Papers by Emily Ashton
In education, Dec 21, 2022
This paper is a collective attempt to respond creatively to a research project we were part of en... more This paper is a collective attempt to respond creatively to a research project we were part of entitled Sketching Narratives of Movement: Towards Comprehensive and Competent Early Childhood Educational Systems Across Canada. We share our slow process of thinking, collaborating, wondering, and pausing along with the figure of the snail as we improvise a nonlinear path towards an unknown future. We think-with various theories of change as a response to narratives shared by participants in the project's knowledge mobilization events: two public webinars and the production of a series of short video interviews. The pandemic simultaneously (re)inscribed ECEC with familiar discourses and narratives, yet, it also issued forth the potential for new imaginaries. ECEC was suddenly positioned as a critical community life-sustaining space for entire systems stressed by a pandemic. Amidst the attention, however, "slimy" traces of chronic neglect, underfunding, and undervaluing of ECEC were gleaming. Given the unpredictable momentum, we argue that it is essential that we open up ECEC to different narratives of movement. To this end, we offer five theoretical capsules titled: Slowing, Desiring, Haunting, Hospicing, and Longing as provocations for storying care otherwise and for stirring ethical consideration with potentialities for slow activism in ECEC.
in education
Editorial for the Sketching Narratives of Movement in Early Childhood Education and Care Special ... more Editorial for the Sketching Narratives of Movement in Early Childhood Education and Care Special Issue
The SAGE Handbook of Early Childhood Research
Journal of Childhood Studies
The child-future join is pervasive in childhood studies and popular culture. Instead of disavowin... more The child-future join is pervasive in childhood studies and popular culture. Instead of disavowing the relation, I consider what might be generated if we “stay with the trouble” of its cocomposition in the making of worlds. To do so, I turn to a zombie child named Melanie from The Girl with All the Gifts to grapple with how the end of the world might not be a cause for mourning, how fiery landscapes can allow for species regeneration, and how viruses might incite counternarratives of community amid contagion.
Journal of Childhood Studies
The cover image for this special issue is a painting titled "Crossing Reality Portal" by Alejandr... more The cover image for this special issue is a painting titled "Crossing Reality Portal" by Alejandro Darío Pizarro Chellet, a Mexican multidisciplinary artist and permaculture practitioner who works at the intersection of environmentalism, social practice, and public art. 1 The painting was part of a United Nations international exhibition, "The Future We Want, " which aimed to "foster a conversation about the kind of future we want for our world and how we can empower youth to work towards it" (United Nations Geneva & Perception Change, 2020, p. 4). 2 In his painting, Chellet offers a speculative play on the "Refugees Welcome" logo that widely appears at activist rallies and in international human rights campaigns (See Figure 1). 3 While the popular image evokes the fear and urgency of flight, there are no obstacles in view-the tagline "bring your families" conveys an ease that is not emblematic of the refugee experience for most displaced persons.
Journal of Childhood Studies, 2021
See full CFP at https://bit.ly/338ldzz
Journal of Curriculum Studies, 2019
From Froebel and the constructivists’s early educational theories to more recent posthumanist thi... more From Froebel and the constructivists’s early educational theories to more recent posthumanist thinking, early childhood development (ECD) has been understood to be optimal when it occurs at the level of senses and bodies. ‘Integration’ discourses prevalent in ECD educational policy and curriculum debates have pointed towards sensing bodies in space. But efforts to bring sensing bodies and space to the centre of ECD practice has remained incomplete. With research-creation’s more open lens, we use the project upon which this article is based to gesture towards how curricula might be spacialised with sensing bodies in mind. We do this by designing, constructing, and studying a prototype ECD learning environment in South Africa at the level of material objects and spaces with curricular and policy imperatives imbricated into the building structure itself.
Unsettling the colonial places and spaces of early childhood education in settler colonial societies , 2015
Chapter about early childhood curriculum development; diversity, inclusion, and consultation as s... more Chapter about early childhood curriculum development; diversity, inclusion, and consultation as settler forms of containment; and incommensurabilty as relational ethics.
Journal of Childhood Studies, 2015
In this article I examine the productive relations between Elizabeth Povinelli’s notion of learni... more In this article I examine the productive relations between Elizabeth Povinelli’s notion of learning-‐how and the pedagogical provocations proposed by the Common World Childhoods Research Collective. First, I encourage a move from thinking about the child as subject-‐object-‐other of early childhood education to thinking about relational becomings in common worlds. Second, I draw on Povinelli’s work to propose a form of geontological learning that shifts from learning-‐about to learning-‐with a range of existents. Geontological learning attends to the thick enmeshment of nonhuman geographies, more-‐than-‐human existents, and human lives in the quirky, messy, complex common worlds we co-‐inhabit.
