Transdisciplinary Child and Youth Studies: Critical Praxis, Global Perspectives

Abstract

Drawing on empirical and theoretical literature from across six continents, this Introduction to a special issue of World Futures serves as a prelude to seven articles focused on transdisciplinary child and youth studies. The resulting gestalt builds on the assumption that those engaged in transdisciplinary research and pedagogy are also deeply engaged in the global reform movement currently underway in higher education. As a contribution to this process, we make two key arguments. First, Indigenous epistemologies (defined as traditional integrated knowledge systems drawing on connectedness to the Earth and ontologies of respect for past and future generations) must be fully included within the transdisciplinary canon. Second, we introduce child and youth studies as an inherently transdisciplinary field, one that embraces complex systems analysis along with young people’s participation in research that concerns their well-being.

KEYWORDS:

• Childhood studies
• indigenous epistemologies
• paradigm shift
• transdisciplinarity

Introduction

Readers of World Futures are by now familiar with the epistemological contours associated with “transdisciplinarity” and its discursive development over four decades as a “new” paradigm within higher education knowledge production; one focused on reform and transformation. Transdisciplinary research draws on holistic and integrative approaches to solving complex systemic problems within the sciences, arts, and humanities to augment truths found within all disciplines for the betterment of the human condition. Certainly, the continued claim of novelty is questionable given the widening circle of academic discourses within which the concept has been popularized. Indeed, herein we draw on literature by theorists and empiricists working through methodological, cultural, and political issues on sites across six continents while awaiting developments from the seventh.

As settler-educators in Canada, we trace the threads of our transdisciplinary perspective to previous careers as counselors with children, young people, and families within service delivery systems spanning psychiatry, child protection and foster care, youth justice, and education for a combined three decades. While we recognize that the boundaries of “childhood” and “youth” have been historically fluid,¹ each of these systems in our professional lives were dominated by Western developmental psychology, and frequently upon interventions using the Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders (or DSM-5, 2013; Mitchell, 2003a, 2003b; Moore, 2004, 2007; Moore & Mitchell, 2008, 2009, 2012a, 2012b). Our day-to-day experiences often occurred in life-altering, and on occasion even life-threatening circumstances for both the young people and professionals involved. During the transition to tenured faculty positions within a mid-sized university in Ontario, we attended a guest seminar by Freirean educators Henry Giroux and Susan Searls Giroux (2004) where we recognized how our previous lives could directly shape our new epistemological perspectives.

[T]he cultural studies emphasis on transdisciplinary work provides a rationale for challenging how knowledge has been historically produced, hierarchically ordered, and used within disciplines to sanction particular forms of authority and exclusion. Transdisciplinary work often operates at the frontiers of knowledge, and prompts teachers and students to raise new questions and develop models of analysis outside the officially sanctioned boundaries of knowledge and the established disciplines that control them. (p. 102)

Giroux and Searls Giroux (2004) contended that this “frontier” approach stresses both historical and political relations, and the broader social and cultural formations embedded within higher education knowledge production, “while remaining attentive to new linkages, meanings, and possibilities” (p. 102). They pointed out that while educators may be forced to fit within academic silos, “they can develop transdisciplinary tools to challenge the limits of established fields and contest the broader economic, political, and cultural conditions that reproduce unequal relations of power” (p. 102). In our journeys since then, many times we have asked what do such tools look like? Within our field of study, transdisciplinary thinking offers this type of knowledge production “tool,” albeit one requiring a shift of paradigms from the instrumental, Western modern science methodologies currently dominant, and the dichotomy between developmental psychology and sociology of childhood (Freeman, 1998; James and Prout, 1997; Matthews, 2007; Mayall, 2000, 2011; Mitchell, 2003a, 2003b, 2005; Qvortrup, Corsaro, & Honig, 2011; Sgritta, 1997; Woodhead, 2008; Woodhead & Montgomery, 2003).

