How Can We Build Solidarity With Children? with Madeline Lane-McKinley

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We live in a world that is profoundly against children—evident in the genocide in Palestine, the fascist targeting of trans children, and the blatant disregard for the lives of migrant children crossing borders and oceans. It is a world in which climate catastrophe has become the new normal, in which children’s futures are by no means assured.

What we need, feminist writer and scholar Madeline Lane-McKinely argues, is a politics of solidarity with children, one that sees children as comrades in our struggle for a better future. Blending personal and political reflection with cultural analysis, Lane-McKinley examines the history of childhood as a system of private property in capitalism, showing how the idea of the child has been weaponized in the service of white supremacy and empire. They disentangle motherhood from the act of caregiving, tracing the possibilities of revolutionary mothering. And they critique the parents’ rights movement and imagines what education might look like outside schools, considering how we might center children as we challenge the strictures of the nuclear family. 

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Transcript

SPEAKER_00 0:07

Hey everyone, welcome back to Left Hand again today. Glad to have you back. Today we are joined by Madeline Lane McKinley to discuss her book, Solidarity with Children, an essay against adult supremacy, out now on Haymarket Press. It's a revolutionary feminist case for child liberation that examines the history of childhood as a system of private property under capitalism and asks what a genuine politics of solidarity with children might look like today. But before we get into it, just a couple of quick announcements from the AHRC. This summer, we're hosting three free public philosophy panels as part of the AHRC agora, including one led by Emma called Should We Live in Communes, a discussion tracing the commune throughout history and asking what forms of collective life it might still make possible. And don't forget that Emma is also offering a four-week course beginning in August called Anti-Civilization, Recovering from Industry and Progress, which you can enroll in now at AcidHorizon Research Commons.com. Okay, let's get on to today's discussion with Madeline. Welcome to Left Hand. I am your host, Serepti, joined today by collaborator and today's co-host, Emma Stamm. We have the privilege of speaking with Madeline Lane McKinley, feminist writer, parent, teacher, and author of Solidarity with Children, an essay against adult supremacy, out now from Haymarket Books. Madeline is also the author of Comedy Against Work, Utopian Longing in Dystopian Times. And Dear Z, co-author of Fag Hag and editor at Blindfield, a journal of cultural inquiry, and co-editor of the forthcoming The Return of the 90s, a cultural history of the present, due out in June from Pluto Press. Madeline is actively involved in several youth-based political projects, including a youth liberationist film group. Today we turn to the urgent questions at the heart of Madeline's work, what it means that childhood, as we understand it, remains structured by the primacy of adult power, and what it would take to transform that relationship, not simply to reform the ways in which adults dominate the lives of children, but to imagine children as comrades, as fellow subjects alongside whom we face the struggle for liberation within the current capitalist conjuncture and against the forms of sovereignty that are continuously deployed against children's lives, their desires, and their futures. Welcome to Left Hand, Madeline. We're so glad to have you here. Thanks for having me. Before we get into solidarity with children, just say a little bit more about yourself.

SPEAKER_02 3:03

Yeah, I'm a parent of a teenager. I should say my teenager is the primary organizer of that youth liberationist film group. And I have a PhD in literature and cultural studies. I'm an adjunct at several universities. And I live in Portland, Oregon with my partner. We're involved in several pretty cool projects here and have been living here since 2023.

SPEAKER_00 3:29

Great to have you. And so Solidarity with Children is an interesting work because it sits at the nexus of various genres or areas of research: fiction, cultural criticism, some film criticism, political theory. And it is a synthesis, we might say, of all those different modes of inquiry. Can you just tell us how it is that you came to this project? What drew you to the question of childhood and adult supremacy as the organizing problematic? And what do you think it means to write an essay that it's at once theoretical, personal, and political?

SPEAKER_02 4:08

That's a lovely question. The simple answer of how I came to it is the child I mentioned before, I sometimes say there's a few starting points. That was certainly one of them. The other being my own childhood eventually came to be something I wanted to think through and politically situate, and also my experiences as a teacher, right, with young people. So I was motivated on some level to just put that practice into theory, I guess, uh the other way around, and to make some connections with the kind of scholarly work I'd done on utopian thought, on um revolutionary feminism and Marxist feminism, on cultural criticism and film studies, to incorporate that in some way onto my thinking. I guess the other aspect of your question that I was uh interested in is over the personal and political reflection and kind of the genre of the book at large. I felt pretty strongly that this shouldn't be academic theory, certainly, which is not just written for adults, but a very, very specialized field of adults, right? But that this could be somehow readable for adolescent readers specifically, or adolescent readers who are are reading alongside older comrades of some sort, either their parents, caretakers, teachers. I know there have been some reading groups that have popped up around it. So I was writing in a way that was kind of using techniques of narrative, storytelling, and especially draws on these like cultural examples or literary objects, I think, in a way to evoke different kinds of readerships for the book. That felt really important for me. Not a book for parents only, also, which is what I have observed a lot in the literature about this. And there's nothing wrong with that. And parents and caretakers definitely need books for them that are about their concerns, but that also limits who feels it's for them. And the book, I hope, can feels for the reader like it's it's for everyone at some level, because childhood is actually a wonderful groundwork for thinking solidarity. It's something we all have some connection to through our own own experience and hopefully through the experience of caring for and helping kids through theirs.

