Studies of childhoods in the Global South: towards an epistemic turn in transnational childhood research?

ABSTRACT

The most well-known and widely cited literature in the multidisciplinary field of childhood studies has been undertaken by scholars based in the Global North, who have produced theoretical frameworks and conceptualisations about childhood frequently deployed by Northern and Southern scholars alike. These are often based on priorities developed in Northern academic institutions, sometimes in response to funding calls by grant-making agencies also based in the North. As a result, when Southern scholars contribute to the dominant childhood studies literature, a field of study in which the majority of well-known articles tend to be published in Northern-based Anglophone journals, their contributions stand mainly as empirical variations of mainstream Northern theories whose scholarship foregrounds theoretical and methodological frameworks designed with particular childhoods in mind. The resulting outcome is that Global South childhoods – in their plurality and diversity – do not contribute epistemically to the construction of a transnational childhood scientific discourse. This ultimately limits the quality of global childhood studies and hinders the development of more conceptually sophisticated, eventually divergent, theoretical frameworks that can account for multiplicity and diversity in childhoods. Therefore, this volume sought to explore locally driven perspectives of childhoods in diverse contexts in the South for the purpose of gaining insights into the knowledge that can be produced about Southern childhoods when research is driven by priorities, demands, and needs of locales in the Global South.

KEYWORDS:

• Knowledge production;
• unequal power relations;
• childhood studies;
• Global South
• Global North
• marginalisation of Southern scholars

Introduction

Over the last 30 years or so the multidisciplinary field of childhood studies has grown significantly, with an abundance of empirical studies, which predominately adopt qualitative methodologies to shed light on various aspects of childhoods and children’s lives – primarily foregrounding children’s own accounts. While many of these studies are situated within Western European and North American contexts, it must be acknowledged that in recent years there has been an increase in the attention given to studies centred around childhoods and children’s lives undertaken in diverse contexts in the Global South. The motivations underpinning some of these studies can be linked to the objective of challenging notions of a global childhood embedded in the universalising agendas of many international agencies seeking to promote children’s rights in diverse contexts (Christiansen and James 2004). Other studies are driven by the need to problematise the parochialism of Eurocentric knowledge and its ambition to universalise its own localised knowledge production (see, for example Balagopalan 2018; Vergara Del Solar, Llobet, and Nascimento 2021; Rabello de Castro 2021; Abebe, Dar, and Lyså 2022). Added to this has been the increasingly vocal attempts of Southern scholars to discuss and document, in more global fora, the contributions of indigenous scientific knowledge from their own contexts (Kesby, Gwansura-Ottemoller, and Chizororo 2006; Sircar and Dutta 2011; Arce 2018; Savegnago and de Castro 2020; Miedema, Koster, and Pouw 2020; Rabello de Castro 2021; Vergara Del Solar, Llobet, and Nascimento 2021). However, a review of reference lists and bibliographies in the publications produced from many of these studies – as well as a cursory glance at university reading lists for childhood studies courses, especially in institutions based in the North – reveals that the most well-known and widely cited literature about childhoods and children’s lives has been produced by scholars based in the Global North. This does not mean that studies focusing on childhoods in the South conducted by scholars also based in the South do not exist, or do not hold relevance for academic and policy debates in their own societies. Certainly, while the development of childhood studies across regions in the South may vary (as indeed, it does in contexts in the North), it is important to recognise that studies of childhoods and children’s lives by Southern scholars have long existed. The fact that the most well-known and most widely cited literature within this field has been produced by Northern-based scholars is simply an indication of the extent to which so-called authoritative centres of knowledge production, which are instrumental in defining what types of knowledge are relevant and what bodies of literature are worth reading, are universities in the Global North.

Aims of this collection

These concerns, which have been well documented in childhood studies in recent years, led us, as editors of this collection, to pose the following question: what would a body of literature focusing on Southern childhoods look like when epistemologically driven by the demands (social, cultural, economic, political) of the localities in which they are shaped and produced? Therefore, this volume sought to explore locally driven perspectives of childhoods in diverse contexts in the South to produce knowledge of Southern childhoods determined, not by Northern priorities and frameworks, but by local needs and contexts. In asking this question, and setting this aim, we did not assume that we would be inundated with papers that only foregrounded, or put forward, clearly distinguishable theories from the South. Given the intensification of global processes and the extent to which the local and the global intersect in the everyday lives of children and their families, we understood from the outset that a body of literature centred around the epistemological demands of localities would also, in many respects, grapple with global as well as local processes and concepts that are relevant and impact children’s lives.

