Lisa Farley
Biographic Data
| ID | 1718934 |
|---|---|
| NAME | Lisa Farley |
| GIVEN NAMES | Lisa |
| FAMILY NAME | Farley |
| SIGNATURE | FARLEY L |
| AFFILIATIONS | York University |
| ORCID | 0000-0002-4907-1120 |
| VERIFIED | Yes |
| TOTAL WORKS | 17 |
| TOTAL CITATIONS | 51 |
| AUTHOR COUNT | 17 |
| EDITOR COUNT | 0 |
| FIRST PUBLICATION YEAR | 2007 |
| LATEST PUBLICATION YEAR | 2026 |
| H-INDEX | 3 |
“We Don’t Own Kids”: On the “Inconvenience” of Transgender in Childhood
This paper examines arguments that defend anti-transgender policies and legislation aiming to censor discussions about gender identity and restrict access to affirming interventions in three Canadian provinces. Building on psychoanalysis and queer theory, we suggest that such policies and legislation are symptomatic of an increasingly precarious and volatile social and political world in which transgender existence is a target of projected anxiet…
Sick at school: Teachers’ memories and the affective challenges that bodies present to constructions of childhood innocence, normalcy, and ignorance
Longstanding impressions of children as innocent to human frailty, alongside the emphasis on efficiency and management in schools, play undeniable roles in the way teachers engage with children experiencing death and illness. This paper draws from a larger study of 116 written childhood memories from prospective teachers and practitioners enrolled across four universities in Canada and the United States and focuses on the 12 memories that specifi…
Childhood innocence and experience: Memory, discourse and practice
This article examines how childhood innocence is taken up in (92) memories of undergraduate students across four sites in the US and Canada. Drawing from Foucault's theory of discourse, we examine how three themes—innocence as not knowing, innocence as being provided for, and loss of innocence as exposure to adversity—construct childhood as the absence of conflict, which perpetuates the myth of an innocence/experience binary and encourages a defi…
The Dreamwork of Childhood Memory: The Futures Teachers Make from the Schooling Past
PEDAGOGICAL PRESENT traces of the past (Britzman, 2003) yet also telegraph dreams about how structures of schooling and society might be imagined otherwise.In teacher education, memories are often used in support of critical reflection.They provide the raw material for prospective teachers to contemplate both desirable and undesirable aspects of the teacher's role and to make observations about issues relating to classroom authority, values, and …
Childhood Memories of Playful Antics and Punishable Acts: Risking an Imperfect Future of Teaching and Learning
This paper takes up the question of risk by examining childhood memories of nuisance-making and punishment shared by 26 participants enrolled in teacher education and/or childhood studies programs. Our analysis surfaces a tension that, on the one hand, idealizes the child as innocent instigator of playful antics and, on the other, produces a child who is guilty of punishable acts. We read these memories as an invitation to theorize a middle groun…
Transgender Embodiment as an Appeal to Thought: "A Psychoanalytic Critique of "Rapid Onset Gender Dysphoria
In this article, we offer a psychoanalytic reading of controversies over “rapid onset gender dysphoria” (popularly known as ROGD), defined as a sudden expression of gender dysphoria in late adolescence and young adulthood where there had not purportedly been evidence of childhood dysphoric experience. We begin by tracing the emergence of the term in relation to contemporary debates about gender, free speech, and academic freedom. Turning to the p…
The failure of thought: Childhood and evildoing in the shadow of traumatic inheritance
Cast No Shadow (2015) tells the story of 13-year-old Jude Traynor, a kid deemed by his rural community to be a “delinquent” who ruins lives and never sticks to his word. The film opens on a roaring
The child in question: Childhood texts, cultures, and curricula
What is a child? The concept of childhood is so familiar that we tend to assume its universality. As Davin (1999) notes, “We all ‘know’ what we mean by child and childhood. Yet its properties are m
A sex of one’s own: Childhood and the embodiment of (trans)gender
The “Human Problem” in educational research: Notes from the psychoanalytic archive
In this paper, I theorize fantasies of idealization at work in narratives of educational research. I take as an example one of the very first psychoanalytically oriented studies in the field: Marion Milner's, The Human Problem in Schools, published in 1938. Evidence is drawn from Milner's published book as well as from the historical context and archived disagreements that surround the study's unfolding. My aim is to trace how constructions of kn…
The Uncanny Return of Repressed History in Jonathan Hobin’s In the Playroom: Playing beyond the Pleasure Principle
This paper investigates the motif of repetition in relationship to the pervasive emblem of the child as future. Drawing from Sigmund Freud’s discussion of the uncanny and from D. W. Winnicott’s theory of playing, the paper proposes that newness rests not on the literal fact of the child but in the play of signification—the life of the signifier—opened up in the haunting encounter with old scenes. When childhood is understood as an uncanny effect,…
Drawing Trauma: The Therapeutic Potential of Witnessing the Child’s Visual Testimony of War
Countertransference plays an often neglected role in witnessing children’s testimony of war and trauma. A dual notion of countertransference, based on the work of Winnicott and Klein, is offered that involves both internal conflict related to early life experience and socially mediated notions of childhood, war, and trauma circulating in a given time and place. A drawing by a thirteen-year-old boy living in the refugee camps in Darfur is used to …
An Essay is Being Written: Between Aggression and ‘Just Words’
