Towards a Posthuman Developmental Psychology of Child, Families and Communities

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.

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.

Key figures in childhood studies have recently hailed Vygotskian approaches as the exception to the otherwise problematic status of developmental psychology (in its dominant reception) as wedded to a deficit and individualist model (see, e.g. Thorne 2007). This may well be so, especially in more recent readings of Vygotsky’s work that draw attention to his interest in emotions and personality (Gonzalez Rey 2011), and this approach has been taken up in a variety of directions in other chapters in this handbook. Such work challenges the individual-social binary that underlies the individualism of current models, and attention to specific contexts of and for interaction has revised previous understandings that portrayed individual mental activity as prior to and separate from specific cultural and historical environments. Hence, this is one approach to reworking the subject-environment rearticulation.

My focus here is to indicate how posthuman analyses might inform the current disciplinary and ethical challenges we face as theoreticians and practitioners in developmental psychology and education. Situating this within current contexts, it seems we are in sore need of critical resources. Increasing public/policy appeals to particular disciplinary knowledges work alongside changing relationships to the national and international state bodies to politicise psychological and educational knowledges in particularly acute ways. For example, in my national context, Britain, school achievement is increasingly evaluated (in ever-narrower terms) by the state while schools are pressurised into becoming private business-making ventures. The new illusions of individual freedoms/autonomies under neoliberalism threaten to return more power/authority to the already privileged upper middle classes, as inequalities between rich and poor widen ever more, regionally and internationally.

A key ethical challenge we face is surely how to resist the drive towards psychologisation (or the explanation of socio-political issues within exclusively individualist psychological terms) within social and policy discourse, as so often occurs in relation to parent blaming. For example, in early 2012 the main UK academic research funder, the Economic and Social Research Council, published a briefing on ‘education and social mobility’ in which it claimed ‘The adverse attitudes to education of disadvantaged mothers are one of the most important factors associated with the lower educational attainment of their children…’ (ESRC Social Mobility briefings series. http://www.esrc.ac.uk/publications/evidence-briefings/index.aspx page 2). Such claims rearticulate familiar classed and misogynist strategies of blaming the poor for their poverty without even admitting into the domain of explanation how and why disadvantage is communicated via women as mothers (rather than say school practices or other partners or agencies), including crucially how and why they have come to be disadvantaged, and the role of the state in supporting or countering such dynamics. In other words, the abstraction and reification that creeps in so easily around ‘children’ and ‘families’ can work to pin societal processes of marginalisation and exclusion onto individuals. These can then be treated as individual problems or responsibilities, much as (in the UK) the new term ‘worklessness’ has emerged to characterise unemployment as a condition of individuals instead of a structural or political context. In particular, posthuman analyses, allied with the so-called new materialist feminisms, may help to challenge some of the spuriously scientific claims associated with the neuropsychological turn (De Vos 2012, 2014).

1 What’s Wrong with Humanism?

Humanist conceptions of the psychological subject are closely aligned with the modern Western Enlightenment, and associated models of development are complicit with modernity’s exclusions and oppressions. It is now widely accepted that such psychological models are heir to, and in turn reinscribe, the economic and cultural privileges arising from capitalist exploitation and European colonialism – whether in terms of theories of family organisation or cultural practices in child-rearing (Buck Morss 1975; Broughton 1987; Boyden 1990). Theories of early education suffer from similar problems in terms of how their conceptions of development reduce dominant economic developmental models to the individual – whether in terms of starting points (the state from which development takes place), contexts (the states or environments in which development occurs), processes (agents of development) and endpoints (goals, outcomes or achievements). Hence, Cannella and Viruru (2004), for example, see clear parallels between approaches to childhood and colonisation.

At issue is not only that these assumptions enter into sets of professional and policy models but also how they work to classify and regulate modes of professional and popular subjectivities, including those of families and children. The model of the child as unit of development in mainstream psychology is portrayed as singular and abstracted (i.e. it is already presumed to be outside social relations). Portrayal of parental figures quickly resolves into the mother or other singular caregiver as mere representative of, or more often uninterrogated microcosm of, the social/societal relations. Not only is this a reduced way of configuring sociocultural relations, but this then accords disproportionate responsibility to a poorly conceptualised and contextually situated socio-educational agent. Mothers and other caregivers therefore come in for much negative scrutiny and evaluation in developmental theory, as do teachers when the gaze moves into formal educational arenas, instead of connecting parenting and familial practices with analysis of the wider sociohistorical and cultural institutional practices and constraints that surround them.

Recent social theory has offered critical approaches to children, families and communities in early childhood education. Such critiques are now acquiring a sense of urgency. For if the romantic humanist model of the subject is the bourgeois, culturally masculine (but presumed asexual), Euro-US child, its trajectory of development has recapitulated that of the western modern industrialisation – rational, technical, detached, alienated and abstracted and heading very fast towards destruction, or at best crises of unsustainability. Rather than merely repeating now well-recognised critiques of models of human and individual development (Henriques et al. 1998), as inscribed within dominant approaches to early childhood education and development (MacNaughton 2005; MacNaughton et al. 2007; Hultqvist and Dahlberg 2001), the challenge addressed by this chapter is to consider alternatives to humanist models.

