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Child as method: implications for decolonising educational research

Erica Burman

Erica.Burman@manchester.ac.uk

Paper in press to appear in International Studies in the Sociology of Education

(with the DOI of 10.1080/09620214.2017.1412266.) (ms accepted 29/11/17)

Abstract

This paper advances an approach, 'child as method', as a resource for interrogating models of
development in childhood and education. Chen's (2010) book Asia as method has generated interest
across childhood and educational studies. Here ‘child as method’ is presented as a related
intervention. Just as Asia as method (re)considers the status of the national and transnational, so
‘child as method’ helps explicate the ways 'child' and 'development' are linked across economic,
sociocultural and individual trajectories. The example of translation is discussed in relation to
sociocultural approaches and how together these might inform childhood and educational studies
debates. The notion of 'method' at work (as framework, technique or narrative) is also clarified as
informed by feminist and decolonization approaches. It is argued that ‘child as method’ offers
strategies for resisting abstraction and remaining attentive to forces and relations of (re)production
at issue within adult-child and child-state-development relations.

Keywords: postcolonial childhood studies; pedagogies of decolonization; Asia as method;

translation; sociocultural theory
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This article puts forward an analytical approach, ‘child as method’, applying an increasingly

influential text from poststructuralist and postcolonial cultural studies, Asia as method (Chen, 2010)

to educational and childhood studies. In particular, ‘child as method’ is elaborated as an analytical

and methodological resource that focuses and builds on postcolonial theory to interrogate

theoretical frameworks in childhood and educational studies, as well as a generative framework for

further research and critical practice. As an indication of the contribution of this developing

approach, this paper uses it to consider some current debates within sociocultural theory.

While the sociocultural approach of VS Vygotsky and his colleagues is typically associated with

psychology and education, its development as activity theory (see Williams, 2016) has made it an

influential resource in other institutional and disciplinary arenas. Its materialist (and Marxist)

conceptual commitments make it a good candidate to bring into conversation with current debates

in the sociology of education, and indeed it is often considered alongside Bourdieu to account for

socio-political organisational dynamics.i Sociocultural approaches are taken as an example here,

then, to illustrate how ‘child as method’ might prompt reconsideration of trans/national political

dynamics within education. Moreover, sociocultural theory (which is sometimes called cultural-

historical theory, and is a key influence on cultural psychology, Valsiner, 2009) has been identified as

a key theoretical contender to ‘bridge’ educational, childhood and psychological studies (Thorne,

2007), in the sense of offering congruent conceptual and political perspectives (unlike most Euro-US

psychological and educational models). However, unlike postcolonial and postdevelopment theories

(with their deconstructionist inflections), sociocultural approaches are typically committed to a

'modern' or ‘progressive’ project of formulating other kinds of psychological and educational

practices (Valsiner, 2009). In this article, ‘child as method’ is discussed in relation to sociocultural

approaches as part of a broader project of interrogating educational geographies of modernity and

‘development’ that can inform international studies of education.

Introducing ‘child as method’

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Feminist, postcolonial and (critical and anti)development studies have mounted significant political

critiques of the conceptual foundations, as well as policy and practice effects, of educational norms

(e.g. Cannella & Viruru, 2004; Burman 2008; Millei & Imre, 2015; Peterson & Millei, 2016; Burman,

2017). These critiques parallel sociological debates on education challenging not only the

Eurocentric character of developmental and educational models and norms, but – echoing the

criticisms of area studies that gave rise to calls for this to be replaced by transnational studies (Sakai,

2010) - also trace how these norms are implicitly globalized via cross-national comparative studies

(Takayama et al., 2017) which therefore both deepen and mask global and local inequalities.

‘Child as method’ is a specific application of postcolonial theory to educational studies. As with

‘southern theory’ more generally, it is ‘not a fixed set of propositions but a challenge to develop new

knowledge projects and new ways of learning with globally expanded resources ‘ (Connell, 2014.

p.210). Specifically, ‘child as method’ arises out of a reading and engagement with Asia as Method

(Chen, 2010), applying arguments that its author, Kuan-Hsing Chen, makes for postcolonial cultural

studies to childhood and educational debates. ‘Child as method’ transposes and reformulates Chen’s

critique to address as a contribution to postcolonial childhood and educational studies (see also

Burman, 2016a; Blaise et al., 2013; Ming & Park, 2016; Zhang et al., 2015). Such initiatives have

applications and implications for re-thinking the place of ‘the international’ as a site of knowledge

production, interpretation and intervention around children, childhood and education, as well as

interrogating the resources informing sociological and educational theories. That is, rather than only

being concerned with ‘Asia’ and relations between and within Asian contexts, ‘child as method’, as a

reading of Asia as method, has particular resonance for - and indeed demands to make of -

childhood and educational researchers worldwide.

As will be discussed later, like Asia as method, ‘child as method’ is a research analytic or orientation,

rather than specifying a particular ‘method’. Yet far from ‘method’ not being a concern, the aim is to

foster and bring into dialogue diverse, innovative and creative disciplinary and research approaches
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to document how child/childhood/children are understood, where ‘child’ is understood as a figure

or trope (Burman, 2008; Castañeda 2002), ‘childhood’ as a social condition or category, and

‘children’ the living, embodied entities inhabiting these positions and their corresponding

institutional practices across a range of geopolitical arenas. Importantly, this process of documenting

goes beyond one of description to bring under critical scrutiny ethical-political practices involved in

the crafting, interpretation and application and reception of research material. ‘Child as method’ is

therefore allied to other activist approaches that understand research practices (including academic

practices) as political interventions carrying responsibilities and opportunities for solidarity and

transformation. While such approaches are already widely discussed (and sometimes practiced) in

educational research contexts (in particular through engagement with feminist, postcolonial, or

decolonial perspectivesii), what ‘child as method’ highlights is the necessary intersection between

the political economy of childhood and geopolitical dynamics, alongside how such local and global

relations must figure as part of a postcolonial, antipatriarchal, anti-capitalist project, and in which

children figure as more than policy or theory tropes.