If education tends to be viewed as an antidote to social violence, this paper turns to Freud’s study of the ‘beating fantasy’ to consider the fictional representation of psychical aggression in scenes of schooling and being schooled. It is argued that such representations both express and fend off libidinal passions at the heart of student/teacher relationships, and language itself. Drawing on clinical examples and a controversial piece of studen…
Analysis On Air: A Sound History of Winnicott in Wartime
Squiggle Evidence: The Child, the Canvas, and the ““Negative Labor”” of History
D. W. Winnicott's "squiggle game" is read as evidence that unearths the negative labor of witnessing that lies at the heart of the analytic situation, offering a glimpse into the processes by which unremembered events become psychologically significant. Two kinds of data are explored: the first is a set of drawings that Winnicott slipped into his notebook during World War II; the second is a published series of images created two decades later in…
Radical Hope: Or, the Problem of Uncertainty in History Education
Curricular questions of what and how knowledge should matter take on particular urgency when the knowledge at stake refers to cultural devastation in history. Whereas narratives of progress and discourses of "protecting the child" continue to dominate the public imaginary, a number of curriculum theorists have begun to explore the multiple ways in which educators have and continue to represent such histories in the classroom. This emergent litera…
The “Shadowy Underside” of Learning History
Radical Hope: Or, the Problem of Uncertainty in History Education
Curricular questions of what and how knowledge should matter take on particular urgency when the knowledge at stake refers to cultural devastation in history. Whereas narratives of progress and discourses of "protecting the child" continue to dominate the public imaginary, a number of curriculum theorists have begun to explore the multiple ways in which educators have and continue to represent such histories in the classroom. This emergent litera…
The child in question: Childhood texts, cultures, and curricula
What is a child? The concept of childhood is so familiar that we tend to assume its universality. As Davin (1999) notes, “We all ‘know’ what we mean by child and childhood. Yet its properties are m
Transgender Embodiment as an Appeal to Thought: "A Psychoanalytic Critique of "Rapid Onset Gender Dysphoria
In this article, we offer a psychoanalytic reading of controversies over “rapid onset gender dysphoria” (popularly known as ROGD), defined as a sudden expression of gender dysphoria in late adolescence and young adulthood where there had not purportedly been evidence of childhood dysphoric experience. We begin by tracing the emergence of the term in relation to contemporary debates about gender, free speech, and academic freedom. Turning to the p…
A sex of one’s own: Childhood and the embodiment of (trans)gender
Analysis On Air: A Sound History of Winnicott in Wartime
The failure of thought: Childhood and evildoing in the shadow of traumatic inheritance
Cast No Shadow (2015) tells the story of 13-year-old Jude Traynor, a kid deemed by his rural community to be a “delinquent” who ruins lives and never sticks to his word. The film opens on a roaring
Childhood Memories of Playful Antics and Punishable Acts: Risking an Imperfect Future of Teaching and Learning
This paper takes up the question of risk by examining childhood memories of nuisance-making and punishment shared by 26 participants enrolled in teacher education and/or childhood studies programs. Our analysis surfaces a tension that, on the one hand, idealizes the child as innocent instigator of playful antics and, on the other, produces a child who is guilty of punishable acts. We read these memories as an invitation to theorize a middle groun…
The “Human Problem” in educational research: Notes from the psychoanalytic archive
In this paper, I theorize fantasies of idealization at work in narratives of educational research. I take as an example one of the very first psychoanalytically oriented studies in the field: Marion Milner's, The Human Problem in Schools, published in 1938. Evidence is drawn from Milner's published book as well as from the historical context and archived disagreements that surround the study's unfolding. My aim is to trace how constructions of kn…
The “Shadowy Underside” of Learning History
The “Shadowy Underside” of Learning History
Radical Hope: Or, the Problem of Uncertainty in History Education
Curricular questions of what and how knowledge should matter take on particular urgency when the knowledge at stake refers to cultural devastation in history. Whereas narratives of progress and discourses of "protecting the child" continue to dominate the public imaginary, a number of curriculum theorists have begun to explore the multiple ways in which educators have and continue to represent such histories in the classroom. This emergent litera…
Squiggle Evidence: The Child, the Canvas, and the ““Negative Labor”” of History
D. W. Winnicott's "squiggle game" is read as evidence that unearths the negative labor of witnessing that lies at the heart of the analytic situation, offering a glimpse into the processes by which unremembered events become psychologically significant. Two kinds of data are explored: the first is a set of drawings that Winnicott slipped into his notebook during World War II; the second is a published series of images created two decades later in…
An Essay is Being Written: Between Aggression and ‘Just Words’
If education tends to be viewed as an antidote to social violence, this paper turns to Freud’s study of the ‘beating fantasy’ to consider the fictional representation of psychical aggression in scenes of schooling and being schooled. It is argued that such representations both express and fend off libidinal passions at the heart of student/teacher relationships, and language itself. Drawing on clinical examples and a controversial piece of studen…
