Artie MCCARTHY

Artie McCarthy (formerly Annie McCarthy) is currently a Lecturer in Global Studies at the University of Canberra.

Their research is focussed on understanding children and young people's participation in development and humanitarianism both in the present moment and historically. Their 2021 book Children and NGOs in India: Development as Storytelling and Performance, documented the way slum children in Delhi creatively pursue their own projects of development through participation in NGO programs.

More recently, Dr. McCarthy’s scholarship has built on their ethnographic research by exploring the historical dimensions of children and young people’s participation in development, humanitarianism and peace activism both in the global south and the global north.  This work forms part of my current research project Crafting Humanitarianism which explores children's participation in humanitarianism from WWI and its immediate aftermath, documenting the involvement of children in organizations like the Junior Red Cross, League of Nations Junior branches, and global projects such as the Peace and Goodwill Message of the Children of Wales. Seeking to disrupt the dominant focus on the figure of the child—most commonly rendered as abject—this work centers children’s material contributions: art, craft, and other creative works which  circulated via global humanitarian networks, producing and enacting key components of humanitarian praxis and international friendship.

Children's contributioins to Interwar Humanitarian and Internationalist Projects

This project explores the diverse ways children contributed to, and were educated in, humanitarian and internationalist ideals and principles in the interwar period. To do this it draws on a vast body of child-authored materials that although abundantly produced in humanitarian and development encounters are typically neglected by scholars. These materials include drawings, stories, letters, poems, and handmade objects such as toys which have been made by children in a variety of contexts from refugee camps, feeding centers, and schools and from there have circulated the globe via programs of exchange or exhibition.

McCarthy, A., 2023. Votes for children: the 1931 NSW Children’s Peace Vote for international cooperation, peace and security. History Australia, 20(4), pp.497-520.

Global Health, Development and Childhood

I am interested in the relationship between biomedicine and development particularly the use of biomedical discourses to mark ‘deficiency’: of growth, of knowledge, of culture etc. Alongside my co-authored work with Kuntala Lahiri-Dutt on Menstrual Hygiene Management, I've also undertaken work exploring the biomedical paradigm of stunting and framings of the malnourished child and children's engagement with WASH programs.

McCarthy, A. 2015. “Telling Stories, Washing Hands: Exploring the Role of Narrative in Development Programmes Targeting Children.” South Asian History and Culture 6 (3):  401-416. 

McCarthy, A. and  K. Lahiri-Dutt. 2020. “Producing Knowledge of Difference, Producing Different Knowledge: Exploring the Epistemic Terrains of Menstruation in India.” Gender, Place and Culture 28 (2): 192-207.

 McCarthy, A. and K. Lahiri-Dutt. 2020. “Bleeding in Public? Rethinking Narratives of Menstrual Management from Delhi’s Slums” in The Palgrave Handbook of Critical Menstruation Studies, edited by Chris Bobel, Inga Winkler, Breanne Fahs, Katie Ann Hasson, Elizabeth Arveda Kissling and Tomi-Ann Roberts, 15-30. Singapore: Palgrave Macmillan. 

McCarthy, A. 2023c. “Timely Development: Visualizing Children’s Growth and Potential.” Journal of Childhood Studies 48 (1): 1-22

McCarthy, A. 2025 “Rickety Puppies, a Cow called UNICEF and a Carrot with Healthy Eyes: More-than-human Teachers and the Malnourished Child” in Children’s Literatures, Cultures and Pedagogies in the Anthropocene, edited by Terri Doughty, Justyna Deszcz-Tryhubczak and Janet Grafton. Bloomsbury

Children’s and young peoples Participation in Development: 

My 2021 manuscript  Children and NGOs in India: Development as Storytelling and Performance based on my doctoral thesis explored the way a group of slum children aged between 12 and 16 navigate the multiplicities and contradictions of development in NGO saturated Delhi.  This book draws on children’s texts and performances to analyse and make concrete everyday experiences of development and marginalisation. 

As part of this work i've also exlpored the key fucntion of postivie affect, intergernational aspiration and competition in development program

McCarthy, A. 2021. Children and NGOs in India: Development as Storytelling and Performance. London: Routledge.

McCarthy, A. 2021. "Staging Joyful Spectacles: Exploring the Temporalities of Positive Affect in Child-Focussed NGO programs." Critique of Anthropology 41 (2): 111-127.

McCarthy, A. 2021. “Multiple Developments: Intergenerational Aspiration and Contested Childhoods in a Delhi NGO.” The Asia Pacific Journal of Anthropology 22 (5): 380-95

McCarthy, A. 2022. “‘Is There Going to Be Another Competition Today?’: Contesting Development Through Competition.” Social Analysis 66 (4): 1-21

Ethical Global Pedagogies 

Taking an auto-ethnographic approch to my own teaching, in recent yeras I have become deeply interested in ethical and caring pedagogies, and in particular questions like: what does a caring pedagogy look like in our intensely globalised neoliberal universities? I've also explored some of the historicla dimensions of pedagogies of international engagement particualrly Development Pedagogies of the 1970s and 1980s 

McCarthy, A. 2020. “Invaluable Enmeshments in Pedagogy: An Autoethnography of an Anthropologist in the Classroom.” HAU: Journal of Ethnographic Theory 10 (3): 906-918.

McCarthy, A. 2023a. “‘Do Not Adjust Your Mind—There is a Fault in Reality’: Simulation Games and Development Education.” HAU: Journal of Ethnographic Theory.