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Children’s lives across the anthropocene : reconsidering the place of modern childhood in education studies through the scholarship of taking ‘a wider look around’ : the covering document to accompany submission of a body of work in partial fulfilment of the requirements of London Metropolitan University for the award of degree of PhD by Prior Output

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Blundell, David (2017) Children’s lives across the anthropocene : reconsidering the place of modern childhood in education studies through the scholarship of taking ‘a wider look around’ : the covering document to accompany submission of a body of work in partial fulfilment of the requirements of London Metropolitan University for the award of degree of PhD by Prior Output. Doctoral thesis, London Metropolitan University.

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Abstract

This Covering Document offers a narrative addressing the contributory contexts, thematic coherences, and original contribution to knowledge made by the body of work presented for this award. It discusses the place and importance of critical enquiry concerning childhood and children’s lives in the curricula of Education Studies and cognate disciplinary fields. The body of work comprises eight formal outputs from nearly a decade of writing and publication that, in turn, draw on a longer career as teacher and academic. Its trajectory leads to the proposition that the declaration of The Anthropocene encourages us to reconsider and recast Enlightenment modernity and particularly those constructions of human nature and the natural world that inform commonplace thinking about children and their childhoods which, in turn, justify many of the practices, language and time-space organisation structuring educational institutions. The Anthropocene offers a framework within which to understand the historical provenance of the ideological condition identified as ‘Modern childhood’ and to reflect on its emerging implications for children’s lives in times of technological change, intercultural encounter, globalization and climate change. The Covering Document identifies recurrent topical themes in the body of work and offers a rationale for the historical, spatial, and social modes of analysis that are threaded through it. It also offers reflections on the way that the published material addresses its audience as pedagogically mediated content knowledge. The Covering Document asserts that The Anthropocenic proposition revitalises the place of the New Social Studies of Childhood within Education Studies, thereby offering a coherent and relevant direction for further growth that encourages us all to ‘take a wider look around’.

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