Hello and welcome to The Monster & The Child, where childhood studies and monster studies collide! I am Dr. Kathleen Kelllett, and this video is an ask me anything. Um, thank you so much for everyone who gave me questions in the comments of my last video. Um, as I mentioned over on that one, I’m taking just the shortest of breaks from video essays um because I’ve been doing a lot of them. Um, basically I’ve been writing 20 plus page scripts for the last almost six months. So need just a little bit of a break to, among other things, just read and watch some more stuff to make video essays about. Um, so in the meantime, we’re doing this AMA. I hope that getting to learn a little bit more about my work and my research will be interesting to you. As you can already tell, this is an unscripted video, so you’re getting a lot more ums and ahs from me than you may be used to. But if you’re interested enough in my work to be watching the AMA, then I’m assuming that you don’t mind. So, uh, I do have — I do have notes, though, to keep me on track. Um, so I’m just going to go through the questions that you guys asked and hopefully this will be a fun little excursion sort of behind the scenes into a humble childhood studies scholar.

I actually think I’m going to cut this into two videos because that was considerably longer than I thought it was going to be and longer than my normal video essays. Um, so you’ll get part one this week and part two next week.

So, to get started, uh, we have a question from upwardlyhopeful4512. I really like that username, by the way. Um, they ask, “I’m very curious as to what your path into your current studies were. At what point did you become aware of this field and choose to seek it out? How did that go for you academically, and what does your day-to-day job look like?” So, um, yeah, it was sort of a somewhat — in some ways a rather straightforward path to childhood studies, but in others a bit circuitous, which I feel like is is probably something that a lot of childhood studies people could say. So, I’ve always known that I wanted to write fiction, and specifically from around middle school knew that I wanted to write children’s fantasy. So, middle-grade and young adult fantasy. Um, fantasy has always been my favorite, and I think the children’s lit bug really got me in sixth grade when I had  — obviously, at that point, that’s also what I was reading. Um, but I also had a really, really, really great English teacher, and she just respected her students so much and taught us so much interesting stuff about just reading novels. And she had such love for and respect for the, you know, basically middle-grade novels that she was teaching, that that was really when I was like, I want to do this. So definitely shout out to Mrs. Ivey. It’s pretty much a straight line from her class to what I’m doing now.

When I went to undergrad I went to Knox College in Illinois. So I wanted to go to Knox because of their creative writing program. Um, it had creative writing as its own major, not as just part of or concentration of the English degree, and that’s what I wanted. Of course, once I was there, I wound up taking a ton of English lit classes, and you know, have very much kept the trajectory of doing both the academic studies and the creative work side by side throughout my life. In some of those lit classes is where I really started learning about like the academic study and application and theorization of monsters. The first class was in a Renaissance lit class that I took with Dr. Lori Schroeder, which I loved. I took several of her classes. She was a great professor. In that class we read a lot of obviously literary pieces, but we read a lot of non-fiction, as well, just to get the sort of cultural context of the English Renaissance. And among those were medical texts, and we read Ambroise Pare’s On Monsters and Marvels, which is a a text where he’s essentially talking about birth defects and where he thinks they come from. I talked a lot about that in my first um childhood and disability video on here, so you can go check that out if you’re interested in learning more. But it was in that Renaissance lit class in undergrad that I was introduced to that and I thought it was so interesting. And then I wrote a paper in that class about depictions of monstrous motherhood in English Renaissance plays. Um, so that was my first time like writing about monsters in a scholarly way and I thought it was really exciting.

And then after that class, I think it was like the next term, I took a young adult literature class with Barbara Tannert-Smith, who was my adviser in undergrad and who I basically worshiped. She is absolutely great as a professor, and just really knowledgeable about children’s lit and young adult lit and just a ton of fun to learn from. So in that class she had this sort of whole unit about monstrosity and its sort of connections to adolescence as a concept as like this liminal time, this thing that’s neither one thing nor the other, neither childhood nor adulthood, that it’s a sort of abject time in terms of puberty and bodily changes. That’s also kind of the first time I learned about the concept of abjection. Um, and that was when, you know, my mind was completely blown from that point on. I was like, oh my god, you can actually study this stuff for the rest of your life. You can apply these ideas of monstrosity not just as literal things, as like literal vampires and werewolves, which I was already very much into, but as a concept, as a series of metaphors, as this whole sort of narrative cultural body that we understand through all of these stories that we have about monstrosity, and then we understand it in this more abstract metaphorical way and apply these these ideas as ways of othering people, as ways of distancing ourselves from the things that we don’t like to think of as part of ourselves. And you know, my future is just set right then and there. I knew that I would be studying this sort of conjunction of adolescence and monstrosity forever.