2 A Critical Posthumanism

However before moving on to describe posthumanism, I will first address misgivings readers may legitimately be harbouring. Humanist approaches to subjectivity have, after all, been hardly fought for and scarcely (if at all) won. Decentring the human subject from models of development and education poses significant challenges for early childhood education and development, not least because many children (like other subjugated or ‘minoritised’ groups such as women, colonised peoples and gay men, lesbians and transgendered people) have not yet been accorded subject status. Debates remain focused on the recognition of identities, and corresponding rights-based claims are still high on political agendas.¹ Yet such humanist, rights-based claims can also work to confirm and reify identities that should be considered transient positions (albeit no less legitimate for this, of course). They install a structure of hailing and recognition of identification that – whether humanist or technocratic – presumes modern rationality, along with such limitations as presuming full access to consciousness, and so offering a fixed and closed, rather than relational, model of the subject, rather than one composed of shifting configurations that are intersecting and mutually transformative.

Instead of merely repeating these well-known problems with humanist models, other conceptual and methodological currents are grappling with alternative ways of dealing with problems of teleology and abstraction in conceptions of human development and attempting to formulate social subjectivities.² Clearly key questions surround the desirability of transcending all aspects of the modern, rather than perhaps reassessing them in the light of diverse modernising processes as they have occurred outside the metropolitan north (Hayami et al. 2003; Chatterjee 1997). Decoupling ‘modern’ from ‘western’ (or what is otherwise sometimes called the ‘global north’) opens up some manoeuvring space, or attention to cultural-historical contexts of practice, from and in which early childhood takes place.

Beyond deconstruction or critical theory (Broughton 1987; Burman and Maclure 2011), contemporary discussions of ‘the posthuman’, diverse as they are, elaborate ways of destabilising the humanist subject from its privileged place within models of social practice. They draw on the history of science (Haraway 1989), science and technology studies (Latour 1991), sociocultural theory (Newman and Holzman 1993) and actor network theory (Fenwick and Edwards 2012). There are also key contributions from and engagements between feminist, postcolonial and queer theory. Like postcolonial theory, posthuman debates do not presume the historical supercession of humanism (which would then reinstate a progressivist narrative), but rather generate conceptualisations that offer alternative conceptions and even prospects that go beyond the limits of current humanist perspectives. Most particularly, they elaborate practical challenges to the isolationism, as well as the cultural particularity, of prevailing models of human development that masquerade as universal through their inscription in culturally dominant approaches (Boyden 1990).

It should be acknowledged that the resources comprising the broad set of debates informing ‘the posthuman’ are not only diverse but are in mutual tension. This can make for some difficulties in trying to arrive at a clear sense of what posthumanism is, or rather which posthumanism each is promulgating. Nevertheless, such critical debate works to undermine any pretensions to complete or triumphal analysis. As Braidotti (2013: 90) notes: ‘A posthuman notion of the enfleshed and extended relational self keeps the techno-hype in check by a sustainable ethics of transformation. This sober position pleads for resistance to both the fatal attraction of nostalgia and the fantasy of transhumanist and other techno-utopias’.

In the rest of this chapter, I explore what posthumanist critiques bring to reconceptualisations of children, childhood, families and communities and their relations to early childhood education.

3 ‘Child’

The child functioned both as the anchor for humanist models of subjectivity under modernity and the nostalgic guarantor of the unalienated part of ourselves we have (supposedly) lost. Sentimentalised images of children and childhood populate not only our screens but also our imaginations, aligned with notions of inner, or even authentic, selfhood. Such cultural ‘baggage’ is unhelpful for many children whose childhoods do not correspond to such idealised images, who correspondingly suffer the stigmatisation and pathologisation of being failing or deficient children and who are the subjects of ‘stolen childhoods’, as well as for the adults who feel robbed of the childhood they once (might have) had. But the values and meanings accorded to children and childhood have a cultural and political history that has been traced and critiqued (see, e.g. Steedman 1995; Shuttleworth 2010). Steedman shows how ideas emerging across modernising Europe came to be constellated around the child. Ideas from cell theory in biology, alongside ideas that would generate psychoanalysis, inscribed romantic humanism with a sense of embodied history focused on the body and mind of the child, especially – as Steedman highlights – the feminised young child, portrayed as innocent and vulnerable (so articulating and reinscribing the convergence of gendered and childhood ideologies). The past – of culture, society and even the species – became something that was ‘turned inside’ via the story of the child. Once rendered as an ‘internal’ matter, the social, political, economic and institutional all fade into insignificance, ushering in domains of explanation and intervention limited by this narrow focus. Hence, the ‘child’ has long been a key focus for critics of humanism (e.g. Stainton Rogers and Stainton Rogers 1992).

Historical and anthropological research offer vital indications of how understandings, and experiences, of childhood vary according to historical moment and cultural location and even throw into question its categorisations as well as contents. Such work also connects with specific socio-political contests and agendas surrounding childhood and models of learning that accompanied the introduction of compulsory schooling, occurring across Europe in the 1870s. Much work (e.g. Rose 1985) has indicated the complex and contradictory concerns that gave rise to this measure – combining opposition to child exploitation in hazardous working conditions with social order concerns posed by an economically active and politically engaged and dissatisfied sector of the population (Hoyles 1989). The ‘schooled child’ placed children within an educational field that positioned them as learners rather than knowers, and so delegitimated the socio-political knowledge of working young people (Hendrick 1990). Such issues remain relevant to educational provision for street-connected children to this day (Corcoran 2015). Similarly, Katz (2004) suggests how globalisation restructures forms of childhood and their community and work practices, so connecting questions of neoliberalisation in education (e.g. Fendler 2001) with wider debates on migration and sustainability.

