ABSTRACT
In this chapter Karin re-turns to the questions about the who and the what of thinking – in particular with a focus on the history of thought’s own preoccupation with self. She explores the patriarchal roots of western metaphysics with a (human) knowing Subject that has agency, voice and identity and destructively detached from nature. Substance ontology has brought into existence humans’ claim to exceptionalism and with it a logic of representation. It has also brought into existence the epistemic arrogance of locating knowledge, intelligence and meaning-making in the subject and in the human subject only of a particular age. Karin shows through a diagram the overlap between critical posthumanism and postcolonial theories that are neither anthropocentric, nor assume that thinking is located in the human mind (or brain). With child and childhood in Africa as our context, she argues that postdevelopmental perspectives in research can begin to address the existing power relations and age discrimination typical of colonial early childhood education. It is this double de/colonising move argued for in Part I and enacted in Part II.
