In this webinar, we tie together the conversations we’ve had on reimagining childhood studies, refusal and slow violence by inviting our speakers to think with, and across, theoretical frameworks that have challenged liberalism. For quite some time now, critical scholarship around race, indigeneity, dis/ability, feminism, neomarxism, decolonialism and postcolonialism have productively interrogated liberal certitudes. These theorizations coalesce in their attempts to historicize liberalism’s moral assertions, politicize its ethics of neutrality and recognize, as well as rework, its ongoing devaluation of particular lives. Our aim with this conversation is to explore the potential and utility of these critiques of liberalism to reimagine certain key assumptions within Childhood Studies. Some of the questions that our panelists have been asked to address include:

• How does these frameworks powerful historicizing of liberalism’s cultural, social, psychic and material practices in settler and non-settler colonies compel us to critically open-up Childhood Studies’ understandings of children’s subjectivities, including the dehistoricized valorization of ‘agency’?
• Given how these theorizations highlight the exploitation of marginal non-white childhoods as neither contingent nor haphazard, how might a more politicized framing of liberal settler and post-independence states, politics of accumulation, racialized capitalism and ‘slow violence’ fundamentally complicate existing understandings children and futurity?
• How might we work to epistemically include marginal children’s cultivation of everyday forms of knowledge – including their ‘refusal’ – as that which often exceed and fail to neatly fit within their representation within “narratives of pain” (Tuck et al 2014)?

Speakers:

• Paula Austin, Boston University
• Veronica Pacini-Ketchabaw, Western University
• Karen Wells, Birkbeck, University of London

Register in advance for this webinar:

https://ucl.zoom.us/webinar/register/WN_JNhAwJNwQ4OSKEws4s0Vug

After registering, you will receive a confirmation email containing information about joining the webinar.

Reimagining Childhood Studies webinar series
The Reimagining Childhood Studies webinar series takes up the challenge posed by the recent publication of Reimagining Childhood Studies (Spyrou, Rosen and Cook 2019) to collectively rethink, innovate, and reimagine our field of studies in an effort to offer a substantive, renewed, and inspiring agenda for the years to come.

The series is convened by:

• Spyros Spyrou (European University Cyprus)
• Rachel Rosen (University College London)
• Sarada Balagopalan (Rutgers University, USA)

Watch previous webinars:

• Reimagining Childhood Studies (25 November 2020)

• Slow violence (10 February 2021, 16-17.30GMT)
• Childhood’s Refusals? (3 March 2021, 16-17.30GMT)

In this upcoming webinar, part of the Reimagining Childhood Studies series, we take up Rob Nixon’s (2011) notion of ‘slow violence’ to explore its value and utility for Childhood Studies as a field. Slow violence, in contrast to spectacular violence which can be easily seen and recognized, is, according to Nixon, gradual, attritional and often invisible. As a result, and despite its destructive force, it remains largely unaccounted for.

With the help of three distinguished scholars, we take a critical look at the concept of ‘slow violence’ and reflect on its scope and reach in Childhood Studies and the representational challenges it poses to scholarship.

Speakers:

• Professor Peter Kraftl (University of Birmingham, UK): Plastic Childhoods: ‘beyond’ toxic renderings of children’s intersections with toys, waste and other plastics
• Professor Erica Meiners (Northeastern Illinois University, USA): Racing to the ends of childhood studies?
• Professor Yaw Ofosu-Kusi (University of Education, Ghana): African Childhoods through the lens of Slow Violence

Register in advance for this webinar:

https://ucl.zoom.us/webinar/register/WN_CTS_XNW2S5eIQdDA9Sq8lg

After registering, you will receive a confirmation email containing information about joining the webinar.

Reimagining Childhood Studies webinar series 
The Reimagining Childhood Studies webinar series takes up the challenge posed by the recent publication of Reimagining Childhood Studies (Spyrou, Rosen and Cook 2019) to collectively rethink, innovate, and reimagine our field of studies in an effort to offer a substantive, renewed, and inspiring agenda for the years to come.

The series is convened by:

• Spyros Spyrou (European University Cyprus)
• Rachel Rosen (University College London)
• Sarada Balagopalan (Rutgers University, USA)

Upcoming webinars include:

• Childhood’s Refusals? (3 March 2021, 16-17.30GMT)
• Liberalism’s Erasures (31 March 2021, 16-17.30GMT )

Previous webinars:

• Reimagining Childhood Studies (25 November 2020)