books by Maria Kromidas
In widely publicized experimental research, a team of psychologists found that white children bel... more In widely publicized experimental research, a team of psychologists found that white children believed that Black children felt less pain than white children. 1 The study extended the findings of previous research wherein both Black and white health care professionals exhibited this belief. The research was designed to find the point in development when children acquire this bias, and found it absent among five-year-olds, emerging at age seven, and " strong and reliable " by age ten. Framed differently, this study illustrates that by ten years of age, some white children fully inhabit our racial common sense, its core structure and logic. They have learned that they and all others belong to a hierarchy of human types, wherein some are less than human and others are more fully human. This highlights that our humanity is always at stake when race is the question. The indisputable fact that there are no natural types of human beings, 2 but at some point we just " see " these types as such, should inspire an awe-inspiring wonder that the question properly deserves: how does this happen? How does one learn to chop up humanity into different types, to consider oneself a type of human and encounter another as a different type that is more or less human? Can these processes possibly be smooth and unproblematic? Is race easy to learn? This book addresses these questions and joins a group of scholars who insist they can be answered only by grounding them among particular children situated in specific places and times, amid the multiple, overlapping contexts, processes , and practices of their everyday lives. 3 Instead of presenting racial learning as something that just happens in development, these anthropologists, sociologists , and geographers document how children struggle to make sense of the constantly shifting terrain of race, racial categories, and racial meanings " over time, through multiple interactions with those who are the same and those who are different " as well as " in relation to the social divisions, real inequities,
papers by Maria Kromidas
Antipode, 2022
This article explores middle-class mothers' labours associated with relocating for a "good school... more This article explores middle-class mothers' labours associated with relocating for a "good school" in NYC as they navigated the material and ideological structures of scarcity related to its highly unequal school system. Based on ethnographic research with a diverse group of women in a middle-class area, I document the multiple ongoing labours associated with this "choice", and trace how the neoliberal education complex (that includes testing and real estate industries, and school rating websites) compels women to perform them. Through the lenses of Marxist feminism and racial capitalism, I demonstrate how these labours produce school and property value that reinscribe race onto space. While middle-class women are disciplined and their labours coerced, their labours are routed to dispossess working-class communities of colour, and reproduce the racial hierarchy of human-ness on which capital depends. This article underscores the role of gender and race-making in middle-class reproduction, and their linkage to elite accumulation and working-class dispossession.
Pedagogy, Culture and Society, 2022
This article argues that reading levels, a seemingly neutral aspect of literacy instruction of ne... more This article argues that reading levels, a seemingly neutral aspect of literacy instruction of neoliberal schooling, initiate students into the symbolic templates of capitalism. I explore young children’s affects, relations, and interpretation of the field of meanings surrounding reading levels and grades in a kindergarten classroom in the U.S. I demonstrate how ranking had profound yet subtle effects on children’s being and becoming by imposing development’s normative temporality in the social relations of learning, and imbuing the emotions of learning with its logic. While evaluation inculcates individualised subjectivities that are crucial to the reproduction of hierarchical relations, this process is imperfect and a site of struggle. I demonstrate how evaluation’s subjugating power contended with children’ already existing convivial ways of being and relating. I conclude that educators must reimagine learning with and through children’s perspectives so that liberatory possibilities of schooling can flourish.
Childhoods in More Just Worlds, 2021
This chapter argues that incorporating children’s radical subjectivities and perspectives is nece... more This chapter argues that incorporating children’s radical subjectivities and perspectives is necessary to re-imagine and enact justice and the good life in ways heretofore unseen. I first demonstrate how race/child/learning/human are entangled in a tragic knot that constructs the individualized hierarchical subject that severs humans from their relations with other humans and more-than-human others. I then review current theorizations that redefine any of these conceptions, exploring how they disrupt this assemblage by implicitly redefining other terms within this knot. The conceptual resources include Black studies, childhood studies, Indigenous Studies, postmodern curriculum studies, anthropology of sociality, and posthumanism. Integrating these insights entails an epistemic break that centers learning as a continual process of being and becoming convivial with children to allow liberatory figurations of being human to flourish
Subjectivity, 2021
This article explores how childhood memories served as a rich resource in women’s formations as m... more This article explores how childhood memories served as a rich resource in women’s formations as maternal subjects. So affectively loaded is the child figure, and so diffuse and malleable are memories, that the remembered child appeared in women’s narratives in multiple figurations and served multiple functions. These memories incited the intensive multidimensional labors of the middle-class mother while also curbing and critiquing these labors, as well as a resource to imagine being mother otherwise. Women’s childhood memories highlight the ways that neoliberalism’s heightened stakes and increased competition for middle-class reproduction lodge themselves into women’s labors and psyches. Yet they also point to perspectives and desires outside of normative neoliberal femininities associated with the middle class. Their narratives enrich accounts of being and becoming mom as a field of dreams, desires, and memories where past, present, and future time intersect in nonlinear ways.