With its appreciation for complex thinking in all fields of inquiry, the discourse of transdisciplinarity opens up our own epistemological and methodological canons to additional theoretical evolution on a planetary scale. In a candid admission, however, Martin (2017) suggested that apprehending the full spectrum of transdisciplinary definitions is a “challenging task” since the term has been

applied so variously that it is not only impossible to isolate a single, generally accepted statement as to what the word means; it is also difficult to identify a coherent strand that runs through the range of definitions that has been offered. In some cases, writers use the term without any elaboration at all, and readers are left to determine for themselves the intended meaning from the context in which it appears. (p. 5; see also Choi & Pak, 2006 for similar analysis)

While we appreciate Martin’s argument, in the same instance we find that it is possible to point to quite common strands throughout the literature. Through our inquiries, we have repeatedly identified four dimensions, although with a caveat we discuss in greater detail shortly. The following “Cornerstones of Transdisciplinarity” are found in Montuori (2005, 2004, 2008), who in turn drew from Gregory Bateson’s (2000) An Ecology of Mind, and Edgar Morin’s (2005) articulation of “complex thought” (Montuori, 2005, p. 154)

• Inquiry-Driven Rather Than Discipline-Driven. A focus on inquiry-driven rather than discipline-driven knowledge production; development of pertinent knowledge for resolution of real-world problems.

• Construction of Knowledge. A focus on the construction of knowledge by the identification of epistemological assumptions.

• Organization of Knowledge. An understanding of the organization of knowledge that includes the history of reductionist or “simple thought” and an appreciation of “complexity thinking.”

• Integration of the Knower in the Process of Inquiry. An integration of the knower in the process of inquiry (from Montuori, 2008, p. xi; see also Augsburg, 2014; Bernstein, 2015; Montuori, 2013, p. 45; Morin & Kern, 1999).

In contrast to Martin (2017) and Osborne (2015), we can see that the rich international tapestry of transdisciplinary literature clarifies both the what and so what questions in this global reform project underway in higher education (Morin, 2008). Through this special issue we focus our attention on the question of now what? With our contributors, we are arguing that to make a fuller contribution to transdisciplinary research, pedagogy, and discourse, Indigenous epistemologies offer educators from all disciplinary traditions a truly planetary ontology (see Apgar, Argumedo, & Allen, 2009; Arabena, 2006, 2010; Christie, 2006; Denzin, Lincoln, & Smith, 2008; DuPlessis, Sehume, & Martin, 2014; Leavy, 2011; Santos, 2007, 2010, 2012, 2016). In addition, we find that transdisciplinary thinking offers the broadest basis for our own field, and a way to reconsider a shared type of global citizenship moving beyond the nation-state (Mitchell, 2005, 2010, 2015; Mitchell & Moore, 2011, 2012).

Montuori (1999), in an end-of-millennium discussion of the polarization between and among so many cultures, presciently noted the fragmentation and reduction of disciplinary knowledge that has accompanied the march of modernity. Herein, we can see how that route is being re-calibrated in a concerted effort to relink disparate domains of art, philosophy, spirituality, science, history, economics, health, and education, while at the same time drawing on the vast range of “human capacities and competencies to address today’s pressing issues, and move into planetary citizenship” (pp. 302–303). Montuori reflects on the importance of both culture and religion in human interaction as germane to this project. He highlights the interconnections within economics discussed by Barber (1992, as cited in Montuori, 1999) in “McWorld versus Global Jihad” to illustrate how the two extremes of global corporate homogenization and a resulting echo of international violence have driven the resurgence of:

nationalist, nativist interests, and a powerful reaction, very often in the form of terrorisms, against this homogenizing force, which is viewed by many as the Americanization of the world, riding roughshod over centuries if not millennia of history, culture and traditions. (p. 301)

Elsewhere, Montuori outlines the “‘holographic’ quality” (2004, p. 350) to be discovered within Edgar Morin’s foundational contribution to transdisciplinary thought that influenced his own early journey into complex systems thinking, scholarship, and pedagogy. In this journal and in other venues, Montuori (2008, 2010, 2013) explores Morin’s transdisciplinarity, mirroring the similar demands we have encountered within the “smart,” digitalized technologies driving child and youth pedagogy throughout the world, and its evolving undercurrent of a new type of planetary cyber-citizenship (Mitchell, 2010, 2015; United Nations Educational, Scientific and Cultural Organization, 2017; United Nations International Children’s Emergency Fund, 2017).