SPEAKER_00 6:35

My first impression of the book, well, I'll say that the impression that was building throughout reading the initial chapters was that the whole concept of childhood historically, and from the standpoint of, let's say, literature or film, is one that's informed both by what we might call historical reality and fact, but also fiction in some sense. The concept of childhood is almost undergirded by the image of childhood and suffused with imagination itself, for better or for worse. In the best cases, it's childhood is shot through with fabulation, right? The whole act of being a child is one that's imaginative, and that's one way that we imagine being a child. So there's this whole sort of feedback loop of imagination built within the historical concepts of childhood and some of the literature that you look at as well. With that said, what do you think, amidst all of the figures that are either mediators or kind of obstacles to rethinking childhood, what did you feel was missing from the conversations that were being had about childhood, whether it's historically speaking or in this contemporary moment? And what had you hoped that this book would do that other books of its kind had not yet done?

SPEAKER_02 7:58

Well, I don't know if I was approaching it in such ambitious terms. I I I don't want to, I don't I'm humbled by all of the the work that made this work possible before me. That said, I think one of the central concerns of the book is thinking about the child or childhood as a social construction. It's not actually a real thing, like biologically or things like that. We could break down human development in all sorts of ways, right? But it's it's really its function is as a social or a political category or a subject position that people are put into that restricts them of rights, that renders them property, that renders them cheap labor and all exploitable in all sorts of ways. So often in the literature of children or childhood, childhood is something that has already happened, that has a determinant ending of some sort. And I think one of the things, especially in talking about the book since it came out, that I've been really struck by is how much um uh readers have have engaged with this idea that that we are all rendered children in some way, right? And that the child is, children are rather often just, I say at some point in the book, someone who's lefter than you or poorer than you, or that they don't even need to be younger than you, right? But but has achieved less of the status, the class status of adulthood than you, that also elders are rendered children in this regard too, right? So I think reframing childhood as something that that continues, that that that lurks not just in your, obviously in your unconscious, you know, in this Freudian kind of way, right? Of what's unsettled or unreckoned with, right? But that is actually something that you get positioned as for political reasons, right? And to use that insight for building practices of solidarity. I think a lot about that as an adjunct laborer in universities, right? The way that admin will speak to not just, I mean, they they speak to tenured faculty with much more job security than myself, but right, the the way that administrators talk down to is obviously infantilizing, right? But the the actual experience, like in terms at a rhetorical level, but the actual experience politically of being disempowered in that way and being told you can't see these documents because they're too complicated for you to understand, for instance. These are political moves that we are we're all familiar with in our in our everyday lives in some way. But I I hope that the book offers a way of kind of making sense of them and and use utilizing again some of these insights in in real, direct, concrete ways.

SPEAKER_01 10:48

The condition of being politically subjugated in such a way that corresponds with this construction of childhood defines my generation, which I think is is your generation too, the millennials. Our avocado toast. Our avocado toast, our lockdowns, our our inability to grow up and take charge in the way our presidents did. And what that brings up for me is the fact that while on one hand, this project speaks to timeless themes and deeply philosophical themes, even as you describe it as uh a work that isn't theoretical in the traditional academic sense. It's addressing the nature of selfhood and personhood. It addresses the way that we construct time in different uh sections. So there's this sort of philosophical timelessness to it, but it's also an incredibly timely project. It I think is super relevant to the millennial condition, and maybe that's my bias as a member of that generation. But also because, as you point out several times throughout the book, there is a particular way in which childhood is being weaponized right now. So you open the text by observing that when Israel declared war on Gaza, half of the residents of Gaza were under the age of 15. And that's just one among many ways that our consciousness has been brought to the question of childhood. You address the circulation of images of children in Gaza in this context. I wonder if you could speak a little bit about things that are happening right now that come to bear on this project.

SPEAKER_02 12:39

Yeah, absolutely. I appreciate you thinking through those different temporalities. It explains a little bit of what what my mind was going through and writing it. But engaging with this thing was such a deep human history that's so complicated that really gets at the structure of our world in this kind of permeable way. And also the kind of non-stop circulation of obviously images of children suffering, children harmed, children dead in Gaza, for instance, and the the panic over particular kinds of children, trans children, the villainization of non-white children, the dehumanization of immigrant children that that we're seeing in our neighborhoods on the news, kind of non-stop, right? And so I was trying to think, think through these things. I appreciate what you're saying about perhaps that was another starting point of the project of quote unquote coming of age in this moment where it's guess what? You never get to be an adult, right? You're going to go to grad school and then and live in kind of this world where everyone has insurmountable debt, where there's no jobs, et cetera. Right. Part of that was also that our generation, and I know it's not as simple of the as this, but especially what I was observing around me was all no one was really interested in having kids of their own. And so my first few years of having a child who I had at 26, in a bit of a kind of revolutionary moment, we were involved in this, these political struggles. And I had a child and was very inspired by the the community I was in to help me raise it and things like that. But overall, there was an almost anti-child sentiment in lots of um left spaces that sometimes I hesitate to bring up because I don't, I don't really want to sound like I have a chip on my shoulder, but I I a little bit do from personal experiences. But in terms of political discourse and things like that, the question of children was very much caught in the pro or anti-natalist debate and not really getting out of that. So what I'm struck by and thinking about the last few years is this is really a moment where more people on the left seem to like really care about kids and want to have some connection and see that the that there's stakes in having solidarity with children and that that has nothing at all to do with them being parents and choosing to have children of their own. Or even the other route, which I should mention, right, is that people become teachers, right? That's the other way that you're expected to care about kids. So I think there is something really remarkable that was really kind of going on in real time as I was writing the book, this this profound energy and commitment to figuring out this question of solidarity with kids that I think is really historically distinct. And I don't think it just came out of nowhere with with Gaza. I think it was it was growing over time as we've seen the ways that the fascist creep specifically really fixates over specific kinds of kids and and really does uh terrible violence to to particular figures of the child, right, around them, right? Whoever that's that's deemed to be.