So Barbara also told me that children’s literature grad school was a thing. I did not know that at the time. Um, so I was very excited about that. So that’s what I did next. Basically immediately after I graduated, I started taking a summer course at Simmons University, starting on my Masters. Um, so Simmons is in Boston, so I moved there. Actually, I took the summer course before I moved there. So I was, uh, going up 3 days a week and taking the class out of a hostel, which I don’t recommend. Don’t do that. Live somewhere before you start going to school there. It’s a lot easier. Um, but anyway, I eventually got an apartment and started on my MA in children’s literature and my MFA in writing for children. So, I was still doing both of those things. Um, and for the MA, I did my master’s thesis on narratives of monstrosity in His Dark Materials by Philip Pullman. So The Golden Compass, The Subtle Knife, and The Amber Spyglass, that trilogy. So that was a really exciting project, as well. I applied a lot of Kristeva, a lot of ideas about abjection in that thesis.

So I finished my two Masters in 2014 when I was 25 and I had absolutely no idea what I wanted to do next, in the grand tradition of people finishing degrees and just sort of the grand tradition of people in their 20s, I think. So, I for a while thought that I wanted to maybe work in nonprofits as sort of my day job and do my own fiction writing sort of as as my side gig until I was able to make that work. Turned out that didn’t really work for me. I really wanted and I think needed my day-to-day life to really revolve around this stuff that I was building an — you know, I don’t like to use the word expertise, because there’s always so much more to learn — but building a a knowledge base certainly around and that I was so passionate about. Um, I feel like I kind of thought that, you know, going into academia was almost a a foregone conclusion for me and therefore I was kind of resistant to it, which in hindsight was a bit silly of me, because it is what I love. But, you know, have to have to bop around your 20s trying different stuff to figure out what you actually want to do by figuring out what you don’t. So that’s what I did for a few years. I did an Americorps term, which is a a sort of national service program. Did that for disaster relief. Learned a lot through that. Everything I did, I think I very much apply to my work now in terms of the things I learned about different systems um and especially how they affect children.

Then I did a lot of tutoring in various and sundry settings, both online, in person, different sort of institutional programs. One of them was tutoring SAT prep for the most part, because I figured — at that point I was like, I think I’m going to go get a PhD but I should figure out how much I really like teaching. Um, and I figured if I could enjoy teaching SAT prep, I could enjoy teaching anything, which did turn out to be true.

So then I started my degree at Rutgers-Camden, which has the only childhood studies graduate program in the US, I believe, is still true. Um, there are a couple more undergrad ones nowadays, but it’s still, as I’ve mentioned a few times in my videos, very much a a small field in the US. The reason that I chose to go the childhood studies route as opposed to getting like a an English lit PhD like focused on children’s literature was that I really wanted to apply a lot of the ideas that I was working with and thinking about to the experiences of actual kids, and in just English lit PhD programs a lot of times that’s not really what you do. You’re focusing on the literature itself. And children’s lit also has this sort of history of uneasiness of dealing with the child reader, and for good reason. So one of kind of the foundational texts of children’s literature scholarship is The Case of Peter Pan, or the Impossibility of Children’s Fiction by Jacqueline Rose. Um, and in that she talks about how, you know, the child character in children’s literature is not really that related to actual children. They’re adult constructions come from adult authors almost all the time. Um, and you know, they’re interpreted through those adult lenses. So they tell us a lot about how adults view childhood. They tell us a lot about those social constructions of childhood. Um, but in terms of telling us about the actual lives of children, including the actual lives of children who read these books, there’s still a huge gap there. And she talks about how, you know, children’s fiction, children’s literature is kind of the only, you know, branch of literature where the authorship and the readership are so different, are from those kind of different identity categories of adult and child. So definitely at Simmons in my children’s lip Masters program, we were always very careful not to you know make assumptions based on the books about actual kids. We talk about like how things are constructed in this text very keep it focused on the text.