What can we offer in the effort to transform this era of dystopian discontent foreshadowed by so many? In this Introduction, we draw on findings from a 3-year critical ethnography investigating transdisciplinary power relations within our own university (Mitchell & Moore, 2015a, 2015b, 2015c) highlighting the caveat we noted above. A key dimension of transdisciplinarity in our own and others’ work—Indigenous epistemologies—is omitted within a significant portion of important literature (Klein et al., 2001; Koizumi, 2001; Kueffer et al., 2012; Martin, 2017; Nicolescu, 2002, 2008, 2010; Osborne, 2015). While contested by many, our sense of the emergence of a kind of planetary consciousness is embedded within these epistemological assumptions, and with these in mind our aims in collating this collection are twofold:

• To argue that Indigenous epistemologies be more fully integrated within the international canon of transdisciplinary literature.

• To argue that complex systems and transdisciplinary epistemologies be more fully integrated within the field of child and youth studies.

In so doing, we pose an additional implicit query: Could making these connections contribute to the emergence of planetary citizenship? While we might think so, in the following sections we introduce some of the linkages we have uncovered in the international literature to support our arguments.

Transdisciplinarity and Indigenous Epistemologies

The “Nicolescuian” or “Zurich School,” as described by Martin (2017, pp. 13–14, 17–19), has thus far been the dominant school of transdisciplinary thinking. As we have noted, although Indigenous epistemologies may be easily argued to align with Nicolescu’s (2010, 2012) “middle ground” based on quantum levels of reality (Burgin & Hofkirchner, 2017; McGregor, 2014, 2015), this worldview is overlooked in significant areas of pertinent scholarship (i.e., Klein, 2001, 2004; Kueffer et al., 2012; Osborne, 2015). Indeed, scholars at the Mapungubwe (or Mapungubwe Institute for Strategic Reflection (MISTRA)) Institute in Johannesburg have focused on transdisciplinarity and Indigenous Knowledge Systems (IKS) as the basis for their research programs. In their case studies from universities in Fort Hare, Pretoria, and Johannesburg, MISTRA researchers DuPlessis, Sehume, and Martin (2014) argued for “indigenous knowledge systems (IKS) as a substream for further interrogation” as they investigate “power relations in speaking of ‘knowledge’, whose knowledge and whose functions are served in perpetuating a particular brand of knowledge production or discourse” (p. 21). This way of knowing from South African sources echoes that found in Santos, Nunes, and Meneses (2007):

The decolonization of science is based on the idea that there is no global social justice without global cognitive justice. The logic of the monoculture of scientific knowledge and rigor must be confronted with the identification of other knowledges and criteria of rigor that operate credibly in other social practices regarded as subaltern. (p. xix)

Denzin, Lincoln, and Smith (2008) similarly observed: “Decolonizing research is not necessarily post-colonial research. … Decolonizing research implements indigenous epistemologies and critical research agendas (citing Smith, 1999, p. 20)” (p. xiv). Furthermore, as Tuck and Yang (2012) assert: “Decolonization is not a metaphor” (p. 1), but must achieve the political will to repatriate control of Indigenous lands and lifestyles to the hundreds of millions of Indigenous populations remaining throughout the world. While this may be uncomfortable, even “unsettling” (Manuel & Derrickson, 2015), our project of linking transdisciplinarity and Indigenous worldviews with critical, cross-paradigmatic theorizing in child and youth studies is aimed at contributing toward this paradigm shift (Khun, 1962). This aim also transcends the truncated, often dichotomous disciplinary debates in our own field in order to gain a better understanding of complexity in young people’s social, cultural, political, and environmental places and spaces in this new century (Fine, Tuck, & Zellar-Berkman, 2008; United Nations Educational, Scientific and Cultural Organization, 2017).