Analysis On Air: A Sound History of Winnicott in Wartime
The Uncanny Return of Repressed History in Jonathan Hobin’s In the Playroom: Playing beyond the Pleasure Principle
This paper investigates the motif of repetition in relationship to the pervasive emblem of the child as future. Drawing from Sigmund Freud’s discussion of the uncanny and from D. W. Winnicott’s theory of playing, the paper proposes that newness rests not on the literal fact of the child but in the play of signification—the life of the signifier—opened up in the haunting encounter with old scenes. When childhood is understood as an uncanny effect,…
Drawing Trauma: The Therapeutic Potential of Witnessing the Child’s Visual Testimony of War
Countertransference plays an often neglected role in witnessing children’s testimony of war and trauma. A dual notion of countertransference, based on the work of Winnicott and Klein, is offered that involves both internal conflict related to early life experience and socially mediated notions of childhood, war, and trauma circulating in a given time and place. A drawing by a thirteen-year-old boy living in the refugee camps in Darfur is used to …
The “Human Problem” in educational research: Notes from the psychoanalytic archive
In this paper, I theorize fantasies of idealization at work in narratives of educational research. I take as an example one of the very first psychoanalytically oriented studies in the field: Marion Milner's, The Human Problem in Schools, published in 1938. Evidence is drawn from Milner's published book as well as from the historical context and archived disagreements that surround the study's unfolding. My aim is to trace how constructions of kn…
The child in question: Childhood texts, cultures, and curricula
What is a child? The concept of childhood is so familiar that we tend to assume its universality. As Davin (1999) notes, “We all ‘know’ what we mean by child and childhood. Yet its properties are m
A sex of one’s own: Childhood and the embodiment of (trans)gender
The failure of thought: Childhood and evildoing in the shadow of traumatic inheritance
Cast No Shadow (2015) tells the story of 13-year-old Jude Traynor, a kid deemed by his rural community to be a “delinquent” who ruins lives and never sticks to his word. The film opens on a roaring
The Dreamwork of Childhood Memory: The Futures Teachers Make from the Schooling Past
PEDAGOGICAL PRESENT traces of the past (Britzman, 2003) yet also telegraph dreams about how structures of schooling and society might be imagined otherwise.In teacher education, memories are often used in support of critical reflection.They provide the raw material for prospective teachers to contemplate both desirable and undesirable aspects of the teacher's role and to make observations about issues relating to classroom authority, values, and …
Childhood Memories of Playful Antics and Punishable Acts: Risking an Imperfect Future of Teaching and Learning
This paper takes up the question of risk by examining childhood memories of nuisance-making and punishment shared by 26 participants enrolled in teacher education and/or childhood studies programs. Our analysis surfaces a tension that, on the one hand, idealizes the child as innocent instigator of playful antics and, on the other, produces a child who is guilty of punishable acts. We read these memories as an invitation to theorize a middle groun…
Transgender Embodiment as an Appeal to Thought: "A Psychoanalytic Critique of "Rapid Onset Gender Dysphoria
In this article, we offer a psychoanalytic reading of controversies over “rapid onset gender dysphoria” (popularly known as ROGD), defined as a sudden expression of gender dysphoria in late adolescence and young adulthood where there had not purportedly been evidence of childhood dysphoric experience. We begin by tracing the emergence of the term in relation to contemporary debates about gender, free speech, and academic freedom. Turning to the p…
Childhood innocence and experience: Memory, discourse and practice
This article examines how childhood innocence is taken up in (92) memories of undergraduate students across four sites in the US and Canada. Drawing from Foucault's theory of discourse, we examine how three themes—innocence as not knowing, innocence as being provided for, and loss of innocence as exposure to adversity—construct childhood as the absence of conflict, which perpetuates the myth of an innocence/experience binary and encourages a defi…
Sick at school: Teachers’ memories and the affective challenges that bodies present to constructions of childhood innocence, normalcy, and ignorance
Longstanding impressions of children as innocent to human frailty, alongside the emphasis on efficiency and management in schools, play undeniable roles in the way teachers engage with children experiencing death and illness. This paper draws from a larger study of 116 written childhood memories from prospective teachers and practitioners enrolled across four universities in Canada and the United States and focuses on the 12 memories that specifi…
“We Don’t Own Kids”: On the “Inconvenience” of Transgender in Childhood
This paper examines arguments that defend anti-transgender policies and legislation aiming to censor discussions about gender identity and restrict access to affirming interventions in three Canadian provinces. Building on psychoanalysis and queer theory, we suggest that such policies and legislation are symptomatic of an increasingly precarious and volatile social and political world in which transgender existence is a target of projected anxiet…
Psychology (15 works) · Psychoanalysis (11 works) · Art (6 works) · Developmental psychology (6 works) · Educator Training and Historical Pedagogy (6 works) · History (6 works) · Philosophy (6 works) · Sociology (6 works) · Psychoanalytic theory (5 works) · Children's Rights and Participation (4 works)