed). 1998. The Children’s Culture Reader. New York: New York University Press.Google Scholar logo with link to Google Scholar
Johanson, Katya. 2010. Culture for or by the Child? ‘Children’s culture’ and Cultural Policy. Poetics 38 (4): 386–401. Google Scholar logo with link to Google Scholar
Joosen, Vanessa. 2019. Children’s Literature in Translation: Towards a Participatory Approach. Humanities 8 (1): 48. Google Scholar logo with link to Google Scholar
. 2022. Connecting Childhood Studies, Age Studies, and Children’s Literature Studies: John Wall’s Concept of Childism and Anne Fine’s The Granny Project. Barnboken – tidskrift för barnlitteraturforskning/Barnboken: Journal of Children’s Literature Research 45. Google Scholar logo with link to Google Scholar
Kraftl, Peter. 2020. After Childhood: Re-thinking Environment, Materiality and Media in Children’s Lives. Oxon: Routledge. Google Scholar logo with link to Google Scholar
Kraftl, Peter, Semenec, Paulina & Diaz-Diaz, Claudia. 2020. Interview with Peter Kraftl. In Posthumanist and New Materialist Methodologies. Children: Global Posthumanist Perspectives and Materialist Theories, Claudia Diaz-Diaz & Paulina Semenec (eds), 167–179. Singapore: Springer. Google Scholar logo with link to Google Scholar
Lesnik-Oberstein, Karín (ed). 1998. Children in Culture: Approaches in Culture. London: Palgrave Macmillan. Google Scholar logo with link to Google Scholar
Malone, Karen, Tesar, Marek & Arndt, Sonja. 2020. Theorising Posthumanist Childhood Studies. Singapore: Springer. Google Scholar logo with link to Google Scholar
Martin, Adrian D. & Kamberelis, George. 2013. Mapping Not Tracing: Qualitative Educational Research with Political Teeth. International Journal of Qualitative Studies in Education: 26 (6): 668–679. Google Scholar logo with link to Google Scholar
Mayall, Berry. 2002. Towards a Sociology of Childhood. Buckingham: Open University Press.Google Scholar logo with link to Google Scholar
Mitchell, Claudia & Reid-Walsh, Jacqueline. 2002. Researching Children’s Popular Culture: The Cultural Spaces of Childhood. London & New York: Routledge.Google Scholar logo with link to Google Scholar
Mohr, Kathleen A. J. 2006. Children’s Choices for Recreational Reading: A Three-part Investigation of Selection Preferences, Rationales, and Processes. Journal of Literacy Research 38 (1): 81–104. Google Scholar logo with link to Google Scholar
Mouritsen, Flemming. 1998. Child Culture – Play Culture. Odense: Department of Contemporary Cultural Studies, Odense University.Google Scholar logo with link to Google Scholar
Murris, Karin. 2016. The Posthuman Child: Educational Transformation through Philosophy with Picturebooks. London: Routledge. Google Scholar logo with link to Google Scholar
Nansen, Bjørn. 2020. Young Children and Mobile Media: Producing Digital Dexterity. Cham: Palgrave Macmillan. Springer. Google Scholar logo with link to Google Scholar
Nikolajeva, Maria. 2009. Theory, post-theory, and aetonormative theory. Neohelicon 36 (1): 13–24. Google Scholar logo with link to Google Scholar
. 2010. Power, Voice and Subjectivity in Literature for Young Readers. New York and London: Routledge.Google Scholar logo with link to Google Scholar
Nodelman, Perry. 2008. The Hidden Adult: Defining Children’s Literature. Baltimore: John Hopkins University Press. Google Scholar logo with link to Google Scholar
Osgood, Jayne & Andersen, Camilla Eline. 2019. A feminist new materialist experiment: Exploring what else gets produced through encounters with children’s news media. Contemporary Issues in Early Childhood, 20(4): 363–380. Google Scholar logo with link to Google Scholar
Osgood, Jayne & Robinson, Kerry H. (eds). 2019. Feminists Researching Gendered Childhoods: Generative Entanglements. London: Bloomsbury. Google Scholar logo with link to Google Scholar
Plate, Liedeke. 2017. Doing Things with Literature in a Digital Age: Italo Calvino’s If on a Winter’s Night a Traveler and the Material Turn in Literary Studies. In Book Presence in a Digital Age, Kiene Brillenburg Wurth, Kári Driscoll & Jessica Pressman (eds), 109–126. New York: Bloomsbury Academic.Google Scholar logo with link to Google Scholar
Poyntz, Stuart R. & Hoechsmann, Michael. 2011. Children’s Media Culture in a Digital Age. Sociology Compass 5 (7): 488–498. Google Scholar logo with link to Google Scholar