The non-relative complexity and interconnectedness of all humans with the land was poetically summed up by another American philosopher, J. Baird Callicott, in an address to the United Nations Educational, Scientific and Cultural Organization (2012) conference in Paris:

We humans are intimately connected—with every breath we take, every sip of liquid we drink, and every morsel of food we eat—to the surrounding bio-chemical-physical world. We are as vortices in a flux of energy and materials, distinguishable only as ephemeral structures in that flux. We cannot—that is, we should not—conceive of ourselves as in any way independent of the natural environment. Rather we are continuous with it. The protection of human health and wellbeing is indistinguishable from the protection of environmental health and wellbeing. (para. 3)

Callicott’s articulation of a human existence shaped by plurality and intimate biophysical connections calls for transformation of Western modern science and its current Newtonian fundamentalism (along with its cousins within economics) to cease ignoring potentialities inherent in the exercise of human freewill (Pycroft 2014). Callicott’s vision supports an integrative understanding of human well-being, and implicit within his vision is the growing awareness of our shared planetary responsibility for passing Earth’s resources along to future generations. This interdependence and the interconnectedness of all forms of life, are central to Buddhist teachings and an easily embraced ontology congruent with “Indigenous epistemologies” being described by the growing cadre of scholars such as Arabena (2006, 2010), Baptiste (2008), Chrisjohn and McKay (2014), King (2013), Malott (2008), McCaslin and Breton (2008), Tuck and Yang (2012), along with non-Indigenous alliances found within Brown, Harris, and Russell (2010), Christie (2006), Denzin, Lincoln, and Smith (2008), and Wilber (1999).

In contrast with Indigenous ways of knowing, the dominance of Western modern science knowledge has been built on genocide, subjugation, and attempts to assimilate and absorb hundreds of millions of the original inhabitants of North and South America, Australia, and African regions over the past five centuries. There are close to 400 million Indigenous peoples still living throughout the world, and many with large and growing populations of young people (United Nations, 2007) whose ancestors faced intergenerational colonialist predation and trauma (Casas, 1552/1992). In his research collaborations with Aboriginal knowledge protectors in Australia, non-Indigenous educator Michael Christie (2006, p. 78) argued that transdisciplinary research with such partners is “different from interdisciplinary research because it moves beyond the disciplinarity of the university” by taking into greater account knowledge practices, which he claims “the university will never fully understand.” As settler educators, we heed Christie’s caution to non-Indigenous academics wishing to explore these links, such that “Indigenous knowledge traditions resist definition from a Western academic perspective.” Moreover, Christie (2006) noted, there are Indigenous knowledge systems with which “the academy will never engage” (p. 78; see also Wingert & White, 2017). Such knowledges are governed by ancestral laws of representation that are still very much alive in Indigenous communities around the globe. Christie (2006) further understood how these laws declare that stories, like languages, designs, songs, and performances “actually belong to real people [sometimes as individuals, sometimes as groups], and that it is wrong to tell the stories which belong to others without proper approval. … Contributors to Indigenous agreements over knowledge must make clear their rights to the claims they make” (p. 78).

Further, Native American scholar Curry Malott (2008) has astutely pointed out that fearing critique, many non-Native North American educators have tended to avoid engagement with Indigenous inquires altogether, thereby “retarding the dialogue between Western and Indigenous peoples that is increasingly important as we enter the twenty-first century facing not only perpetual war and global poverty, but environmental devastation as well” (p. 13). In an interview with Malott (2008), Freirean Joe L. Kincheloe furthered this analysis, remarking that in so-called North America:

People are absolutely unaware that they are using Native land—it is not part of Western consciousness—that we are on Native land. Just the fact that we would even begin to talk about this is an amazingly revolutionary act. It is really unfortunate to have to say that because it is so damned obvious, and yet it is not something I have heard anyone talk about anywhere I have ever lived or taught. That is basically true for everyone in the United States and Canada – those were originally Native lands. (pp. 153–154; see also Kincheloe, 2010)

We present this disjuncture in research partnerships in the vast majority of global North institutions in order to pose Malott’s main question here again: “How can students of philosophy (and we as teachers) better our practice by considering the relationship between Native and non-Native philosophies?” As he contends, this question is of utmost importance for educators because every decision we make, whether conscious or not, emerges from our own philosophy. We draw again on Santos et al. (2007) in response:

[t]he epistemological privilege granted to modem science from the seventeenth century onwards, which made possible the technological revolutions that consolidated Western supremacy, was also instrumental in suppressing other, non-scientific forms of knowledges and, at the same time, the subaltern social groups whose social practices were informed by such knowledges. In the case of the Indigenous peoples of the Americas and of the African slaves, this suppression of knowledge, a form of epistemicide, was the other side of genocide. There is, thus, an epistemological foundation to the capitalist and imperial order that the global North has been imposing on the global South. (p. xix)

