#parentinghacks: what are we hacking?
Naomi Hodgson, Edge Hill University

In today’s digitized conditions, our experience of which is constituted in part by (a mostly popularized version of) positive psychology and neuropsychology, a specific “parenting” account of raising children is foregrounded in which the unknown and unknowability of both parent and child are infringed in a way that suggests a crisis of otherness. In parenting accounts on Instagram, in which “experts” and “momfluencers” tell parents how to “parent” their children – and indeed themselves – often in the form of a #parentinghack, we identify a bypassing of speech in the parent-child relationship. The logic of the #parentinghack provides a reminder of something of the “essence” of raising children, of the relationship between parents and (their) children: that we, as educators, inevitably have to live our lives with our children in the face of their unknowability, and of the unknowability of the/their future.

Naomi Hodgson is Reader in Education at Edge Hill University and Visiting Professor at KU Leuven, Belgium. Her research focuses on upbringing, culture, governance and subjectivity, drawing particularly on Foucault and Cavell. She is co-convenor of the BERA Philosophy of Education SIG and Assistant Editor of Ethics and Education.

All welcome.