The approach taken here aligns with equivalent initiatives in critical psychology where the political

roles accorded psychological models and theories as well as practices have come under critical

scrutiny specifically from postcolonial perspectives (Dhar, 2015; Dhar & Siddiqui, 2013; Paredes-

Canilao, 2017), including addressing limits of prevailing discourses of childhood and development

(Burman, 2017, 2008; O’Dell, et al., 2017). Similar debates are taking place within the sociology of

education (Takayama et al., 2017) both to re-think and address the legacies of Western knowledge in

constructing current globalized modes and practices. From early childhood educational studies,

Taylor (2013) considered this question in relation to the cultural construction of understandings of

childhood and nature (and the natures of childhood). In relation to sociology of education, various

commentators have reflected on the significance of Bourdieu’s (colonial) experiences in Algeria,

(which he himself describes as ‘without contest the pivotal moment’, Bourdieu, 2004, 433) first for
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his military service and then as Professor in the University of Algiers, inspiring his shift from

philosophy to sociology, and in particular his reflexive and engaged approach (Yacine, 2004).

A second, related, resource for ‘child as method’ is Mezzadra and Neilson’s (2013) Border as

Method, an intervention from geography and development studies focused on migration and labour

that also explicitly references Chen’s Asia as method. They analyse the complex relations and mutual

impacts between apparently diverse forms of labour and production occurring across the world. By

focusing on the figure of the migrant, the authors aim to deepen Marxist analysis of current forms of

dispossession and exploitation that take analyses beyond ‘neoliberalism’ and ‘globalisation’. In

particular, they recompose debates on sovereignty and citizenship to attend to (what they call) the

multiplication, as well as recent divisions (including global redistributions), of labour. Their analysis

correspondingly brings a discourse of international labour to transnational educational debates that

may have further fruitful implications. Notwithstanding the different disciplinary orientation, with

Border as Method clearly engaged with social and political science paradigms rather than Asia as

Method’s address to cultural studies, there is considerable overlap in conceptual project and

approach, since both are oriented towards engaging and enriching discussions of political economy –

as also does ‘child as method’.

As indicated by the above examples, alongside reconfiguration of central concepts within key

disciplines, like Asia as method, the project of ‘child as method’ is also necessarily crossdisciplinary

and transdisciplinary, or even what might be termed ‘off-disciplinary’. Critical resources formulated

from various disciplines are set in play and in relation to each other. Correlatively, the attention here

to the cultural-historical and material conditions for the formulation of theories and models of

childhood can be seen as an example of a postcolonial strategy that situates the local in relation to

wider cultural and material global conditions (see also Takayama et al., 2015).
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In what follows I, firstly, outline the main arguments of Asia as method and review its uptake in

educational studies. Second, the case is made for why this merits consideration by scholars of

international education – as precisely exemplifying the project of decolonization advocated by Asia

as method - situating this focus within wider postcolonial debates (on which Asia as method also

draws) in critical theory that go beyond homogenising and essentialising binaries of West/East or

West/Rest. Thus equipped, the third section outlines ‘child as method’ as a mimetic transformation

of Asia as method to address early childhood and education. An example is then discussed, since

‘child as method’ is a perspective, orientation or research analytic that is put to work in specific

practices. Through focusing on translation, the perspective ‘child as method’ brings to the

interpretation of sociocultural theory is put forward to indicate the wider relevance of this approach.

The status of method in both ‘child as method’ and Asia as method is then clarified, before

concluding with some comments on specific analytical contributions ‘child as method’ may offer for

postcolonial childhood and educational studies.

‘Asia as method’: its relevance to childhood and education studies

Chen’s (2010) text addresses the project of cultural studies and the contemporary politics of

knowledge as it constructs and impacts on Asia. However, the approach has wide implications – both

beyond his particular discipline and to other geopolitical contexts, as the accumulating literature

within childhood and educational studies citing the book suggests. Indeed 'Asia as method'iii now

figures across childhood and educational studies, being applied to science and technology studies

(Anderson, 2012), teacher training across national contexts (Ma, 2014) and other pedagogical and

educational transnational dynamics (Takayama, 2016), as well as curricular applications (Lin, 2012;

Daza, 2013). It is also being drawn upon to elaborate innovative methodologies for ethnographic and

crossnational comparison of childhood and educational contexts (Blaise et al., 2013; Yelland &

Saltmarsh, 2013), although (to my knowledge) it has not yet figured within the pages of this journal.
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While also informed by Chatterjee (2004), Nandy (1978) and Hall’s (1997) important interventions

highlighting the role of cultural studies in the politics of anticolonial debates and struggles, Chen’s

analytical framework for 'Asia as method' was built from Mizoguchi Yūzō's (1966/1989)'s 'China as

method' and then Takuchi Yoshimi's (1960)'s ‘Asia as method' (Chen, 2012). ‘Asia’, here, is more

than a geographical region, site of imaginary engagement or even cultural-political entity with

complex relations with its constituent parts and with others. In Asia as method, Chen explicates and

evaluates the current status of postcoloniality and postcolonial studies, identifying key analytical and

political impasses that have beset debates thus far, including how old forms of colonization are

maintained through newer practices of global capitalism. However he urges attention to the ways

subversions and transformations occur in practice, through combining and synthesising the local

with the imposed or external, giving rise to what Gaztambide-Fernández and Thiessen (2012)

usefully summarise as a ‘“critical” syncretism [that] inverts the relationships between ‘dominant’

ideas and the experiences of ‘marginalized’ groups, by placing the latter at the centre as the source

of a multiplicity of new flows’ (p.8).