Santos et al. (2007) observed how many non-Western populations “conceive of the community and the relationship with nature, knowledge, historical experience, memory, time, and space as configuring ways of life that cannot be reduced to Eurocentric conceptions and cultures” (p. xx). They outline how a new ecology of transdisciplinary knowledge production critically considers this privilege, while at the same time offering educators a clear “invitation to the promotion of non-relativistic dialogues” (p. xx). Such an approach facilitates opportunities to engage in “broader epistemological disputes aimed both at maximizing their respective contributions to build a more democratic and just society and at decolonizing knowledge and power” (p. xx). As American film consultant and Cheyenne Chief Philip Whiteman, Jr. articulates, knowledge production from these spaces emerges from a fundamentally different worldview:

The linear language [of Westerners] thinks in lines and corners. With a circular language, there’s no beginning and no end. There is no power structure. Everything is in the moment. But when you think in terms of lines and corners, you’re running out of time, and fear, shame, ego and arrogance is the dominant force. (Wheeler, 2018, n.p.)

Metaphysical and metacognitive translations of language may yet be a planetary-wide prerequisite for survival, both our own and other species. This “epistemicide” is being revealed in our own national context by the inquiry currently underway into 3,000 “Missing and Murdered Aboriginal Girls and Women” across Canada (Government of Canada, 2016). Undertaken well after reports of the “missing” came from organizations such as Al-Jazeera News Agency (2014) and Human Rights Watch (Rhoad, 2013), little to no scholarship can be found on how and why these daughters, sisters, mothers, and aunts have simply “disappeared” (for a rare study, see University of Ottawa thesis by Bychutsky, 2017). The troubled inquiry aims to address these knowledge gaps, although we acknowledge the transformative “cognitive” and “emancipatory processes” described by Santos et al. (2007) are overdue due to political, cultural, and historical contexts in Canada being constructed by the Indian Act (1876/1985) and its racist statutes (Palmater, 2017). Alarmingly, Saul (2010, p. 136, citing Bourgeault, 1998) recounted development of the South African apartheid system using Canada’s template (see also Cambre, 2007). We can trace this epistemicide beginning with Spanish sailors as “New World explorers” and their erasure of Indigenous science, history, economies, and cultures through the so-called Doctrine of Discovery (Joseph, 2016; see also Casas, 1552/1992); yet the erasure has been echoed within much of the contemporary discourse of transdisciplinarity.

We have observed that the first steps toward a process of Indigenizing the academy in our own and other colonized contexts has begun, however tentatively, and that some transdisciplinary scholars have argued for including the recovery and re-establishing of First Peoples’ epistemologies to allow a deeper understanding of the broad, planetary discourse to which this issue contributes.

Accordingly, to confront this paradigm in all its dimensions is the challenge facing a new critical theory and new emancipatory practices. Contrary to their predecessors, this theory and these practices must start from the premise that the epistemological diversity of the world is immense, as immense as its cultural diversity and that the recognition of such diversity must be at the core of the global resistance against capitalism and of the formulation of alternative forms of sociability. (Santos et al., 2007, p. xix)

As Wingert and White (2017) pointed out, “[w]hat is clear is that the old approach in which researchers planned and carried out research on Indigenous Peoples from the ivory towers of the academy and government without regard for their rights, histories, cultures, and knowledges is no longer acceptable, nor does it make for very good science” (p. 8).

Transdisciplinarity and Child and Youth Studies

The Truth and Reconciliation Commission of Canada (2015) made 94 recommendations to politicians, educators, and citizens-at-large, after collecting and analyzing thousands of stories from survivors of the forced removal and abduction of more than 150,000 First Nations children from their homes by police, Indian agents, and church missionaries. In order to attend 80 residential schools far from their families operating across the country by the 1930s, they faced extreme forms of deprivation, corporal punishment, rampant infectious diseases, malnourishment, and odious acts of physical and sexual abuse, along with state-sponsored medical experiments in at least one location (Shuchman, 2014). Estimates suggest that at least 6,500 simply perished—many buried in unmarked graves—between the opening of such institutions in the 1880 s and their final closing in the 1990s, with many parents never even being informed of their child’s fate.