Working with this understanding we issued a call for papers which received 40 abstracts from researchers from diverse contexts. A significant number of papers (16) involved scholars based in Latin America, which is an indication of the strength of the field of childhood studies in that region. Of the 40 abstracts submitted we selected 16 papers, including 13 papers with authors based in the South, primarily in Latin America, but also in West Africa, Southern Africa, South Asia, and the Caribbean. These authors were invited to the next stage of the process, which not only involved the production of a full first draft, but also consisted of attendance at two online workshops involving all prospective authors, the three guest editors, and the Managing Editor of Third World Thematics. Initially, the spread of papers showcased studies undertaken in a range of contexts – Jordan, Turkey, Ghana, Malawi, South Africa, Ethiopia, Brazil, Chile, Argentina, the Philippines, China, India, and the Caribbean – a number of which were written by authors or writing teams with at least one contributor based in that context. However, during the process, a number of these papers were withdrawn, most of which involved authors based in the South. This was a development that we noted with concern as editors. In the process of reviewing the manuscripts we received, we further observed that while many authors sought to address the objectives of the collection, some were hesitant in the way they framed their theoretical contributions to the field. This “modest” stance could be a product of the positionality (including career stage) of some of the contributors. However, this could also be a by-product of power asymmetries within the academic and publishing world. Additionally, we were conscious that this could also be because for many authors from the Global South the process of paper submission to international journals can be exceedingly onerous and challenging. Firstly, in the case of those coming from other language traditions the reason behind this challenge can be attributed to the fact that they have to write fluently in English as well as be able to transmit very nuanced arguments in a language which is not their native one. Secondly, the editorial process can be less intelligible and clear to them; besides, qua Southern authors, their work can be subject to more preconceived evaluation (see Collyer 2018). At the end of the process, ten contributions remained for final consideration for the volume. While focusing on distinct topics, all these pieces offer fresh insights which either problematise and expand on existing concepts developed in the North or offer alternative approaches to explaining children’s everyday lives.

Rationale and background

That the most widely cited publications focusing on childhoods have been produced by scholars based in the Global North is only a small component of a structural problem within the multidisciplinary field of childhood studies. Another significant problem is that much of the produced literature has, hitherto, been based on studies of childhood that have been framed by theories and concepts which have their roots in work developed by Northern-based scholars, many of whom – at least in the early days of the field – drew on work they had conducted with children based in the Global North (Alanen 1988; James and Prout 1990; Qvortrup et al. 1994; Qvortrup 2005; Jenks 1996; Corsaro 1997; James, Jenks, and Prout 1998; Mayall 2002).

In recent years efforts have been made to develop theories more closely connected to, or better explaining, the everyday lives and relationships of children in parts of the Global South (see, for example, Abebe 2013, 2019; Abebe, Dar, and Lyså 2022; Spyros 2017; Spyros, Rosen, and Cook 2018; Twum-Danso Imoh, Tetteh, and Oduro 2022). Yet, the dominance of theorising from the North prevails in discourses about childhoods and children’s lives in both the Global North and the Global South. Part of this can be attributed to the prominence of the development agenda in contexts in the South. In many regions the demands of various development agencies drive the scope and nature of research projects and, thus, lead to a more applied focus on the research undertaken by many academics (see Alatas 2003; Collyer 2018). This has been noted recently by Pastore (2022, 114) in relation to child research in Mozambique:

It is noteworthy that a literature review on the issue of childhood in Mozambique, especially in Portuguese-language literature, showed that there is still little specific production of research and documents that place the child as the central focus of the study. Exceptions are some official Mozambican documents, such as reports from UNICEF-Mozambique, the National Institute of Statistics of Mozambique, or even, the National Action Plan for Children 2006–2010 (Governo de Moçambique 2006) and the National Action Plan for Orphaned and Vulnerable Children (Cardoso 2010). The predominant concern is linked to social problems such as illness, shelter, social vulnerability, adoption, street situation, among others.

Hence, in situations whereby funds flow unidirectionally, and “research” is framed as “applied”, and often related to welfare and development projects, many childhood researchers in contexts in the South have no other choice but to frame their questions and results accordingly. This limits the extent to which they can devote their intellectual efforts to engaging in theorising within the field.

