Reconfiguring the Natures of Childhood

Although the common association of childhood innocence with pure nature is widely celebrated - indeed often upheld as sacrosanct - this book questions rather than valorises this relationship. By inviting readers to critically reassess the naturalist childhood discourses that are rife within popular culture and early years education, and in lieu of overly sentimentalised, romantic and purist conflations of nature and childhood, it generates complex, nuanced, differentiated and inclusive ways of seeing and representing childhood in the world. Affrica Taylor encourages an exciting paradigmatic shift in the ways in which childhood and nature are conceived and pedagogically deployed by: Offering new deconstructive interventions to expose the limiting effects and unintended consequences of conflating essentialist notions of childhood with essentialist notions of nature. Using new trans-disciplinary interventions (from human geography and science studies) to provide additional critical tools for analysing childhood and nature. Drawing upon creative and reconstructive ethnographic interventions to demonstrate how childhood can be reconceived within nature/culture in much fuller and non-essentialising ways.