Childhood, Geontopower and the Anthropocene

Thursday, 10 July 2025: 13:00-14:45
Location: SJES003 (Faculty of Legal, Economic, and Social Sciences (JES))
RC53 Sociology of Childhood (host committee)
RC04 Sociology of Education

Language: English

The emergence of the Anthropocene as a pivotal event in the planet’s history has instigated extensive scholarly inquiries in the realm of childhood studies, predominantly within the context of the global north. This extensive body of research seeks to challenge the dichotomous distinction between the human and non-human within the discipline, and aims to rectify the human-centric exceptionalism that underpins many discourses within the field.

Although important, childhood studies has much work to do in challenging what Yusoff (2018, 2024) describes as the white Anthropocene, which disregards “the historical colonial geographies that materially delivered humanism, its structures of thought (the human and its “others” and in parallel the discourse of nature and its ‘others’), its organization of value (philosophy of natural philosophy, ethics, and racial capitalism), and its scientific and industrial institutions (that were funded, and thereby grounded, in the financial spoils of imperial enterprise)” (2020, p. 663-4). This session invites papers that engage childhood studies within these problematics. Topics might include, but are not limited to: geontopower; live vs nonlife – including the inhuman; colonial Anthropocene; underground agencies.

Yusoff, K. (2018). A billion black Anthropocenes or none. University of Minnesota Press.

Yusoff, K. (2020). The Inhumanities. Annals of the American Association of Geographers, 111(3), 663–676. https://doi.org/10.1080/24694452.2020.1814688

Yusoff, K. (2024). Geologic life: inhuman intimacies and the geophysics of race. Duke Press.

Session Organizer:
Veronica PACINI-KETCHABAW, Canada
Chair:
Veronica PACINI-KETCHABAW, Canada
Oral Presentations
Thinking with Black Ecologies in Early Childhood Education
Fikile NXUMALO, University of Toronto, Canada; Tia MADKINS, University of Texas at Austin, USA
Common Worlding with Children in Brazil: Refusing and Reimagining Pedagogies in the Colonial Anthropocene
Adrianne BACELAR DE CASTRO, Western University, Canada
Tuning to Shapeshifting Bodies and Bodying Chronologies in Childhood Studies
Nicole LAND LAND, Canada; Meagan MONTPETIT, British Columbia Early Childhood Pedagogy Network, Canada
Mushrooms, Clay, and Crone: Refiguring Childhood in the Anthropocene
Emily ASHTON, University of New Brunswick, Canada; Nancy VAN GROLL, University of British Columbia, Canada; JoAnna RICKARD RICKARD, University of New Brunswick, Canada; Angela WARD, University of British Columbia, Canada
Childhood on the Frontiers of the Geontopolitical State
Natalie DELIA DECKARD, Davidson College, Canada
Weaving with Excess in Early Childhood Education
Alex BERRY, Canada
See more of: RC53 Sociology of Childhood
See more of: RC04 Sociology of Education
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