Additionally, key journals within this multidisciplinary field, such as Childhood: A Journal of Global Child Research (Norway), Children’s Geographies (UK), Children & Society (UK), and the International Journal of Children’s Rights (UK), are based in countries in Western Europe, especially the UK (and managed by editorial teams of academics primarily based within this region). Thus, not only are the bulk of articles about childhoods in the South written by scholars in the North, but decisions about what work is acceptable for publication are primarily determined by academics also based in institutions in the North, even if their origins can be traced to contexts in the South.

The fact that so many of these journals are specifically based in the UK illuminates another structural problem within the childhood studies field – that is, the prominence of Anglophone researchers and academics, notably those based in the North, in the list of most widely cited and known authors in this field. Writing about global inequalities more broadly, Penn (2005, 11) refers to English as a “killer” language because its dominance results in all other languages becoming positioned as subordinate. Phillipson (1992) shares these sentiments which is evident by his coining of the term “linguistic imperialism” to convey the dominance of the English language as the lingua franca of academia (in Flint et al. 2022, 83). This has serious implications because it results in a disregard for the relevance, and importance, of those works published in other languages. This is an indication that in addition to the issue of inequality in knowledge production between the North and the South, there is a need to consider language inequalities in these discussions which lead to the foregrounding of English over other languages, including those associated with other countries based in the Global North. This dominance of the English language in academic knowledge production, as has been noted in other fields of inquiry, presents challenges, not only for those who come from non-Anglophone countries (see Victora and Moreira 2006; Murphy and Zhu 2012), but also for those in the South who come from countries where English is the official language as a result of the legacy of British colonial rule. As Nguigwa Thiong’O (1987) puts it, the adoption of English as the language of intellectual endeavours in territories previously colonised by Britain has led to “a deliberate disassociation of the language of conceptualisation, of thinking, of formal education, of mental development from the language of daily interaction in the home and in the community” (in Murphy and Zhu 2012, 919–920). Hence, the fact that most high-impact journals are produced in English has exclusionary consequences for significant numbers of academics from the non-English-speaking parts of the world as well as from so-called “Anglophone” contexts.

These inequalities within the knowledge production system that surround the publication of literature within childhood studies have a number of implications. First, this state of affairs has resulted in the outputs of knowledge produced in the South not being deemed as important to Northern researchers. As a result, they have not been consumed by large numbers of academics in the North or by students, who rely on reading lists provided by academics to guide them in their exploration of the knowledge produced in a given field. As Canagarajah (2002) argues, reading lists (and all inter-quotation indices within an area of study) articulate a politics of writing whereby a certain fragment of world knowledge, as specified by a certain set of authors, themes, concepts, and ideas, becomes the recognised and legitimate framework for conversations in that field as a result of the geopolitical structure of scientific knowledge production. Second, when Southern scholars contribute to the dominant childhood studies literature, their contributions stand mainly as empirical variations of mainstream Northern theories underpinned by scholarship which foregrounds theoretical and methodological frameworks designed with particular childhoods in mind (Rabello de Castro 2020). In effect, then, Southern childhoods – in their plurality and diversity – are not recognised as contributing epistemically to the construction of a transnational childhood scientific discourse. Third, and related, these inequalities lead to the marginalisation of scholars in the South, which is evident in the division of labour in international scientific studies/discourses whereby Southern scholars ever remain in the position to replicate received theory. Fourth, as marginalisation within these dominant forms of knowledge production can be disguised as an indicator of the irrelevance of an individual’s work, Southern scholars can become trapped into ensuring they are “recognised” within the “international circuit” by submitting themselves to the authoritative canons laid down by Northern scholarship. In the process, they find themselves becoming somewhat removed from the realities that underpin the context in which they live and its attendant social, political, and ethical demands. In other words, then, their contribution can become globally recognised but locally irrelevant (Alatas 2003; Adesina 2011; Okere, Njoku, and Devisch 2011; Connell et al. 2017; Bernardino-Costa, Maldonaldo-Torres, and Grosfoguel 2018).

