I would need to practice being:

  • critical of confining children to private spaces such as the home or schools
  • critical of anchoring children to local spaces, ignoring how children traverse scales of geography
  • critical of dismissals of children’s capacity to grapple with the transaction between children’s experiences and understandings of their concrete, embodied, lived realities and that abstract, global forces that impact upon their lives
  • critical of the conceptualization of children as vulnerable, passive sponges,  just as it is critical of the promotion of children’s individualistic agency
  • critical of the drive for children to become resilient against unjust and inequitable forces rather than be collaborators in social transformation
  • critical of the charismatic child who knows all the right words, the discourses of power, and how to manipulate them
  • critical of child development and social development as the Foucauldian disciplining of self and others
  • critical of “empowering” children by promoting them to assess and gain power through self-governance and the reproduction/reification of systems and structures that promote inequality
  • critical of using children’s voices without acknowledging the power of curation, representing a universalism that marginalizes and hides subaltern child voices
  • critical of tokenism just as it is critical of child leader-bullies in participatory spaces
  • critical of research with children that is not reflexive of what choices in questions and methodologies highlight and obscure about the role of children in society
  • critical of research with children that doesn’t engage children to examine their role in knowledge production and social transformation
  • critical of normative assumptions about childhood in an open way, to wrestle with what normativity in relation to my situatedness, in context, in scholarship, in deliberation, in contestation, in questioning the boundaries of my imagination