Reimagining Childhood Studies

Description

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.

Spyros Spyrou is Professor of Anthropology and Sociology at the European University Cyprus, Cyprus. He is also the founder of the International Childhood and Youth Research Network. Rachel Rosen is Associate Professor in Childhood at IOE, UCL's Faculty of Education and Society, University College London, UK. Daniel Thomas Cook is Professor and founding faculty of Childhood Studies at Rutgers University -Camden, USA. He is co-editor of Childhood: A Journal of Global Child Research.

This book is a very welcome addition to the critical literature in Childhood Studies, timely in the questions raised and insights provided. Disruption, dialogue and descent are core, lending an authoritative focus to re-thinking the field to a more outward looking stance, scaling up and confident assertion of its contribution to knowledge. A thorough and highly engaging read that I will have as core reading for my students. * Dympna Devine, Full Professor and Head of Education, University College Dublin, Ireland * In recent years, the excitement and possibility that characterized the emergence of the 'new childhood studies' in the 1990s have largely been replaced by stagnant frameworks, self-referential methodologies, and an often celebratory focus on the figure of the agentic child. Reimagining Childhood Studies diagnoses and offers multiple ways out of this academic mid-life crisis. A provocative and forward-looking response to big questions from a range of disciplines, this book is a must-read for every scholar researching with and about young people in the twenty-first century. * Kristine Alexander, Canada Research Chair in Child and Youth Studies, University of Lethbridge, Canada * This is a genuinely important volume. Transdisciplinary in its reach and ambitious in its breadth, it challenges the reader to think anew on topics from materiality to agency and children's rights. Reimagining Childhood Studies signals a maturing field of study, and is essential reading not only for scholars of childhood, but for all those interested in new thinking on the structure societies and social relations. * Sharon Bessell, Professor of Public Policy, Australian National University, Australia * Reimagining Childhood Studies revisits key debates while charting a more complex and nuanced future for childhood studies. It raises rarely asked questions and puts forward perspectives that seem to be marginal within the current debates in the field. By bringing together interdisciplinary approaches and conceptual lenses, the book is replete with innovative ideas that postgraduate students and researchers of childhood will certainly engage with for decades to come. * Tatek Abebe, Professor of Childhood Studies, Norwegian University of Sciences and Technology, Norway *