SPEAKER_00 16:15

I almost want you to speculate on why it's the case that, for example, some or maybe many or most leftists in in your group, your cohort were of an anti-natalist band or anti-children. And what do you think constituted that shift to where things were more inclusive?

SPEAKER_02 16:35

Ooh, there's a lot of there's a lot of things, and then I've I I guess anecdotally have observed that a lot of folks who were anti-natalist 10 years ago seem to have children during the pandemic, which I found striking. So there's a lot of contradictions that I'm I'm I'm just a spectator for, and I'm I'm very curious about why those particular shifts I think have happened. But I think really what I'm commenting on is that it was it was just so reduced to that matter, right? And children were flattened to a matter of a decision that one makes, right? Which is also how abortion discourse works, right? And to be able to think children outside of just that matter of an idea of a dis a political decision one makes is I think one of the things that one of the things I'm I'm hoping has changed in the course of that time.

SPEAKER_00 17:32

I mean, can I can I share something with you? Maybe this will give you some insight into how some others are thinking. I'm married, but I don't have children. And we're not going to have children, but I would say early in the dating or in engagement phase, if you will, I think it was a foregone conclusion that we were not going to have children. And the sort of unspoken premise was that this world is shit, and there's no reason to bring a child into this world, which is the thought of so many people. And over time, I mean, now I've I've been married for 10 years, and it's not that that I've I've reversed my decision to have children, but I have observed in myself a sort of nihilistic thread running through that, that opinion, that premise. And uh, you know, have since maybe I've changed my mind about it. Maybe if if I were to go back in time, maybe something different would have come of our relationship. Maybe I would have had a child had I thought differently about it. But I think this is one of the big challenges. And especially for those of us who had a difficult childhood and so forth, those two things get associated. The very grim circumstances within which we live and the memory, the echoes of the past sort of coursing over all of that makes the whole idea of for some of us, especially on the left, having children seem uh like such a uh dismal prospect, you know, to bring somebody into this world. But I think the me of now thinks that the real revolutionary position is to affirm life. Granted, this this has nothing to do with like a pro-choice or pro-life abortion argument, but just in the general sense that we would not deny life to ourselves, given the state of the world, that it is within our hands to change things.

SPEAKER_02 19:22

Yeah, I appreciate that reframing. I don't, I refuse to weigh in on whether or not people should have children. I am not going to have another child, but children exist. That's really what my my book is thinking about is beside beside that decision. And there's a lot I a lot of people make the decision to have a child and then they have that child and they love that child, but they also regret the decision to have had the child at the same time. And I think there's a complexity to that as well, that is hard to speak to among parents who who've who've done that. But most parents I know are very who are in our kind of political milieu are not very interested in like sharing the the pronatalist position and telling you why to reproduce too, right? It's it's their life circumstance, right? Life, life is there. And so for whatever reason, people become parents, whether they choose to to have those children themselves, as happens with caretakers. And I think that the the actual everyday experience of care is is really like the terrain I'm I'm interested in in thinking about. Um but that said, I'm gonna say there was a lot of talk about one battle after another. And I'm also not gonna weigh in on any of that talk. The thing that really frustrated me about that movie, which I'm gonna assume listeners and you have have seen, is that the actual moment of that decision to have a baby is jumped over, right? There's like this break where all of a sudden she's like nine months pregnant, right? And that to me seems like the most interesting part of that movie is, or of the story potentially, is like the experience of being caught up in a revolutionary moment and that also coinciding with its decision to reproduce. That was my experience of having a child. I felt extremely utopian and extremely charged with revolutionary energy and is like involved in this like student movement and living in a collective house, and really felt like if I was going to have a child, that this was a situation in which I would do it. And that was my experience of it, which I can which I can speak to. But it's very interesting. People come up to me after the book talk and they say, Should I have a child? So maybe you're you're striking a nerve, but I want to say that that's something that I'm I'm like, I'm not going to no, that's not my terrain, but it is interesting. Interesting what people want to talk about with this stuff. And I know that these are these are deep questions that people grapple with a lot. Even my friends who, well, I'll say one more thing. I have a friend who never wanted to have a child and is identifies as antinatalist and realized that doesn't mean hating kids, but that there was a certain slippage for them for a long time. That having that position meant like also having some kind of resentment towards children that they encountered. And actually, that the antenatalist position that I most respect is the one that's focused on the solidarity with children question, right? Which is why would we want to bring children into a world that's clearly falling apart, right? But that slippage, right, between the idea of the child and actually existing children, that that's I think what I'm trying to politically intervene on. And what I've noticed also on the left is even even folks who are like most interested in in speaking for children and and showing up for children in this way is children are often reduced to to mirror ideas in these conversations, right? So how do we how do we change that? What does it look like if we if we mess around with our structures, our our our inner working so that the kids could actually be an active part of it?

SPEAKER_01 23:20

I haven't seen one battle after another. So I'm missing some crucial comments here. It's okay. Oh really?

SPEAKER_00 23:28

No, I will though. It's on the list. Yeah. Yeah. Sorry to make the assumption.