From the posthuman repertoire, other perspectives emerge. While deconstructionist approaches and the textual-linguistic ‘turn’ shifted the focus from time to space, history to geography, identity to context and individual to group, the preoccupation within posthuman studies is to explore further the move from a singular, bounded individual to multiple, mobile collective subjectivities. This goes further than Moss and Petrie’s (2002) call for a move from children’s services to children’s spaces, for example (where the focus moves from defining what children ‘are’ and what they ‘need’ to attending to and providing socio-educational contexts in which they can act and interact). Taking seriously how subjectivity crosses bodies and minds offers additional approaches to conceptualising and engaging with children. This includes challenging the privilege accorded rationality, and so one key posthuman move has been to attend to and explore affect, as a necessary corollary of embodiment. It also means unhinging the child from the origin point of any development story, singular or general, and instead challenging the temporal hierarchies such models involve, including those that treat what comes earlier as more influential than later experiences or events on particular outcomes. This anti-historicism does not deny history but rather attends to the claims made for such historical continuities or causalities, inviting critical evaluation (Burman 1998, 2017).

As a key example, instead of ‘growing up’, as we assume children will or should do, queer theory critically interrogates the normalisations inscribed in such trajectories, inviting exploration of alternative pathways such as ‘growing sideways’ (Stockton 2009). Such perspectives are especially useful to challenge presumed ideas about ‘progress’ that are read back onto and into child development, but they also bear upon current moves to address some of these criticisms from within developmental psychology such as discussions of ‘developmental cascades’ (which allow for multiplicity but still privilege earlier over later influences) and of course incite very different approaches to claims focused on neuroscience, brain morphology or physiology.

Humanist models have relied heavily on a presumption of a clearcut demarcation between human and animal (usually premised upon claims to language as a specifically human activity and achievement). Even radical humanist approaches, such as that of Freire (1972), made much of this distinction, and various feminist postcolonial commentators have traced how discourses of European superiority were founded on such demarcations (Seshadri 2012). The young child has long been a source of fascination in this regard, portrayed as bridging nature and culture, with culture figured as the entry into language (see Flegel 2009). But what this presumes is that nature is separated from, and even prior to, culture – an assumption that is increasingly questioned in this (postnatural) world. Man (or human)-made interventions have come to deeply shape apparently natural entities such as climate or landscape, and so ‘nature’ cannot be divorced from ‘culture’, nor humankind from animal and other kinds, since we share the same planetary predicament.

Hence, a key feature of posthumanist analyses is that they pressurise the human/non-human relation to attend to entanglements and complexities of human, animal, nature and environment. Indeed ‘trans’ appears as a ubiquitous term – transnational, transpecies, transversal and of course transgender. While the work done by, within and across ‘trans’ still demands further explication, it certainly delineates a shift of focus away from dichotomies and polarisations to connections and relations. Further, as Haraway (2003) notes in both her Companion Species Manifesto and earlier work on the ‘onco-mouse’ (Haraway 1997) (the genetically engineered mouse created specifically for experimental research), acknowledging such complexity does not imply equal or symmetrical relations but rather mutual relations and dependencies. These unequal interdependencies offer insights for models of mutual engagement and cohabitation, even as humans exercise greater control over animals and territories. An indicative application of posthuman ideas, specifically as formulated by Haraway, to early education is offered by Taylor (2013), who deconstructs the association between child and nature via a critical history of early educationalists’ philosophical commitments (she discusses Froebel, Pestalozzi, Montessori), shaping the emphasis on nature work in kindergarten curricula. Just as Strathern (1992) shows how national identities are forged and maintained through particular conceptions of the organisation of nature (whether as gardens or agricultural cultivation or less ‘benign’ uses) as well as buildings, Taylor highlights how particular gendered and cultural hierarchies are elaborated through this constructed notion of nature. Taylor moves on to offer a series of worked examples of how else human-animal relations might be reconfigured, specifically through reflecting on dilemmas and prefigurative examples arising from classroom and domestic practices.

A further feature of posthuman analysis is that it embraces technology. This is in dramatic contrast to most humanist approaches that decry the machinic as dystopian and destructive of distinctive human characteristics. Here Haraway’s earlier (1985) discussion of the cyborg has been a key influence for feminist and postcolonial approaches. Haraway portrays the cyborg as potentially³ offering a model of subjectivity that is not structured according to the traditional gender binary (male/female), nor tied by history or embodied affective relations (though perhaps even these assumptions will come to be questioned as machines gain sufficient complexity to – seem to – be sentient). The increasing human use of information technologies (for commercial, medical or recreational purposes) has transformed understandings of and horizons for knowing and being, making material ideas of distributed networks of connection that cross bodies and transgress traditional mental/material binaries.

