Afterword

Abstract

This chapter presents the critical and sometimes polemic misgivings a desk-based scholar might have about applying new materialist and posthumanist theories to the study of children’s literature and culture. Reflections on personal stories, a recent school shooting, and two picturebooks raise questions about the optimistic claims made by new materialist and posthumanist researchers that challenging human exceptionalism, blurring binaries such as adult/child and human/nonhuman, and embracing a notion of agentic objects will necessarily lead to more ethical inter- and intra-actions between the human and more-than-human world. This chapter thus encourages scholars to think carefully about the unintended material consequences of a full embrace of new materialist theories.