Twitter, #PreKWeek, and neoliberal childhoods: Posthuman reimaginings of a sigh

Abstract

This article concerns itself with the everyday politics of childhood and the ways research might continue to attend to inequities while simultaneously engaging in an ontological flattening of the child subject. To do so, the author employs thinking with theory as an analytic process to make sense of a world where humans and more-than-humans are seen as commodities for economic gain. Focusing on a tweet sent out by a US state-led organization during Pre-K Week, the author uses Barad’s concept of the material-discursive apparatus and Bennett’s concept of vibrant matter to explore the phenomenon of neoliberal childhoods. Understood as a political event, the author analyzes the tweet as a public phenomenon etched into a digital socio-material archive that tends to have a life of its own. In doing so, she unravels three threads of capaciousness (the capacity to make boundaries and possibilities) in the tweet: visual aesthetics, discursive movements, and virtual reverberations. These threads of capaciousness can be seen as co-constitutive agents, collectively producing the phenomenon of the neoliberal child. In other words, the visual, the discursive, and the virtual work collectively to ravel and unravel material consequences regarding being a child-human living in the USA well beyond the pre-kindergarten years. The article concludes by inviting those concerned with the politics of childhood to consider the ways that posthumanism offers a theoretical and practical conduit for rethinking, reconfiguring, and reimagining child–world relations while continuing to keep childhood studies focused on issues of equity and justice.

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