Chen’s account is structured around the elaboration of three analytical strategies: decolonisation,

de-imperialisation and de-cold war. Together, these offer key frames for the formulation of

anticolonial cultural-political analysis which, importantly, includes re-orienting focus away from the

traditional sources of power/knowledge (i.e. Europe and North America) to attend to local and

regional relations, or what he calls ‘inter-referencing’. In Chen’s project, these strategies offer a

useful analytical framework in which to work together to build a geopolitical materialist approach to

cultural studies, which can equally relevantly apply to education.

Contrary to the ways such 'de-' words (decolonisation, de-imperialisation and de-cold war) may

suggest a too-complete undoing (in the sense of implying overcoming, surpassing or transcendence)

of such relations, Chen argues for greater attention to the ways cultural imaginaries and

subjectivities are central to these socio-political processes, as informing this geopolitically inflected
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historical materialism. He extensively draws upon the ideas of Frantz Fanon, whose analysis of

decolonization has also been mobilised to reconceptualise childhood and education (Burman,2016a,

b, c, d, in press; Pinar, 2011; Dei & Simmons, 2010). In these, as also Chen’s, account, decolonization

is a question of affective, subjective orientation as well as political and economic transformation.

This attention to subjectivity is also one of the key connections with sociocultural approaches, as

discussed later.

Significantly, Chen highlights how a second analytical frame, de-imperialisation, brings into focus not

only the subjectivity of the colonized but also highlights the role and responsibilities of the (historical

or actual) colonizers/imperializers to challenge residual imperial desires. As discussed below, this is

clearly a key challenge for those of us located within, as also intellectually framed by and oriented

to, Euro-US contexts or (what is sometimes called) the global North,iv constituted as particular

cultural-historical entities with continuing authority over definitions of modernity and development

but also as ‘imagined communities’ (Anderson, 2006).

The third analytical move, to 'de-cold war', is discussed by Chen in relation to the complex history of

South East Asia, in particular China, Japan and Taiwan, whose long histories of mutual influence as

well as conflict, occupation and colonisation are also modulated by, in the case of Japan and Taiwan,

US occupation and, in relation to China's changing position in the global world order, its shift from

state communism to capitalism. This perspective on what a de-cold war focus involves chimes with

current readings in educational and psychological theory. Scholars are now situating the

formulation, reception and interpretation of sociocultural theory within shifting cultural and

historical contexts (e.g. Dafermos & Marvakis, 2011; González Rey, 2009, 2014; Hyman, 2012; Jones,

2015; Matusov, 2009; Valsiner, 2009; Yasnitsky & Van der Veer, 2016).

In this sense, as Park (2016) puts it, Asia as method is a ‘conflict theory’, i.e. ‘a critical proposition to

transform both knowledge structure and knowledge production’ (pp.206-7). Chen’s analysis also
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highlights an additional methodological caution: the importance of not presuming the nation state

as the unit of political analysis, but rather attending to multiple social movements and contestations,

as well as transnational influences. An example of this is how the sociocultural theory of Vygotsky

and his group was formulated through, as well as in relation to, engagement with western

psychologists and psychologies (Yasnitsky & Van der Veer, 2016). Such key historical reviews reflect

wider critiques of methodological nationalism (Wimmer & Glick- Schiller, 2002) which have also

been fruitfully applied to educational studies (Shahjahan & Kezar, 2013; Margison & Rhoades, 2002).

Indeed Dale and Robertson (2009) have claimed that international educational debates are

structured by ‘not just methodological nationalism, but methodological statism and methodological

educationism’ (p113), while Shahjahan and Kezar (2013) argue: ‘Although researchers may be aware

that the nation-state is a porous entity, their research questions continue to assume and suggest

that the nation-state is self-contained as they continue to overlook the impact of cross-national

influences or transnational processes on their objects of study’ (p.22). Such cross-national and

transnational influences are now widely acknowledged within the formulation of sociocultural

theory (Yasnitsky & Van der Veer, 2016), even if they were suppressed or distorted in the early

Anglophone interest in Vygotsky in the 1960s, which preferred to pit Vygotsky against Piaget rather

than acknowledge their mutual engagement and indeed commonalities (Burman, 2017; Santiago-

Delefosse & Delefosse, 2002).

Chen’s call for solidarity, regional collaboration and inter-referencing (promoting inter-regional

collaboration rather than looking to the US or Europe) is perhaps particularly relevant to the

transnational context of reception and practice of childhood and educational studies at the level of

policy, curriculum and, of course, models. As Hanson and Nieuwenhuys (2013) discussed in relation

to the formulation and enactment of child rights policies across national and transnational arenas,

contexts of 'application' play an active role in the reformulation of models and theories, such that

their ‘translations’ into specific contexts can significantly shift and change them. European countries,
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as elsewhere, comprise regions which have had complex and contested historical relations with each

other, ranging from colonizer/colonized to more recently being subject to the (at least) cultural

imperialism of what is sometimes called the ‘global north’. Kołodziejczyk and Şandru (2012) have

called for exploration of the complex ways eastern-central Europe is situated within discourses of

modernity in ways that mobilise, but also critique, postcolonial analyses through the challenge to

theorise east-central Europe’s relations with its west. This could be seen as exemplifying Chen’s

project of ‘inter-referencing’.

