Introduction: Childhood Studies, a Welcoming Field, Laura Weiner and John Davis
Childhood studies has always been an eclectic and welcoming field. The field’s scholars and practitioners hail from a variety of cultures, countries, professional backgrounds and academic disciplines to form ‘new’ and ‘improved’ understandings of a very specific point of time during our lives (childhood). We wish to carry on that warm tradition and welcome you to this text. We hope it will be the start to a fascinating and liberating journey.
The interdisciplinary academic area of childhood studies is ever-expanding. With around 26 per cent of the world’s population under the age of fifteen (and with some countries having nearly 50 per cent of their population under eighteen), childhood is not a minority concern for international, national and local governance and accompanying services and provision (Szmigiera 2021). There is a corresponding growth in research interest areas, assisted by the international focus on the different stages of childhood (e.g. early years – OECD 2015; childhood – UNICEF 2015; adolescence – UN Committee on the Rights of the Child 2016). This expanded interest and relevance have brought many new academics, practitioners and children to the field, and may be part of the reason you have chosen this book.
In keeping with this international growth, this book has four central aims:
1. Provide an ‘advanced-level’ text on critical childhood studies which explores contradictions, false dichotomies and ‘old’ theory in a new light.
2. Make transparent authors’ and contributors’ positionalities.
3. Support decolonization and social justice in childhood studies.
4. Ask readers to consider their relationship to theory and practice.
We are aware that you will have different reasons for engaging with this text. For example, you may be a student, a policymaker, a lecturer, a practitioner, a service manager or a combination of some or all of these things. Our goal is to demystify our subject area, bring it to life and engage with your aspirations, thoughts and quandaries concerning childhood and its fullest cross-national and cross-disciplinary nature. With combined decades of collective experience working with students, plus the experience of one of the co-authors currently undergoing the PhD process, we have constructed this book to have wide appeal. You may be seeking to understand your own childhood, to answer a professional conundrum, to begin a process of developing questions for your own project with children or to answer a question set in an assignment. This book is designed to assist you in making choices when approaching uncharted junctions, both personal and professional. This book is also for lecturers of childhood studies, providing potential to teach and learn together with students.
In this book we outline a journey towards advanced understandings of childhood and, in doing so, map the contested ideas that pepper our field. Similarly, while we acknowledge that the purview is too often dominated by global North scholars’ views of childhood, we likewise seek to recognize the work needed to recalibrate and take decolonization seriously within the childhood studies field. We have purposely raised these issues in all of our Chapters.
Childhood, while unique everywhere, is equally defined by its context. The globalization of postgraduate studies and cross-national interests in the field reflect an increasingly diverse area of study. We honour this diversity by involving commentators and contributors from around the world and from people in the field who self-define as practitioners, policymakers, students, researchers, teachers and more.
These perspectives shed light on many of the book’s cross-cutting themes while presenting notable examples from different corners of the globe and representing the multiple childhoods depicted in this book. We also include literature and other resources that encourage a cross-national breadth and critical analysis.
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