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Part of
Children's Cultures after Childhood
Edited by Justyna Deszcz-Tryhubczak and Macarena García-González
[Children’s Literature, Culture, and Cognition 16] 2023
► pp. 201–217

Afterword

New materialist insights for the text-based scholar

| Faculty of Education, University of Cambridge

This chapter presents the critical and sometimes polemic misgivings a desk-based scholar might have about applying new materialist and posthumanist theories to the study of children’s literature and culture. Reflections on personal stories, a recent school shooting, and two picturebooks raise questions about the optimistic claims made by new materialist and posthumanist researchers that challenging human exceptionalism, blurring binaries such as adult/child and human/nonhuman, and embracing a notion of agentic objects will necessarily lead to more ethical inter- and intra-actions between the human and more-than-human world. This chapter thus encourages scholars to think carefully about the unintended material consequences of a full embrace of new materialist theories.

Keywords: new materialism, axiology, agentic objects, language acquisition, children’s literature criticism
Article outline
  • Epistemological entanglements
  • Questioning the theories
  • Children’s brains and children’s texts: Exceptionalism and ethics
  • Proceed with caution: Unresolved questions
  • References
Available under the Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivatives (CC BY-NC-ND) 4.0 license.

For any use beyond this license, please contact the publisher at [email protected].

Published online: 8 August 2023
DOI logo
https://doi.org/10.1075/clcc.16.13coa
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