The reach of ‘child’ and ‘Asia’ ‘as method’ into educational studies

The considerable engagement with Asia as method within childhood and educational literatures

appears to have been concerned either with research and practice outside European and North

American contexts (e.g. Pham, 2015; Cave, 2015; Lee, 2016), or with minority or migrant students

and teachers (including student teachers) (e.g. Ma, 2014; Zhang et al., 2015). This is unfortunate as it

both overlooks the relevance of its arguments for those at the colonial ‘centres’, and risks re-

‘othering’ those already marked as different/marginal. Similarly, the project of internationalizing the

curriculum has been treated as primarily a concern only for non-Anglophone contexts. Yet as

Gaztambide-Fernández and Thiessen (2012) pointed out, key epistemological problems and political

challenges are posed by how ideas travel and how they are taken up across diverse contexts, which

go beyond questions of mere inclusion or equal representation. These challenges not only engage

what they describe as ‘the colonial impetus of internationalization’ (p.9) but also invite non-

essentialised understandings of indigenous (as also diasporic) knowledge and practices. The project

here is not only acknowledging flows of knowledge with power, but also highlighting the multiple

origins and complex, contradictory currents that inform such practices.

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Specific colonial histories and their contemporary legacies continue to structure particular lines of

connection between European states and their former colonies, in which educational policies and

practices have exercised major influence (Stoler, 2002; Grieshaber, 2006). Such legacies occur

alongside current globalizing impulses evident in international development policies, in which

discourses about education (at all levels) also figure strongly. These threaten to inscribe within

supposedly general models what are in fact historically Euro-US norms and assumptions (Tag, 2012),

as has been discussed in relation to Developmentally Appropriate Practice, for example (Shallwani,

2010).

Yet, to take a key example, Europe is currently a site of key tensions and divisions, such that the

signifier ‘Europe’ labours under considerably strain, even crisis. This crisis is both economic (the

‘austerity’ of recent years that has hit Southern Europe in particular), and symbolic – so highlighting

the need to attend both to and beyond material conditions. It includes how and whether Central

European states, previously considered ‘transitional’, are to be included in ‘Fortress Europe’ and its

privileges (Stark, 2010), and whether the project of European Union remains viable. In the context of

recent violence and destabilisation in the (so-called) Middle East (but of course it has to be asked

from whose gaze is this region the ‘middle’?), as well as ecological threat, there is also a crisis of

legitimacy and of confidence in the projects of modernity and secular democracy on which the

imaginary of Europe is founded (Delanty, 1995; Pagden, 2002). As Mezzadra and Neilson (2013) also

review, the nation state has become both more insecure but also – through the border controls

(re)introduced to manage the unprecedented refugee crisis – more rigidly securitized and

exclusionary than ever (Ong, 2006), while the ‘civilising’ status of the signifier ‘Europe’ and the West

becomes increasingly questionable (Neocleous & Kastrinou, 2016).

Such geopolitical reflections shift debate away from the traditional binaries of the West and the Rest

(Said, 1979) that have structured international theoretical discourse in less than facilitative ways.

Subverting this, Dhar (2015) has taken up this discussion not merely to address the Rest of the World
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but the World of the Rest. This includes the West in the Rest, and its wider epistemological and

disciplinary implications. As Chen (2010) puts it ‘...Asia as method ceases to consider Asia as the

object of analysis and becomes a means of transforming knowledge production’ (p.16). This is a call

for what he calls a kind of ‘internationalist localism’ (p.223) which, importantly, keeps some critical

distance from the nation state, and respects tradition without essentialising it – even when this

might oppose the West. It ‘…avoids either a resentful or triumphalist relation with the West because

it is not bound by an obsessive antagonism’ (ibid. p.223). This is because, as Chen shows via

discussion of the theories of Frantz Fanon and Albert Memmi, this antagonism feeds and reproduces

the very dynamic it seeks to overcome.

The approach therefore involves a bi-directional dynamic of both provincializing and worlding

(Painter, 2015), to address both the globalizing and indigenising impulses that can also be seen in

forms of (critical and cultural) psychology. In Dhar’s (2015) words: ‘Asian critical psychology thus

bears the double burden-bind of recovering, recuperating and foregrounding the “Asian” while at

the same time putting under erasure ‘Asia’ or rendering deconstructive “Asian” metaphysics’

(p.249).

Having outlined key concepts and ideas, I move now to explicate resonances between 'child as

method' and 'Asia as method', before exploring what they might bring to each other, and for

childhood and educational debates.

'Child as method'

Notwithstanding its interpellation as presumed object of intervention and manipulation within

national and international policies, ‘child’ works here as an analytical tool, rather than the base unit

for a theory of child (or children's) development. It is a site of tension, a stubborn particular (Cherry,

1995) forged from the material encounter of the sociopolitical (including psychological and

pedagogical) gaze on child and state. As with Asia as method, the work that the preposition 'as' after
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'child' does – whether as analogy or association - should be noted as enlisting ‘child’ into a range of

political projects (Burman, 2013). Reference to 'child', rather than 'the child', is also important: for

'the child' has been the prototypical, abstracted subject of western, hegemonic developmental

psychology that is not merely singular (rather than using the plural, ‘children’) but a fabricated

artefact of alienating and de-socialising methodological practices (Burman, 2017; 2008).

