Researching Childhood Growth and Change

1. Researching Childhood Growth and Change Bio-politics, affect, attractors

2. What am I up to? • There have been good reasons to build defenses against the relevance of ‘life processes’ for childhood studies and social science more broadly • Today there are good intellectual and strategic reasons to drop those defences • News ways to grow and articulate critical insights are needed.

3. What is bio-politics? • Contestation at the overlap of life processes and social processes • Aristotle - two words for life - zoë / bios • Foucault – state/population relationship • Very newsy • Craig Venter ‘artificial life’ • Food, water, power, climate, resource scarcity

4. The Overlap • Relations between life processes and social processes are not binary but multiple-huge complexity and variation • Novel relations emerge all the time • From attempts to articulate atmospheric concentrations of CO2 with how you get to school to the EPAS1 gene that separates Tibetans and Han Chinese • Need to get some sort of handle on it

5. Bio-social relations • Vary by; • Relevance • Negotiability • Novelty

6. Affect and Novelty • ‘Affect’ – Deleuze and Guattari • Simply points out that ‘things’ have powers to affect and be affected by other things • This goes for bugs, machines and people • I use this concept to guide me as I study the emergence of novel bio-social relations

7. Meningitis: affective communities Here’s an account of a novel bio-social relation in formation

8. Neisseria Meningitidis

9. Commensal bacterium Lives in nose and throat of 30% • Interacts with human epithelial cells and immune cells • Helps sustain immunity • Normally this affective community makes no connection with community of human whole organisms even though it shares ‘substance’

10. Epidemic • New strain of Neisseria meningitidis, or • Immune suppressed population, or • Weather conditions • Can enter blood stream • Can cross blood-brain barrier • Can cause swelling of meninges

11. Meninges

12. Meningitis Belt

13. Novel connection • Normally community of bugs and cells and community of humans can ignore each other • 1996 Kano Nigeria • Pfizer took opportunity to test a new antibiotic on infected children • Parents issued a thicket of compensation claims • Grounds: lack of informed consent

14. Mosquito: affective strategy • Here’s an account of a second novel bio-social relation in formation

15. Mosquito device

16. Inner ear (human)

17. Hearing loss by age

18. Novel connection • A new bio-social relation has been formed between affects of young ears and affects of high frequency sound making device • It means shopkeepers don’t have to talk to youngsters • ‘Bad’ aspects of consumers can be abolished • Formal and informal protest by young

19. You tube • Mosquito (teenage deterrent)

20. Problem These are very different events Affective relations in the bio-social overlap are, of their nature, heterogeneous and highly localised What is the core or organising principle around which knowledge of them can accumulate ?

21. Metaphor Alert!‘Strange Attractors’

22. Imagine • Whirly coin collector – end is an attractor • Marble rolling in a bowl – path is an attractor • ‘Strange’ attractor never repeats but a pattern emerges over many iterations

23. Three ‘attractors’ • Life • Voice • Resource • You can trace these through my two examples • In my metaphor these are strange attractors – room for novelty but you have a guide to pattern.

24. Life, voice and resource • Can be used to: • Orient research topic within bio-social space • Pathfind between aspects of a topic • Compare findings from different locations • Sensitise to connections between life-processes and social processes