Jeunesse: Young People, Texts, Cultures, 2019
In "Gorilla, My Love," Toni Cade Bambara's Black girl narrator reverses the traditional adult gaz... more In "Gorilla, My Love," Toni Cade Bambara's Black girl narrator reverses the traditional adult gaze on the child to disrupt our taken-for-granted notions of childhood, adulthood, and their relations. Read through the lens of Sylvia Wynter's poetics of being and becoming human and Avery Gordon's utopian margins, this story serves as a counter-narrative to that of the hegemonic child and inspires new narratives as part of enacting liberation. Through Hazel's unruly resistance against capital, white supremacy, and patriarchy, Bambara recuperates the alterity of childhood in a way that reveals the joy and revolutionary transformation lurking in the present.
Curriculum Inquiry, 2019
Sylvia Wynter’s wide-ranging intellectual contributions contain a poetics of being and becoming h... more Sylvia Wynter’s wide-ranging intellectual contributions contain a poetics of being and becoming human that serve to counter the hegemony of developmental psychology and its articulation of the child in teacher education. In this article, I use Wynter’s insights to unsettle the universality of this child figure to reveal the child of Man, a genre-specific formulation of the not-yet-fully-human white modal child. In the first part of the article, I demonstrate how the origins of the developing child are conjoined with purely biocentric nineteenth century views of the human as formulated within the context of asserting the hegemony of the Western bourgeois subject. In the second part, I consider how the genre-specific trope of the child of Man persists in teacher education and the kind of subjectivities it compels for teaching candidates. I explore materials relating to the developmental psychology course (i.e. standards, syllabi and textbook), an important site where teacher candidates confront notions of the child. I argue that the white Western bourgeois child masquerading as universal child is key to reproducing our current hierarchical order by inciting the violence of continual measurement, evaluation and ranking, thereby legitimizing and depoliticizing the “achievement gap”, and condemning Black, brown and poor children. In conclusion, I suggest ways to use Wynter’s poetics of being and becoming human in the constructive sense to inspire other ways of thinking about the child, teaching and learning for a project of re-enchanting humanism.
City Kids: Transforming Racial Baggage, 2016
For accounts of race in childhood are not just intellectual endeavors. These accounts serve deepl... more For accounts of race in childhood are not just intellectual endeavors. These accounts serve deeply emotional and psychic functions. They affect us. They exert a powerful force on us. They form us as racial subjects. As we interact with these narratives, we perform and figure what race is, what it does, and what it means. I have earned a few pages to speak if not free from the way I have been disciplined, at least to be inspired by “childish” things—my felt experiences, my informal critical studies of everyday life, my imaginative musings, and my gut feelings about what’s happening in these affectively loaded spaces where we learn about race from the child.
‘He’s cute, for her’: Kids’ entangled pedagogies of sexuality and race in New York City
Children, Sexuality and Sexualization, 2015
In book: Children, Sexuality and Sexualization, pp.159-173
The innocent child construct that inh... more In book: Children, Sexuality and Sexualization, pp.159-173
The innocent child construct that inhibits our understanding of children’s sexualities also plagues our understanding of children’s racial subjectivities. But if we dispense with faulty constructs of the innocent child or a bounded children’s culture and begin instead with the understanding that children are indeed both sexual and racial (as well as gendered, national, classed, religioned) subjects, then new questions are opened for exploration. How are race and sex productive of each other? How is sexuality a site for racial (trans)formation? And how does learning race and becoming a racial subject inform sexual desires and experiences? What does it ‘feel’ like to experience desire within these raced, classed, gendered structures?What emotional and interactional responses do they oblige? This chapter will explore these questions through analysis of talk and interactions of 9-, 10- and 11-year-old children in a ‘superdiverse’ school in NYC, illustrating how the domain of sexuality is a productive site for the (trans)formation of race.