In relation to childhood, such technological developments have radically transformed some of its key tenets. Reproduction can now be technologically assisted, or terminated. The bearing and giving birth to children has not only become medicalised (as feminists have long noted, Martin 2001), but increasingly testing during pregnancy and genetic screening make some foetuses/babies less likely to be born. The abuse of such technologies for the selective termination of girl babies is well documented (Arditti et al. 1989), with far-reaching national and global consequences that Malouf (1995) attempted to envisage. As well as posing many more ethical-political dilemmas in relation to gender and disability rights, such questions also impose new questions around the relationship between ownership of the body and (women’s) labour – as in surrogacy.

Hence, far from only entering into conception and birthing issues, increasingly technologised children and childhoods generate much popular concern and debate (see Lesnik-Oberstein 2008, for analysis of how such technologies reiterate possessive individualist desires for an ‘own child’ notwithstanding – or perhaps precise because of – their ‘assisted’ or ‘artificial’ modes). Some of this concern occurs in relation to children’s use of technology, their ‘vulnerability’ to abuse through the Internet (cyberbullying, grooming or stalking, etc.) and others – reinstating romantic nostalgic themes – that can be seen in the criticisms over children leading increasing sedentary lifestyles and not playing outside, a feature that also arises through increasing child protection considerations, which have helped to produce the segregation of children from other sites of social production in industrialised contexts. Finally, there are hints that children, as a new generation growing up with advanced new technologies as their assumed culture, are taking over as the experts in a way that inspires some fear as well as envy (see also Burman 2011, 2013).

Hence, multiple and ambivalent cultural anxieties are mobilised in reworkings of culture and nature symbolised by children and childhood. The posthuman perspective invites us to go beyond such ‘additive’ models of, for example, supplementing existing educational practices with new technology (as in ‘ICT for schools’ initiatives), to envisage more messy and intertwined connections between humans, animals and technology that unsettle some of the perceived constants that have constellated around early childhood education. These constants, or assumptions, are not only focused around notions of gender, or sexuality, for example, but also extend to reconsideration of environments or landscapes of learning and interaction that necessarily transform models of competence, assessment and pedagogy.

4 ‘Families’

Models of the family have long been a site of investigation and critique in developmental psychology and early education. While traditional sociological approaches largely adopted functionalist frameworks, thereby reducing and adapting household practices to economics, psychology has addressed families as the primary arena for the care and upbringing of children – often primarily figured in relation to social policy agendas. Hence, the re-inscription of the binary between the social and the individual is re-enacted not only via disciplinary demarcations but also through legal and social policy distinctions made between what is presumed to be public or private. While Marxist analyses highlighted the family as vital to the state for its reproductive labour – in the sense of maintaining and servicing workers and reproducing new generations of workers – feminists have challenged the gendered division of labour inside and outside the home, including how the reproduction of that division, and the extension of its accorded status outside the home, is responsible for the low value, and corresponding low pay, accorded care work. This remains the case even where – under neoliberalism – emotional labour is increasingly demanded from all workers. Thus, intersections of longstanding patriarchal relations with the creative and intensifying strategies of capitalism produce specific sites of regulation and evaluation of household positions and in which psychological expertise has increasingly been drawn upon as arbiter.

Critiques of discourses of the family are of course longstanding (see Poster 1978). These emphasised how the rise of the bourgeois nuclear family naturalised the gendered division of labour and the role of the state in policing and normalising family functioning, including naturalising the emotional and physical labour of women. Black feminists also challenged the restricted model of the family addressed by social theory as well as representations of the family as only oppressive, citing how it can also protect against the insults of structural and institutional racism (e.g. Carby 1987). These limitations in conceptualisations of the family have far-reaching consequences. Feminist postcolonial analyses have highlighted how the rise of the ideology of the nuclear family, in the wake of the emerging impacts of Darwinian ideas, provided not only the model for but also a rationale for colonialism. Women and children under the rule of the husband/father constituted a structure of naturalised inequality (‘hierarchy within unity’) that was applied outside the family, in particular to colonial contexts, to render them as less developed or immature, and so confirm the ‘underdevelopment’ of those peoples upon whom rule was then sanctioned to be imposed. As McClintock (1995: 45) noted:

Projecting the family image onto national and imperial progress enabled what was often murderously violent change to be legitimatized as the progressive unfolding of natural decree. Imperial intervention could thus be configured as a linear, nonrevolutionary progression that naturally contained hierarchy within unity: paternal fathers ruling benignly over immature children.

Hence, critical and feminist psychologists have challenged the positions and identities produced for parents and children (and the disproportionate emphasis on mothers) via familialist discourses (Arendell 2000; Phoenix and Woollett 1991), just as their sociological counterparts documented diverse varieties of family and household practices that transgress and transcend the models populating textbooks (Gittins 1985). Childhood offers a key link between material and so-called immaterial labour as structured within a classed conception of the family. As Lesnik-Oberstein (1998: 7) put it: ‘the very idea of childhood itself is crucially implicated in the structures of feeling that define the bourgeois nuclear family, and which prioritise emotions as a structuring and motivating force for both public and private life in contemporary capitalism’. These ‘structures of feeling’ (Williams 1977) have been both presumed (naturalised) and then evaluated (assessed) by psychological theories and practices that precisely demonstrate the ideological and mutable character of the public-private binary.

