Abstract

Inspired by the philosophies of Donna Haraway and Karen Barad, the aim of this paper is to stir up trouble and to double trouble time in education. We trouble how certain views of childhood shape our experience of school time and secondly, we trouble the way in which time as experienced in school, affects how adults relate to childhood. A particular relationship to and experience of time is nowadays prominently fostered and cultivated in educational institutions. We propose that ‘time’ and ‘childhood’ are intrinsically entangled concepts and logically connected, in the lived experience of educational contemporary institutions, with colonialism and capitalism. Decolonisation requires a troubling of the experience of time as it involves the subordination and denigration of children and childhood (‘mysopedy’). We do this through a genealogy (a political reading of ‘the’ present) of the concepts time, childhood and school. Inspired by Karen Barad, we adopt Kyoko Hayashi’s idea of ‘travel hopping’. Travel hopping as methodology is a transindividual commitment to undo the injustices committed to those who are (also) no longer there (as well as our ‘own’ childhood ‘selves’), without any pretense that the past can be made undone. Drawing on Barad’s queer reading of Quantum Field Theory, we produce decolonising insights by diffractively tunneling through boundaries between human and nonhuman bodies in our writing, thereby unsettling the current relationship to time, the adult/child binary and adult temporality.