The Child in Question

What is a child? The concept of childhood is so familiar that we tend to assume its universality. However, the meaning of childhood is always being negotiated, not only by the imaginations of adults, but also by nations, markets, history and children themselves. Yet, as much as the question is considered by the social world, the contributions in this book remind readers that children are also active, embodied, and inquiring agents engaged in figuring a relationship with that the world they inherit. This book's unifying theme, "The child in question," emerges from an assertation that childhood has boundaries far more elastic than can be held by the familiar notion of the innocent child developing toward a heteronormative future. The title pays homage to the work of sociologist, Diana Gittins, who, over twenty years ago, asked how the shifting meanings of children and childhood impact the lives of children. The contributions of this book examine contemporary educational policy and practice, curriculum material, literary and visual representations, and teacher narratives to further probe how and why it matters that childhood, as a concept and experience, remains as multiple and elusive as ever. The chapters in this book were originally published as a special issue of the journal, Curriculum Inquiry.

Julie C. Garlen is an Associate Professor of Childhood and Youth Studies at Carleton University. Her work in cultural curriculum studies has explored how culture functions symbolically, institutionally, and pedagogically in the lives of children and youth. She is the co-editor of Teaching with Disney (Peter Lang, 2016) and Disney, Culture, and Curriculum (Routledge, 2016). Lisa Farley is an Associate Professor in the Faculty of Education at York University in Toronto, Ontario. Her research considers the uses of psychoanalysis in conceptualizing dilemmas of historical representation, pedagogy and childhood. She is the author of Childhood beyond Pathology: A Psychoanalytic Study of Development and Diagnosis (SUNY Press, 2018).

Introduction: The child in question: Childhood texts, cultures, and curricula1. The quasi-human child: How normative conceptions of childhood enabled neoliberal school reform in the United States2. Teaching the Third World Girl: Girl Rising as a precarious curriculum of empathy3. Fanon and the child: Pedagogies of subjectification and transformation4. Comics and the structure of childhood feeling: Sublimation and the play of pretending in Gilbert Hernandez's Marble Season5. What is it like to be a child? Childhood subjectivity and teacher memories as heterotopia6. L'ecole Gulliver and La Borde: An ethnographic account of collectivist integration and institutional psychotherapy