Typologies of parenting styles elaborated within psychology (as authoritarian, permissive or authoritative, e.g. Baumrind 1971) hark back to post-World War II discussions of building democratic societies (informed by Adorno et al.’s 1950 model of ‘the authoritarian personality’ as produced through family, though interestingly specifically father-son relations). Such models inscribed schooling and so-called progressive or child-centred education, although the gaps in interpretation and practice have been widely documented (see, e.g. Sharp and Green 1975; Walkerdine 1984 and for a recent analysis outside the global north, Sriprakash 2012). Despite being published nearly 25 years ago, Walkerdine and Lucey’s (1989) analysis of how child-centred educational approaches are applied to mothers’ negotiations with their children, importing the pedagogical imperative from school to home, remains increasingly relevant – including the affective intensifications noted by Lesnik-Oberstein (1998), and the drive towards instrumentalisation and optimisation of individual human capacities highlighted by Foucauldian analyses (e.g. Rose 1989, 1990). Everyday marketing now routinely mobilises developmental psychological discourse to incite a maximisation of development opportunities for children, simultaneously confirming appropriate maternal identities (see, e.g. Burman 2012, 2013). As state cutbacks in health and welfare provision gather pace, amid neoliberal policies that use conditions of recession and ‘austerity’ to further the promotion of marketisation and globalisation, measures are being introduced to ‘activate’ and ‘responsibilise’ parents and children, with the ‘burden’ of caring increasingly located within a restrictively defined family household and activation entering into the very earliest schooling (Ailwood 2008).

It should be clear that it is important not to overstate the distinction between posthuman and other critical approaches. In relation to critiques of familial models in psychology, there is a large and longstanding body of critical research that has both documented diversity of family forms and analysed the consequences of failing to represent these within psychological and social theories and policies. Of these, perhaps Phoenix’s (1987) discussion of the ways young Black mothers feature in psychological accounts only as problematic is particularly noteworthy. The dynamic of normalised absence/pathologised presence she identified, that is, of only being represented when stigmatised and disappearing from attention when non-problematic, has been taken up more widely to address general dynamics of the ways gender and culturally minoritised positions intersect (see, e.g. Burman and Chantler 2005). Intersectionality theory is perhaps one of the key crossover frameworks between feminist (particularly Black feminist) and posthuman analyses (Phoenix and Prattynama 2006; Cho et al. 2013).

The emergence of cultural psychology has also brought attention to anthropological research documenting varieties of family and kinship systems across and within cultures. A first step was to attend to cultural differences in norms of caregiving practices produced through different family and household organisations, such as joint families (e.g. Kurtz 1992). But this move ran the risk of reinstalling particular static, reified conceptions in the name of cultural authenticity. More recent work has engaged with the changing structure and functioning of families and households as they struggle to cope with, and indeed often creatively adapt to, changing economic conditions that distribute caring and familial responsibilities across great distances, often transnationally. Familial forms can then be understood alongside the political and economic forces that shaped them, but also in relation to how changes in the structuring of labour have produced a ‘global care chain’ (Hochschild 2000) such that poor women from poor countries are paid by richer women in rich countries to care for their children, while the poorer women’s children are cared for by grandparents or other – often female – family members.

Moreover, just as intranational and transnational labour migration become increasingly normalised, this has transformed understandings of family as well as labour relations, showing their mutual constitution. A further set of analyses has documented how economic pressure shapes even the most intimate and earliest caregiving activities. Gottlieb’s (2014) account from the Cote D’Ivoire of Beng practices of feeding and washing babies suggests how activities that could be understood as violent intrusions work in the service of maintaining their mothers’ agricultural labouring capacities. This puts into a rather different context debates circulating from the global north about breastfeeding and its class structuring (Newson and Newson 1973) – despite and amid claims that ‘breast is best’. In terms of the intensification of labour for survival in contexts of accelerating global poverty inequalities, Nieuwenhuys (2007) has coined the term the ‘global womb’ to describe the ‘hidden’ work of women and (both boy and girl) children as the last resource being mobilised by and in response to capitalist superexploitation. A more familiar example in the global north – which also pertains to the global south – is how, contrary to prevailing images of the family in which children are cared for rather than providing care (surely a massively false opposition), many children across the world are carers for their families, either through parental disability, dislocation or death (Widmer et al. 2013). Thus, gendered and generational positions are mediated by class and economic privilege, and the boundaries around family forms and functioning are shown to be increasingly permeable according to the whims and appetite of capitalism.

While such cultural analyses have certainly destabilised prevailing understandings of both children and their parents, as well as how and where they live, perhaps queer theory has done the most to challenge models of the family. This goes beyond earlier work (e.g. Tasker 2004; Tasker and Golombok 1997) warding off the pathologisation of gay men and lesbians as parents by documenting how their children can be as happy and well adjusted as children growing up with parents in a heterosexual relationship. Useful as this was, as Anderssen (2001) pointed out, it maintains the prevailing orientation around a heteronormative model by focusing on how gay and lesbian families can be ‘as good as’ heterosexual ones. Beyond this kind of compensatory approach (which maintains heterosexual privilege), other challenges have emerged. In particular, within the posthuman frame, Edelman’s (2004) book No Future takes issue with the ways the child is (under prevailing conditions of conception and reproduction) the distinctive and definitive outcome of a heterosexual coupling. He critiques the way the child is figured culturally as a significant guarantor of heterosexuality around which not only is the heteronormative family constellated but, linked to and through this, wider institutional and structural practices are confirmed. Edelman develops this analysis to indicate far-reaching connections between the figure of the child as signifier of continuity and futurity and wider societal notions of teleology. Hence, national, international and even planetary progress figure as driven by and supporting heteronormativity. Edelman’s analysis may be limited by insufficient attention to the specifically gendered discourses around parenting roles and indeed parenthood (see Lesnik-Oberstein 2010; Caselli 2010). Nevertheless, his analysis highlights interpretive vistas opened up by highlighting the ways family forms implicate, and are implicated within, restrictive and coercive discourses of (hetero)sexed/gender relations.