SPEAKER_01 23:32

On on the list. I only mentioned that in case it's consequential for what I'm about to say. It tees me up pretty nicely, actually. The the matter of the the decision to have kids. And as you put it, Madeline, the fact that we tend to flatten childhood to a decision. And it's almost as if our thinking about childhood has to follow one of two tracks. Either we opt into parenting or to working with children as professional caregivers or teachers. Or on the other track, we disengage with childhood after we reach a certain age. And that goes along with this idea that if you don't have children, that you don't like children, or that not having children is not an ongoing phenomenon in your life. That the condition of not having children is not a way of, let's say, constructing a certain relationship to the world around you, but simply instead an absence of thought and an absence of a relationship. I know that there's, I don't know if I would call it a stereotype, but there's this image that uh plagues women in particular who don't have kids, that this figure is sort of smug about the whole idea of the child. Children are gross, children are sticky, children take so much time, children ruin your body, all of this, the stuff that we believe that is going on in the mind of the woman who does not have a child. And one of the really remarkable things about this text is that that image is completely incompatible with all of the ideas that you're laying on the table and the futures that you're envisioning. Because really, I don't think, I don't think anybody, any any person of any any gender actually thinks like that. And maybe even even if they do maybe make an offhand remark that's sort of smug and nasty about children. I I have a hard time believing that, being that we were all once children, and most of us have children in our lives in some way, shape, or form through family or something else, that people don't really think about children like that. And this is all in getting toward a question about how you conceptualize mothering, because that chapter really stuck out to me. Um, it seems to me that in the way that you are talking about mothering, it's almost as if an ideal of uh a future, a utopian future is a world where we would all be mothers and be mothered. And I'm gonna leave it at that, maybe, and let you um sort of riff on that.

SPEAKER_02 26:37

Yeah, thank you. Yeah, I was it's a wonderful way of describing the possibility. I think that chapter is is writing toward. And a lot of that means dismantling the the historical institution of motherhood, right? Which is another like rights-based, property-based system that excludes many who are doing the the verb, the work, the practice of of mothering. And so I wanted to recognize that that schism so that we could start to look for acts and practices of mothering that that we all have access to, that we're all called into. Partly in my political communities, there's always a mom, there's always a mom figure. And sometimes they don't want to be the mom. Sometimes they really don't. And I've certainly been that myself, as you know, who's the default older femme in this context. Well, I guess that person's gonna be the mom. I've noticed this and thought a lot about the issue of consent, right? Can consenting to play that role, but also that a part of that role is atomization, it's kind of separation from from everyone else, right? In this kind of way. It's it's it's isolative. And I'm interested in that breaking, breaking apart and being something that we all can can kind of inhabit at different registers, right? Like what's what's implicit when somebody's like, oh, we're at a barbecue, that person's like being the mom, right? Is that she's got she's got it covered, right? And what would it mean to to observe that and then do something different with that insight, right? It's like, okay, well, I'm gonna go in and mom her or out mom her or whatever, right? What are these kinds of playful gestures we could do with that observation, which happens all the time, to to even to just make make sure that that role is somewhat something that someone wants, I think is a really radical gesture that we might do. I loved what you were saying about, I'm also thinking about like whatever, the the childless cat lady or or these types of, yeah, these types of figures. Every single childless cat lady I know is really fun to hang out with with my teenager. Like there's just there's so many ways to to relate to to young people outside of the the framework of mothering that we get from motherhood, right? And so whatever we think about this as like being an auntie or things like that. I love the way that that kind of gets casually and in our language acknowledged all the time, right? But that's also kind of a part of this project of of collective mothering, right? Is making possible all these kinds of genres of mothering, right? That don't have to be all the time nonstop, unceasing, unbearable, that can be things you dip in and out of in different people's lives. So that's kind of what what I was hoping to think with. I've learned a lot from being a so-called mother, whether in like the biological formal legal relationship I have with my teenager, but also in the capacity of I've had in political context and things like that. But I think just like anything, everyone should be able to see what that is so that they can understand how how different spaces and and groups work, right? It's like in in a collective house. Everyone needs to know how to do the dishes. Why is it that it's not one person's role to do that, right? But if we could we could recognize that at a more formal scale, I think would be just it's these are like small insights, but I just wonder how much could be built out of them. Sometimes when I say these things, I'm like, it I know it sounds very simple, but it actually really isn't. It it involves a profound change in how we think about our relationships, but it does need to be broken down into simple, simple questions.

SPEAKER_00 30:44

In the book, you make this distinction, and I paraphrased it here. And so please correct me if I've I've misquoted it. You say that the histories of childhood should not be mistaken for the histories of children themselves. And, you know, realizing now that perhaps the scope of this book isn't to make a profound argument about the metaphysics of being a child, but at the same time, it raises the question of well, if it is true that childhood is something that's historically constructed, you know, as you said, produced through property relations. And that's something that I think we could dig into a little bit more if we wanted to. Is it possible to think that childhood exists in some sense beyond the historical narrative? Because it seemed like that's what that particular sentence was trying to say. You know, I have to say, one of the things that I've had some difficulty with, just in my path as a philosopher, as somebody on the left, is overcoming this intuition that the child is something like an archetypal given in the world, presented to us as almost epistemically formless. But of course, that's only true relative to the episteme that we actually live within. Children clearly have an epistemic reality. It just might not be the one that we have been accustomed to or are inured to as adults. But still, children are quite vulnerable. They are sometimes lured into believing things by adults who have uh unsavory wishes or desires, if you will. They want to exploit children. I think of you know, child trafficking and everything else. So, with that said, you know, how are we to conceive of the child and childhood in a in a way that maybe isn't universal in its scope, but perhaps acknowledges that there is some dimension to childhood that exceeds the historical narratives as we know them now? Or maybe that's simply not true. Maybe that's simply not true. Yeah.

