Towards a Decentering of ‘The Child’

Abstract

This chapter reviews a number of key contemporary developments in social theory—poststructuralist, feminist, and post-humanist—to consider their impact on knowledge production in childhood studies as a field. It argues that in different ways the insights of these theoretical approaches offer the field opportunities to decenter its very object of inquiry, namely, the child, and to rethink its knowledge practices in ways which extent its scope. The chapter also considers what a critically reflexive childhood studies may look like and how a diffractive way of thinking may help the field to reflect on, and assess, its political and ethical commitments through the knowledge it produces.