If queer theory has questioned what is presumed to be natural and critiques the child as the site of heteronormative social reproduction, developments in reproductive technology prompt further posthuman and postnatural analyses (including precisely those that have been used by gay and lesbian parents – such as donor insemination, surrogacy and in vitro fertilisation). Taking developments in reproductive technologies as a starting point, Strathern’s (1992) influential book After Nature provides a rather different set of reflections and resources that inform posthuman debates. Indeed, she and Haraway write in a cycle of mutual influence, so that in this early text, she draws on Haraway’s (1985) ‘cyborg manifesto’. Strathern traces the transformation of the notion of ‘kin’ from its earlier anthropological use to describe cultural networks and hierarchies to become – after and via interpretations of Darwinian evolutionary theory – something that is increasingly treated as a matter of biological, rather than social, relationship. On a methodological and analytical note, Strathern specifies her claims as relating to the retrospective accounting procedures of British anthropologists of the mid-twentieth century. Such qualifications turn out to have significance, not only in relation to the particular contributions of British anthropologists to theories of kinship but also precisely in relation to the question of (smaller) family size that, it has been claimed, gave rise to the earlier emergence of and value accorded notions of individuality in England. Unlike Macfarlane (1983), whose work she draws upon, rather than treating this as part of a progressivist narrative, Strathern leaves open the question of historical facticity to read such accounts (in Foucauldian terms) as histories of the present, that is, as relating to preoccupations of the contemporary moment – somewhat playfully leaving open whether she sees these as explanatory factors for, or rather as symptoms of, these. A key argument running through this rich and allusive text is that the postevolutionary discursive shift from social to biological kinship paradoxically evacuates the notion of ‘kin’ of its social dimensions. Not only does the individual emerge stripped of its social constitution, but notions of nature come to be understood as outside the social in a way that ultimately de-socialises the individual itself.

Strathern offers an account of the separation of nature from the social that constitutes the preconditions for the genetic developmentalism that Edelman problematises, with all its heteronormative and other (class, cultural, differently abled, gendered) exclusions. Moreover, her analysis addresses the relevance of such notions within the rising culture of individualism and individualisation that formed the cultural-temporal backcloth to her analysis – Thatcherite Britain of the 1980s – to provide an analysis that is strikingly prescient of the current twenty-first century posthuman discussions. In relation to families, as she also notes, the postevolutionary discourse that privileges biological notions is now combining with an economic climate of cutbacks to welfare support such that people are increasingly expected to look for and find support from their families – however defined, but with an agenda of de-responsibilising the state and wider social relations in favour of smaller, local, ‘personal’ networks of support and care. And so we see how mutual citations and presumptions work to confirm existing social conditions and oppressions, but also how posthuman critiques can unravel these and show different possibilities.

Finally, discussions of the posthuman not only critique prevailing exclusionary and restrictive definitions but, taking up the reworking (or queering) of human-animal and technology relations, also suggest how other sets of relationships could be acknowledged and mobilised. This invites a redrawing of kinship relations not only across non-biologically connected individuals and groups but also across species. It is no accident that stories of savage children and wolf boys became sources of cultural fascination from the mid-nineteenth century (see Chen 2012; Seshadri 2012). A key text here is Haraway’s (2003) ‘Companion species manifesto’, a highly influential successor to her 1985 ‘Cyborg Manifesto’, which takes the practice of dog training to illuminate complexities, mutual and reciprocal (but not equal) relations between humankind and animalkind. She addresses the pleasures, frustrations and jointly agentic productions of such interactions in a way that starts from, but goes way beyond, conventional humanist anthropomorphic and possessive notions of ‘pets’ or animal companions. This is not merely an account of how ‘pets are family members too’ – although such may also be true. From this close study emerge broader issues of human-animal connectedness and responsibility.Haraway and others (such as Braidotti 2013, who takes this up via a Deleuzian framework) elaborate this analysis to envisage a sense and set of commonworlds that critique prevailing capitalist and humanist models of ownership and superiority in favour of a shared common destiny. Thus, from the detail of the pedagogical (and so social technological) patterning of activity with her dog, a different framework for relating across prevailing definitions of family emerges – not ‘the family’ of ‘man’ or even ‘humankind’ but of shared animal living in an increasingly pressurised ecological context that urgently requires human reparative attention.