SPEAKER_02 32:41

Well, I'm gonna answer what I hear is part of the question, which is I want to abolish these categories of a primarily adulthood, because I think whatever childhood is, is clearly like what we it contains all of the the wishes and the kind of utopian kernels of what adulthood has imposed upon us. That said, I'm not denying that there's development, right? That people develop, that their bodies, that their brains develop, that they psychologically develop. Part of what I hope can be broken open from like, what if we were to think outside of these terms of hoods, right? Of childhood and adulthood, is that we'd be able to see some of the ways that we we grow at different in different ways in different directions. We're not just growing up, right? Which is how we often speak of childhood, right? We're growing all sorts of ways, downward sometimes, right? Sideways, that growth happens at different trajectories. But one of the fictions when you're when you have a child, in fact, it begins with pregnancy. The first uh month they start sending you these emails, and it's like, I have a lima bean, now it's a walnut, now it's a there's a a specific track, and then the the child is born, and it's like, oh well, your child should be doing this and this and this this month, and next month this and this and this. And there's these benchmarks that are very intense during the first few years of of a child's life. But we see this through the school system, right? We see this, and then there's something about adulthood, which we know also is false, which is ah, finally we're liberated from this thing where we're constantly having to make these like benchmarks in school and like pass these tests or, you know, in fact, that just keeps going as well, right? So we live in a world where development is tracked through these arbitrary, often really fucked up metrics, right? But what if we were to take from the insight that, like, yes, we do develop and certain people are ready for different things at different points in their lives, and some are never ready. And what does it mean to be ready, right? Those kinds of questions kind of can unfold once we get rid of these, these bigger kind of boundaries drawn by adult child. So, yes, when you say children are vulnerable to being lured, exploited by predatory people, that is very true. Also, I am too. So are other adults, right? There's some a lot of the things we start to we start to say about kids, you start to how is that different from me? Right. So, one of the questions I get a lot is well, I want to believe in children's liberation and I want for my child to be autonomous. This is often coming from a concerned parent's perspective, but children fall down. I don't want them to walk into the street. I don't agreed to being liberated doesn't mean being endangered, right? But it's interesting how these assumptions get made, right? That to be liberated means to be feral, to be like unleashed, right? And to be put in put in harm's way of of all sorts of predation in that capital A adult world. I I understand that, but the the thing about children is that they need to be cared for, and we recognize that, but actually we do too, right? And that the that that involves like really messing around with this idea of of achieving adult status, which is like there's some fantasy caught up in that that you're somehow exempt from needing care, which is false, right? Um, so I think in in most cases, the things that when we look to what we're most concerned about in terms of children and their well-being, right? These kinds of anxieties that come up, I think that that's also the how we how we find these kinds of critical insights into like our own need to be with each other, to, to support each other. So we all depend on each other, and that's not something that stops at 18, right? So I don't know if that answers your question, but I think I I just don't know what the use of these these bigger concepts are, other than to discipline us to to exert power, to, to restrict rights, to determine property and inheritance and these types of things. And in in a lot of cases, cases it it robs from us a actual ability to reflect on where we are in our lives, right? Because maybe we're not, I just turned 40. Maybe I'm not what I'm supposed to, my life is supposed to be at 40, right? But what where am I apart from that, right? Those kinds of questions I think are more important and riskier and and spicier often.

SPEAKER_00 37:44

Sure. I I mean, to be fair, and just to be honest, it's it was all part of my provocative interviewer persona that I came at you with that question. I I mean I I I agree.

SPEAKER_02 37:54

I agree, yeah.

SPEAKER_00 37:55

Yeah. One of the things that that you made me think of too is elder care and just how I'm thinking particularly of elderly women these days, and how, you know, I've heard so many stories uh from friends and and various family members of women being exploited online and being lured in the same way that that young children might be. And just to your point, that the concept of childhood and or adulthood doesn't really assist us in that instance. And myself, as having been a prison educator, I mean, the one thing that's that's interesting to me is that in the context of of a certain kind of classroom when where feelings are being shared and what have you, you see this very unusual mixture of like it was mostly, it was all men where I taught, but the this kind of flux of machismo, but then an instant like regression back to this sort of like childlike state. You know, what seems to me to be childlike showing some vulnerability, showing wounding, and then vacillating right back to that macho position, too. I I think you know the story is far more complex than these two simple categories. And maybe one of the ways that I see it, I mean, I'd almost be betraying my deluzianism if I said that childhood were a thing, being a child or becoming a child is a becoming in a sense. It's it's that which is that allows us to sort of break through the the sedimented identities and those ossified thresholds that adulthood imposes upon us. And that's one of the interesting ways that he thinks about the figure of the child. Uh, and and to me, that seems kind of adequate to the task, at least in terms of what we're talking about here.

