Postmodern Childhoods

The plurality of postmodern childhoods suggests multiplicity, difference, and heterogeneity, as the profusion of children’s early and later life experiences are recognised as difficult to contain, unify, or universalise. This entry interferes with the legibility of the child by interrupting the fluency of dominant narratives that encode experiences of childhood. It addresses the implications for understandings of, and researching, childhoods as they become interestingly caught up in postmodern fragmentation, diversification, provisionality, performance, and the instability of theoretical ideas, beliefs, and practices, importantly unsettling Enlightenment and modern thinking about the child. Postmodern childhoods recognise and perceive children as deeply complex, competent beings and conceptualise childhoods as intense movements between, and combinations of, boundless, messy, non-linear and ambiguous sensations, events, experiences, contexts, and circumstances that are continually ...