But Marah Gubar, who is another children’s literature scholar, a very sort of important, influential one — children’s lit scholars sort of following Gubar talking about a kinship model of adulthood and childhood are thinking about closing that gap a little bit. Like obviously we still don’t want to pretend that constructed children fictional children made up by adults are real kids or tell us anything about real kids. But we can’t just ignore or treat as unknowable and mysterious the reader experience of children’s literature, or just like the experiences of childhood in general. You know, that’s leaving such a gap in our research and scholarship. Um, and so Gubar talks about like finding ways of working with children to bring their knowledge and bring their sort of responses into like children’s literature studies, and I think that’s cool. Um, so I knew that I would be able to do more work like with actual young people if I went the childhood studies route as opposed to like the English lit route. So that’s what I did.

Um, so got to Rutgers, absolutely loved it. It was truly the perfect place for me. Um, you know, I try not to be like that person who’s like, “Yeah, go get a PhD,” ’cause it’s extremely not for everyone. Um, it’s really hard and your job prospects afterwards are not great. But I loved it so much. I loved it so much, and I really feel like the program I was in at Rutgers was just absolutely the correct place for me to be. Um, I loved that everyone had a different background, in terms of the disciplines they studied, that I was learning from anthropologists and sociologists and historians, people who focus on girlhood studies, just — digital humanities, sort of medical setting research with children. I loved that we were all doing different stuff, and that I was learning about methodologies and theories that had just never entered my world when I was just in the literature space. Um, so that was super exciting.

Um, learning to work with actual populations of people was really nerve-wracking for me at first, but I’m again really glad I did it, because for my dissertation I did a digital ethnography of a book club that I started and facilitated with a dozen teenagers from around the US, and that was an incredible experience. It was Monster Book Club, obviously. Um, so we talked about monster YA — so young adult fantasy, science fiction, and horror that featured monstrous characters prominently. And we talked about the the politics thereof, because what I wanted to do — like obviously so many YA texts are using their monsters to make political statements. Like generally it’s not subtle. Generally the metaphors are pretty on the surface. But I wanted to know like how the actual intended readers of these texts were approaching them. And so I got this cohort of teens and with them, we — I sort of co-produced knowledge, the sort of taxonomy of different types of monsters that you find in YA and sort of the political meanings thereof, the types of things that those kids found effective in fiction, the things that they found less effective — because I think that’s also an important thing to study in children’s literature, is like, yeah, it’s a bunch of adults writing these books for kids, but like are we are we doing it well? Um, are we writing things that actually resonate with their experiences? Um, so that was part of the study as well. And it was great. I loved it. So that was 2023 that I completed my PhD.

Um, so then for two years after that I worked at Stevens Institute of Technology. Um, this is a school in Hoboken, New Jersey, that as you can tell is an institute of technology, a setting that I had never been in before. But obviously they want their students to also have like strong communication skills, strong writing skills. So they have a program about writing and humanities that all the first years are required to take. So in the fall, it’s basically first year composition where you, you know, do the how to read academic texts, how to interpret them, write about them, how to form a research paper, etc. Your classic first year comp. Um, but then the really cool thing about that job was that in the spring semesters, we would get to teach a humanities course basically on whatever we wanted. Um, so I taught in my first year a class just about monsters and then the second year was the monster and the child. Um, so recycled that name for the channel. So that was a really good experience.