In steps toward decolonizing ourselves and our teaching, we co-authored a reflective piece on where the sort of cognitive justice cited by Santos et al. (2007) might originate with a former graduate student returning to academia after a decade of teaching in the Canadian Arctic (Moore, Tulk, & Mitchell, 2005). Bewildered by the dozens of child and youth suicides she had witnessed, we considered the impact of that complexity and how non-Inuit professionals working with young people in these regions consider a

• “transdisciplinary” approach be established towards educating Qallunaat [White, southern] professionals as an important step in achieving effective practice within Northern communities—one which integrates knowledge from Inuit Elders with cross-cultural counselling techniques, multicultural competency development and practice-based wisdom. (p. 117; see also Mitchell, 1996)

In a 2014 volume entitled Dying to Please You, Chrisjohn and McKay presented the most insightful analysis to date regarding why suicide rates for Indigenous children have been stratified for decades at more than three to 10 times those of non-Indigenous populations throughout Canada. They wrote:

How easy has it become for the social scientists of today to do what even the Nazis couldn't bring themselves to do? In truth, does not the history of Jewish suicide during the holocaust, like the histories of suicide in the Arawaks, the Home Children, and the Marshallese Islanders, and countless other oppressed groups, teach us that suicide is in part a normal human reaction to conditions of prolonged, ruthless domination?

The predominant depiction of suicide in Aboriginal Peoples inhabiting Canada rhetorically neglects these parallels, biasing those trying to come to grips with the phenomenon away from the readily apparent and into esoteric realms. “Models” of Indian suicide are individualistic, relying on supposed internal characteristics instead of looking at the inverted pyramid of social, economic, and political forces impinging upon Aboriginal Peoples. Existing explanations blame the victim, finding that they suffer from personal adjustment problems or emotional deficiencies like “low self-esteem” and “depression.” (Chrisjohn & Mckay, 2014, pp. 9–10, emphasis in original)

Through these lenses we are reminded of the key organizing principle for this journal, that of the “paradigm shift” originally identified by U.S. physicist Thomas Kuhn (1922–1996) as a fundamental change in the core concepts and practices within “scientific” disciplines. In the above contexts, our deployment of “paradigm” is conveyed as he originally intended, as a basic transformation in the conceptualization and related research practices within our own field (Kuhn, 1962). Our researching of children’s understanding of themselves and their life-worlds has led us to adopt numerous transdisciplinary tools including complexity theory, human rights, and notions of what constitutes an “Indigenous epistemology” (Denzin, Lincoln, & Smith, 2008; McCaslin & Breton, 2008; Santos, 2007, 2010, 2012, 2016) since so many children of the original inhabitants have been abducted, abused, and murdered in our national context. This is a central distinction, in our view, of the necessity for shifting paradigms from Western scientific dominance, and its reductionist, deterministic, deficit-laden child development research on children, to methodologies with child and youth direct participation (James & Prout, 1997; Mayall, 2000, 2011; Moss & Petrie, 2002; Woodhead, 2008; Woodhead & Montgomery, 2003). Qvortrup et al. (2011) observed how “the social studies of childhood” (pp. 4–6) developed from the 1980s onward and paralleled the global ratification of the United Nations Convention on the Rights of the Child (UNCRC; United Nations, 1989) by 196 nations over the same time period. To date, the only nonparticipants to the treaty’s terms are the United States and South Sudan (Vandenhole, Desmet, Reynaert, & Lembrechts, 2015, p. 5; also Invernizzi, Liebel, Milne, & Budde, 2017).

Since the early 1990s, the UNCRC has evolved as a de facto planetary framework for young people’s individual and collective citizenship rights (Doek, 2008; Freeman, 1998; Mitchell, 2010, 2015; Qvortrup et al., 2011; Vandenhole et al., 2015). Without acting as apologists for its many failings, we note that the United Nations does serve as the one singular, truly planetary organization established and functioning in our time, although one could fairly challenge the latter notion. We maintain that the children’s treaty also represents the type of “transdisciplinary tool” suggested by Giroux and Searls-Giroux (2004) for educators interested in critical reflection and praxis (Moore, 2007; also Mitchell, 2005, 2010, 2015; Mitchell & Moore, 2012; Moore & Mitchell, 2008). This international framework for thinking about active child citizenship is in keeping with French philosopher and psychoanalyst Fèlix Guattari’s (2015) discussion of the benefits of “transdisciplinary” research (see also Foucault, 1981):

