Our members, Prof. Kay Tisdall and Dr. Marlies Kustatscher, talk about their new textbook, co-edited with Prof. Debi Fry, Dr. Kristina Konstantoni, Prof. Kati Maternowska, Ms. Laura Weiner (all from the University of Edinburgh, UK), and Prof. John Davis (University of Strathclyde, UK), Critical Childhood Studies: Global Perspectives (Bloomsbury Academic, 2023).
Critical Childhood Studies: Global Perspectives is an accessible textbook for childhood studies. It introduces key concepts and unpacks debates and meanings concerning central ideas of the field, including agency/structure, adultism/childism, generational orders, materialism and decolonisation. It examines childhood studies’ relationship with varied disciplines, including geography, psychology and critical child development, history, social anthropology and public health, and challenges readers to envision multi- and transdisciplinary approaches to their work.
The book explores how children’s rights scholarship, childhood studies, social policy and the political interact, in areas such as children’s participation in decision-making (e.g. in practice settings). It also considers the universality – or not – of childhood across the world. The book demonstrates how an intersectional lens can contribute to understanding the complex power relations which shape children’s lives. It challenges readers to consider their own positionalities and implications for how they have come to understand childhoods and advocate with and on behalf of children. Finally, the book considers how various interdisciplinary understandings and theories about childhood can benefit practice contexts and, in turn, how practice can help develop more robust theory.
The chapters by our writing team are complemented by critical commentaries from international experts based in Australia, Brazil, the UK, the USA and Zimbabwe. The book contains a range of pedagogical features, from guiding questions to group activities. We also have an open-access companion website which contains videos and interactive tasks.
Childhood Studies is such an exciting and dynamic area, with a range of current debates both within the field as well as in broader interdisciplinary connection – from human rights, to decolonisation, to theories into practice.
As a team, we come from different geographical and disciplinary backgrounds and are at different career stages. In our teaching and collaborations, we interact with students, policymakers, researchers, practitioners, and frontline service providers. We wanted to provide an advanced-level textbook on childhood studies to invite readers into our subject areas, while introducing and demystifying understandings of childhoods. We also wanted to recognise the dynamic nature of the field as we recalibrate and take seriously questions of decolonisation and interdisciplinarity.
We hope the book takes readers on a journey of understanding their own childhoods, of confronting professional conundrums and promoting social justice for children through research, practice and policy. This book is also for those teaching childhood studies, who are looking for a unique way to teach interactively and learn together with students.
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.