2021-03-01, 06:35 PM
Re-thinking identity: Children’s experiences of self
Donna Thomas, PhD
Dr. Thomas argues that children, before a conceptual, culture-bound notion of self is inculcated in them, have a more spontaneous, broader sense of identity that defies our current worldview. She argues that their more natural, fluid self is more conducive to overcoming the despair characteristic of our present situation, and that it has much to teach us about reality itself.
Donna Thomas, PhD
Dr. Thomas argues that children, before a conceptual, culture-bound notion of self is inculcated in them, have a more spontaneous, broader sense of identity that defies our current worldview. She argues that their more natural, fluid self is more conducive to overcoming the despair characteristic of our present situation, and that it has much to teach us about reality itself.
Quote:For Hannah Arendt (1971), theorizing can only arise ‘out of incidents of living experience and must remain bound to them as the only guidepost by which to take its bearings.’ Some scientists may disagree, as research that relies on the personal accounts of people is often regarded as poor academic practice. In the cartesian-dominated world of science, the business of social researchers is to capture and explain human experience, while attempting to justify its empirical validity. This is a grave task when the bar is set at replicability, measurability and an empiricism that relies on conditioned consensus. How can the immeasurable be measured? Social scientists interpret human experience through incidence of themes, linguistic analysis, stories and collective agreements; all through the lens of the researcher’s position—governed by the latest theoretical ideas—with each turn constructing, deconstructing, fragmenting and obliterating the self.
Quote:Despite Arendt’s concept of experiential authority appealing exclusively to political life, the social sciences run with the idea of lived experience as a valid source of knowledge. In this way, social realities, systems and what it means to be human can be understood through the stories that people tell. Arendt herself ambiguously classifies experience as collective, not something that can be gleaned through subject-object relations. Yet social researchers tend to assume a cartesian-subject as a source of epistemic authority in relation to self, others and the world. This subject is the ‘story-I,’ an apparent self that moves through chronological and spatial dimensions, an inner subject held in relation to outer objects; as Nietzsche posits (see Spivak, 1974), a specifically linguistic, figurative habit of immemorial standing, a self that is, in the Foucauldian sense, entangled in discourses that circumscribe and constrain who we are.
I have seen this happen recently with children who frequently have ‘non-ordinary’ experiences; children who have premonitions, talk with deceased relatives, engage with disembodied beings, visit alternative realities and can lucid-dream on command. Although these experiences are considered as ‘non-ordinary,’ they appear to carry a surprising ordinariness in the life-worlds of many children; children who are consistently silenced, ignored and, at worst, diagnosed for experiences that do not fit into the dominant cultural narrative. When I research with these children, I listen to their ‘story-I’s,’ which are filled with discourses of illness, shame and difference. Self is never considered beyond the story (see Aatolla, 2017 ). Yet, as these children show, self and experience appear to extend far beyond mainstream ideologies, the limitations of language and even past their own inner narrative worlds. Postmodern preoccupation with lived experience and narrative self pays little attention to the ‘I’ of experience—in terms of its ontological existence and epistemological authority.