Reimagining Childhood Studies

Spyros Spyrou, Rachel Rosen, Daniel Thomas Cook, Spyros Spyrou, Rachel Rosen, Daniel Thomas Cook

• Publisher: Bloomsbury Academic
• Year: 2018
• ISBN:
  9781350019232
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Bildung
• Subtopic: Grundschulbildung

Reimagining Childhood Studies incites, and provides a forum for, dialogue and debate about the direction and impetus for critical and global approaches to social-cultural studies of children and their childhoods. Set against the backdrop of a quarter century of research and theorising arising out of the "new" social studies of childhood, each of the 13 original contributions strives to extend the conceptual reach and relevance of the work being undertaken in the dynamic and expanding field of childhood studies in the 21st century. Internationally renowned contributors engage with contemporary scholarship from both the global north and south to address questions of power, inequity, reflexivity, subjectivities and representation from poststructuralist, posthumanist, postcolonial, feminist, queer studies and political economy perspectives. In so doing, the book provides a deconstructive and reconstructive dialogue, offering a renewed agenda for future scholarship. The book also moves the insights of childhood studies beyond the boundaries of this field, helping to mainstream insights about children's everyday lives from this burgeoning area of study and avoid the dangers of marginalizing both children and scholarship about childhood. This carefully curated collection extends beyond critiques of specified research arenas, traditions, concepts or approaches to serve as a bridge in the transformation of childhood studies at this important juncture in its history.

CHAPTER ONE

Introduction:

Reimagining Childhood Studies: Connectivities … Relationalities … Linkages …

Spyros Spyrou, Rachel Rosen, and Daniel Thomas Cook

After three decades, a good deal of childhood studies in practice finds itself stuck, in many ways, in a mire of its own articulation. The urge to conceptualize children as “active in the construction and determination of their own social lives” (James and Prout 1990: 8) and to grasp childhood as a social fabrication constituted in and informed by history, politics, culture, and geography rings no less relevant and necessary now than it did in the 1980s. Yet, the inventions and interventions forged by one generation of scholars rightly bent on disrupting largely unquestioned and uncontested notions of children and childhood have transfigured, subtly though perceptibly, into the givens, the truisms, and sometimes the platitudes of another. Most insidiously, the generative problematic of the field—i.e., the constructed, agentive, knowing child—regularly enfolds back onto itself, often reappearing as the solution to the problem it poses. No question or inquiry in the arena of childhood studies, it seems, can attract a satisfying response without some recourse to this figure—this skeleton key of sorts—which is increasingly apprehended as sufficiently self-explanatory or, at least, analytically self-contained. It may very well be the case that the “child” of childhood studies—as it has been forged and reforged collectively over the years—stands as a foremost obstacle to ways forward.

Reimagining Childhood Studies arises from a self-conscious recognition that the production of knowledge in a field—particularly in a “new” field still excited about its possibilities—can, like a boomerang, rebound and ensnare the producers and products of that knowledge in ways unintended and counter-intentional. This effort—represented in this Introduction and in the collection of chapters to follow—joins other voices in the field to offer possibilities to revisit some tensions, distinctions, and presumptions of childhood studies scholarship with an ambition to disrupt what we see as a detrimental, self-referential tendency of so much scholarship which calls itself “childhood studies.” Admittedly, not every aspect of every chapter achieves this goal. The value, we hope, also lies in the cumulative reflexive attempts to engage in a reimagining along these lines and when, put together, these works encourage dialogic engagement with similar efforts that have come both before and into future scholarship.

Childhood studies, as a field of thought, arose at a particular moment in the social sciences, when modernist and what might roughly be called “post” and “neo” framings (post-modernist/post-colonial/neo-Marxist/etc.) were jostling for dominion in ways of understanding and explaining the social world. As Prout (2005) points out, childhood studies largely oriented itself toward putting forward arguments for children and childhood that spoke to the still dominant modernist frames which sought stability and coherence, often reducing ambiguity and complexity through dualistic categorization. Yet, because childhood studies jumped into the fray at a time when discursive explanations or the “linguistic and cultural turn” were on the rise across the social sciences, from the outset, the field participated in an extended period of rejection of economism, totalities, and “grand theory.” A part of this effort entailed asserting a fundamental difference and rupture from political economy modes of inquiry and explanation (e.g., Butler 1997b)—a difference which the bourgeois, Global North “child” subject as the theoretical center of the field made manifest and robust (as Sarada Balagopalan, this volume, discusses).

