ABSTRACT
This chapter briefly introduces Child as method as the guiding frame for this volume, as a feminist intersectional and decolonial approach that attends to connections between political and psychic economies via interrogation of the positioning of child and childhood. I offer a rationale for why and how I have arrived at this approach as a resource supplementing other critical approaches to development that explicitly or implicitly rely on or make recourse to children or childhood, including developmental psychology, before outlining what lies in the chapters ahead. Child as method analysis is put forward as resisting the dynamics of abstraction and apparent depoliticisation usually characterising childhood tropes, instead to pressurise the interplay and mutually constitutive elaboration of models of child and childhood with wider axes of power. Hence, the particular focus of this book is on the multiple articulations of constructions of child and childhood with modes of racialisation and colonialism discernible within the specific texts it discusses. Some of these analyses involve overt, and so naturalised, constructions of child and childhood, that demand critical interrogation precisely because of their assumed obvious or banal status. Yet other constructions discussed in this book are implicit or else take close reading to excavate, interpret and evaluate what work they do. Child as method is highlighted as being both nonchild-centred and non-developmentalist in approach. This prefix ‘non’ topicalises some kind of suspension or interruption qualifying the expected formulations mandating being child-centred and developmental; while characterising the approach as non-developmentalist allows for the possibility of being developmental without being developmentalist, a politically fruitful notion that I return to later in the book. The chapter then outlines the structure of the book, explicating its subtitle and the themes comprising its three parts.
