Notice Board

The Institute for Child and Youth Studies 
along with The Prentice Institute
presents:

Childhood in a Time of Monsters
by Bridget Stirling

In structural conditions that echo those of the early 20th century that led to fascism’s rise, the world faces new iterations of fascism that emerge from capitalism in crisis. We live in a new interregnum – a time of monsters as described by Gramsci: “the crisis consists precisely in the fact that the old is dying and the new cannot be born; in this interregnum a great variety of morbid symptoms appear.”  We are trapped in a crisis of the now that has no clear path into the future or easy retreat into the past. In a crisis of the now, childhood becomes a nexus of conflict. The figuration of the child is entangled with the future and the past; in a time when all futures and all pasts are contested, childhood is also destabilized and contested. Within what Toscano describes as fascism’s “forward flight into the archaic” that rejects capitalism’s temporality of the now and the new while still protecting capitalism, a forward-looking nostalgia of childhood renders children in their present selves invisible. This talk will consider childhood and temporality in discourses within and about (proto)fascism and the possibilities for a relational politics of childhood that sees childhood’s futurities as multiple and unknown and children as living, present beings.

March 27, 2025
12:00 PM 
C450 

Bridget Stirling is a PhD candidate in educational policy studies at the University of Alberta. Her doctoral research examines political discourses of childhood in Alberta's Inspiring Education report and the subsequent period of education reform. She is particularly interested in futurity, nostalgia, and the temporal displacement of childhood.