SPEAKER_02 39:42

But yeah, I mean, I I think a lot about it in terms of childishness. Um, the end of my book is thinking about childish utopianism, the feeling that Emma and I were talking about comedy earlier, but I often get this from comedy of just a rush over you where what was that? That that time, that, that temporality I was just in, right? I was I was taken away from my job or my miseration or something like that so briefly, so temporarily. But what if we describe that as this kind of childish utopianism or this childlike time that we still have access to? Because when we speak about the figure of the child, when we speak about childhood, as I said before, it is so often, and the we in that sentence being adults, a thing that is over. If an perhaps it is a trauma that we don't want to ever talk about that we're repressing, or perhaps it's a nostalgic past that we're romanticizing, or all variations of it, but it's irretrievable, it's over, right? What if it was something that we still had some some form of access to to call back to your your initial question, which I really liked, is you know, a lot of this is about our imagination, right? And to be thinking about really cultivating an imagination around these, around these problems.

SPEAKER_01 41:06

The figure of the child, certainly, as it comes through in your work, is where we, as ostensibly not children, place conditions and roles that are incompatible with how we're supposed to see ourselves as self-sufficient and realistic under capitalism. And this makes me think about your commentary on child activism or youth activism. You talk about uh school shooting survivors leading gun violence activism. I'm paying quite close attention these days to the youth-led Luddite and anti-AI movements and thinking through issues of generational conflict and intergenerational solidarity as it relates to our understanding of the impact of technology in the world. And this seems like an interesting thing to dig into because, on the one hand, from a child deliberation framework, we might uncritically slide into glorifying the child activist, but it's not quite that simple as you write.

SPEAKER_02 42:26

Yeah, glorifying or in some cases, right, co-opting, right, which is so so often what happens, even for people who have the best intentions, glorifying, co-opting, fetishizing, right? Just again, more versions of of making children and their or young people's political commitments into ideas, right, in the service of of our own struggles. I I really love this question, and this is something I've been thinking a lot about specifically the the conversation that I've been enjoying having around the book is over the phrasing of protect trans kids, right? And how how simple the language is. The the question of language is so simple, right? But what does it what are some other ways that we might imagine that that relation of solidarity other than as protector, right? So stand, I stand with trans kids or listen to trans kids or show up for trans kids, right? These kinds of reframings I've I've heard trans kids speak a lot about, right? Like that actually really matters when I hear somebody use a different phraseology than this, but it it means more than that, right? So one of the tendencies I I note in the book is over like inclusion of children in political spaces, which sometimes just means childcare, which is often like physical. Marginalized in the political space. But at its best, it's kids get to be part of the political meetings. And what ends up happening to the kids in the political meetings is that they're doing the best they can to pretend that they're adults, right? And I've been a part of those things. Like I get it's not even to criticize those, right? But that that's not the only way in which children can be brought into the fold. And in fact, like we should be looking for more in ways to be brought into their fold, right? And so I've been suggesting a lot look at, especially for people who I completely understand you don't have kids, you're not a teacher or a librarian or a social worker. Um you have friends with kids, but that's really it. Just finding ways to support stuff that's been happening in in terms of high school walkouts over Gaza, over Iran, over Solidarity with teachers and things like that. But high school students are so well organized and get no recognition for it. And they're working almost completely autonomously without any adult support, other than maybe a few teachers. And to recognize spaces like that in which young people are being self-directed, are being self-organized and finding ways to support that from the sides, right? And creating figuring out what you have access to as a quote adult that would help. These are kinds of tactics that I really encourage people exploring because I think you just in doing that, you open up many more kinds of formal possibilities in terms of your meeting structures and terms of your direct community you're you're organizing with and things like that. So, but yeah, I really appreciate that question.

SPEAKER_00 45:54

One of the things that you bring up in the book that I think is really important to discuss is school as a social totality, or as this kind of site of a social totality. And how some families, you know, we we often think in terms of like the libertarian who wants to take their kids out of school and homeschool them. And this is an antidote to the excesses of modern culture. And and for everything that's wrong with school, there may be something correct about that impulse, but often it's the case that they're resisting some of the things that we're advocating for here, right? Which is the inclusivity of non-heteronormative people in our society, trans children, and so forth. And I mean, I'll bring in this anecdote. Maybe 10 years ago, I had a landlord who was, you know, for all intents and purposes, like a middle class or an upper upper middle class family. And they had, they homeschooled their children, but they did so with an enclave of non-religious families, basically of the same social class as they were, likely seeing that the current school system was simply not delivering the goods. It wasn't socializing children in a way that was adequate to their standards or what have you. And strangely, from the outside looking in, I would see the children from time to time, and I would see the family altogether. It was clear that there was, in some aspect, this was a privilege of their social class. They could do this because they had the money, the time, the resources, and so forth to get it done. But at the same time, that same grouping of families was attempting to cultivate something that our school system today was not delivering. Those families were much more hands-on, they were in tune with their children. Uh, the children themselves organized projects, the learning was based on their interests and so forth. And in your book, we we come across this criticism of homeschooling, but then there's this other concept of unschooling as well. And just looking at the entire social field here today, and this was 10 years ago. Now we're living in the age where the short-form video content has young people in its thrall, not to mention the intervention of AI now has has created a new challenge for students and learning and their ability to engage with the learning material and to read. So there's so much more at stake, and there seems to be so many more obstacles to educating a child in the sort of traditional way, which on the one hand allows us to perhaps intervene and as communities try something new. But on the other hand, it seems that the risks and the threats are just stacked so high these days, it's almost to the point that something like AI and all these algorithmic platforms are taking something away from children, basically acclimating them to the surveillance state and its growth in some sense. I know I've thrown a huge bundle at you here, but given everything that's at stake with the sort of collapse of the edifice of the public school system here in the United States, it being vastly underfunded, teachers being underpaid, all of the community alternatives are under threat, just given the fact that everybody's overworked and so forth. And now with everything else coming at us, like AI, algorithmic platforms and what have you, what do you see as some viable alternatives or lines of flight? This seems to be an area in which you're working and doing some activism. Tell us a little bit about what you're doing and how you see what you're doing as presenting a potential antidote to the threats that are on the horizon.