These inequalities surrounding knowledge production within childhood studies ultimately limit the quality and strength of the field theoretically, empirically, and methodologically. For instance, by starting from a premise that theories which relate to childhoods, and are produced within the scope of Northern scholarship, can be drawn upon to deepen understanding of childhoods in all societies leads to the production of knowledge that is introspective, self-centred, and somewhat myopic. Further, it also results in the reproduction of unequal power dynamics in academic knowledge production which mirrors broader inequalities in the global economic and political system. This leads to a situation whereby the priorities and narratives from the North are held up as the norm that must be achieved by all societies. Put another way, scholarship on children in the Global South has, for the most part, drawn on “a historically northern-centric and elite pattern of knowledge production that claims ‘global’ legitimacy” (Abebe, Dar, and Lyså 2022, 4; see also Stephens 1995; James, Jenks, and Prout 1998; Naftali 2014; Spyros, Rosen, and Cook 2018; Balagopalan 2018). Therefore, while much of the literature in childhood studies produced in the last 30 years seeks to challenge universalising agendas such as those underpinning dominant and global children’s rights debates, it can be argued that the framework on which the field is based has reproduced, in similar ways, research agendas that are also universalising and seek to impose a certain lens through which researchers explore childhoods regardless of context.

Overview of papers

These ten articles, which seek to address the aims of the collection from different disciplinary perspectives as well as from diverse geographical contexts, problematise existing hegemonic discourses underpinning the study of childhoods, personhood, intergenerational relations, education, care, children’s rights and wellbeing and livelihoods. For instance, Shelda-Jane Smith, Adaeze Greenidge, and Levi Gahman (2022, in this volume), in “Unsettling orthodoxy via epistemological jailbreak: ethinking childhood, psychology, and wellbeing from the Caribbean”, call attention to the historical, sociocultural, and political dimensions of global “psy” framings of childhood and personhood. As Smith and colleagues point out, these framings draw on reductionist, individualistic, “rational” explanations of human experience which ignore alternative understandings of childhood and personhood. The authors further argue that in the case of Afrodescendant populations in the Caribbean, Euro-centric “psy” sciences fail to recognise the enduring material and psychosocial consequences and intergenerational traumas among these local populations caused by historical experiences of enslavement, the plantation system, colonialism, and indentureship. Positing that these epistemological deficiencies produce ineffectual mental healthcare methods, the authors offer the alternative framework of “psychohistoriographic cultural therapy” which considers the long-term impact of historical experiences as well as the role of ancestral connection, kinship, and spirituality in maintaining children’s wellbeing. As such, these therapeutic approaches are arguably much better suited to the needs of the child constituencies they are meant to serve.

The importance of prioritising indigenous epistemologies of childhood is also a key theme in Roberto Salva’s article, which engages with yet another universalising discourse, that of children’s rights. In “Kapwa child participation, kapwa childhood, and a path towards the indigenisation and expansion of international agreements” (2022, in this volume), Salva notes that the Philippines has championed the idea of children’s rights, and specifically children’s right to participation, from the drafting stage of the Convention on the Rights of the Child (adopted by the United Nations General Assembly in November 1989) to the creation of child participation structures in domestic and regional intergovernmental governance. Arguing that this stance is a product of an indigenous sociocultural anchor, Salva identifies this anchor as kapwa, a Filipino term roughly equivalent to the Western term “other” but which carries the meanings of “shared self” or “together with the person”. The study demonstrates how the moral and epistemological framework of kapwa produces social engagements which acknowledge children’s vulnerability and need of protection, but also, and at the same time, recognise children’s equality with adults, viewing this group as simultaneously “human beings” and “becomings”. When coupled with the dominant global child rights discourse, the result is an expanded conceptualisation of children’s agency rights which tends to the needs and demands of local communities. Salva’s study offers a fruitful direction for critical explorations of Global South engagements with the child rights framework as a constructive process in which universalising discourses of rights are domesticated and enriched by extant Indigenous knowledge systems and ethical frameworks.

Several other studies in this collection illustrate this point. In their article “International perspectives on the participation of children and young people in the Global South” (2022, in this volume), Lucy Jamieson, Irene Rizzini, Tara Collins, and Laura Wright present the results of a comparative study of the meanings of children’s participation and protection rights in three national contexts: Brazil, China, and South Africa. Focusing on programmes and forums in which child participation occurs in a dedicated space, the study finds there is no single conceptualisation of child participation that aligns with the different country contexts. For instance, while children’s respect for parents and their duty to elders constitute an important concern in discussions of child participation in China and South Africa, participants in Brazil employed the rhetoric of “protagonism” to address young people’s autonomy in public policy. Nonetheless, the study finds that in all three case studies, child participation is formulated as a collective, rather than an individualistic, practice, with ideas of group solidarity, co-responsibility, social justice, and sharing playing a central role in adult and children’s formulations of child participation and agency. These findings lend support to the notion that we should move beyond Global North conceptions of individuated agency to a conceptualisation of children’s agency as “a communal practice” or “relational dynamic” (see Spyros, Rosen, and Cook 2018, 5).