Entangled in the analytic, moral, and political structures of its founding, a good deal of contemporary childhood studies scholarship also remains reactive to the ghostly presence of developmental psychology (see Burman 2017) and tethered to a cultural heritage derived from the UN Convention on the Rights of the Child (UNCRC) and its ongoing aftermath (see Cheney, this volume; see Balagopalan, this volume; see Wickenden, this volume). The specter of invoking, wittingly or unwittingly, some version of the psychological child in particular haunts the periphery of investigation as pre-emptive constraint. Child development continues to represent the negation—the foundational distinction—against which and upon which childhood studies builds its epistemology at both the level of the subject and the level of structure. Considerable attention and effort expended by authors, instructors, and editors serve to police and reinscribe the boundaries delimiting the child of psychology and that of childhood studies from each other. With near ritualistic formality at times, article after article and talk after talk painstakingly revisit and rehearse, to greater and lesser extents, origin stories of how the child of childhood studies has been rescued from universalism, cultural monotropism, and essentialism by virtue of this “new” perspective.

Hence, it should come as no surprise that, as a field, childhood studies has ventured into an immense historical and collective investment in a particular “problem of the child” which is, in many ways, existentially consequential for the discipline. Childhood scholarship and the production of childhood scholarship have together been complicit in valorizing children’s agency to the point of a fetish, making of it a moral and analytic bulwark against the encroachment, or perceived encroachment, of anything that feels like psychological, biological, or indeed structural ways of knowing. Wide swaths of thinking and research accordingly exhibit a decided aversion to centering anything that suggests a decentering of the child subject as the consequential actor or force under consideration—as in, for example, most notions related to child development (in its many forms), or the determinative flows of capital and power or non-human and technological forces as found in other theoretical perspectives. There are certainly notable exceptions (e.g., Lee 1998; Stephens 1995; Prout 2005; Wells 2009, to name but a few). However, the thrust of approach and conception continues to favor singular—if socially, culturally, and historically embedded—subjects who display, or must be allowed to display, creativity and active engagement of the world in the here-and-now (see Cook, this volume; Oswell, this volume). Consequently, we contend, something of the vital relationality of the child remains at arm’s length and kept out of reach conceptually, analytically, and politically.

Indeed, one would be hard-pressed, for instance, to traverse the landscape of childhood studies course modules, textbooks, and conference presentations without encountering the sentiment that “children are beings not becomings” (Qvortrup et al. 1994: 2). Clearly, a significant epistemological intervention into presumptions about reading children as merely in the process of undergoing change (i.e., especially learning and development), the notion of “being” in this sense has effortlessly taken its place among the new clichés, often deflecting rather than inviting critical reflection. Evidently preferential to “becoming,” “being” supposes a desirable state or, at least, a favored perspective on childhood as something to be released from the teleology of adult conceptions and institutions that tend to favor single, linear trajectories of learning, development, and perhaps being (see Uprichard 2008; see also Oswell 2013). “Being” seems a reasonable place to repose from the vantage point of those of us who sit atop Maslow’s hierarchy of needs. For others, like some of the queer of color youth Bernardini (this volume) discusses, “being” signifies navigation and struggle within multiple structural vulnerabilities, and “becoming”—becoming “sideways” (Stockton 2009) perhaps—might appear as both desirable and undesirably uncertain. The hesitancy to embrace “becoming” speaks to a generalized reluctance to let go of the foundational distinction from developmental psychology and the individualized, monadic child which carries or holds agency unto itself.

The flight from becoming in this way encodes, paradoxically, a kind of denaturalized child which exists in a here-and-now, often for the sake of claiming academic positional distinction. Consequently, the underlying epistemological and moral privileging of agency, usually particular types of agency (see Sanchez-Eppler, this volume; Cordero Arce, this volume; and also James 2007; Spyrou 2011; Oswell 2013), cultivates an analytic blind spot—a space of perpetual unsight—which undoes or disables possibilities of seeing differently. Indeed, presuming “being”—and presuming that a particular sort of being is realized through the exercise of a particular sort of agency—arguably discourages inquiry into how multiple and connective scales, relationalities, and structural entanglements also make the “child” of childhood studies possible and viable. Discussing existentialist readings of politically committed texts for children, Beauvais (this volume) notes: “Doing childhood studies without agency ready at hand” enables “wonder” about “temporal inflections” (this volume). Kontovourki and Theodorou (this volume), as well, lay bare the obstacle of children’s agency—of a presumed shape and content—rather than seeking to liberate them from non-agency.

Such fetishization does not only result in an intellectual loop but has serious political consequences. Much like Nancy Fraser’s (2009) depiction of feminism’s “uncanny double,” a version of itself that has not just been co-opted by neoliberalism but has a strong affinity with the very constitution of late capitalism, the “darling figure” of childhood studies (see Cook, this volume) bears marked similarity to the idealized subject of neoliberalism. At once innovative and chameleon-like, this figure demonstrates a remarkable ability to constantly remake itself anew, well-befitting a regime of “flexible accumulation” (Harvey 2007). Because this ontological production is rendered sacred, it can obscure interrogation of its productivity for capitalism, and indeed arguments developed in childhood studies about the agentic child may even be used to bolster neoliberal projects, from the “Girl Effect” (Shain 2013) to early childhood interventions aimed at the human capital development of the active child (Newberry 2017).

