Prologue: Towards slow childhood scholarship

Markéta Supa and Rebekah Willett

Viewing children’s lives and childhood research through a temporal lens illuminates the depth and breadth of children’s experiences (Gavin, 2022). It also unsettles familiar binaries that continue to shape how childhood is understood (Uprichard, 2008), for example, children as beings or becomings, childhood as lived experience or conceptual construct, mind and body, adult and child, and human and non-human. Against this backdrop, the relationship between childhoods and time has attracted increasing scholarly attention (e.g. Pomerantz and Knight, 2025). The present collective joins and extends these discussions by foregrounding children as whole beings who experience, imagine, and make meaning of time subjectively, yet always in relation to spaces, materials, and other human and more-than-human beings. We engage in “thinking time differently” (Barad, 2018) through dialogic reflection on our research in the fields of literacy, media, and education across various environments (home, school, public, digital, and rural) in Canada, Czechia, Finland, and the USA. Approaching time as moving backwards, forwards, and sideways, and as lived through moments of stillness, pause, and elasticity, we ultimately invite temporally sensitive ways of being with children in research and everyday life.

The article is framed as a series of nine diverse yet interconnected contributions developed through sustained dialogue within the Children and Placemaking Collective, an informal international network of scholars committed to slow and collaborative childhood scholarship. Our devotion to this form of scholarship required careful reading of selected texts, conversations over many months, and different forms of engagements with ideas including writing personal reflections and poetry. Such slow reading and writing stands in contrast with many of our experiences of rushing through journal articles to locate “just-in-time” references in order to support ideas about which we were writing.

Our slow childhood scholarship, however, is not only resistance to the neoliberalisation of universities that require high levels of “productivity” as discussed by numerous academics (e.g. Berg and Seeber, 2016; Hartman and Darab, 2012). Additionally, resisting the pressure to always publish new findings, we recognise that our research with children improves when we revisit our data, taking time to think more deeply, listen more closely, and to develop new frameworks for analysis and so on. This article, therefore, represents a commitment to processes of research that are best approached slowly. Further, in line with feminist politics, our approach involves a commitment to an ethics of care for fellow scholars. Our time together provided us new ways to “recognize the value of collective authorship, mentorship, collaboration, community building, and activist work in the germination and sharing of ideas” (Mountz et al., 2015: 1250).

Inspired by earlier collective explorations by Da Rosa Ribeiro et al. (2023) that seek to release childhood from the hegemony of linear, sequential, and progressive time, our colloquium likewise questions dominant temporal understandings that shape today’s childhoods. Yet rather than focusing on conceptual, philosophical, and historical thinking about childhood, our contributions explore temporalities in concrete moments of being with children and children being with others. As a collection, the article offers an interdisciplinary synthesis of affective, relational, and situational perspectives on children and time. We explore how children live and imagine time while learning, making, playing, storying, reading, and engaging with media across diverse contexts. Interwoven throughout is a reflection on our own positioning as qualitative researchers. We rethink interactions with children as temporal spaces for pause, dialogue, and justice, while fostering more responsive and empathetic approaches to childhood research.

The first three reflective pieces by Jenny R, Kristiina, and Chin Chin with Jenny B. are situated within interrelated research projects that draw on posthuman, decolonial, and new materialist perspectives. These contributions dwell on children’s environmental and ecological experiences and learning, while exploring cyclical and rhythmical understandings of time within multispecies and more-than-human relations. The following triad, by Jacquie, Layla, and Melanie, interrogates power and agency related to time in diverse spatial and embodied contexts: self-care children in libraries, rural childhoods, and school and online learning environments. These reflections explore children’s perceived spatialities and their negotiation, allocation, and meaning making of time. While experiential approaches to time are present across the collection, the reflections by Rebekah, Markéta, and Harini accentuate this perspective, deepening the critique of hurried and forward-driven temporalities. Emphasis is placed on the importance of slow and expansive time for creative, reflective, playful, and imaginative practices. Attending to children as aware of their past, present, and future selves—and to researchers as needing to be attuned to these temporal experiences, as well as to questions of equality and marginalisation—these reflections highlight the value of listening to children’s media experiences and personal stories.

Foregrounding temporality as a shared reflective lens, this collective exploration contributes to ongoing debates in global childhood studies concerning the relational and contextually shaped nature of children’s lives. At the same time, it highlights the potential of slow childhood scholarship to foster respectful and care-orientated dialogue across disciplines, perspectives, and geographical locations.