The [UN] Charter of Human Rights ought to include an article on the right of everyone to research. All social groups, all professions, minorities … have a need of the research that concerns or implicates them. Creating a pole for the singularization, the particularization of research, balancing out the pole of the universal rationality of science seems indispensable. It is a matter here of the affirmation of a new paradigm of processual creation, linked to aesthetics in the social domain. (p. 132)

His reflection was certainly forward-thinking, and for all of its endemic corruption we can still agree with Guattari’s (2015) assertion that for any resolution of the majority of “social, urban and ecological questions, trans-disciplinarity would consist in stepping back at a planetary level and problematizing local questions on the basis of horizons that put the whole of life and of international relations into play” (p. 134; see also Alston, 2017). These threads are visible in the transdisciplinary literature even though, as American author Ken Wilber noted in Wilber, 1999, the structure of today’s “modern world” is characterized by a scientific framework that is planetary in its reach, but forms a useless skeleton around which hundreds of premodern religions create meaning and value for billions of Earth’s inhabitants.

In line with this thinking, it’s no stretch now to reimagine why cultural philosopher and poet W. I. Thompson instigated the Lindisfarne Association in the mid-1970s, leading to a 25-year collaboration of poet and poetess with environmentalists, scientists, educators, architects, Indigenous healers and cosmologists, various religious practitioners, and myriad scholars in the arts, humanities, and sciences engaged intimately together at the edge of history (Thompson, 2013a, 2013b). Luminaries included Jonas Salk, James and Sandy Lovelock, Mary Catharine and Gregory Bateson, Hanne and Maurice Strong, Humberto Maturana, Francisco Varela, Allen Ginsberg, Kathleen Raine, and Carl Sagan, among the many planetary thinkers who shared a renewed vision of interdependent life on this intergenerational biosphere and collective home. Their sense that Western civilization was at the edge of collapse is more obvious today, and any potential for a new “planetary culture” would require us at the very least to follow their embrace of complex dynamic systems, and their format of multisystemic dialogue taking place across disciplines, cultures, and continents. Although important to many, today’s Davos meetings will simply not suffice. By their very presence, however, academic institutions are where vast planetary populations meet daily, and each possesses untapped potentials for promoting greater egalitarianism than generated to date by the annual elite Swiss gathering (see also Clark Kerr’s “seventy universities,” 2001, p. 115).

We have also noted how children throughout the globe are increasingly exercising social, civil, and economic rights and, as preposterous as this may sound to some readers, could the planet be in any worse shape extending the right to vote to younger people? While young people have traditionally been excluded from both knowledge production and from voting during elections, 16- and 17-year-olds were given the franchise in Scotland’s 2014 national independence referendum, and have had these rights retained since then. This intergenerational view of “citizenship” is a topic well worth debatin, and is integrally tied to our notions of transdisciplinarity, Indigenous epistemologies, and complex systems thinking. British childhood studies professor Berry Mayall (2011) considered how

[i]n entering into direct relations with the state, children’s agendas intersect with the state’s socialization aims. One society’s daycare may promote the notion of children as collaborating citizens of a socialist society [the former] (USSR); another’s (France) fosters children as heirs to national culture … in the United States of America emphasis will be on citizenship but also on competition between individuals. (pp. 177–178)

The long-term, deleterious outcomes from democratic elections—the 2016 UK and U.S. versions come quickly to mind—fall disproportionately on those below age 18 (majority age in many nation-states), as well as all those yet to come who will inherit our messes. We would observe how similar socialization aims for young people are in most nations, regardless of ideological, cultural, political, or economic approach. We have debated these notions with governmental and nongovernmental representatives, and orthodox religionists and philosophers of various expressions (as well as agnostics) from Ecuador, Egypt, England, and Ethiopia at numerous United Nations children’s sessions and numerous academic conferences. This perspective of an intergenerational approach to citizenship, both domestic and planetary, is being brought to bear in a landmark U.S. federal lawsuit by children and youth over climate change. Those who bear responsibility for the destruction of natural environments in the United States and internationally are being litigated, and the case is moving through the courts as we write (see the National Geographic report by Parker, 2017). This is a striking example of young people’s political, economic, and democratic activism, but by no means the only one.

