Posthumanist and New Materialist Methodologies by Claudia Diaz-Diaz & Paulina Semenec

Author:Claudia Diaz-Diaz & Paulina Semenec
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 9789811527081
Publisher: Springer Singapore

9.5 Temporality and Material Worlds

Q. Part of your research has attended to time and temporality as a way to challenge developmental perspectives on young children. Time and temporality can be such ephemeral concepts but very present in our understandings of children. How do posthumanist and/or new materialist theorizing and approaches help you to offer new understanding of children through concepts of temporality/time?

Child/hood is enmeshed in so many temporal constructs (e.g., aging, development, growth, youth, etc.). I think that many of us for whom social constructivist or otherwise sociocultural viewpoints were formative in our education rely (perhaps unquestioningly) on the notion that child/hood is situated within in a particular “place and time.” So, it seems to me, that any theorizing that unfixes those two concepts from specific locality and chronology can be provocative. For me, the theorizing most useful to my interests in the multi-scalar and multi-temporal aspects of child/hoods is currently Timothy Morton’s (2013) work on hyperobjects. Although this isn’t theorizing that is specific to childhood per se, it does provide a conceptual grammar for space-time mattering in such a way that the scope of any given childhood becomes unfixed.

Q. What advice would you give to scholars (or students) who are interested in exploring/experimenting with posthuman and materialist approaches/methodologies? What are some of the challenges/limitations/ as well as openings that these approaches offer to the study of children/childhood? In what ways do these approaches transgress traditional notions of the child/childhood?

My advice for those pursuing posthumanism or new materialisms would be not to wait until you understand every aspect of every theory (this will never happen) or feel yourself to be an expert (whatever that means). Put theory to work and attend to what is produced as you are learning. Because knowing is necessarily tied-up in doing, it seems to me that it is an onto-epistemological imperative to attempt to work in this way. Many years ago, when I was in first engaging with Deleuze, Todd May’s (2005) introduction to Deleuze helped me understand philosophy differently. He said that philosophy should not beg the question, “what should one do?” but “how might one live?”. For those who are Deleuzian scholars (I am not), this is likely a trivial thought. But to me, at the time, it was everything. The idea that philosophy and theory were less about “getting it right” and knowing the answers than about how they afforded possibilities for doing differently…that still guides me. Of course, I don’t mean that anyone should be reckless in terms of the practical relations of their research; quite the opposite. Possibility and responsibility (or response-ability) go hand-in-hand. If an entangled relationality is your point of departure, then all research practices, whether explicitly taking an activist stance or not, are enactments of relations with real consequences. So, my advice is: Do, be careful/ Do be careful.

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