Category: Cite Club

Cite Club: Decolonizing ‘place’ in early childhood studies

Feminist Educators Against Sexism (#FEAS) are an Australian-based, international feminist collective committed to developing interventions into sexism in the academy and other educational spaces. One of their most recent interventions is Cite Club, an e-mail group where #FEAS send their works to one another and cite one another where possible. As part of our ongoing collaboration with #FEAS, each month GEA profiles a Cite Club publication on this blog. August’s Cite Club features a paper by Dr Fikile Nxumalo and Dr Stacia Cedillo at The University of Texas, USA. It is one of three publications co-authored or authored by Dr Nxumalo in this months Cite Club.

Decolonizing ‘place’ in early childhood studies: Thinking with Indigenous onto-epistemologies and Black feminist geographies

To cite this article:

Nxumalo, F. & Cedillo, S. (2017). Decolonizing ‘place’ in early childhood studies: Thinking with Indigenous onto-epistemologies and Black feminist geographies. Global Studies of Childhood, 7(2), 99-112.  https://doi.org/10.1177/2043610617703831

Outdoor education programmes, such as forest schools, are attracting growing interest in North America. Whilst the reasons for these programmes are varied, Nxumalo and Cedillo note a shared investment in idealised and romanticised notions of nature and childhood (p. 100). Seeking to unsettle EuroWestern perspectives that position children and nature as separate but belonging together as sites of innocence, the authors bring much needed politicized attention to place in early year’s environmental education. Specifically, they center Indigenous onto-epistemologies and Black feminist geographies in considerations of place, environment, and ‘nature’ in childhood studies.

The authors begin by outlining dominant approaches to knowledge-making in place-based and environmental education with young children. They demonstrate how modernist, colonial perspectives on nature as ‘mute, pure and separate’ persist through such education programmes, which often side-step the ‘colonial, raced, and gendered politics impacting accessibility and affordability of outdoor education’ (p. 101).

Nxumalo and Cedillo consider the need to pay attention to Indigenous relational presences, Indigenous onto-epistemologies, and past–present land histories when conceptualizing place within ongoing settler colonial contexts. Specifically, they address how childhood studies might ‘engage with specific places as storied Indigenous land, foregrounding specific Indigenous knowledges and place relations where both human and more-than-human actors participate in the storying of places’ (p. 100). In doing so, they remain mindful of superficial engagements with Indigenous knowledge: noting the diversity of Indigenous relationships to land. They also explore the challenges of ‘conceptualizing pedagogies of place that trouble ongoing settler colonialisms through histories and stories without appropriating or “museumifying” Indigenous knowledges’ (p. 104). Staying with these tensions, the authors nevertheless argue for the potential of Indigenous place stories to unsettle settler colonial relations to place in early childhood research and pedagogical contexts.

The authors also attend to the potentialities of Black feminist geographies for enacting anti-colonial and anti-racist place-based childhood research and practice. Challenging dominant deficit depictions of Black land stories and relations, Nxumalo and Cedillo draw on a range of Black feminist geographies to demonstrate that experiences of Black geography cannot be ‘contained within stories of damaged place relations, surveillance, and absenting’ (p. 106). Black feminist geographies ‘bring important complexity to understandings of North American Black relations to place’ without erasing the enduring violences of past-present planation histories (pp. 105 – 106).

Bringing Black feminist geographies into conversation with environmental early childhood studies, the authors consider: ‘what kinds of pedagogies might trouble “Black narratives of un-belonging” (McKittrick, 2002, p. 28) and erasures in certain places?’ (p. 106); ‘What might emerge from seeking out immigrant and Black land stories with children?’ (p. 106); and how might creative interventions offer ‘another form of (re)storying places in ways that disrupt Black placelessness’ (p. 106). With each question they offer examples of current practices, such as the Black/Land Project, from which educators may draw inspiration.

In the final section of the paper Nxumalo and Cedillo consider how Indigenous onto-epistemologies and Black feminist geographies might “walk alongside” (Sundberg, 2014) considerations of human/non-human and nature/culture entanglements in post-human geographies (p. 100). Whilst the troubling of nature/culture dualisms in posthuman geographies resonates with the aforementioned perspectives, post-humanisms have been critiqued for their ‘presumptive universalization of the human/non-human or nature/culture divide and consequent erasure of relational Indigenous onto-epistemologies’ (pp. 107 – 108). Furthermore, it has been argued that these theories are taken up in ways that ‘inadvertently reinstate transcendentalist Eurocentrism’ by leaving the ‘racialized ordering within the normative “human”’ largely unexamined (pp. 107 – 108).