One key alignment between 'child as method' and 'Asia as method' (taking the latter as inspired by

but going beyond Chen’s, 2010, text), then, is the critique of development as a political practice of

power and domination. This is not merely a question of children's rights, that is, of the ways

children's lives, subjectivities and aspirations are dominated and colonised by adults (although it also

includes this, Cannella & Viruru, 2004). It also addresses how local, national and international

policies focus on children as the raw material for national prosperity, security and even survival. In

children's rights' speak, this is a model of children as becomings, not as beings (Lee, 1998; James et

al., 1998). Under late capitalism (sometimes called neoliberalism), the child is discoursed in policy as

the site for the production of compliant but active and economically self-sufficient citizens (Fendler,

2001; Lister, 2005; Henderson & Denny, 2015). This instrumentalisation is, moreover, complicated by

how –as also part of constituting modern, European subjectivity - the child is also a site of and for

memory, myth, fantasy, and also of embodied caregiving practices; including providing meaning and

hope to lives (Steedman, 1995).

A second key methodological intervention of ‘child as method’, therefore, is the attention to affect

and subjectivity. This reflects other decolonial and postcolonial critiques arising from, in particular,

Fanon’s (1952/1970) passionate account of the psychic insult and alienation generated by racist

oppression, alongside feminist deconstructions of the passion/reason binary as part of the

repertoire of the ‘masters’ tools’ (Lorde, 1984; hooks, 1990; see also Schiwy, 2007; Oliver, 2004).

Beyond this, slippages in development policies and practices between child, individual, national and

international development, between different levels, subjects and agencies of development, invite
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reconsideration of the directionality, purpose and units of development at play (see also Burman,

1996a; Tag, 2012) - hence the proposal to talk of developments, in the plural, to highlight the

cultural, symbolic and material forms of violence undertaken in condensing these diverse projects

and reading them onto 'child' (Burman, 2008). Such projects also overlook (or wilfully dismiss) the

individual and cultural-political subjectivities of the majority of the world's population (especially the

poor population) who are young.

Other key oppressions are both produced and obscured by the (presumed positive) register of

'development'. Hence, thirdly, the discourse of growth that flows from the semiotic associations of

'child' with 'nature' as well as capital invites re-evaluation. This is what helps to maintain the

equation of national and international development with 'growth', instead of - in the name of

environmental sustainability - focusing on de-growth (Kallis, 2011), to explore the wide range of

survival and sustainable strategies mobilised by people in so-called less 'developed' or even 'failed'

states. This point is also made by critics of methodological nationalism in education (Shahjahan &

Kezar, 2013), but we need to add into this account how the developing child or young person figures

in this as a warrant for such narrow and oppressive policies. Indeed, rather than ‘growing up’, queer

childhood and educational theorists have proposed attention to 'growing sideways', to destabilise

the teleology and unidirectionality of development (Stockton, 2008) on which tropes of

normalization - and correspondingly pathologization - rely (Farley, in press).

‘Child as method’ therefore draws upon and constellates postcolonial and decolonial discussions to

focus (or one might also say ‘queer’) them in relation to the ways these inflect, and are inflected by,

configurations of children, childhood and child. It formulates a set of problems and agendas for, but

also beyond, childhood studies that situates an interdisciplinary and cross-disciplinary political

project in and via the analysis of childhood. Importantly, ‘child as method’ is not a meta-theory, nor

does it specify a particular research design. Rather, it is a research analytic promoting postcolonially

sensitive and innovative inquiries for, about, and with children. Such studies therefore include the
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study of cultural artefacts of and about childhood, and – specifically relevant for this paper –

crossnational educational theories and practices. I will now explicate ‘child as method’ by exploring

what this postcolonial sensitivity contributes to debates in what is arguably its closest ally in

education, sociocultural approaches, focusing on translation.

Travelling theory and translation

A particular convergence of method and topic between 'child as method' and Asia as method is

travelling theory and translation. Said (1994; 2001) and other cultural theorists drew attention to

how as theory travels it changes and is transformed in relation to particular contexts of reception

and interpretation – and how this in turn offers a key interpretive lens on those very cultural-

political contexts. As is well known, there is a long historiography of the movement of peoples and

ideas surrounding sociocultural theory, from Kozulin's (1990) early intellectual history through to

Yasnitsky and Van der Veer's (2016) recent collection documenting networks and exchanges and

influences (see also Yasnitsky & Van der Veer, 2012). While the phrase 'travelling theory' is

sometimes used by sociocultural commentators (Hyman, 2012, mentions it in her long review article,

for example), some further analytical insights arise in relation to broader claims for the generality of

theory and interpretation.

The travel of theory across languages, cultures, and temporalities has of course been addressed by

and through discussions of translation, and there is now a considerable literature on the fate of both

Piagetian (Burman, 1996b) and Vygotskyan texts in their various migrations, and the (cultural and

historical) significance of these trajectories. We might draw attention in particular to the ways

Vygotsky was incorporated into Anglophone psychology and education as addressing instructional

practice, to the neglect of his wider political and social analyses. This dynamic extends even to the

translation of specific terms. To take a few well-known examples from Vygotskyan theory, Michael

Cole (2009) drew attention to the ways obchenie was mis/interpreted as 'instruction' (rather than
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‘learning’) in English, and how this reflected political differences between the US and the (former)

Soviet Union in both the cultural practice, and understandings of the project, of education. Also

relevant are analyses of the reception of the zone of proximal development (ZPD), the term used to

designate what a learner could do with help. For example, Jones (2011) has highlighted how the ZPD

was presented in English as a perfect harmonious process that expunges tension and struggle, and

naturalises into oblivion the alienation structured into the institutional education systems to which it

has been so overwhelmingly applied. Moreover this process also misplaces subjectivity to portray

this as individual, with key consequences for the role of ‘the meaning of that assistance in relation to

a child's learning and development’ (Chaiklin, 2003, p.43).

