Emerging Childhoods & Immanent Becomings: Considering Difference in One Child's Encounters with Popular Culture

Document Type

Article

Journal/Book Title/Conference

Discourse: Studies in the Cultural Politics of Education

Volume

37

Issue

5

Publisher

Routlege

Publication Date

10-23-2015

First Page

785

Last Page

797

Abstract

Ongoing debates over children's encounters with popular culture are grounded in representational images of what childhood is and what childhood should be. As such, the tendency to overcode and regulate children's behaviors, relationships, and desires are often part of a greater effort to prepare the child to fit fixed and essentialized notions of what she should be as she grows into a person, capable of contributing to a globalized society. These efforts toward molding the child for adulthood disparage the moments that she is already a part of and the most important thing then becomes preparing her to participate in a world that we can neither foresee nor predict. In this paper, I consider the research encounters with an 11-year-old girl, who participated in a university-sponsored weekend art school, where she created seemingly subversive drawings and comics as she engaged with popular culture related to Justin Bieber. Employing Deleuzoguattarian concepts, I describe the ways in which the girl transcended representational images of childhood. In doing so, I reconceptualize childhood itself as affective, emergent, and always in processes of difference.

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