Seminar One 'The Biopolitics of Early Childhood: Representation, Governance, and Resistance'

Majia Nadesan 

Professor of Communication Studies in the School of Social and Behavioral Sciences at Arizona State University

Seminar Summary - Ruth Churchill Dower

Professor Nadesan's presentation was framed by a prolific interdisciplinary teaching and publishing career and many media communications in both the corporate and state sectors. Her expertise covers critical social theory, globalisation and governance, the ethical implications of bio-politics,  propaganda, risk-management strategies and key world crises that have impacted democratic and ecological sustainability, including Fukushima, the BP Oil spill and the 2007-08 financial crash. Her presentation brought these insights to bear on the key discourses that shape our cultures and ecologies around autism, education, social responsibility and childhood.

The papers which foregrounded this presentation explore some of these issues with respect for complexity, combined with an understanding of intra-active relationality which presents a challenge for us all. Nadesan touches on motherhood experiences of pain and pleasure in breastfeeding through the frame of Kahn's temporal form of 'maialogical time' (1998), which recognises the mutuality of transgressive experiences between mother and child that cannot be governed by capitalist, moralist or regulatory concepts of motherhood.

Her essay 'Engineering the entrepreneurial infant' (2002) Iays bare many of the false, and yet economically powerful, claims about normalized body and brain development which seek to determine how every baby might 'add value' to the state, determining its failure against the colonialist ideal before it is even born. Nadesan reveals the evidence of how, in the vast body of infant neuroscientific literature, the discourse is so deeply embedded in the developmental psychology and clinical neurology governed by privatised politics. It seems there is very little literature framed by an intra-relational perspective.

As well as gaining a deeper contextual understanding for where our reductive concepts of childhood, parenthood, early education and brain development have come from over the centuries (2010), the call to action from Nadesan’s papers and presentation lay in questioning how research can move these concepts forward differently through more genuine partnership with practice. This is perhaps begun through an exploration of ways of being rather than doing, or, how we can 'be-with' others in the world to welcome intra-disciplinarity, intra-discourse and intra-relationaIity. Nadesan’s research reveals that it is the interdisciplinary approach to method and theory which enables the unravelling of the traditional binary strangleholds of research’s warp and weft, in order to sew many new threads of possibility.

References:

Nadesan, M. (2010). Governing Childhood into the 21st Century: Biopolitical Technologies of Childhood Management and Education. New York: Palgrave Macmillan. https://bit.ly/3oQdWfg

Nadesan. M. (2002). ‘Engineering the Entrepreneurial Infant: Brain Science, Infant Development Toys, and Governmentality’, Cultural Studies, 16:3, 401-432.

Nadesan, M.H. & Sotirin, P. (1998). The Romance and Science of 'Breast is Best': Discursive Contradictions and Contexts of Breast-feeding Choices. Text and Performance Quarterly. 18(3), 217-232.