Van der Veer and Yasnitsky (2012; 2016) document and classify the various ‘mistakes’ in translations,

including inaccuracies, suppressions, insertions, and multiple retranslations, as well as how many key

so-called Vygotskyan phrases (including the iconic ‘ZPD’) were rarely or even never used by Vygotsky

himself. Valuable as this may be, this should not lead to a fantasy of pure or total translation. Rather,

such translations and their corresponding inscriptions and re-inscriptions offer key texts for the

diagnosis of cultural-political conditions and relationships. As theorists from Benjamin (1923/2000)

to Spivak (1993) have highlighted, translation is not only a method of reading culture, but also of

writing it. Joseph Glick (2014) takes up this point, proposing that the ZPD should be modified to

become the ZPWe to identify the ‘zone of proximal development’ as an interpersonal, social, context

– requiring a ‘we’ or collective subject; that is, a dialogical and bi-directional model ‘where the

activities are governed more by rules of social interaction than they are of instruction’ (p.51). Yet

even Glick’s well known anthropological critiques of developmental psychology may not go far

enough, since what remains unquestioned is a form of global theory and globalization of theory that

– unless systematically critiqued - remains tied to a capitalist model of globalization that aligns

development with westernization, or rather Americanisation, and leaves intact the naturalisation of

the nation state.

 17

In Asia as Method, Chen discusses translation as itself related to modernization, as producing

thorough its engagement with dense and contested local histories something new that reflects the

‘organic shape and characteristics of local society and modernity’; it is thus a ‘a social linguistics, or

an intersection of history, sociology, and politics.’ (p.244). He continues: ‘In the end, translation

allows us to more precisely identify what aspects of modernity have been articulated to the existing

social formation’ (ibid.). Mezzadra and Neilson (2013) take a different angle in Border as Method,

where translation emerges as one of their few critical strategies for resistance and coalition-building

across different marginalised groups. Consistent with their overall concerns, however, they focus on

the labour of translation in terms of the meaning construction work done by workers on the margins

brought together by the demands of capital, rather than hegemonic and so imperializing dominant

translation practices.

While sociocultural theorists attend to the significance of words and language in relation to

formation of subjectivities, then, some further purchase is to be gained from these broader cultural

studies and social science perspectives. Across these disciplinary discussions, what emerges is an

irresistible commitment to the particular, and a resistance to the general. This in turn challenges the

generality of the project of sociocultural theory as formulated by Vygotsky and the Soviet School,

and is presumed within some current accounts (e.g. Hyman, 2012). Instead: ‘We must be able to

understand specificity as a fundamental working assumption of critical cultural [here read: childhood

and educational] studies’ (Chen, 2010: 245).

On 'method'

Like Chen (2010) and Mezzadra and Neilson (2013), the notion of ‘method’ at play in ‘child as

method’ is one of research analytic, rather than specific alignment or prescription for particular

methodological approaches or techniques, as also put forward in Smith’s (1999) widely cited text,

notwithstanding its title, Decolonizing Methodologies. The conditions for methodological

 18

nationalism were forged in the nineteenth and early twentieth century where quantitative and

qualitative social science research methodologies – of the kinds informing sociology, psychology and

education – emerged to meet the political needs of European nation states to classify and regulate

their populations, including for the purpose of sorting out educable children and assessing the

mental and physical fitness of soldiers to fight imperial wars (Rose, 1985). Indeed as Foucault (1977)

argued, the disciplinary function of schooling specifically prefigures that of the army as well as the

workplace (see also Allen, 2013). Such historical attention to the emergence of disciplinary

methodologies therefore resonates with current debates about the regulatory and surveillant effects

of current national and transnational comparative educational instruments (Shahjahan et al., 2017;

Roberts-Holmes & Bradbury, 2016).

These reflections on the limits of such technological and technicist orientations prompt caution

about the reception of and claims made for ‘Asia as method’ within childhood and educational

studies. While the subtitle of Zhang et al.’s (2015) text, ‘a defiant imagination’, topicalises affective

and creative strategies (of the kind that Silova et al., in press, also mobilise), other accounts criticise

readings of Chen (2010) as uneven in their application (Park, 2016: 219). Park comments ‘… most of

the existing works make use of it tangentially without properly addressing the sociological and

political problems pushed forward by Chen’ (219), also provocatively following this with a question

about whether this ‘could be due to some unique characteristics in the field of education itself’

(ibid.)

While Park (2016) concludes that ‘…it is not a philosophy of science but a framework or narrative

tool’ (p.219), in my reading, Chen’s analytic of ‘Asia as method’ is less concerned with the

formulation of a specific ‘method’ than a call to activist critical engagement informed by political

commitments. In this sense the approach does not specify particular methods or techniques but

rather is, as Park puts it, ‘an attitude and epistemological orientation’ (p.214). Further, the approach

does indeed have specific methodological implications of ‘being open to – even embracing – the
 19

influence of marginalized others, rejecting strict conceptions of origins, and allowing “methods”

grounded in other geographies to evolve’ (Gaztambide-Fernández & Thiessen, 2012, p.10). By such

means ‘our research and discursive practices can become critical forces pushing the incomplete

project of decolonization forward’ (Chen, 2010, p. 113).