A similar argument about the need to reconceptualise agency is put forward in the article, “Considering an agency–vulnerability nexus in the lives of street children and youth” by Ernestina Dankyi, Lorraine van Blerk, Janine Hunter, and Alison McFadden (2022, in this volume). Noting that children and youth living and working on the streets are part and parcel of urban realities for many rapidly expanding and highly unequal cities in the Global South, the authors point out that media and government discourses have long regarded street children as “social problems” and/or as passive victims. Meanwhile, recent academic scholarship has begun to position children living in the street as social actors with “agency”. Unpacking the normative assumptions underlining these different formulations, the authors argue that both are problematic if employed as antonymic binaries. Drawing on secondary analysis of data from a longitudinal ethnographic research project in which street children and youth in Ghana were both participants and researchers, Dankyi and colleagues argue that children’s agency is not employed freely. Rather, social, and structural constraints mean that for many children and youth living on the street agency is always exercised within a specific relationship with vulnerability. In fact, in some cases, the exercise of agency may itself render youth – particularly girls – more vulnerable. The authors conclude that instead of considering children and youth as either “vulnerable” or “agentic”, it is best to examine “the vulnerable situations within which young people living on the street exercise their agency” (Dankyi et al. 2022, in this volume, p. 5, emphasis added).

In “’Shed, ‘hed akkalu’ and differentiated chooling: arratives from an Indian ity” (2022, in this volume), Vijitha Rajan likewise employs a critical perspective to examine the lives and experiences of migrant child populations and the various programmes that purport to improve these children’s mobility chances. Drawing on a postcolonial critique of the theoretical constructs of children’s “agency” and “multiple childhoods”, Rajan considers how the distinct living conditions and marginalised identities of temporary migrant children in the city crucially shape their sense of space and place, as well as their educational experiences. The ethnographic study reveals that while migrant children actively engage with their precarious living conditions, the structural conditions of temporary migration crucially shape – and in effect delimit – these children’s agency. Offering a scathing critique of current educational programmes aimed at temporary migrant children, Rajan notes that state development projects designed to mainstream migrant children into “normative” universal education fail to consider – or perhaps prefer to ignore – children’s unstable living conditions and marginalised socio-spatial positions in the city. Meanwhile, some NGO functionaries sentimentalise migrant children’s experiences to legitimise the differential, substandard education they receive in the NGO-run schools. In this way, both state and NGO projects contribute to, rather than ameliorate, migrant children’s current social exclusion. They also limit these children’s chances of climbing the socioeconomic ladder in the future.

As mentioned above, interestingly, five articles in this volume are authored by scholars based at institutions in Latin America, with three produced by authors solely based in Argentina, one by Argentine and Chilean academics and one by academics based in Chile. While each of the articles focusing on this region address distinct topics, all play around, more or less explicitly, with the notion of a “Latin American” specificity to the analysis of childhoods and children’s lives. Thus, on one hand the colonial history of Latin American countries, be it in terms of its geographical/geopolitical space, inter-ethnic composition, or linguistic affiliations, is foregrounded in the analyses of each article. On the other hand, Latin America is also viewed as part of the broader “geographical metaphor” (Boatca 2015) of the “Global South” because the region shares, with other Southern contexts, different experiences of childhood compared to those that tend to be illuminated in the North. These experiences invite alternative theorising that can epistemologically enrich and complexify the present status of childhood studies.

Drawing on an historical critical approach to analyse the notions of childhood and modernity in “The heterogeneous temporalities of Latin American ‘modern’ childhoods” (2022, in this volume), Valeria Llobet and Ana Vergara Del Solar set out to unveil the different biographical, institutional, and state temporalities that make up the specific condition of being a child as scale and historicity constitute missing elements in childhood scholarship. In this vein, multiple and heterogeneous temporalities embed the production of Latin American childhoods, one of which stems from the “European” model of modernity in relation to which different regions of Latin America have developed complex and oblique relationships. This entails that the production of Latin American childhoods not only spills out of a linear, historically staged conceptualisation, but also that very different childhoods coexist simultaneously. The authors critically analyse the phenomenon of “child circulation”, where children are relocated among different families. Claiming that this phenomenon cannot be viewed as a “premodern residue”, they demonstrate that some of these experiences mobilise social, political, and institutional processes of re-inscription which recategorise child circulation as child abandonment. Such a (re-)ordering of childhood represents the effects of the hegemonisation of the modern state on the making of a homogeneous childhood with its conversion to the tempo of capitalism. The authors advocate for an epistemological shift to reconsider the question of Latin American childhoods in light of the acknowledgement of the multiple and heterogeneous temporalities, one of which is that of European modernity. This will ensure an alternative frame which avoids reductionist linear divisions along spatial or temporal dimensions such as those of the premodern or modern, and the poor or well-off child.

