(NB: I have started a YouTube channel! I will be hosting transcripts here, along with other blog posts. I hope you enjoy!)

Hello there! My name is Dr. Kathleen Kellett, and this is The Monster & The Child. I am incredibly excited to bring this new venture into the wide world of YouTube. This channel is my new haven of public scholarship about childhood studies, monster studies, and all the ways they overlap.

In case you are saying, well, I like monster stories, but what does “childhood studies” have to do with that? Also, who is this enthusiastic academic-y person talking to me right now? Well, allow me to tell you a little bit about me and my background. I completed my PhD in Childhood Studies at Rutgers University-Camden in 2023. Before that, I completed an MA in Children’s Literature and an MFA in Writing for Children from Simmons University – then Simmons College – in 2014. Moving from Children’s Lit to Childhood Studies was not actually the hard pivot that many people assume it is. This is because in the U.S., at least, which is where I am based, most people don’t really know what Childhood Studies is. It is not childhood development or childhood psychology. I don’t know much about either of those things. Instead, Childhood Studies is what happens when sociologists, anthropologists, and other social scientists start to say, “Hey, maybe we should study how cultures make meaning out of childhood as a social concept and category,” and then a bunch of historians, lit scholars, and other people in the humanities say, “I want in.”

For this reason, giving a clear and single definition of Childhood Studies as an academic discipline can be kind of difficult, because you can have two people with the same degree from the same place who study wildly different things. For example, I’m one of the people from my alma mater holding down the children’s literature and media fort, while some of my colleagues from the same program study childhood and the criminal justice system, childhood and immigration, disability and children’s education, and kind of everything else you can imagine about society and childhood. But since baseline definitions are generally useful, what I typically tell people is that Childhood Studies is the study of social constructions of childhood – that is, cultural ideas and beliefs about what childhood means – and how those social constructions shape the lived experiences of actual kids, across history and throughout the cultures of the world. (If you are a Childhood Studies scholar and want to argue with that definition, feel free to do so in the comments. It would be good for engagement.)

The way I personally have chosen to go about all this childhood studies stuff is by also studying monsters. As you may have noticed, monsters and children tend to show up together in a lot of different media. You have your classic creepy horror movie kids, from Reagan in The Exorcist to the Children of the Corn to screamin’ Sam in The Babadook. (I’m particularly fond of that last one, not only for queer icon reasons, but because Sam’s creepiness is actually a fully justified response to his situation. If you stick with this channel, you’ll find that I love when the child or the monster are in the right.) Monsters also show up in plenty of media for children from the earliest ages – see your furry pal Grover or the Wild Things.

I’m interested and will talk about all of these things, but my most particular area of study is monstrosity in adolescent literature and media. I research the ways in which monsters and monstrosity are used as political metaphors in young adult literature and other forms of fiction, and what these metaphors say about a) how we define humanity versus monstrosity, b) how adults (overwhelmingly the writers and publishers of YA lit) interpret the political orientations and needs of teenagers, and, as much as possible, c) what real teen readers think about all of this. I’m not breaking new ground by saying that monsters are very frequently used as metaphors for marginalized identities. This can be for better or worse. Sometimes these depictions are meant to reinforce marginalization – in fact, that makes up a lot of monster history – but in a lot of contemporary YA, the intention is to present monstrosity as something that a marginalized young person can identify with and even find potentially empowering. I like to investigate the embedded assumptions, blind spots, biases, and creative potentials of these metaphors as they appear in different forms of youth media.

So that’s my general deal as a scholar, and that brings me to what I hope to do with this channel. I believe that, now more than ever, public scholarship is really important. Higher ed is currently under pretty heavy attack in the United States. The humanities are particularly suffering as we currently have a Department of Education that sees education only as direct professional training and, of course, huge pressures to rid schools of “diversity, equity, and inclusion.” Recent executive orders about education, both at a K-12 level and in higher ed, censure teaching about race and racism and gender and sexuality. Also see the book ban epidemic in the U.S. (Links to all these sources are in the description.)

Now, luckily, there are plenty of educators in all levels of schooling – including myself – who saw these orders, said “nah”, and continued to teach our subjects properly (that is, backed by rigorous theory and evidence-based research). But I believe understanding this intense battle over education requires understanding social constructions of childhood: our expectations and beliefs and identities surrounding the roles children play in society. It also requires understanding the way childhood intersects with other identities, such as race, gender, and sexuality, and what that means for how different demographics of children are treated. And it also requires understanding the way people place boundaries around our definitions of what it means to be “a good person” or even just “a human” – and a great way to explore that is by looking at humanity’s antagonistic opposite, monstrosity.

But not a lot of people study this stuff, at least in my country, where Childhood Studies is not as established as it is in other anglophone nations. Also, a lot of US-based schools and departments will be struggling due to loss of funding, loss of international students, and other ongoing challenges and restrictions. Add that to the eternal expensiveness of American higher ed, and you wind up with a situation where accessing formal schooling becomes more and more difficult for more and more people. So that’s why I’m jumping into this public scholarship space, because I believe that scholarly analysis of childhood, media, politics, and monsters should be able to reach as many people as possible. Also: I think it’s fascinating and exciting and I want to share my passions with all of you.

I also have a few other exciting ideas coming down the pike. I am in the process of starting up a book club and mentorship program for high school students that will provide a community of peers to discuss monster literature and one-on-one mentoring services to develop independent academic, creative, and/or activ6ist projects that can be shared with students’ local communities. I’m hoping this channel will link in with that program once I get it up and running, so stay tuned for more on that in hopefully the near future.

But in the meantime, if you are interested in answers to questions like: what is a monster? What narrative ingredients make up a monster story? What’s the relationship between childhood and monstrosity? What does “childhood innocence” really mean, and do all kids get to have it? How can we use monster stories to understand our beliefs about childhood, adulthood, and humanity in general? Then you are the right audience for The Monster & The Child, and I am incredibly happy to have you here. And now, for the very first time in my life, I will say please like and subscribe if these topics interest you, and I will see you very soon with more monster-y food for thought.