This article intervenes in the scholarship of race by way of the child, demonstrating how childho... more This article intervenes in the scholarship of race by way of the child, demonstrating how childhood is a doubly strategic site in disrupting the ontology of race as natural type or kind. One path involves disentangling children’s association with nature, a tragic knot conjoined through a particular conception of the human. This strategy reveals the savage child that apprehends and sorts bodily differences, working to sustain the nature of race. Rejecting the savage child opens up a space to view actual children through a distinct posthuman lens that emphasizes laughter, play and surrealism in everyday life. Drawing on ethnographic material where children in New York City struggled with the visibility of the body, I demonstrate that alternative ontologies of race are possible and do exist. These tasks allow both race and childhood to emerge in a new light, with important implications for anthropology’s cherished idea of the human.
Politics of Interculturality, 2011
Affiliation or appropriation? Crossing and the politics of race among children in New York City
Based on ethnographic research in a diverse New York City neighborhood, this article examines iss... more Based on ethnographic research in a diverse New York City neighborhood, this article examines issues surrounding the practice of crossing from children’s perspectives. Crossing refers to the use of language varieties to which one does not have conventional access, practices that could be disparaging or affiliative. The author explores how children distinguished the two types through the principle of authenticity, itself derived by means that went beyond the usual determinants of blood, birth and bodies. While playful, the author argues that crossings were one way for children to participate in the everyday politics of difference and critique the existing racial order.
Elementary forms of cosmopolitanism: Blood, birth, and bodies in immigrant New York City
In this article, Maria Kromidas explores how nine-, ten-, and eleven-year-old children in a diver... more In this article, Maria Kromidas explores how nine-, ten-, and eleven-year-old children in a diverse neighborhood school in immigrant New York City navigated and often undermined hegemonic notions of difference and belonging offered by mainstream multiculturalism and raciology. Based on ethnographic research and utilizing a fnegrained sociocultural linguistic analysis, Kromidas demonstrates how the children subverted the most dehumanizing elements of these ideologies-most notably their essentialism and absolutism and their basis in blood, birth, and bodies. She argues that the children provide a compelling vision for living with difference, one that emerged from the rich experiences and everyday-ness of multiracial living
Critique of Anthropology, 2004
The tragedy of September 11th produced immense controversy and re-ignited simmering culture wars ... more The tragedy of September 11th produced immense controversy and re-ignited simmering culture wars in the media over the presentation of these events in American schools, or what students should know. The ethnographic research conducted with fourth-grade students in a public school in Brooklyn, New York, side-stepped this debate in order to contribute to it. Specifically, the goal was to capture what children do in fact know through an investigation of their modes of speaking and writing about these events. What figured most prominently in the students’ talk and writing was their racialization of a far-away and ill-defined enemy. By showing how this racialization was also evident in the students’ interactions and friendship, and contextualizing these patterns in the racial (dis)order of the United States, I suggest that the events of September 11th and the war on terrorism have produced a culture of fear that will have lasting, if as yet unintelligible, effects on the racial dynamics of the United States.
book review by Maria Kromidas
American Anthropologist, 2016
H-Citizenship, H-Net Reviews, 2016
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books by Maria Kromidas
papers by Maria Kromidas
The innocent child construct that inhibits our understanding of children’s sexualities also plagues our understanding of children’s racial subjectivities. But if we dispense with faulty constructs of the innocent child or a bounded children’s culture and begin instead with the understanding that children are indeed both sexual and racial (as well as gendered, national, classed, religioned) subjects, then new questions are opened for exploration. How are race and sex productive of each other? How is sexuality a site for racial (trans)formation? And how does learning race and becoming a racial subject inform sexual desires and experiences? What does it ‘feel’ like to experience desire within these raced, classed, gendered structures?What emotional and interactional responses do they oblige? This chapter will explore these questions through analysis of talk and interactions of 9-, 10- and 11-year-old children in a ‘superdiverse’ school in NYC, illustrating how the domain of sexuality is a productive site for the (trans)formation of race.
book review by Maria Kromidas