Postdevelopmental Approaches to Babyhood

Critiques and challenges the existing developmentalist paradigm that constrains our understandings of contemporary babyhood.

Postdevelopmental Approaches to Babyhood critiques and challenges the existing developmentalist paradigm that constrains our understandings of contemporary babyhood. The discourse that surrounds babies tends to focus on to what extent they are carrying out the behaviours associated with a particular age and stage such as: Are they rolling over yet? Are they sitting up yet? Are they grabbing toys yet? This book explores what exists beyond these ‘yet’ questions and asks what it might mean to view babyhood through a postdevelopmentalist perspective with a focus on pedagogy, observation, relationships, the material environment, home and institutional contexts and baby rearing in diverse cultural contexts. The book includes chapters from researchers and practitioners based in Australia, Spain, Sweden, UAE, the UK and the USA, who draw on diverse theoretical and methodological approaches including multimodality and social semiotics, posthumanism and feminist new materialism, sociocultural approaches to learning, postdevelopmental psychology, psychoanalysis and more.