Um, however, I don’t live anywhere near Hoboken. My commute was incredibly long. I can’t actually move from where I am right now because my wife works for the city and so there’s a residency requirement. So, we have to live here. And that is fine with me because I want to live here. Um, I really like living in Philadelphia, and I don’t want to move. So, I was like, I can do this for 2 years, and then I can’t anymore, because I was just incredibly burned out from an 80 mile commute. Um, so I already knew starting in, you know, fall 2024 that that was going to be my last year at Stevens. And I was like, okay, the job market, she’s not great. Um, but, you know, if I have to take a gap year, I had kind of ideas about this YouTube channel and ideas about other things I could do in the interim. So, I was like, okay, if I have a gap year from academia, that’s fine. And then Trump won the election and academia, you know, started imploding because of his administration’s targeted attacks on everything — on everything that has to do with education. You know, the complete loss of funding for like — federal funding for a bunch of schools, these sort of inquisitions into, you know, their teaching practices and DEI and all of these now forbidden (theoretically) subjects, which is basically all the stuff I teach. Um, so the job market that was already quite rough, got considerably worse, like kind of overnight. Um, and so I was like, okay, this gap year might be more than a year.

But when I defended my dissertation, one of my committee members, Dr. Lauren Silver, had said to me like, “Oh, you should do this — you could do this book club thing as like a a business going forward.” And I was like, “Oh, let’s tuck that into the back of my mind.” Um, so I was like, “This is a good opportunity.” Because as much as I love academic spaces, there are things that I want to do as an educator that are not necessarily well supported in those arenas. I was getting a bit burnt out on graded work, especially in the age of AI. But not just, you know — AI is — AI use and like ChatGPT for writing papers is bad. Don’t do it. Um, but it’s a symptom of a larger issue, like the the perverse incentives to just try to crack a formula to write something that you think is going to garner a good grade and not take any risks and not like actually engage in work that’s going to challenge you because you’re afraid that if you challenge yourself, you may fall short of that challenge and you may therefore not get a good grade, and therefore not going to get a job and all that stuff. Especially with how expensive higher education is, making that pressure even higher. You know, that was the sort of thing where it’s like I find teaching so important, critical thinking so important and there are just things about the education system as it is right now that need supplementing, need supplementing from outside in a less pressured environment.

Um, I always knew that the kind of academic writing I wanted to do was not just like the academic journal circuit. Um, I always knew that I wanted to write for broader audiences because first of all, some of my favorite scholarship is written for with broader audiences in mind, not just scholarly audiences. And, you know, I think the stuff that I study is important. I want more people to have access to it. I think that makes sense. Um, so that’s when I really started to sit down and say like, what if I started my own thing? Um, and that’s kind of where we are now. We’re still in the early stages of that. I’ve really just been focusing since summer primarily on the YouTube channel because that is what I am using in terms of gauging interest — which I do seem to have found some, which is exciting. And also — also turns out I love writing video essays, so that’s great. But also just sort of making myself a known entity, so then when I start my program of book clubs and academic, activist, and creative mentorship services for young people, you know, it’ll be a person who, you know, people can look up and be like, “Oh, this is her work. I can understand the kind of stuff that she’s doing.” Um, also, spoiler alert, I do hope to use some of these social media platforms as means of, you know, starting some fundraisers for these programs for kids, because I need to get paid, but it’s incredibly important to me to come up with accessible services for kids. You know, I don’t want to just be, you know, providing mentorship for kids who can afford, you know, expensive courses of extracurriculars. Um, so I knew that I would have to sort of — I was starting from zero in terms of like I didn’t have any kind of online presence, so I would need to build that up a bit before I could even get to that point. So that’s what I’ve been doing.

So my day-to-day since summer when I started all this has you know very much been researching and writing videos, then filming them and editing them, learning how to do that. I’d never done that at all before this year. Um, I’ve done a lot of networking with local educators, just sort of sussing out the the scene in Philadelphia for sort of in-person stuff I can do in the future. Um, but I do also plan on having digital services, much like I did for my dissertation, for book clubs coming up, as well. And then yeah, just kind of it’s a lot of just reading stuff, writing stuff, which is great because those are the two things that I love to do. But hopefully in the new year, there will be more sort of small group teaching stuff as well, because I love that in addition to talking to this sort of broader platform.

