Childhoods and Time: A Collective Exploration

Abstract

This collective piece explores the philosophical, ontological, and epistemic potentials of analyzing the relations between childhood and time, proposing thought experiments and fieldwork analyses that release childhood from a linear temporality toward (modern) adulthood. Each experiment originating from the authors’ distinct scholarly positionings fractures “modern childhood” and its civilization project, built from the hegemony of linear, sequential, progressive, and principled time.

Entering the assemblage of (un) teaching

“…Earlier research has discussed the temporality of education for young children and how to overcome the dominant linear view on time (e.g. da Rosa Riberio, 2023; Westman and Alerby, 2012). The continuum of (un)time unfolded in this study shows how different layers of time coexist – linear and rhizomatic and everything in-between – entangled.…”

On racialized linear time and temporal ‘othering’

“…Additionally, Walter Kohan and Karin Murris (2021) theorize ‘childhood’ and ‘time’ as entangled concepts and discuss how the relationship to time cultivated in educational institutions is linked to colonialism and capitalism. More recently, Camila da Rosa Ribeiro and Zsuzsa Millei (2023) have pithily summed up these effects through a focus on ‘the model of modern childhood’. They state how, “reformers and policy makers have used and still rely on this model today in their civilizing efforts” (p. 135).…”