In “Children’s agency and cultural appropriation through the lens of South American anthropology: Mapuche and Toba/Qom children facing Catholic education” Mariana García Palacios and Andrea Szulc (2022, in this volume) set out to explore how Mapuche and Toba Indigenous children in Argentina receive, interpret, and transform religious education. Using an historical and ethnographical approach, the authors scrutinise both the homogeneity of the concept of indigenous childhoods in Argentina as well as the notion of Catholic evangelisation, showing that the historical and territorial aspects of the encounter between children and their adult teachers/preachers matter to how they develop a syncretic identity incorporating both Mapuche or Qom and Catholic belongings. Different educational guidelines of Catholic evangelisation will result in diverse outcomes of their encounter with Indigenous children, like an enthusiastic appropriation or a blank refusal of Catholic elements. It is not only Indigenous children and their families that are interpellated in the exercise of cultural appropriation but Catholic preaching itself can incorporate, to varying degrees, indigenous meanings of Mapuche and Qom cultures. The article follows this turbulent, tense, and non-linear scenario of interethnic encounters where the disadvantaged positionality of being a Mapuche or Qom child in the face of the historically hegemonic position of evangelising and “taming the Aboriginal culture” is rearranged by different actions taken by children that intentionally create distance, ignore, or even make up their own versions of Catholic symbols. In this sense, the authors offer an important epistemological shift as they situate children’s agency in the multiple layers of the historical and contextual particularities of an intergenerational and interethnic frame of analysis in the context of legacies of colonisation of Indigenous peoples.

Focusing on children in the urban context of a big South American city, Leavy’s and Shabel article on “Childcare and participation in the Global South: an anthropological study from squatter houses in Buenos Aires” (2022, in this volume) foregrounds how notions of care and participation are re-signified in the context of urban squatter occupations in the city of Buenos Aires during the COVID-19 pandemic, where children, especially girls, become overloaded with diverse demands necessary to family survival. The article addresses the construction of childhood in the context of structural social inequality of the Global South which is aggravated by racial, gender, and social class markers. Through ethnography, the authors underscore a new contour of patriarchal and generational determinacies given by specific local processes where the “fate” of girls leads them to assume a heavier load in the reproduction of the family. In this vein, the authors claim the conceptually inextricable entanglement of participation and care when girls’ actions of self-care and caring for others, both at home and in the public sphere, redefine the scope of caring practices beyond the conventional private sphere and individualistic moralities. By the same token, the performativity of children’s political participation assumes a “caring” feature, as these girls go out to denounce the violence they suffer at home or meet to discuss the painful aspects of their daily lives. The article shows how (self-)care is relational, done with, and through, others and changes according to the relations of power in children’s lives. This contribution, drawing most of its literature from Southern scholarship, foregrounds the singularity of children’s experiences as lived with parenting arrangements different from those of the nuclear family model and in which family space is not synonymous with shelter and well-being. Here, the authors assume the challenge of a decolonial theorising about childhood driven by the demands of their localities.

Localities as well as the languages which methodologically and conceptually constitute the field of childhood studies are key issues in Cortés-Morales and Morales-Retamal’s article “Vaulting the turnstiles: dialoguing and translating childhood and agencies from Chile, Latin America” (2022, in this volume). They show how “the travelling” of the concept of agency from North to South entails a veiling of the specific conditions of its emergence in Northern countries. The authors demonstrate how agency and agencia, its Spanish equivalent, are constituted by different historicities and connotations. Agency relies on a certain (desirable) understanding of childhood as ideally independent from the adult world, autonomous and empowered; but in Latin America the notion has been conceptually re-inscribed to support its coupling, and compatibility, with notions of inter-independence, vulnerability, and a sense of community. The authors discuss the example of the Chilean events of 2019 when young people and children were protagonists of a revolt against the political regime that soon inflamed the country, integrating other generations and sectors of Chilean society. Jumping over the metro barriers, argue the authors, did make a difference to social reality, not only in the short term, but also in the long run as it contributed to a new constitutional process. Here agencia becomes associated with children’s collective will to oppose the status quo, an example among many of Latin American children and young people participating in social movement organisations. It can be seen as a collective form of agency/agencia, grounded in Latin American historicity and expressed through protest in public spaces involving bodily, playful, and festive actions. Agencia, therefore, situated in a geographical, cultural, and historical context, foregrounds collective action, resistance, and political participation through corporeal and performative gestures.