The point for consideration here is not simply that scholars have produced and entertained “wrong” or “inappropriate” conceptions of children’s agency, or that it has remained entirely unexamined in the field. It is that agency itself—in its centrality, dominance, and hegemonic position in childhood studies—may very well stand in the way of reaching for alternative ways of knowing. Efforts to move beyond individual and individuated agency span from Alanen and colleagues’ (2000, 2001) insistence on generation as a relationally inflected time-scale of knowledge and measurement to Oswell’s (2013) theorizations of multiple and varied agencies. As well, those in educational studies (see Edwards and D’Arcy 2004), literacy studies (Fisher 2010), and children’s geographies (e.g., Ansell 2009; Kraftl 2013b) strive to problematize and, in some ways, decenter the child by attending to the materialities and geo-scales which surround and construe children and their worlds. Agency here arises as a relational dynamic—not so much a property of an entity, but an element of a complex, an assemblage of sorts which, as Oswell states, “is always in-between and interstitial” where “the capacity to do and to make a difference is necessarily dispersed across an arrangement” (2013: 70).

We strive to position Reimagining Childhood Studies as an invitation to readers and colleagues to engage in further dialogue about the nature and boundaries of this shared endeavor. Our concern at this historical juncture centers on how childhood studies, as it is being practiced and deployed across a range of institutional domains, might be becoming ossified despite the rather robust efforts of many scholars to the contrary. To breakthrough a long-standing epistemological and conceptual impasse in childhood studies requires a commitment to aspire to dislodge some of the foundational notions of the field without completely dismantling the entire enterprise. In what follows, we attempt to perform this difficult trick, not as an exemplar of some ideal new reimagining of the field but as a contribution to a larger, ongoing conversation regarding our own endeavors to engage with the child, children, and childhood beyond received frames. In so doing, we place ourselves alongside, not above or apart from, the contributors to Reimagining Childhood Studies, and other colleagues in the field, who welcome the excitement as well as the risks of stepping past boundaries. Most important, we place our conceptual move in this volume within an emerging current of scholarship in childhood studies, a current which is not always sufficiently forceful and influential but which is however greatly important and valuable in helping disrupt the orthodoxies of the field we described above. Some of this work is mentioned in this Introduction and throughout the various chapters of the volume, although we acknowledge that the purpose of this volume is not to review this emerging literature but to offer a reflective attempt at reimagining childhood studies alongside other efforts that do so.

Our initial effort to assert our own (re)thinking about childhood studies starts with a discussion of ontology. In many ways questions of ontology lie at the heart of childhood studies, with its efforts to reclaim the passive, developing child, and yet the fascination and recapitulation of the field’s favored agentic child have meant that more pressing questions about ontology have largely been neglected. In response, we gesture here to the productivity of relational theories of ontology and explore what these can offer to childhood studies, not just as a theoretical enterprise, but as one that is fundamentally bound up with the ethics and politics of knowledge production. Which child, children, and childhood do we bring into being through our scholarship and which do we preclude? Repositioning relationality as the core focus of writing, conception, and research prods scholarship to push past conceptualizing children in essentially monadic terms—i.e., as beings which have (i.e., “own” or “possess”) agency—and into realms where children and childhood can only fruitfully be located by way of linkages with other human and non-human aspects of the world. Thinking relationally about the child in this manner thereby invites a relational posture not only toward bodies and persons but also toward objects, technologies, systems, epistemes, and historical eras. Such a focus begets and informs attention to blind spots in the field, areas which we do not see, or are not even aware of, because the ontological and scalar frames which dominate the field do not allow for their existence. Political economy along with its multi-scalar operations, we argue, is one such blind spot. In centering the relational and foregrounding ethical and political commitments, we then proceed to interrogate the political economy of childhood under contemporary, financialized capitalism, suggesting this can open up lines of inquiry and offer critical ways to address new, and more invasive/pervasive, means of capital accumulation and the concomitant heightening of inequities.

In so doing, our point is not to engage in a zero-sum game of replacing one ontology, scale, or “turn” with another. At root, we make the deceptively simple point that the complexity and dynamism of life itself necessitate making a “cut” around the object of study, and demands of us decisions as to the theoretical and conceptual resources we mobilize: What kind of child do we choose to bring into light? What kinds of inclusions and what kinds of exclusions result from our choices? We do not suggest that the issues we raise in this Introduction are the only lines of inquiry in childhood studies. In offering an explicit reimagining of ontology and new imaginings of the contemporary political economy of childhood, we set out to make the case that these have a crucial role to play in advancing the intellectual and political project which is childhood studies, including in providing the basis for interventions which have preferable material consequences for children and those human and non-human others with whom they live their lives.