5 ‘Communities’

Conventionally, ‘communities’ are much less discoursed in developmental psychology than are notions of ‘child’ and ‘family’ (and so it is particularly commendable they figure that within this volume). Arguably, the reason for this arises precisely through the ways the term ‘families’ has functioned as the proxy for the social in developmental psychology to the detriment of indicating its social, structural and cultural determinants. Interestingly, community psychology is not often connected to developmental psychology discussions. This is a significant omission since the radical community social psychologies of Latin America, for example, offer profoundly different models for social-political practice (Montero 2002). In my own (UK, European) context, there is much celebration of the notion of ‘community’ (usually discoursed as singular), which is typically formulated in relation to nostalgic regrets over its (supposed) demise. By this account, the ‘loss of a sense of community’ is associated with the rise of individualism and corresponding egotism and lack of sense of shared cohabitation and responsibility. In this regard, Strathern’s account of how the rise of the individual occludes the conditions for its own existence, that is, the social, is particularly relevant to claims of the disappearance of ‘community’:

Individuality signals choice: it would also seem that it is up to the individual whether to adhere to convention. Choice becomes conventional, and conventions are for choosing. It then becomes redundant to externalise other domains, or even think of social relationships as an object of or context for people’s communication with one another. This explains why the active citizen can be relied upon to behave responsibly in her or himself; why the New Right can talk in the same breath of the duties of the citizen and the freedom of the individual without any intervening image of a community. (Strathern 1992: 15)

Having supposedly disappeared, politicians attempt to reinvent ‘community’, although this now occurs within specific political parameters of neoliberalism elaborated with an agenda to devolve responsibility for provision and support from the state to civil society. Indeed, the key feature of the British Conservative electoral platform leading up to its 2010 victory (to form a coalition government) was its call for a ‘Big Society’ as a means to regenerate social engagement. Indicators of this were seen in recent tropes of British policy eliding dynamics of social deprivation with family functioning, such as ‘Broken Britain’, ‘Feral underclass’ (in the wake of the 2011 riots) and ‘Lost generation’ (in relation to escalating youth unemployment and vistas of downward mobility even amongst graduates). But as various commentators have pointed out, and as is strikingly reminiscent of Strathern’s analysis, it would seem that this Society (Big or not) has – precisely through such policies – been so emptied of its contents that there is little left inside. Rather, it is an empty society, without complex large institutions (and cities), composed of active but flexible subjects in supposedly small, friendly, local associations (Raban 2010). ‘Communities’ by this account, then, are supposed to be benign, supportive and culturally homogeneous – a far cry from the complex, multi-ethnic contiguities of most cities.

As a state-level correlate of the ways child, families and communities are engaged with, it is worth noting that in the current UK administration, Children and Families are dealt with in one Ministry, while Communities are in another. What this highlights is how the term ‘communities’ (in the plural) in a UK political context currently designates minoritised communities in a manner reminiscent of the ways ‘ethnicity’ is often discussed as an attribute only of minority ethnic groups. This discourse not only maintains a dynamic of ‘othering’ but also occludes the relational process by which this is produced (by the majority ethnic group). Moreover, the term’s political career has moved from a focus on ‘community relations’, that is, with social order and disorder especially in relation to policing and social stigmatisation (also largely associated with minority communities), to now being allied with social and community ‘cohesion’ (or security) agendas. This securitisation discourse links local with national and transnational concerns, such that it is preoccupied with identifying ‘vulnerable’ individuals deemed at risk of exploitation (e.g. by radical islamisation) in order to prevent terrorism. (See Mclaughlin 2012; Furedi 2008 for analyses of how the discourse of vulnerability both mobilises and is supported by those surrounding children and families.) Hence, ‘communities’ is far from being an innocent term.

Furthermore, prevailing discussions of ‘communities’ tend towards a static emphasis and incite an abstraction and reification of practice (that makes reference to ‘culture’ all the more problematic). Antiracist feminist analyses (e.g. Gupta 2003; Yuval-Davis 1998; Anthias 2008) have long critiqued the image of minority cultural communities as stable, homogeneous and benign, showing how they are divided by class, gender, age and sometimes religious differences. Both critiquing and going beyond the arguments offered by queer theory, they have also challenged the ways women have been seen to represent cultural identification, via their association with the bearing and caring of children, as designating general heterosexed and gendered dynamics that is disproportionately associated with minority communities. Thus far from being separated from community and societal relations, gendered roles and positions, including the evaluation and regulation of women’s behaviour, are articulated through and in relation to discourses of both cultural-religious and national belonging.⁴ Beyond these discussions, even in that now rather outdated understanding of ‘community’ (as a geographically delineated neighbourhood), indicative studies suggest that – contrary to many people’s preconceptions – matters of cultural diversity or homogeneity are largely a function of class position, rather than ethnicity, in the sense that working class communities have always been much more culturally diverse and mixed than middle class ones as a reflection of the intersection between racialisation and economic position. Acknowledging such mutually constitutive and intersecting relationships is vital for the elaboration of better theories and practices around children and families – whether from minoritised or majoritised contexts – as various studies domestic abuse provision for minoritised women and children have highlighted (Burman et al. 2004).

So, for many, ‘community’ (or ‘communities’) is so imbued with ideological components that other terms are preferable. Indeed, in addition to its implicitly racialised character, one key matter overlooked by discussions of ‘community’ is class. Currently inside academic debate as well as outside, there is much discussion about ‘new social movements’ that are creating (or re-creating) networks and relationships that are not structured according to age or gender hierarchies (and so challenge or trouble the adult-child binary) and that do not correspond to traditional forms of political organisation. While ‘community’ retains some territorial connotations of rural nostalgia or humanist belonging that command posthumanist suspicion, it remains to be seen whether or how ‘social movements’ will replace ‘communities’. Certainly it is a better substitution than another candidate, the ‘social enterprise’, that has arisen through the permeation of neoliberalism into social and community mobilisation now used to designate self-organised support and campaigning groups.