Um, so what I’m currently doing in this little tiny hiatus from the proper video essays is reading and watching a bunch of stuff to stockpile for future videos because I’ve almost exhausted a lot of the the topics of stuff that I’ve already seen. Um, so it need to sort of get up to — get up a new body of work um that I can draw from. So then I will have time to set up and run those programs starting hopefully within a month or so. Month is probably a little optimistic, but the next couple months. In addition, if you are local to Philadelphia and either are a teen or know any teens who might be interested, I do have a course that I’m offering through the Mount Airy Learning Tree, which is a really great program of local community classes. And I’m really excited to do a monster story writing workshop for teenagers starting in February. Um, link to that in the description. I will be putting out like specific announcements about that as well. But if you know any Philly people, um, be sure to share that with them. So, yeah, that was quite a long answer to just the first question, but to be fair, the question was pretty big, about how I got here.

Okay, since we’re on the topic of childhood studies, keeping things related there. Um, indigohalf asked, “I’m not going to ask you to explicitly lay out your own stance on such controversial topic since you haven’t addressed it directly in your videos, but how does the field of childhood studies broadly feel about youth liberation as a political goal? Does it come up?” Yes, it comes up all the time. Um, childhood studies is, as I mentioned before, broad and diverse, especially in terms of discipline, academic discipline. Um, so we’re not much of a field that has like scholarly consensus about much things because we do all such different work. However, youth liberation typically refers to dismantling systems of power that oppress children, and that is highly central to the goals of childhood studies as a field of scholarship. Like that’s kind of what we’re all about. Um now, that terminology, youth liberation, is frequently used in anarchist settings. So the ways that that term can be used in the exact goals can certainly differ between those sort of anarchy settings versus like childhood studies academics. Um, but we definitely, as childhood studies academics, tend to have, you know, more radical views on what youth liberation and youth rights would really mean and look like in society than most people even think to consider. Not necessarily more radical than the anarchists, but you know, more radical than the general population.

One really good example is Dr. John Wall, who is a faculty member at Rutgers, who has written books about just the rights of children and especially voting rights for kids, really advocating for lowering voting ages. I definitely agree that the voting age should be lowered. And, you know, a lot of his work focuses on the civic rights and political rights and political involvement of children. And to an extent — you know, his work is very directly about that, but to an extent, kind of all childhood studies people are researching about topics that affect children’s material realities and advocating for changes that would improve those material realities. And in a lot of situations, that means treating children less as the property of adults, the property of parents, and as humans with human rights unto themselves. And that’s, you know, still, as indigohalf alluded to, an honestly controversial take. But yeah, the construction of the nuclear family and parental rights is a major point of critique for a lot of childhood studies scholars, because those are often things that really keep children unable to advocate for themselves, unable to like actually have agency to make changes in their lives that differ from the wishes of their legal guardians. One thing that I’m pretty passionate about is, even though it’s not like my specific area of study, is children having rights to medical knowledge about their own bodies. Um, you know, getting to know if they’ve been diagnosed with something — like that’s a parent’s call. And I don’t think it should be. I think that, you know, the person who has the body or mind in question should have access to that knowledge regardless of someone else’s wishes.

Um, a lot of the difficulties of youth liberation as a political goal are really centered around how to balance the legitimate caretaking needs of children, especially young children, who have caretaking needs, who cannot really survive without adult people making a lot of the calls for them –but how to balance that with human rights and autonomy. It’s not easy to do, and that’s why there’s so many disagreements about how to like reform education, for example. Like do you take what we already have and try to reform things or do you like full on kind of demolish the systems that exist? I tend to be suspicious of anyone who has any easy answers when it comes to youth liberation, because I don’t think the answers are easy. So for example — you know, there’s a lot of people who with the — maybe this is why you were like you don’t have to tell me your your controversial takes. But radical unschooling, for example, people who, you know, completely remove their child from not just like in-school systems, but also from like any kind of structured education even within homeschooling. I think that that does work for some people. However, I think that it doesn’t work for a lot of people, as well. And I think that it can have the effect of putting that — of not giving the power back to the child, as is the sort of philosophy behind a lot of it, but instead just giving the power back to the parent instead of other educators. And not all parents are good educators, and that’s fair. You don’t have to be a good educator to be a good parent. Um, but if you’re gonna try to do both, then you probably should be. Um, so yeah, I think like those sort of ideas of like, oh, just, you know, demolish all the systems we have and the youth shall be free. Um, if it — if it sounds too easy, it probably is.