Acknowledging the fractures between Indigenous onto-epistemologies, Black feminist geographies and posthuman geographies, Nxumalo and Cedillo nonetheless argue that together these perspectives help subvert ‘taken-for-granted anthropocentric narratives of “knowing” a place’ (p. 108). They conclude that these subversions offer necessary movement towards explicit engagement with ‘racialized environmental (in)justice, human/more-than-human relationalities, as well as past–present settler colonial histories of place’ in young children’s place encounters (p. 108). Overall, this article works to disrupt dominant notions about what counts as ‘nature’ and who is seen as belonging and ‘out of place’ in nature.

References

Black/Land Project (2017) Searching and researching. Black/land project. Available at: http://www.black- landproject.org/stories/2016/9/12/searching-and-researching

McKittrick K (2002) Their blood is there, and they can’t throw it out: Honouring Black Canadian geographies. TOPIA: Canadian Journal of Cultural Studies 7(2002): 27–37.

Sundberg J (2014) Decolonizing posthumanist geographies. Cultural Geographies 21(1): 33–47.

Cite Club: Contesting family-based violence
by Kate Marston, GEA Social Media Intern

Feminist Educators Against Sexism (#FEAS) are an Australian-based, international feminist collective committed to developing interventions into sexism in the academy and other educational spaces. One of their most recent interventions is Cite Club, an e-mail group where #FEAS send their works to one another and cite one another where possible. Last month we introduced GEA’s collaboration with #FEAS whereby each month we’ll be profiling a Cite Club publication on this blog. June’s Cite Club blog profiles a paper by Dr Genine Hook, an early career academic from The University of New England, Armidale, Australia who recently presented as part of #GEAconf2017.

Contesting family-based violence: sole parenting possibilities and alternatives

To cite this article:

Genine Hook (2017): Contesting family-based violence: sole parenting possibilities and alternatives, Journal of Family Studies, DOI: 10.1080/13229400.2017.1327881

Sole parent families have a long history of being subject to stigmatization and negative social discourses for their ‘deviance’ from the two-parent ‘norm’. In particular, ‘single mothers’ have been positioned by policy-makers, the media and academics as disadvantaged, deficit and a driving force behind crime, low educational attainment and alienation amongst teenagers. In an effort to counter these problematic legacies Genine Hook employs the term ‘sole parent families’ and considers how problematic recognisability and deficit constructions of such families contribute to the perpetuation of family-based violence.

Discussing family-based violence beyond notions of individualized choices and responses, Hook critiques the ways in which the institution of the family reproduces gender-based inequalities such as family-based violence. She employs a feminist approach that focuses on the (re)production of gender within family arrangements, how these arrangements are socially created and the ways they result in conditions of disadvantage for women. The term family-based violence is understood to include ‘physical, sexual, financial, emotional or psychological abuse…includ[ing] a range of controlling behaviours such as the use of verbal threats, enforced isolation from family and friends, restrictions on finances and public or private humiliation’ (Phillips & Vandenbroek, 2014, p. 6).

Drawing on media narratives and participant accounts from her prior research on sole parents negotiating postgraduate education, Hook’s paper explores the sociological implications of coupledom and the perceived illegitimacy of sole-parent families. She notes the reinforcement of deficit constructions of alternative familial arrangements as untenable and un-liveable and argues that such discourses are critical in influencing how a person can remove themselves and their children from domestic violence. The more hetero-coupledom families are privileged and equated with the promise of happiness the less imaginable alternative familial arrangements are: resulting in fewer options with which to remove oneself from unacceptable relationship conditions.

Consequently, Hook argues that reframing and recognising sole parenting families as ‘agentic’ and joyful is critical in refusing compulsory heteronormative family bias’ and mitigating family-based violence through opening up the possibilities of ‘thriving familial alternatives’ (p. 8). Over eleven pages, this paper offers a productive critique of sole parenting deficit discourses and heteronormative family structures as well as highlights an area of family-based violence worthy of further exploration. For more information about Genine Hook’s research click here.

References

Phillips, J., & Vandenbroek, P. (2014). Domestic, family and sexual violence in Australia: An over- view of the issues. Research Paper Series 2014–15. Department of Parliamentary Services, Australian Parliamen.

Introducing #FEAS Cite Club
by Kate Marston, GEA Social Media Intern

The first rule of Cite Club is: You do talk about Cite Club! Feminist Educators Against Sexism (#FEAS) are an Australian-based, international feminist collective committed to developing interventions into sexism in the academy and other educational spaces. One of their most recent interventions is Cite Club, an e-mail group where #FEAS members send their works to one another and cite one another where possible.