SPEAKER_02 49:53

What we imagine education to be is changing so rapidly. It's difficult to know what to do. And a day-to-day level, parenting a kid, thinking about these questions of education, absolutely. For me, the question isn't, I do have a critique of homeschooling, that homeschooling was in many ways an incredible way for abusers to get away with their abuse in the private home, right? That uh collapsing the the school into the private private family as so often uh homeschooling works, puts many children in in danger of abuse that that goes unreported. And of course it does, right? Which is not to say school equals safety, right? But it it does for some, for many children present some version of safety. And I say that not it's probably not through the administration, it's probably not even through the school, it's probably actually through the group of kids that they're having lunch with every day. But that that's okay. So getting back to it, it's not to school or unschool for me. It's thinking kind of dialectically about this, thinking about how to unschool through schools, how to re-school. I'm thinking, I'm I'm joking a little bit, but but the the discourse that I engage in the book is that of de-schooling. So thinking about which uh Ivan Illich coined, but I'm also kind of drawing from a lot of radical pedagogy. The situation is Rael Banayim has a lot of thinking about collapsing the institutions from within, right? But but understanding schools as a revolutionary instrument, right? The school is in terms of our institution the best chance we've got to have have to take over an institution of power and build build revolutionary capacity. I don't need to educate anyone on on that, right? The long history of that happening in in campuses, of the school itself being repurposed from within. So I see that happening in a kind of larger scale, revolutionary scale, but I also see that being a really important facet of what school life offers, offers to kids. So I mentioned before high school students being like the most rad, showing up doing all this stuff that why is no one noticing? I mean, people do notice, but I'm constantly on online, you know, hearing or reading people dismissing youth-based active youth big youth-based activism is like not organized enough or not properly planned or things like that, right? Anyways, one of the things that high school students have going for them, which I don't think most people actually in our world have anymore, especially because most people are are grappling with a few jobs and don't have a centralized workplace and things like that, or less and less of us are, that they're all having lunch together every day, that they have a group chat after class, that they're that they're keeping track of each other's lives, that they're making sure that each other is safe, they're calling each other on the phone because they're getting followed by a weird car on on their walk home, they're showing up for each other. And the and these things that young people are are developing with each other often dismissed, but the school is the main, the main space where where where they can do that work together and extend out of extending out of the school, right? But but that is the possibility of school as it is that I think can be instrumentalized and is being instrumentalized by by young people all the time. So those are some of the reasons why I think we should we should take seriously school as a as a site of political work. But then obviously I feel like I've totally neglected what's clearly at the foreground of that chapter, right? Which is the the long history of school being a mode of disciplining children into adulthood, preparing them for the workforce, right? Slowly degrading whatever this is that we're talking about, this experience of being a child through the course of many years, right? And that that is many children's first encounter with what it means to be a worker, what it means to be exploited, what it means to be disciplined, punished in public ways and things like that. So outs outside of the family family. And so yeah, I hope that my kind of thinking dialectically about the school comes across though, because if the school lunch table is anything, if if it's just sharing common grievances about school, that's fine. But that's that to me constitutes unschooling that's happening during the school hours at the school, right? And that these things can kind of bleed into each other and in fact reroute and politicize what's what's what's happening even in the most like extreme disciplinary contexts that are really depriving kids of any degrees of freedom. I I'll attach to this too, like one of the main concerns I have about school is access to recess that I've written about. You mentioned things that I've that I've worked on, but access to to recess is effectively a human rights iss issue, like access having access to free time play is I don't know if it's getting worse and worse for kids because of like quote, technology or things like that. I I I'm sometimes a little bit wary to weigh in on on things that feel a little bit like generational discourse like that. But what I do what we do know is that the amount of time that kids have to do self-determining activity, intrinsically rewarding activity, which we call play, uh is shrinking generationally in in terrifying ways, as is the amount of space that, like physical space that children are have access to to roam and and do things in, right? So we see these these kinds of measurements are alarming to me in terms of what what version of childhood children even have access to.

SPEAKER_01 56:16

So this brings up something very interesting. Which is the idea of schools and educational spaces, including college campuses, as at their very best versions of utopian communes. At their very worst, they're versions of prisons.

SPEAKER_02 56:40

Or concentration camps, yeah.

SPEAKER_01 56:43

Yeah. And this ties back into the notion that adulthood as conventionally construed is that which comes after childhood and is opposed to it. So as adults, we're supposed to say that the utopian commune is unrealistic and we're supposed to do what we can to keep ourselves out of prisons and to work towards worlds where uh we're all sort of acting in already disciplined ways so that we can stay out of them and not have to think about prisons as they exist in our society. So it's it is this sort of interesting thing because of course, in schools, just as in prisons and to a certain degree also in the history of concentration camps, these are all sites for organization. Uh, and the the conditions of these spaces facilitate that. At schools, people have lunch together, young people have lunch together. If you're um in a carceral institution, you are sharing time and space in a way that, as you point out, is increasingly not the case for adults. I am one of many, many people, including, I would assume, many listeners who don't have a traditional set of work that I go to. This is um going to be more and more the case, I think, as time goes on, and that has implications for how we're able to connect with each other and organize, of course. We can use the fact that children are in school in traditional school settings, or even if not, are usually being schooled, not having their schooling completely neglected in an abusive way, as a way to engage in the work of solidarity with children, using their already given linkages to each other through these structures as a way in. So the question that I have is considering that they're already very well positioned for this, how do we, as their accomplices, to use one of your favorite words, how do we work with them in a way that reflects what they're capable of back to themselves? Because this is something that's really missing. I think they seem to know this, they seem to be acting on this, and a lot of what we should be doing is affirming this, reflecting this. So, what does this look like in practice?