Finally, through our advocacy and research with young people, we concur with Bartollas (2014) who critiqued the “simplistic Newtonian, mechanistic” (pp. 277–278) cause-and-effect dominant approaches in social work and juvenile justice systems. In a volume dedicated to greater understanding and application of complexity theory in these fields he suggests:

• Quantum mechanics moves us beyond positivism by observing a simple, causative model that is unable to explain complexity and the multidimensional nature of human behaviors.

• Quantum theory places an importance on human agency, suggesting not only that humans have free will and are responsible, but that they very much shape the reality of their lives.

• Post-Newtonian paradigms present a much more fluid and involving “self” than is found in Newtonian notions of fixed personal identities, definite and unchanging through time.

• The quantum view sees the self as changing and open to the possibility of emergence at every moment—free and not determined.

We share these perspectives with Morin (2014, p. 17), and his views on the limitations of positivism and reductionism are salient:

Traditional reductionism claims that we are all individuals, in society and in ecosystems. In this perspective, we are merely units inside these systems, and we are not the connections. In contrast, complexity tries to understand the type of connections that are present. (as cited in Montuori & Donnelly, 2016, p. 748; see also Callicott’s view, 2012)

Before closing, we need to also highlight those whose scholarship on “planetary culture” and “futures study” long predates our own by acknowledging the long history of thoughtful analysis on these perspectives that has already taken shape through numerous academic journals. See, for example, World Futures Studies Federation president Jennifer Gidley’s book (2017), along with World Futures Review editor Jim Dator’s review of same (2017). In the end, the understanding and inclusion of each child’s capacity for free will to choose which path they take toward our interdependent, interconnected future is perhaps what all research paradigms most need to recover.

In Conclusion

This issue of World Futures positions transdisciplinary child and youth studies as new paradigm research through integrating Indigenous epistemologies, and our arguments for greater appreciation and application of complex systems to more accurately reflect childhood in the contemporary era. In support, we share this collection from colleagues near and far who are also operating from their own “frontiers” of knowledge production, and who daily interrogate the increasingly complex lives of young people in the fashion noted above by Bartollas (2014).

Our contribution is guided by manuscripts that challenge the hegemonic role of psychology in childhood studies by bringing forward restorative justice principles to reconceptualize healing (Moore, this issue), while emphasizing pedagogies of the land and the disconnect between Indigenous and Western ways of knowing (Francis & Vansickle, this issue). This process of building new knowledge forms continues with an overview of colonization, psy-governance, epistemicide, and child as metaphor (Mills & Lefrançois, this issue), while consideration of dominant discourses driving negative constructions of Black masculinity and Black male youth are also explored (Tabi & Gosine, this issue). New meanings of transnational mothering, childhood, kinship and diaspora are considered through the lenses of film and of queer theory (Dyer & Mecija, this issue), while performance studies guides readers in an exploration of youth-oriented circus-theatre through Deleuze and Guattari’s becoming child (Fancy, this issue). The special issue closes with a complex conversation introducing readers to the challenges of professional child and youth practice, and the incommensurabilities that frequently emerge when ontological loyalties are entangled through transdisciplinary epistemologies (Land, Gulamhusein, Scott, & Coon, this issue).

NOTE

Notes

1 The terms “child” and “youth” are used to refer to particular groups in all societies, distinguished on the basis of age. Who is considered a “child” is not a given; it varies with social, economic, and cultural circumstances. Article 1 of the United Nations Convention on the Rights of the Child (UNCRC; United Nations, 1989) states: “For the purposes of the present Convention, a child means every human being below the age of eighteen years unless under the law applicable to the child, majority is attained earlier.” The provision explains how the term “child” is to be understood for the purposes of that treaty. It does not state that every person below 18 years equals a child as such. This is nonetheless how the concept of “children” has become commonly defined, namely as all persons below 18, leading to an invisibility and even “infantilization of adolescents.” It therefore seems more appropriate to talk about “children and young people” when referring to the persons who come within the scope of the UNCRC (from Vandenhole, Desmet, Reynaert, & Lembrechts, 2015, p. 2).