Rose, Jacqueline. 1984. The Case of Peter Pan: Or the Impossibility of Children’s Fiction. London: Palgrave Macmillan. Google Scholar logo with link to Google Scholar
Roy, Malini. 2021. The “Lynx-Eyed Sagacity” of the “Schoolboy”: William Godwin and the Juvenile Library (1805–1825). In Intergenerational Solidarity in Children’s Literature and Film, Justyna Deszcz-Tryhubczak & Zoe Jacques (eds), 191–204. Jackson: University Press of Mississippi.Google Scholar logo with link to Google Scholar
Schulte, Christopher M., Semenec, Paulina & Diaz-Diaz, Claudia. 2020. Interview with Christopher Schulte. In Posthumanist New Materialist Methodologies: Research after the Child, Claudia Diaz-Diaz & Paulina Semenec (eds), 123–133. Singapore: Springer Nature. Google Scholar logo with link to Google Scholar
Sekeres, Diane Carver. 2009. The Market Child and Branded Fiction: A Synergism of Children’s Literature, Consumer Culture, and New Literacies. Reading Research Quarterly 44(4): 399–414. Google Scholar logo with link to Google Scholar
Shayan, Tahmina. 2020. The Culture of Childhood in (and) Spaces of Resistance. Contemporary Issues in Early Childhood 23 (2): 122–138. Google Scholar logo with link to Google Scholar
Skiveren, Tobias. 2020. Almanac: Literature. Matter: Journal of New Materialist Research. 1: 158–162. Google Scholar logo with link to Google Scholar
Smith, Victoria Ford. 2017. Between Generations: Collaborative Authorship in the Golden Age of Children Literature. Jackson: University Press of Mississippi.Google Scholar logo with link to Google Scholar
Sparrman, Anna, Samuelsson, Tobias, Lindgren, Anne-Li & Cardell, David. 2016. The Ontological Practices of Child Culture. Childhood 23(2): 255–271. Google Scholar logo with link to Google Scholar
Spyrou, Spyros. 2017. Time to decenter childhood? Childhood 24(4): 433–437. Google Scholar logo with link to Google Scholar
. 2018. Disclosing Childhoods: Research and Knowledge Production for a Critical Childhood Studies. Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan. Google Scholar logo with link to Google Scholar
Stockton, Kathryn Bond. 2009. The Queer Child: Or Growing Sideways in the Twentieth Century. Durham, North Carolina & London: Duke University Press.Google Scholar logo with link to Google Scholar
Tandoi, Eve. 2019. “It’s Not Just Writing”: Negotiating Childness in Children’s Literature through Performance. Children’s Literature in Education 50 (1): 76–89. Google Scholar logo with link to Google Scholar
Taylor, Carol. A. & Hughes, Christina (eds). 2016. Posthuman Research Practices in Education. London: Palgrave Macmillan. Google Scholar logo with link to Google Scholar
Thompson, Christine Marme. 2006. The Ket Aesthetic. In When We Were Young: New Perspective on the Art of the Child, Jonathan Fineberg (ed), 31–43. Berkeley: University of California Press.Google Scholar logo with link to Google Scholar
van Lierop-Debrauwer, Helma & Steels, Sabine. 2021. The Mingling of Teenage and Adult Breaths: The Dutch Slash series as Intergenerational Communication. In Intergenerational Solidarity in Children’s Literature and Film, Justyna Deszcz-Tryhubczak & Zoe Jacques (eds), 218–230. Jackson: University Press of Mississippi. Google Scholar logo with link to Google Scholar
Vermeulen, Pieter. 2014. Posthuman Affect. European Journal of English Studies 18(2): 121–134. Google Scholar logo with link to Google Scholar
Wesseling, Elisabeth (Lies). 2019. Researching Child Authors: Which Questions (not to) Ask. Humanities 8(2): 87. Google Scholar logo with link to Google Scholar
Cited by (2)

Cited by two other publications

Sørenssen, Ingvild Kvale
2025. “I feel a little bit of both”: Exploring the relational experiences of Norwegian tween girls through age as enactment and age-shifting. Childhood 32:4 ► pp. 615 ff. DOI logo
Russumanno, Paolo
2024. Childhood Entanglements, Artifacts, and Inheritances. Journal of Childhood Studies ► pp. 85 ff. DOI logo

This list is based on CrossRef data as of 7 december 2025. Please note that it may not be complete. Sources presented here have been supplied by the respective publishers. Any errors therein should be reported to them.

Mobile Menu Logo with link to supplementary files background Layer 1 prag Twitter_Logo_Blue