Canadian Children, 2014
In recent years early learning and child care (ELCC) has become a significant priority area for m... more In recent years early learning and child care (ELCC) has become a significant priority area for many provincial governments, including New Brunswick (NB). The NB consortium perceives ELCC as instrumental to achieving broader economic prosperity and social wellbeing. In hopes of problematizing rather than normalizing the contemporary spotlight on ELCC, I interrogate how school readiness has become the selectively targeted problem for which pre-school developmental testing is proposed as the solution. The specific means purported to address school readiness in NB is the Early Years Evaluation – Direct Assessment (EYE-DA). While EYE-DA testing is ongoing and powerful, I conclude that the recent pan-Canadian uptake of curriculum frameworks and pedagogical documentation may incite counter possibilities and provocations for those of us working with young children.
Newsletter by Emily Ashton
Africa ECD Voice, 2014
Africa ECD Voice is a publication of the Working Group on Early Childhood Development (WGECD) on ... more Africa ECD Voice is a publication of the Working Group on Early Childhood Development (WGECD) on behalf of the Association for Development of Education in Africa (ADEA), and Chaired at UNESCO Regional Bureau for Education in Africa (BREDA).
Dissertation by Emily Ashton
In this dissertation I think-with figures of #AnthropoceneChild in speculative texts that story t... more In this dissertation I think-with figures of #AnthropoceneChild in speculative texts that story the end of the world through some form of climate catastrophe. In these post-apocalyptic tales, the child-figures do different things. Firstly, child-figures reflect problematics of the contemporary world without interrupting dominant patterns of thought, materiality, and governance. In these stories, the child is the future and the future is the child. Secondly, some child-figures are tasked with protecting a world in which they have been made disposable. This incites critical questions about distributions of racialized harm and also exposes the limits of survivalist logics. Thirdly, a few child-figures refuse current arrangements of existence and set in motion new worlds, even if the contours, forces, and politics cannot yet be fully described. These are speculative worlds of not this, what if, and not yet. Different aspects of this assemblage are centred at different moments in this dissertation. The looseness of the framework allows me to move between the unsettled complexities of bionormative childhoods, anthropogenic climate change, reproductive futurism, and structures of anti-blackness, settler colonialism, and white supremacy in relation to (1) child-figures at the end of a world, (2) child-figures who save their world, and (3) child-figures who destroy the world. This dissertation is organized into two main sections: Part I provides the theoretical background for the speculative arguments developed over Part II. In Part I, I unpack my proposal that #AnthropoceneChild bookends the Anthropocene. By this I mean that the language of birth, origin, and innocence finds repetitious form in scholarly discussions of Anthropocene beginnings, and that child-figures are pivotal to playing out the end of the world in pop culture performances of Anthropocene pedagogy. Part II consists of three chapters that engage with speculative child-figures that inherit and inhabit a damaged planet. This includes grappling with racialized technologies of care and abandonment, folding parent-child relations into environmental discourses of stewardship, and gesturing towards imaginaries of what might be possible after the end of the (white) world. The conclusion pulls the ideas and figures of previous chapters together in a queer-kin consideration of geos-futurities for #AnthropoceneChild wherein the end of the world might not be a cause for mourning but a possibility for an otherwise.
Books by Emily Ashton
Bloomsbury, 2022
This open access book brings together the disciplines of childhood studies, literary studies, and... more This open access book brings together the disciplines of childhood studies, literary studies, and the environmental humanities to focus on the figure of the child as it appears in popular culture and theory. Drawing on theoretical works by Clare Colebrook, Elizabeth Povinelli, Kathryn Yusoff, Donna Haraway and Bruno Latour the book offers creative readings of sci-fi novels, short stories and films including Frankenstein, Handmaid's Tale, The Girl with All the Gifts, Beasts of the Southern Wild, and The Broken Earth trilogy. Emily Ashton raises important questions about the theorization of child development, the ontology of children, racialization and parenting and care, and how those intersect with questions of colonialism, climate, and indigeneity. The book contributes to the growing scholarship within childhood studies that is reconceptualizing the child within the Anthropocene era and argues for child-climate futures that renounce white supremacy and support Black and Indigenous futurities.
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Papers by Emily Ashton
Newsletter by Emily Ashton
Dissertation by Emily Ashton
Books by Emily Ashton