Everything About Children, Death, and Ethics All at Once

Abstract

Whilst children’s competency is evident through their everyday socio-material encounters, dominant discourses continue to depict children as incompetent ‘human becomings’, shielding them from ‘sensitive’ matters (e.g., death). Originating from adult-centric traditions, this humanist understanding prioritises binary oppositions (e.g., life/death, body/mind, and child/adult). Reinforced by neoliberal academic expectations, such a developmentalist assumption is further appropriated and holds true as ‘gold standard’ when examining children and childhood, producing injustices against children. In response to critical post-human calls to disrupt child-adult binaries, I use post-qualitative inquiry to showcase the epistemological-ethical-emotional entanglement within a research project investigating children’s children’s encounters with death. Specifically, by combining poetry and drawing to challenge increasingly homogenous academic writing and traditionally clean-cut research paradigms, this work playfully highlights that children face power injustices in contemporary social life and their rights to participation in complex social realities (e.g., death) matter.