Our members, Prof. John Wall (Rutgers University, US) and Prof. Karen Wells (Birkbeck, University of London, UK), along with their co-editor Prof. Sarada Balagopalan (Rutgers University, US), talk about their edited collection, The Bloomsbury Handbook of Theories in Childhood Studies (Bloomsbury, 2023).
The Bloomsbury Handbook of Theories in Childhood Studies aims to advance cutting-edge work taking place in the field of childhood studies around how children and childhoods are critically theorized. Its 26 chapters by leading international childhood studies theorists from the humanities and social sciences explore diverse and sometimes conflicting frameworks for making children’s lives visible, meaningful, and empowered in scholarship and societies. They do so in relation to larger theoretical discussions around gender, race, class, sexuality, disability, coloniality, and other dimensions of human lived experience.
The volume explores three main themes. Part I on “Subjectivities” examines how children and young people understand and experience their identities through variously complicating normative assumptions around agency and voice. Part II on “Relationalities” looks into young people’s interconnections and interdependencies regarding others, such as other children, adults, communities, cultures, societies, and nature. And Part III on “Structures” interrogates children’s engagement with social systems, such as institutions, schools, law, economies, and politics.
While childhood studies has been theorized in multiple ways in its over three decades as a field, the wide array of possibilities has yet to be brought together into a single collection. This volume provides both newcomers and veteran scholars with the resources to explore the difficult theoretical issues involved in understanding childhoods in a comprehensive way. In the process, it enables readers to draw broader conclusions and develop new ideas.
The editors have all been deeply immersed in childhood studies’ growing range of theoretical discussions. We felt, however, that this exciting work needs to be brought into broader conversation so that the significant diversity of emerging approaches can better learn from and enrich one another. Our hope is that readers find resources both to ground their own theoretical thinking and to contribute to developing more critical theorizations of the field moving forward.
While the field of childhood studies shares a general set of aims, it has theorized these aims in a number of different and sometimes divergent ways. There are certainly overlaps between theories of, say, power, difference, positionality, materiality, queerness, protagonismo, governmentality, posthumanity, coloniality, and so on. At the same time, these and other theorizations contain important differences and even conflicts that need careful unpacking and further consideration.
We also hope this volume helps the field of childhood studies to develop and refine its own distinctive theoretical ideas. In addition to learning from theories already at play in the academy, the study of childhoods – just like the studies of other marginalized groups – opens up new theoretical possibilities that contribute to theoretical thinking in its own right. In this way, childhood studies can find new ways to conceptualize not only children’s and young people’s lives, but also those of adults, institutions, cultures, and societies.
Subjectivities
The distinctive shift that childhood studies helped set in place is its attentiveness to children as ‘subjects’ of study. This not only hinges on the recognition of children’s ‘agential’ capacities but also is powerfully combined with the purposeful leveraging of these capacities to decentre the epistemic weight of developmental understandings of the child (James and Prout 1997; James et al. 1998; Walkerdine 2009). Broadly speaking, the focus on children’s subjectivities within an understanding of childhoods as socially constructed turned our attention to how children think of themselves and their social, political, economic, geographic and cultural realities (Stephens 1995). With ‘agency’ recognized as a key aspect of research on children’s subjectivities, childhood studies enabled a re-imagining of our past and present with children being constructed primarily as social actors engaged in processes of ‘interpretive reproduction’ (Corsaro 2020) where adult knowledge is reworked in innovative ways with children assumed to have ‘the capacity to make a difference within their social environments’ (Wyness 2015). In this way, childhood studies offered a perspective in which children contribute to change and cultural (re)production on their own terms (Alderson 1995; Christensen and James 2017; Qvortrup, Corsaro and Honig 2009). However, what became exceedingly apparent from fairly early on was a constitutive tension between childhood studies focus on the authentic representation of children’s agential and hitherto silenced perspectives and poststructuralism’s critique of self- contained subjects. To better understand this tension and the critical role it plays in how we frame children’s subjectivities, we briefly contextualize the shift in the construction of the subject that poststructuralism engendered.
