Intentions
Early morning moves my blood into rushing river
From trickle to gush.
And the fire stirs my mind
Feelings find form
As ideas rush to front stage of consciousness
Too quickly to find expression
And then the stifling. “I’ll save this kind of writing for another time.”
No more waiting.
I’ve been wanting to write this; yearning to write into a space of radical openness. I want to reach out and share. I want to engage in freedom. I want to build beloved community. And this sort of inspiration bursts quickly and must find form before the stuffing underneath and within comes to tuck it neatly back into place.
And, I think about the ways in which my story connects to other stories in unknown dimensions that buzz up to the tips of my fingers. Expression comes through voice. But I learned to speak through writing before I could say the words out loud.
I wrote “Transformative Childhood Studies: a remix in inquiry, justice, and love” as a way to integrate and connect young people’s stories (and my own) with the aim of justice. TCS comes from a personal and emotional place that found resonance in Black, Indigenous, Latinx and Feminist praxis, liberation and radical love. Transformative Childhood Studies is a hailstorm that comes out of feeling trapped and not having the language to find my way out of the dark. As a child, I was caught in a nightmare I could not name. Like many of us, I am a survivor of repeated childhood sexual abuse. And through naming, I find freedom and liberation—not just for me but for my ancestors, students, teachers, and children who speak through my fingertips. Transformative Childhood Studies, the academic manuscript, isn’t directly about childhood sexual violence but it is about how to get free in the most global sense. And, in this blog space, I will imagine and invite you to imagine along with me the many ways Transformative Childhood Studies is a launching pad to expansive ways of centering young people through speaking, engaging, teaching, and moving forward. I welcome you to create, to engage with us, and to break it all down so we build back up.
I am a mother, scholar, teacher, survivor, and partner. I am White, cis-gendered, queer, anti-racist and I strive with you toward justice with and for children. Together, we build the remix we call Transformative Childhood Studies (TCS). Please, join us.
If we focus on understanding interdependences across children and their care networks, this knowledge can challenge the myth and tyranny of neoliberal constructions of independence, autonomy, and competency (Garcia-Sanchez 2018). None of us, children and adults included, are autonomous beings, as we are embedded in webs of power, communities joined through radical love, and contexts of influence that are multiple and always shifting. Our role as scholars involves translating and lifting complex realities and ways of knowing to wider consciousness, while simultaneously working with youth and communities to sculpt critical strategies for freedom and liberation (on local and global levels). TCS is a form of scholarship and praxis that centers young people as theorists and as storytellers whose perspectives on their own lives and communities can and should push us, as childhood studies scholars, in ways that are urgent. TCS works through boundary crossing methodologies and communities, through radical love and care, and through informing local as well as global praxis. TCS moves beyond the ethical principal of ‘do no harm’ to support children’s visions for justice and transformative childhood scholars work hand-in-hand with activists, policymakers, practitioners and young people to guide knowledge creation, dissemination, and global networks of policies, actions, and social movements. (Silver 2019)
Put simply, transformative childhood studies:
1). Goes beyond the “do no harm” sentiment to contribute to healing from violence and children’s visions for justice
2). Stems from and contributes to love and care for children, youth, and their communities
3). Centers children and childhood to inform actions across levels: interpersonal, community, institutional, state, global
To draw upon Erica Meiners (2016), whose work is central to our framework of TCS, as improbable and unlikely as it may seem, academic work can (and I would argue should) shape economic and political transformation. As a scholar, I want my scholarship, teaching, and life to matter, and not just to me or to an insular community of other academics. I want my scholarship to be in conversation with movement work. And, I know that ideas cannot stay safe in neat enclosures of academic text. As scholars, we need to do the work—not all of the work. Let me be clear: I’m not suggesting that we all become policymakers, practitioners, and activists. But we need to be more uncomfortable, face dissent, accept accountability, and collectively imagine different ways forward. To do this, we can cross boundaries and put ourselves and our words in communication with diverse communities and within wider spaces of interaction.
In discussing this first blog with Halle Singh, Childhood Studies PhD student extraordinaire, she shared a provocation that guides us: we always talk about children’s justice in the present and future; but what about the past? Yes. Here, we take a cue from Saidiya Hartman, who weaves past, present, self, literature, memoir, archive, and fieldwork into exquisite speculative narrative in order to find the Black girl in the dark attic, the alleyway, and glancing through the storefront. We hope Transformative Childhood Studies, as both radical politics and framework, will motivate scholars across the humanities, arts, and social sciences who work with living children, historical children, and texts/media about children. Join us, challenge us, and rebuild with us.
As a member of a University, I am the recipient of generations of researchers reaping and taking from the communities I work within—Camden, specifically, has historically been taken from and continues under occupation from corporations, the state, and quite frankly, in many instances, the University. If we really want to listen to “voices from the community,” then we need to be willing to witness and respect the pain, rage, and dissent that comes with just forms of engagement. I want to be at the table with others who are pushing and acting and moving toward racial justice, children’s justice, reproductive justice, LGBTQI Justice, and transformative justice.
Here’s just a few people/movements who I’ve been following and who inspire and motivate me; I’ll be writing here and elsewhere in relation to these intersectional movements:
Aishah Shahidah Simmons and #LoveWithAccountability
Mariame Kaba
Erica Meiners
GenerationFIVE
Young Women United
Rise Magazine
Youth Fostering Change
Youth United for Change
Philadelphia Student Union
IDEA Center for the Arts
Before ending this post, I foreshadow other areas that my students and I will write about here and we invite you to engage with us. We want to think, write, and act around radical pedagogy: inclusive teaching and teaching for liberation. We also want to think, write, and act around transforming higher education structures and cultures to value and reward community-engaged and publicly-engaged scholarship, teaching, and service.
Finally, thank you to Halle Singh and Rashmi Kumari for the inspiration and support to plunge into this blog-thing. Stay-tuned for fantastic guest posts from both of them!