SPEAKER_02 59:19

That's really a lovely question. I mean, I think about this at a practical level. What are the things I have access to as an adult that I can do that you don't have access to? And I can give you that access. So, you know, honestly, a lot of the time that looks like giving rides. I'm not including like whatever. The same logic could be applied to beer. I'm not talking about that. But can I take you from from someplace? I have I have access to money, I can give you some money. What are these like it seems very simple, but I do think that's the baseline, right? What can I open access to? But I appreciate part of the question I'm hearing is how do you show kids that they they believe in themselves? How do we show them that we believe in them too? Right. And so I think just asking honestly, asking questions and asking for advice and asking for suggestions, young people are not often in the position of of being spoken to in that way. And I think that simple shifts in the dynamic in that way can mean a lot. It also, yeah, finding ways to materially support so all of the high school walkouts and things like that, they need they need fundraising, they need people to bring a bunch of donuts or a bunch of, you know, like snacks or waters or or things like that. I think those gestures are showing young people, I'm not trying to do the content, I'm not trying to tell you what to do, or I'm just showing up and being supportive and listening. I think that makes a huge difference. And using, as you're saying, these kind of networks that they already have in place to not just work with kids individually, but kind of facilitate spaces for them to go to and things like that. Meeting spaces, hangouts, barbecues, film screenings, any kind of thing like that where you're you're not at the center of it, but it's just again a matter of facilitating. I think young people just don't have access to a lot of space. And that's that's not really new, right? But it has got that is something, again, I think has gotten remarkably worse. So yeah. I'll give a film recommendation that maybe you haven't seen either, but it's called Over the Edge. It's a great 1979 film about these young people in a town, and all they want is a bowling alley, but the adults won't listen to them. And the adults certainly pay the price for that. I will just say that, no spoilers. But but yeah, we want a bowling alley. That that's that's a that's a that that's a considerable and serious political demand that young people can have, right? So what is our equivalent? What it's not it's it's it's so easy for adults, but it's not something I think people feel entitled to to do.

SPEAKER_00 1:02:19

Well, Madeline, I just want to say thank you for showing up here today. Actually, one question to kind of take us to the end of this discussion, you know, just in terms of some of the suggestions that you have offered us when it comes to showing solidarity with children, showing up for them. It seems like some of these practical on-the-ground sorts of things have been formalized to some extent in some of the activism and community work that you do. Could you tell us a little bit about what that looks like for you? And then maybe as we sort of head towards the the end of our discussion here, talk about some other projects, whether they're writing projects or more community organizing, things that you're working on at the moment.

SPEAKER_02 1:03:03

Sure. Well, it looks to for me in my immediate environment. I think I'll plug a project that I really love that's in Portland, which is called Budding Roses. And my kiddo is in involved in that and is now a junior counselor. And they put on a completely free two-week summer camp every summer. The first week is organized uh more by the adult accomplices and junior counselors. And then the second week, the the campers get to facilitate their own workshops, activities, and things like that, and are play an active role in in that. I'm also involved in another closed camp of that sort that's youth, youth-led and youth-centered. So I'm I've been getting really excited about doing those kinds of projects, not just because of like the special two weeks or one week that you get to spend with with those folks, but all of the things that come out of those projects. So that involved like just knowing more young people in my town who I can, yeah, give rides to, go to their protests and things like that. But it's really opened up a lot. And is also, I think budding roses is a great, especially because it's free and it offers free lunch and it's very much modeled after the Black Panther Free Breakfast Project, is thinking about like the connection between like these simple things like sharing food and doing an art project, but then also like political education and and thinking about radical history and situating ourselves in that. So I'm really excited about working on that. And am I answering your question at all?

SPEAKER_00 1:04:49

No, absolutely. You're you're doing a great job. I I guess the the last thing I would ask is uh outside of that, do you plan to continue this line of research or do you have another book project in the works?

SPEAKER_02 1:05:00

I do have another book I'm working on that is thinking about specifically the figure of the young adolescent girl, which comes up a few times in the book. And then not surprisingly, in the context of the Epstein Files and things like that, I've been asked a lot of questions. I spent a lot of time like really avoiding a lot of stuff around the Epstein files, but I'm also specifically as a as a survivor of stuff myself, but also just I I find it very hard to um I have to I have to carve out time and space to to look at at stuff like that. I can't kind of casually read a news article in the kind of way I've observed some. But I felt like actually the cultural moment of the Epstein files really does feel like something I should take seriously and think about and also really reflect on. Experience of talking so much about these issues at the same time, these things, these kinds of conversations coinciding. So I don't want to have more details on that. I don't have a contract or anything like that. It's just kind of where my research is going next, I think.

SPEAKER_00 1:06:15

Well, it was fascinating to take a look at Solidarity with children. And for those who want to obtain it, you can purchase it from Haymarket Books. And Madeline, if you do have future writing, please get in touch with us. We'd love to have you back on the show.

SPEAKER_02 1:06:30

Thank you so much. I really appreciate being invited on, and thanks for the wonderful conversation.