My 'method' here is associated with wider epistemological and methodological commitments drawn

from feminist and postcolonial theory, such that Chen’s analyses can be understood as building on

Mohanty’s (2003) arguments for a transnational comparative pedagogy for feminist studies. In

inviting an exploration of the interplay of two hegemonic discourses of development - child and

(trans)national development - the project becomes not one of deductively reading one in and as a

reflection of the other, for doing this would reiterate reductionist and determinist analyses in

precisely the ways I am critiquing. Rather, my interest lies in exploring what other perspectives

emerge when we read the three tropes of 'child as method', 'Asia as method' and ‘Border as

method’ alongside each other. Hence, like 'Asia', 'child' is constituted amid multiple, contradictory

and shifting discourses; it is not entirely abstract, nor specific, since it cannot function outside

broader discourses and relationships surrounding children and childhood. 'Child as method'

therefore takes ‘child’ as a nodal point in a set of practices, social relationships and institutional

arrangements as a way of reading transnational cultural-political practices, including academic

practices.

Remaining problems, changing problematics

The problematic of translation is merely one example of various that could be taken to apply ‘child

as method’ to key educational resources, such as sociocultural theory. Similar questions attend the

conceptualisation of ‘zones’ (a trope mobilised across educational and economic development

arenas) (with Border as method offering key analytical insights from geography and development

studies, especially via the notion of ‘borderscapes’). As indicated above, there are connections with
 20

current interventions within the project of crossnational comparative (or crosscultural) education, as

exemplifications of the need for de-colonisation, de-imperialisation and to de-cold war (Burman, in

press; Takayama et al., 2017). Like many educational approaches, sociocultural analyses are aligned

with the project of linking individual and social development in the name of progress, a project that

postcolonial and postdevelopmental literatures (among others, such as queer theory) critique.v

Subverting the dominant discourse that elides ‘child’ with both national and individual development,

‘child as method’ highlights two additional dynamics to be resisted: (1) completion, and (2)

normalisation. Each of these limit genuine socioculturally embedded notions of development. This is

because to have a closed or finished model of subjectivity confines what we can be to what we are,

in all our current conditions of constraint and foreclosed political horizons. Correspondingly, to

subscribe to a specific trajectory of development not only reinstalls discourses and practices of

normalization, and so inevitably also pathologisation, but it also reduces political agendas of

transformation and development to individual psychology, and so risks becoming a psychologisation

of politics.

‘Child as method’ is therefore aligned with projects exploring how to get beyond colonial framings of

the international (whether of psychology or education) as equated with the West, including the

linguistic and cultural imperialism of academic English, and its colonial roots – as literatures on the

variety of Englishes are now highlighting (Kachru et al., 2009). From Chen on Asia as Method, two

strategies emerge: inter-referencing and cultural syncretism. Challenging the equation between

modernity and westernisation, Chen calls for an attention to the ways cultural-historical features

(such as traditions and customs) are not merely surpassed by processes of modernization (and

globalization) but are re-worked in new ways, under changing conditions. In this he is anticipating

criticisms of the discourse of multiple modernities as offering only a relativist and pluralist approach,

rather than a deeper engagement with how the categories of European modernity that remain

privileged as the perceived pinnacle and origin, were forged through colonialism and enslavement
 21

(Bhambra, 2014, 2007). Instead what is needed is an analytic frame that explores the connections

and mutual, and mutually constitutive, relations between modernity and its others. Hence the

opposition of tradition/modernity becomes untenable; rather, the question is how these are

mutually articulated, and what sensitivity to local and multiple contexts of formulation and practice

brings. It is what Silova et al. (2017), using related theoretical resources to address memories of

‘post-socialism’ and echoing the influential work of Mignolo (2007), have recently described as a

process of ‘postcolonial delinking’.

We can this occurring in the contemporary post-Vygotskyan educational field, where distinct

'schools' of thought have emerged within specific cultural-political contexts. To take merely two

examples, González Rey's focus on subjectivity and subjective configuration can be read as

formulated from a Cuban sensibility that resists a prevailing political climate favouring social

determinism (González Rey, 2009, 2014), while Norwegian childhood and educational researchers

have developed sociocultural theory through the 'life mode interview' (Haavind, 2011; Andenæs,

2011). Their emphasis on children's competence and participation not only echoes the cultural-

political frame of the social democratic conditions of formulation, but also a (related) feminist

commitment to psychosocial and relational features (Andenæs & Haavind, 2018). Each of these

strands resists and complements the historical (but continuing) dynamics of selective reception and

political inscription of sociocultural theory reflecting cold war dynamics (as González Rey, 2014,

highlights).