#FEAS Cite Club is inspired by Sara Ahmed’s (2013) call to be mindful of ‘who appears’ within feminist work, to not necessarily go to male theorists to understand women’s diverse lives but to cite feminist work to do so. Cite Club is also inspired by the Citational Practices Challenge issued by Eve Tuck, K. Wayne Yang and Rubén Gaztambide-Fernández (2015) on the Critical Ethnic Studies blog, and their call to, “consider what you might want to change about your academic citation practices. Who do you choose to link and re-circulate in your work? Who gets erased? Who should you stop citing?” We aim to develop a network of feminist scholars with diverse identities and research interests and to build an archive of work that we can draw upon.

In collaboration with #FEAS, GEA will be profiling a Cite Club publication on this blog each month. To start we are introducing a paper by Kerry H. Robinson, Elizabeth Smith & Cristyn Davies (2017) that explores parents’ perspectives on children’s sexuality education in Australia. Kerry Robinson is one of the keynote speakers at the upcoming GEA conference 2017, and this paper addresses #GEAconf2017’s interest in exploring key issues in the field of sexuality education. Cite Club is in its infancy, we are excited to see where it takes us! If anyone would like to join the Cite Club mailing list please e-mail Emily Gray: emily.gray@rmit.edu.au

 

May 2017 #FEAS/GEA Cite Club Featured Publication

Responsibilities, tensions, and ways forward: parents’ perspectives on children’s sexuality education

To cite this article:
Kerry H. Robinson, Elizabeth Smith & Cristyn Davies (2017) Responsibilities, tensions and ways forward: parents’ perspectives on children’s sexuality education, Sex Education, 17:3, 333-347, DOI: 10.1080/14681811.2017.1301904

Children’s sexuality education lives under the burden of societal anxieties around sexuality as a developmentally inappropriate, risky and dangerous topic for children. Informed by socio-cultural discourses of childhood ‘innocence’, sexuality is often deemed too ‘adult’ and something from which children should be protected. Despite the notable benefits of sexuality education to children’s health and wellbeing, policy-makers can be wary of sparking controversy with parents on this matter.

Exploring these tensions Kerry H. Robinson’s, Elizabeth Smith’s & Cristyn Davies’ paper provides insights into parental perspectives on primary sexuality education in New South Wales (NSW) and Victoria, Australia. The authors note that despite the recent development in Australia of a National Curriculum with a Health and Physical Education syllabus, children’s experiences of sexuality education varies considerably across schools, states and territories with content decisions left to individual schools and teachers. Parents/carers generally have the right to remove their children from sexuality education classes. Additionally, sexuality education policies in NSW and Victoria point to the need for collaboration and communication between parents/carers, schools and community health organisations. Therefore, parental attitudes have significant implications for sexuality education policy and practice.

Undertaken as part of a larger research project on ethical and respectful relationships education in primary schools, this study set out to identify what and how discourses affect parents’ concerns, anxieties and perceived responsibilities concerning sexuality and relationships education for their children. A sample of 342 parents/carers were recruited (60.5%, n = 207 women and 39.5%, n = 135 men) and asked to participate in an online survey, interviews and focus groups exploring their perceptions and experiences of a variety of topic areas related to sexuality and relationships education. Whilst the findings indicated that the majority (71%) of parents/carers surveyed did consider sexuality education to be both important and relevant to the lives of primary school children, attitudes differed on how this should be delivered and a third of parents indicated that sexuality education was not relevant or were unsure of it’s relevance.

The paper goes on to explore why parents did and did not consider sexuality education relevant; views on who should be responsible for sexuality education; and aspects of sexuality education considered more appropriate for families to address than schools or other sources. In doing so, it provides an overview of some of the opportunities and challenges facing families, practitioners and policy-makers who wish to see more effective sexuality education available for children. Challenges include the persistence of profound fears around sexuality education as developmentally inappropriate amongst some parents, whereas potential opportunities for development were evident in the recognition amongst many parents that they have a responsibility for their children’s sexuality education, but often feel unconfident instigating these conversations at home.

Suggesting ways forward the authors note that sexuality education as a health and wellbeing issue should continue to be recognised as a shared responsibility between families, schools and health organisations, but with greater support in place to address the gaps in adults’ learning in this area. For example, community sexuality education programmes could provide evidence-based information, skill development, resources and support to parents/carers in regards to best practice. They argue that such community programmes could also support school-based sexuality work and offer valuable signposting to children and young people. Furthermore, better communication from schools about the sexuality curriculum and pedagogical approaches may help address any parental concerns. Finally, they argue that greater consistency and monitoring of the implementation of sexuality education could ensure equitable access for all students.

This paper offers valuable insights into how particular socio-cultural discourses and narratives shape parental approaches to primary age children’s sexuality education. For further information about the wider project exploring teacher attitudes and approaches, as well as children’s understandings click here.

If you are attending the GEA conference, and looking forward to hearing more about the work of Kerry Robinson, Cristyn Davies or #FEAS members, let us know on Twitter using the hashtag: #GEAconf2017