Drawing on Foucault’s theorization on the relation between power and truth in which the role of power in the formation of subjectivities is no longer limited to the suppression of truth, poststructuralism challenged the existing belief that our psyches and our desires lie at the heart of our experiences as humans. This reconstituted relationship between truth, power and the production of subjects moved beyond an ideological understanding of power to instead focus on how these forms of thought and practice were shaping our contemporary experiences and subjectivities. Through his focus on institutions like the school, prison and the hospital, Foucault helped highlight how the emergence of human beings as subjects was linked in different ways to practices that sought to know and manage the individual. His theorization helped demonstrate how our self-understanding as subjects with certain rights and capacities is bound to different apparatuses through which knowledge of human individuals is produced and where power is articulated on bodies, with these shifting over time, to produce different kinds of subjectivities.
Though childhood studies understood the child as socially constructed, its efforts to retrieve children’s ‘agency’ and ‘voice’ set in place a generalized understanding of the latter as a universal and largely transparent endeavour. It thereby appeared, in its initial iteration to be surprisingly agnostic to the role that power plays in producing children as subjects. Instead, the assertion of children’s subjective ‘agency’ that childhood studies was attempting to seek appeared stuck within an earlier structuralist framing in which the subject was produced via the imposition of an external system of power, language and culture as understood by the concept of ideology. Thus, quite unlike feminist theory that took up the poststructuralist challenge to declare gender identity as performatively constituted by the very ‘expressions’ that are said to be the working out of this identity, childhood studies took up this challenge by opening-up agency to the complexities that frame children’s subjectivities as social actors (Abebe 2009; Bordonaro and Payne 2012; Esser et al. 2016; Klocker 2007; Oswell 2013).
Over the years, scholars have variously complicated ‘agency’ beyond its narrow framing around children’s actions to also include a recognition of gendered and racialized silences; non-normative framings of sexuality and ability; and a focus on generation, relationalities and vulnerabilities. Their critical engagement with the moral, embodied and emotional components of children’s subjectivities (Mayall 2002) and increasing attempts to recognize and work with the challenges posed by ableist, gendered and racialized assumptions that frame ideas of children’s voice and participation (Gallacher and Gallagher 2008; Hunleth 2011; James 2007; Komulainen 2007; Spyrou 2011) also include a recognition of the exclusions that shaped disciplinary knowledge formations around children (Bluebond-Langner and Korbin 2007; Burman 2008). In addition, the focus on generation or intergenerationality as a dimension of social stratification (Alanen 1994; Cribari- Assali 2018; Huijsmans et al. 2014; Williams 2016) that positioned children within a particular hierarchy that was both categorical and relational (Abebe 2019; Aitkin 2001; Balagopalan 2021; Hanson and Niewenhuys 2013; Silver 2020) resonated with efforts that highlighted the structural, social and relational constraints that affect children’s agency (Balagopalan 2018; Honwana 2012; Mizen and Ofosu-Kusi 2013), including the continued importance of socially recognizing children as vulnerable (Wells and Montgomery 2014).
This expansive reframing of ‘agency’ beyond its initial articulation (as a recuperative and self-evidently empowering move) also reflected the increasing poststructuralist recognition of childhood as ‘the most intensively governed sector of personal existence’ (Rose 1999: 121). Childhood as a mechanism for a technology of power centred on life in which the ‘will to know’ dominates sharpened the focus on processes and techniques set in place to achieve children’s subjection and subjectification. This biopolitical framework troubled children’s ‘agency’ within various child-centred discourses, including children’s rights, by disclosing how the ‘agential’ child had helped mask, as well as sustain, more pernicious projects undertaken by state, non-state and international actors (Holzscheiter, Josefsson and Sandin 2019; Newberry and Rosen 2020; Stephens 1995; Wells 2011). These efforts based on social science research methods highlight how this operates as an organizing trope for neoliberal local, national and global projects. Relatedly, explorations of children’s figurations within literary, visual, historical and philosophical fields helped complicate agency as always already racialized thereby foregrounding the need to historicize ideas of innocence and futurity. Children’s subjectivities as shaped by colonial and racialized capitalism and its continuing logics of extraction, epistemic devaluation and ableist norms tied efforts to disaggregate ‘agency’ together with broader theoretical attempts to critically reimagine the discipline through a focus on political economy (Spyrou et al. 2019) as well as rethink the self-congratulatory rhetoric of progress that marked the civilizational genealogy of modern Western selfhood.