Finally, the Argentinian scenario is again brought into focus through children’s and their families’ experiences of child labour in Rausky and Zuker’s article on “Disputed meanings about child labour, its consequences, and interventions: discussions based on ethnographic research in Argentina” (2022, in this volume). The authors problematise the dualistic discourses on child labour which, on the one hand, regulate its abolition, and on the other, forward it as a right. Childhood scholarship has well documented how, in the Global South, child labour remains a significant dimension of children’s lives, a fact that, in the context of the UN Convention on the Rights of the Child, has led to its pathologisation. Drawing on research data from two localities in Argentina, the authors analyse how the family unit emerges as the primary support of material needs, learning, affective links and relationships, community belonging, caring, and being cared for, in between the universal state norms that regulate child labour and the daily struggle to survive in the precarious and informal economic sector. In this vein, children’s participation in work activities becomes part and parcel of family survival and children’s subjectivisation processes. The network of positive meanings attached to children’s labour by children themselves and their parents is entangled with mixed feelings and ambivalent narratives. Thus, the authors underscore the tense, conflicting, and painful experiences that frame the overall meanings of child labour in this context. Therefore, against a normative framework that tends to overlook the minutiae of people’s lives, the authors argue that the concept of child labour cannot be viewed as a coherent concept with definite boundaries suited to clear-cut policies. Rather, a more pluralistic and critical conceptual framework would allow the integration of beliefs about the nature of childhood and child labour with the process that determines the nature of policies and interventions around the issue.

Conclusion

Together, this collection offers insights, perspectives, and realities related to the conceptualisation of childhoods and the lived experiences of children in diverse contexts. There are three key observations that we take away from these articles. First, while clearly anchored to the demands and priorities of the setting in which the research was conducted, which is also highlighted by the extent to which they rely on sources produced within their own contexts, it is evident that many of these contributions also engage with extant concepts that have long been foregrounded in childhood studies. This suggests that the continued intensification of global connectedness between societies, not just economically, politically, and culturally, but also intellectually, makes a clear-cut binary between the academic endeavours of researchers in the South and those in the North neither feasible nor realistic. However, these authors do not simply reproduce extant debates. They draw on the dynamics of childhood experiences and the attendant relationships (intergenerational and intragenerational) to expand, adapt, and make these dominant concepts in childhood studies meaningful to the society on which they are focused, bearing in mind its given particularities or specificities. A notable example is the concept of agency, which is taken up by numerous authors in this volume. What emerges is that these authors do not seek to discard the concept altogether. Rather, they make a strong case for the need to reconceptualise the idea of agency while, at the same time, drawing on historical data and empirical findings from contexts in the Global South. Specifically, the articles acknowledge that children’s capacity to act is necessarily refracted through their physical vulnerability as well as by stark socioeconomic, ethnic, racial, gender, and religious inequalities. They further demonstrate that children’s agency is ultimately relational: their choices and actions are grounded in a notion of the family as a reciprocal moral bond rather than a quasi-contractual, abstract exchange between interested parties. These insights suggest that it is time to shift attention from engagement with theoretical conceptions of childhood, personhood, and the family produced in the Global North in favour of a systematic examination of epistemologies of childhood and the actual needs and life conditions of children in the Global South.

A second key insight centres around the sources the contributors to this collection have relied on to produce their article. As some of the reference lists show, a wider literature basis has been used, especially relating to childhood studies scholarship situated within the locality of the research. This means that the construction of a research question from a Southern perspective has benefitted from looking more deeply into how the existing vernacular knowledge has interpreted the social and cultural demands of localities. This is an important point because usually when submitting to an international journal the reviewers’ expectations are that the author uses, and refers to, the set of references that are the most relevant from a Northern point of view. However, as evidenced by this collection, when one examines local realities, other vernacular literature may be the most appropriate to understand and investigate such local realities.