Reimagining childhood studies with relational ontologies

Though not explicitly discussing issues of ontology, a number of the chapters in this volume argue for the need to turn our attention to the relational and interdependent aspects of children’s lives as well as the ethics and politics which characterize them. Cordero (this volume) argues for the need to rethink the child legal subject, abandoning the “petrous ontology” of the independent legal subject and moving toward an interdependently autonomous one who is a full-fledged rights holder and duty bearer. Balagopalan (this volume) offers her own critique of the autonomous, independent child-subject of contemporary childhood studies and argues for a non-sovereign kind of relationality based on an ethics of responsibility toward others, while Oswell (this volume) makes the case for an expanded political vision for, and on the basis of, childhood studies, which would also include infancy by accounting for infrastructures and supports, vulnerabilities and solidarities. Together with these contributors, we explore what it might mean for childhood studies to rethink its object of inquiry—the child—with relational ontologies.

Of course, the field’s concerns with ontology are not new. The “new paradigm” was in many ways a reaction to the essentialist ontologizing of the child by the developmental and socialization theories which preceded it. In the early 1980s, Chris Jenks expressed his clear dissatisfaction with the ontological assumptions which guided much of the scholarly thinking until then: “It is as if the basic ontological questions, ‘What is a child?’, ‘How is the child possible as such?’ were, so to speak, answered in advance of the theorizing and then dismissed” (1982: 10). The “new paradigm” offered a fresh and welcomed answer to the ontological question by positioning the child as socially constructed rather than universal; as a reflexive, social actor rather than a passive presence within overwhelming structural determinations; and as an individual whose very ontological existence needed to be acknowledged as independent and autonomous. The “new paradigm” also offered a set of methodological tools that would help bring forth this new ontological understanding of the child through a commitment to the use of qualitative methodologies, which would highlight children’s voices and agency in the local contexts of their everyday lives. But despite these early ontological concerns of the field, its social constructionist orientation and emphasis on epistemology have largely failed to move discussions on ontology beyond the agentic child.

Without downplaying the critical insights of the cultural turn, the call of the “ontological turn” is to embrace a more expansive terrain where human, non-human, and technological forces are recognized as entangled in the constitution of the social world, and producing knowledge about its character. What the ontological turn offers is the theoretical possibility of recognizing the materiality of life while understanding that discourse is entangled with, produced by, and productive of this materiality. A concern with the “real”—the material presences of life—as these acquire their status within discursive fields of meaning and power is what is of interest here. It signals, in this way, a move from a concern with categories and essences to emergence stemming from children’s relational encounters with the world. Asking us to rethink our ontological commitments and certainties, this theoretical orientation takes us back to that basic question of the field: “How is the child possible?” The question invites us to reimagine the child, not by reducing our understanding to essentialist assertions but through a fresh look at matters of ontology, which highlight the complexity of the child. Placing childhood and children within this larger relational field of human, non-human, and technological forces, we are led to explore their becomings as necessarily and inevitably interdependent “on other bodies and matter (Hultman and Lenz Taguchi 2010: 525, 531; see also Balagopalan, this volume; and Cordero, this volume),” as well as social relations which both precede and are transformed through this intra-activity but without resorting to romantic claims about authenticity (Rautio 2014: 471–472). These becomings are not without history as Balagopalan (this volume) shows, nor are they free from social, cultural, economic, and all other kinds of constraints. But, and this is the important point here, they are nevertheless constitutive of change, however small or slow it may, at times, be.

This kind of relational ontologizing signals a shift from a view of children as individual, bounded entities and independent units of analysis to an understanding of children as ontological becomings: what matters is not what they are but how they affect and are affected in the event assemblages they find themselves in (see Lee 2001; Barad 2007; Fox and Alldred 2017). Relational ontologizing also signals a shift from childhood as an identity category to the practices which enact it as a particular kind of phenomenon: from what childhood is to how childhood is done. These shifts, to the extent that they inspire empirical and theoretical work, are in many ways attempts to decenter children and childhood and to contribute to childhood studies’ overcoming of its child-centeredness and inward-looking gaze (see Spyrou 2017; see also Beauvais, this volume). To decenter children and childhood through relational ontologizing is precisely to identify and examine those entangled relations which materialize, surround, and exceed children as entities and childhood as a phenomenon diversely across time and space.

Alanen (2017: 149) has recently noted that “to encourage a turn to ontology in this sense means to invite childhood scholars to study and to think ‘deeply’ of their philosophies of science” and indeed the nature of “reality.” A move toward a reflexive and critical consideration of knowledge practices may contribute toward childhood studies’ development as a critical field which is not merely ...