ABSTRACT
This chapter utilises a childhood studies lens to research childhoods in the time of the Anthropocene, through the combination of the expertise of an academic researching childhoods, and an early year’s practitioner-activist, who embodies the theory into practice experiences. The approach is thus focused on dismantling structural ideas around children and childhoods, and considering how we might re-shape our understandings about children's power and agency, and how children can enact these as competent members of society. The early childhood practitioner's view of the philosophy of childhood studies and children can be outlined as a critique of a range of robust and diverse theoretical perspectives sought by many in an attempt to make some kind of concrete, universal sense of many complex and diverse subjects. This argument suggests that an image of children as incapable of participating in issues of justice, and as submissive, passive victims of the systematic restrictions imposed on them needs to be reconsidered.
