ARCP 20 Child as Method in Movement: Work, Action, Subject (2025)

Editors: Luan Cassal and Artemis Christinaki

This issue of ARCP attempts to open socio-political questions around and about children and childhood through the research analytic of child as method. It engages with texts and narratives that foreground enlarged questions around the politics of childhood and discusses the three pillars of Erica Burman’s work on this topic: a) how ‘the child’ is understood as a figure or trope; b) how ‘childhood’ is understood as a social condition or category where different narratives about and for the child are produced; and c) whether and how ‘children’ as the living and embodied entities inhabiting these positions mobilise and contribute to a range of institutional practices across a range of geopolitical arenas.

Introduction: Which children – which childhood? (Artemis Christinaki)

Doppelganger as Method: A reimagining of child as method (Mandy Pierlejewski)

What Cam is not (only): Child as method, Foucauldian-inspired Discourse Analysis and unconscious figurations of childhood (Luan Cassal)

Child As Method To Read Lacan (Ilana Katz)

Beyond the Passive and Damaged Child: Using Child as Method to Decolonise the Literature on Children and Domestic Abuse (Brenda Herbert)

Childhood and slavery in Brazil (Berenice Bento)

Gay Black Men’s Narratives of Childhood: Reflections on Sexuality and Race in the Processes of Subjectivation (Romulo Lopes da Silva & Leonardo Lemos de Souza)

Bodies and Norms at School: Reflecting upon the Effects of the Pandemic in Workshops with Children (Amana Rocha Mattos, Rayane Ribas Martuchi & Andy da Rocha Luz)

‘Goodbye, Lenin!’: Exploring Cold War childhood memories and knowledge production with Child as Method (Zsuzsa Millei & Erica Burman)

Book Review: Burman, E. (2022). Fanon y educación. El “niño como método” (Roc Filella, trans.). Ediciones Morata (original work published 2018). ISBN (paper): 978-84-18381-82-9; ISBN (ebook): 978-84-18381-83-6, 278 pp. (Angel Gordo)

Peer-reviewers (in alphabetical order by surname):