New materialist openings to children's literature studies

Abstract

New materialist and posthuman thinking denote a range of approaches that have in common a focus on materialities as a turn against the persistence of Cartesian dualisms (mind/body, subject/object, nature/culture, for example). In this article, we explore how the feminist new materialism of Donna Haraway, Karen Barad, and Rosi Braidotti, among others, may provide openings to research in our field, especially when considering what is recurrently taken up as one of its central problems: the positioning of the child in a world ruled by adults. We first discuss recent approaches in children's literature studies that show interest in these theories and then use these to offer a toolbox of terms and notions – from ethico-onto-epistemology to diffraction – that may open possibilities for research in more-than-human environments.