If ‘child as method’, like its antecedents discussed above, is primarily influenced by Fanon, rather

than (say) Bourdieu, as a contribution to the sociology of education the arguments here nevertheless

accord with other critical readings of Bourdieu’s work. While as a psychiatrist as well as (incipient)

revolutionary, Fanon was primarily concerned with questions of alienation and distress arising from

colonial oppression (Fanon, 1959/1965; 1961/1963), Bourdieu and Fanon’s ideas were forged from

the same colonial and anticolonial scene of Algeria’s national liberal struggle. Both Go (2013) and
 22

Calhoun (2006) note that Bourdieu drew heavily on Fanon’s writings even if he disagreed with his

revolutionary politics (in particular critiquing Fanon’s and Sartre’s romanticisation of the peasantry),

and indeed Calhoun proposes that Bourdieu provides a richer view than Fanon of the (implicit as

well as explicit) roles of education in sustaining colonisation. Yet notwithstanding their different and

differently racialised positions, their contributions can be read as not only complementary but also,

it has been suggested, compatible resources for contemporary postcolonial debates. In particular,

Go hails Bourdieu as anticipating key postcolonial interventions in sociology by foregrounding the

role of racialisation and overt violence in colonialism, whilst also providing a materialist grounding

for forms of identity or subjectivity this produced (which both Fanon and Bourdieu amply

document), thereby prefiguring the emergence of ‘southern theory’ which – as Chen’s and related

analyses would highlight is forged from political standpoint rather than sociological location or

identification (Connell, 2006, 2007). If (as von Holdt, 2013, also proposes) both Bourdieu and Fanon

can be considered to offer resources for postcolonial and decolonial analysis, then, the role accorded

subjectivity and the domain of the psychological (which Go attributes to Fanon) can be understood

as further grounded sociologically through Bourdieu’s reflexive and relational sociology.

At the transnational level, contemporary educational discourse has its own legitimacy struggles -

with the domains of the pedagogical and psychological threatening to be eclipsed in favour of

neuroscience (De Vos, 2015, 2016). It is therefore particularly timely to recall the differently

constituted relations between psychology, education, psychoanalysis and neurophysiology that were

envisaged (and indeed practiced) by Vygotsky and Luria in the early days of post-revolutionary

Russia, before Stalinism expunged that creative transnational endeavour. Hence, at the level of

geopolitics, the need to attend to local impacts and responses to global events becomes increasingly

urgent.

Taking up Chen's (2010) strategies offers some additional connections and analyses. Applying also

Zhang et al.’s (2015) and Lin’s (2012) engagements of Asia as method with educational theory and
 23

practice, decolonisation of childhood becomes not only a matter of resisting hegemonic forms and

the recovery of indigenous forms, but rather of exploring how their interplay can work to destabilise

both local and wider systems of domination. As also discussed by Park (2016), the various readings

of Asia as method need to be differentiated to highlight this as not simply a question of geographical

focus but of analytical frame, to critically interrogate the dynamic transnational relations at play.

In conclusion, four consequences follow from a 'child as method' perspective, as informed by Asia as

method and related resources. Firstly, it means detaching the child from the project of national

development, and instead challenging modes and models of childhood that work to secure

discourses of normalisation and pathologisation, including those configured around being less/more

developed. Secondly, in relation to de-imperialisation (including its subjective aspects on the part of

those positioned as its beneficiaries as well as its victims), this extends to disinvesting from

sentimentalized identifications with the child (that, although culturally-specific in origin have now

acquired global currency). The third application, moving beyond cold war agendas, is (as I have

indicated) already at play within contemporary cultural-historical and sociocultural debates. Yet

special vigilance is called for in the context of the revival of cold-war dynamics between US, Europe

and Russia for, as Silova et al. (2017) highlight, there remains much colonialism in models and

practices of knowledge production in comparative education in relation to post-socialist contexts (of

Southeast/Central Europe and former Soviet Union). Finally, discussion of 'child as method' as a

postcolonial, deconstructionist engagement may help ward off the too precipitous foreclosure of the

teleology of development, with its corresponding dynamics of homogenisation and fantasies of

developmental completion, that still inhabit national and transnational imaginaries, theories and

practices of education.

Acknowledgements
 24

My thanks to the anonymous reviewers of earlier versions of this paper, whose comments helped to

improve it enormously, plus many colleagues, to local, national and transnational encounters with

whom have inspired and deepened the analyses here. In particular I should acknowledge

participants at the 2016 Critical Psychology retreat in Kelsa, India; at the 2016 International Society

for Cultural-Historical and Activity Research in Crete (especially Sofia Triliva and Manolis Dafermos);

my other cultural-historical colleagues in Brazil (Fernando González Rey and Daniel Goulart) as well

as in Norway (Agnes Andenæs, Oddbjorg Skjær Ulvik, Liv-Mette Gulbrandsen and Hanne Haavind),

and finally fellow colleagues and students of Social Theories of Learning at the University of

Manchester – especially Julian Williams and the Foucault reading group.

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i
It lies beyond the scope of this paper to review the extensive discussions of the relations between Vygotskyan
and Bourdieusian approaches. Suffice it to say here habitus can be related to zones of proximal development,
while the various forms of capital (symbolic, cultural, etc.) have been juxtaposed with Vygotsky’s discussions of
the development of abstract reasoning (see Williams, 2012, 2016, Williams et al., 2007).
ii
See Bhambra (2014) for discussion of the different genealogies and geopolitical origins of these two terms.
iii
Where Chen’s book is referred to I retain the italics, otherwise I am citing how others refer to the approach.
iv
The various available terminologies including global North/South, minority/majority, West/Rest have
strengths and limitations, while crucially they reference the economic inequalities rich/poor as well as cultural
designations of ‘developed’/’de-developed’. Corresponding with Chen’s (2010) analysis, the key point here is
that there are many norths and souths within the global North and South, as the debates on methodological
nationalism also highlight.
v
Space does not permit discussion of a key example of the political difficulties of the cross-cultural research
(though see Burman, 2007). However it should be noted that Soviet cultural-historical group also undertook
this, as indicated by their problematic Uzbekh expeditions (see Lamden & Yasnitsky, 2016).