The third key insight relates to the need to further develop the role of Southern realities and perspectives in childhood research. This connects to the point made above that, while some of the papers we initially received promised rather bold arguments, the first drafts were ultimately quite modest in scope. Hence, the recognition of Southern realities, and the entirety of their attendant demands, will take time to develop since they must be backed up and sustained by academic South-South networks that often are incipient or/and non-existent. Further, as asserted by Fiddian-Qasmiyeh and Daley (2019), South-South cooperation initiatives must be prepared to handle the potential risks of cooptation by the North’s neoliberal hegemony. For Southern scholars, international (read as “Northern”) recognition remains an important asset in making career choices which may lead to preferential academic interlocutions with Northern colleagues compared to the, often painstaking, task of South-South interaction. At the same time, existing academic circuits of interaction and the circulation of knowledge rely on the economic and commercial backbone of powerful editorial corporations which, as they set the parameters of publication practices, tend to homogenise indigenous efforts in favour of other possible alternatives. Although some changes can be noted in this scenario, there is still some way to go to achieve a real and necessary “Southernisation” of transnational childhood research which is about the importance of critiquing and problematising the Global North’s hegemonic theorisation. Hence, a Southernization of child research requires affirming and reaffirming the possibility of putting into perspective universals that are, in fact, more local than the way in which they are framed. Even in the face of globalising processes, childhood theorisation must face the challenge of being relevant to local realities that have been completely overlooked by hegemonic theories. Therefore, we are not arguing for a completely Southern theoretical perspective because this would put scholars all over the world in intellectual bubbles, which would limit intellectual conversations and theorisations. Instead, the argument made here is that there is a need for an expansion and complexification of childhood theory as Southern realities are reflected on, and theorised from, localised standpoints.

We hope that this collection, by bringing together a range of authors, including many who are based in the South, will play a role in deepening reflections, conversations and specific actions which will, ultimately, contribute to addressing the structural inequalities that underpin the field of childhood studies.

Acknowledgements

We are grateful to Global South Colloquium Fund, which has supported this collection.

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author(s).

Additional information

Funding

This work was supported by the Global South Colloquium Fund.

Notes on contributors

Afua Twum-Danso Imoh

Afua Twum-Danso Imoh is a Senior Lecturer in Global Childhoods and Welfare in the School for Policy Studies at the University of Bristol. Much of Afua’s work focuses on constructions of childhoods; children’s rights and social and cultural norms; parent-child relations; the impact of historical developments on constructions of childhood and child rearing practices; and problematising the binary between the Global North and the Global South as it relates to childhood studies. Much of her research has concentrated on Ghana and Nigeria. Afua is the author of numerous peer-reviewed journal articles and book chapters. She is also the lead co-editor of three edited collections: Childhoods at the Intersection of the Global and the Local (Palgrave, 2012); Children’s Lives in an Era of Children’s Rights: The Progress of the Convention on the Rights of the Child in Africa (Routledge, December 2013); and Global Childhoods Beyond the North-South Divide (Palgrave, 2018). In addition, she is one of four editors of the forthcoming new edition of the Handbook of Children and Young People’s Participation to be published by Routledge in 2023.

Lucia Rabello de Castro

Lucia Rabello de Castro is Professor of Childhood and Youth at the Instituto de Psicologia at the Federal University of Rio de Janeiro. She is also Chief Editor of DESIDADES, a Latin American peer-reviewed scientific journal on childhood and youth. Her research interests focus on childhood theories and methodologies, childhood and decoloniality, children’s and youth’s social and political participation. She has published on such themes in Portuguese, Spanish and English. Two of her most recent publications are the edited volume, Infâncias do Sul Global: experiências, teoria e pesquisa desde a Argentina e o Brasil, 2021 (Childhoods of the Global South: experiences, theory and research in Argentina and Brazil, 2021), and “Righting adults” wrongs: “generationing” on the battlefield’, Childhood, 29 (3) (2022).

Orna Naftali

Orna Naftali is Director of the Louis Frieberg Centre for East Asian Studies and Senior Lecturer in the Department of Asian Studies at the Hebrew University of Jerusalem. Her research interests include the anthropology of childhood and youth, gender and the family, nationalism, militarisation, and the nation-state in the People’s Republic of China (PRC). She is the author of two books: Children, Rights, and Modernity in China: Raising Self-Governing Citizens (Palgrave Macmillan, 2014), and Children in China (Polity, 2016), and is currently working on a new book project on the militarisation of children’s culture and education in the PRC (1949-present). Dr. Naftali’s articles have been published in leading peer-reviewed journals, including Journal of Youth Studies; Childhood: A Journal of Global Child Research; Journal of the History of Childhood and Youth; The China Quarterly, and The China Journal.