6 Endings or Beginnings?

It would be counter to posthuman analysis to arrive at any firm conclusions, but three threads of argument can be drawn together that indicate lines of inquiry relevant for reconceptualisation of (the relations between) children, families and communities in psychology and early education. In particular, such moves may facilitate recent calls to build connections with other disciplines, especially articulated from ‘the new social studies of childhood’ which historically has (understandably) been critical of traditional developmental psychological and educational theories (Thorne 2007; Alanen 2010).

First, posthuman analyses are neither utopian nor dystopian. What this means is that, while informed by a critical impulse, there are also clear ethical-political commitments guiding posthuman discussions. Precisely as a result of the criticisms of progress and teleology, however, they are not fixed on a specific future vision or ideal, for this could install easy recuperations. After all, notwithstanding the creative and transgressive work underway, the project to attend to and reconfigure animal-human relations is not immune from familialist and colonialist (re)constructions. It is important to remember how the early child-saving movement in Britain employed religiously sanctioned patriarchal models through analogy with Christian imagery of the Holy Family. While the earliest animal protection society in the world, the Royal Society for the Protection of Cruelty to Animals (RSPCA), was formed in Britain 50 years before its child protection movement, this too had its class and cultural exclusionary features which – as Gandhi (2006) notes – were also played out through its differences from the Vegetarian Society (founded in Manchester in 1847). In her history of the National Society for the Prevention of Cruelty to Children (NSPCC), Flegel (2009) suggests that such familialism played a role within the tensions, and subsequent parting of the ways, between the NSPCC and its supportive predecessor, the RSPCA, quoting articles in The Child’s Guardian (an NSPCC publication) in 1887 where ‘ … The choice of these parents to care for animals before their children is a sign of their savagery, of their failure to respect and protect the sanctified space of the home’ (p. 63). Both historically and currently, significant political and analytical opportunities were overlooked in failing to attend to gender, generational and cross-species intersections, with significant consequences: Flegel (2009: 72) suggests ‘ … by severing the child from the animal, the NSPCC failed to recognise the ways in which narratives of child-animal suffering might help to illuminate problems of power, cruelty and domination’.

Secondly, analytically and methodologically, there is a focus on specificity, particularity and contingency (rather than generalisation, standardisation and universality). Earlier I discussed how Strathern (1992) framed her arguments in terms of the mid-twentieth century Englishness. This was a specific intervention in a particular disciplinary set of debates (in English anthropology), yet it also acts as an exemplar for a mode of analysis and argumentation that elaborates new criteria for coherence and engaged scholarship, challenging scientism and mere adaptationist notions of ‘application’. Indeed, the French political theorist Badiou (2012: 2) has precisely argued for a specific understanding of ethically informed practice, such that ethics … ‘should be referred back to particular situations. Rather than reduce it to an aspect of pity for victims, it should become the enduring maxim of singular processes.’ Similarly, in her Companion Species Manifesto, Haraway (2003) argues that kinship claims are forged through a material history of joint and relational activity, rather than abstract a priori commitments. They are ‘ … made possible by the concrescence of prehensions of many actual occasions. Companion species rest on contingent foundations’ (p. 5). Hence, from specific analysis of dogtraining, she arrives at a position that ‘the origin of rights is in committed relationship, not in separate and pre-existing category identities’ (p. 53).

A third feature arises as an effect of the second: the attention to affect as both topic and analytic resources. The affective turn – in its both negative and positive versions (Clough with Halley 2007) – has been central to many methodological innovations and interventions in educational and social research. Its impact has been felt less within developmental psychological research, although the rise of psychosocial studies is now starting to have some impact here (Britzman 2011). Beyond static rationalist models of reflexivity, the affective turn promises to support politically engaged and innovative research that attends to the apparently minor or insignificant, the fleeting and the non or the less rational in research relations and accounting practices (Burman 2015). Further, attending to affect as a relational effect of multiple and complex interactions helps to ward off the individualisation and privatisation of models of the detached and isolated researcher to foster rigorous and engaged practice (Ahmed 2004; Luke and Gore 1992; Leathwood and Hey 2009; Hey and Leathwood 2009).

Such critical perspectives also have implications for understandings of children’s rights and their sometimes apparently tense relations with culturally inflected discourses of childhood – for both presume an abstracted domain of elaboration and application. Instead of treating rights as western-framed cultural universals that overlook other cultural practices, Reynolds et al. (2006) characterise ‘children’s rights as social practices that emerge from the encounter between everyday experiences and the body of knowledge on which practical decision-making is based’ (p. 297). Further lessons for childhood researchers include attending to the dangers of overstating what our research does. As Gallacher and Gallagher (2009) highlight, what we might better aim to do is to be more modest and limited in our claims, to enjoy and celebrate ‘immature’ or limited research that helps slow down the societal over-readiness to apply and ‘roll out’ or ‘scale up’ such claims, in particular in instrumentalising early childhood development and education.