I’d never heard of childhood emancipatory studies before reading this article and I’m still not totally sure I understand what it is—I found this to be one of the least accessible pieces we’ve read this semester. But my sense of the field—at least how Mary Galbraith sees it—is that it is an interdisciplinary one (with a strong bent toward psychoanalysis) that roots itself in the subjective experiences of children, who are often marginalized and silenced. Galbraith proposes that we need to emancipate children by “understanding the situation of babies and children from a first-person point of view, exploring the contingent forces that block children’s full emergence as expressive subjects, and discovering how these forces can be overcome” (188). But for Galbraith, the way to accomplish this is adult-centered: “through adults transforming themselves and their own practices” and “reevaluat[ing] their own childhood experience as part of a personal emancipatory human project” (188-89).

While I think this is a valid idea, I think that Galbraith fails to emphasize the intersectionality of difference sorts of “emancipatory studies.” There is an enormous discrepancy in how silenced or marginalized a child is depending on his/her socioeconomic status, race, gender, learning or cognitive dis/abilities, family background, etc. For example, studies have shown that students of color are penalized more often and more harshly than their white peers at schools across America. (See below for some articles about these studies.) This type of research comes out of sociology or anthropology, fields I didn’t really see Galbraith giving much of a nod to compared to psychoanalysis and philosophy. In a field like childhood emancipatory studies—or really, any field that’s attempting some sort of understanding of someone’s “subjectivity” who isn’t ourselves—it’s especially important to be mindful of cultural difference. Maybe combining multiple emancipatory models—Galbraith lists liberation theology, feminism, and pedagogy of the oppressed as examples outside childhood emancipatory studies—would allow for more nuanced and comprehensive analyses of emancipation.

Ultimately, what I found most compelling about this article was how Galbraith questions “postmodern skepticism”—which I too have found frustrating. For Galbraith, a key problem of postmodern analysis is “showing theoretical access or even existence” of childhood or other experiences outside ourselves, which can hinder any sort of scholarly conversation about childhood whatsoever (191). But I wonder if a postmodern, skeptical reading is really all that different from the approach that Galbraith encourages and attempts. For example, Galbraith’s analysis of the Polar Express seems based in a certain kind of skepticism of traditional readings of children’s stories. And although, like Kate, I find her analysis of Polar Express with Santa as Hitler-figure questionable at best, I do see how using an approach like Galbraith’s—one that encourages that we question our presumptions and traditional modes of understanding—can be very useful in studying children’s literature and in fact go hand in hand with the type of postmodern criticism that Galbraith seems to oppose.

Articles about race and disciplining in schools:

http://www.ed.gov/news/press-releases/new-data-us-department-education-highlights-educational-inequities-around-teacher-experience-discipline-and-high-school-rigor

http://www.nytimes.com/2015/08/25/us/higher-expulsion-rates-for-black-students-are-found.html

http://www.npr.org/sections/codeswitch/2014/03/21/292456211/black-preschoolers-far-more-likely-to-be-suspended