But I do firmly believe that youth rights and empowerment of youth as opposed to just protection of youth is incredibly important, incredibly lacking in our society, and needs to be much more a part of the conversation. And I would say that pretty much all childhood studies scholars would agree.

Okay, next question is from modernwizard who asks, “I would be curious to hear about your own experiences with disability, disabled people, and/or a disability studies/crip studies perspective.” Um, and this was as a response to the fact that I’ve done a couple of disabilities and childhood videos, one of which is still my most popular, and probably the one that brought a lot of you here to this channel. So I think experience with disability is just experience being alive. Um, you know, very few people have a perfectly typical or normative bodymind. Um, so like most of the people you meet are going to have something going on that can be disabling in society based on the way that we set up our our norms and only sort of facilitate participation in society based on those norms. So, um, yeah, obviously I have plenty of friends and family who have a various and sundry disabilities. Um, I typically answer on job applications — and this is my job right now — so I typically click the choose not to disclose button. Um, because again, like, you know, I don’t have anything clockable and therefore I have privilege from that. But I’ve got I’ve got a few diagnoses of my own.

However, more to the point perhaps of the question, I have a very close friend from my cohort, who was in my wedding party — so, shout out to Anna Perry — whose work is in disability studies, specifically in special education in schooling, including disability accommodations processes and experiences in undergraduate college settings, and that’s a lot of what her dissertation in progress is about. Um, so I’ve learned a ton from her, just, you know, listening to her talk about her work and her interests and sort of the the scholars that have inspired her. And I think it’s a really important — like disability studies is really important to always consider within childhood studies because they have such overlap in terms of — in terms of paternalism, in terms of people making decisions on behalf of other people for their own good based on assumptions of a lack of competence. You know, those are major major cornerstones of what is studied within disability studies and within childhood studies. So, tons of overlap there. And then obviously with monster studies, so much of it is related to disability. So much of monstrosity is kind of just metaphors for different bodies, bodies that don’t fit the cultural expectations or norm, as well as as minds. So yeah, I think that’s just sort of my natural interest in it is because I don’t think you can do childhood studies and monster studies without also doing disability studies.

Um, book recommendation: Sami Shalk’s Bodyminds Reimagined: (Dis)ability, Race, and Gender in Black Women’s Speculative Fiction is rad. And if you’re interested in disability studies in sort of literature and storytelling, which you probably are if you’re on this channel, then I would definitely recommend that book.

All right, sircaine50 asks, “What does your note-taking process look like when you’re doing research? Do you take advantage of any apps like Zotero? Also, do you have any favorite slash had a great impact on me articles related to monster studies?” Um, my note-taking process is really boring. It’s just on Microsoft Word. I don’t even use Google Docs. I’m 100,000 years old and will use Word until I die. Um, and I don’t use any apps. I know people who do and who really like them, but for me, a classique bulleted list of notes on the ol’ Microsoft Word works. Um, I always make sure to include lots of quotations that I know I’m going to use and always, always put the page number of the quotation. Um, that is — that is my tip for note-taking for everyone. Um, and then the had a great impact on me article, it’s an obvious answer, but it’s true, is Jeffrey Jerome Cohen’s Monster Culture (Seven Theses). That was actually the one that I read for the first time in that young adult literature class in undergrad that just like completely rewired my brain. I’ve mentioned on one of my early videos that I have a line from it tattooed on me. Obviously enough, it’s the line “monsters are our children.” Um, so yeah, it absolutely foundational both to kind of monster studies in general, but also to me as a person.

My Patreon link is in the description. Um, and if you are so moved, you can support me on there. I also have super thanks enabled here on YouTube. Um, and thank you so much for watching. Thank you for watching my videos. Thank you for making the beginning of this venture really exciting. Um, starting something new like this is so scary. Um, but it’s been really rewarding. Like the comments that you guys leave on my videos are so incredibly kind. Everyone’s being so nice to me on the internet, which is wild. Probably just jinxed it now, but I really appreciate the incredible feedback that I have received, and I am so excited to provide you with some more educational content in the new year. So I hope everyone’s been having a really happy holidays, and I will see you very soon for more monstrous food for thought.