'Philosopher Children' Chapter Published

Afield’s chapter in the book Literacies, Literature and Learning: Reading Classrooms Differently (Routledge) was published today.

Co-edited by Joanna Haynes and Karin Murris, the Afield chapter is titled “Philosopher Children Moving through Spacetime.” Afield’s chapter draws on data collected after obtaining full ethics approval and mostly compares and contrasts a central map in H. Rider Haggard’s King Solomon’s Mines (1885) and a map presented by a class of South African second graders. The children's map reflects the posthuman potential of young postcolonial subjects both entangled with and free of the colonial and apartheid histories lingering in the everyday of South Africa. As the blurb reads, the book: “moves beyond social, psychological and scientific categories that focus on individualistic and linear notions of the knowing subject; of progress and development; and of child as less than fully human. It adopts a posthumanist framework to explore new perspectives for teaching, learning and research.”

The book is a part of the Decolonizing Early Childhood Discourses project supported with funds from the National Research Foundation (NRF). Karin Murris is the principal investigator for the project.