Society and social changes through the prism of childhood: Editorial

ABSTRACT

This editorial argues, that while several children’s geographers and other childhood researchers have already succeed to draw on research about children’s lives and the spatiality of childhood in order to speak to broader debates, much more could be done. Hereafter, the notion of childhood prism research is briefly explained, followed by a presentation of the aim of a special issue on ‘Society and social changes through the prism of childhood’, namely to bring the field one step further towards significant and distinct contributions to the wider scholarly field. Finally, the editorial presents each of the articles in the special issue, explaining their contribution to this mission.

KEYWORDS:

• Childhood prism research
• engagement with the broader scholarly fields
• less child-centric research
• theoretical development
• challenging adultism

‘Understanding childhood properly is to understand society differently’

(Roet &Thomas 2017¹)

Researching children’s and young people’s lives from a standpoint of critical acknowledgement of childhood as a social/material phenomenon holds great promise for significant theoretical development beyond the field of children’s geographies and childhood studies, as well as for empirical exploration of broader societal issues (Punch 2020; Thomas 2019; Spyrou, Rosen, and Cook 2018; Philo 2016; Holloway 2014; Wall 2013). This applies especially to researching the spatiality of childhood. Although the field of children’s geographies already explores the wider matrices of societal/global changes in which children’s lifeworlds are embedded, more could be done to elaborate on these findings in a less child-centric manner for the purpose of theoretical development and engagement with the broader scholarly fields of human geography, philosophy and sociology, to mention but a few (Spyrou 2018; Philo 2016). This is not to say that children’s geographers and other childhood researchers have not already drawn on research about children’s lives and the spatiality of childhood in order to speak to broader debates; indeed, as early as 2006, John Horton and Peter Kraftl advocated doing exactly that in an article in this journal, and several children’s geographers as well as other childhood researchers have taken up this challenge (see for instance Holloway, Holt, and Mills 2019; Wall 2014; James 2010; Moran-Ellis 2010; Ansell 2009; Katz 2008; Bluebond-Langner and Korbin 2007). Nevertheless, there is still much more to be done, as we have arguably not yet succeeded in dismantling either adultism or the predominant perception of childhood research, among the broader social sciences and humanities community, as an ‘exotic’ or primarily development-psychological or pedagogical research field (Punch 2020; Thomas 2019). To paraphrase Speier: the intellectual and analytical position of sociologists, geographers, philosophers is still essentially ideological in the sense that they use ‘an adult notion of what children are and what they ought to be that is like that of the laymen in the culture’ (Speier 1976, 170; in Thomas 2019, 330–331).

This special issue of Children’s Geographies brings us one step further towards addressing this challenge. We explore how studying changing social spatialities through the prism of childhood challenges fundamental epistemological and ontological assumptions in the humanities and social sciences, allowing us to rethink theories and contribute to ongoing theoretical development, as well as to gain new and/or deeper insights into decisive issues in current societies. By ‘studying through the prism of childhood’, we mean research on children’s lived lives that is rooted in the childhood studies tradition, notably studies featuring a relational ontology of children and childhood and which also acknowledge that childhood is a social-material phenomenon (Alanen 2020). The prism metaphor expresses the idea that any given phenomenon can be represented in multiple ways, depending on our approach. The childhood prism co-frames, but does not determine, either the approach or the way a given situated phenomenon is represented. Thus, the childhood prism enables multiple representations that are still distinct from representations generated through other lenses.

The critical reader might ask the well-founded question: why publish a special issue in Children’s Geographies if the purpose is to speak to broader debates? Our motivation for choosing this journal is to contribute to the already burgeoning debate in the field of children’s geographies and childhood studies about how to address the – still prevailing – lacking appreciation of what childhood research offers the broader fields of human geography, sociology and beyond about the past 40 years of critical childhood research.

Thus, this special issue makes two contributions to the fields of children’s geographies and childhood studies. First, we dive into the how these fields contribute to broader debates, by elaborating on the three approaches, namely childhood prism research, childism, and child as a method. Second, we present examples of ‘less child-centric children’s geographies’, that is, analyses that explicate their contribution beyond childhood/children’s lives; and we show how these analyses can also inform us about, for example, adults’ lives, cultural issues or wider matrices of societal/global change.

The first three articles, by John Wall (2019), Erica Burman (2019), and myself (Warming 2020), respectively, elaborate upon the potential of childhood prism research as a broad scholarly field with multi-faceted perspectives and a societally-oriented methodology which offer a lens through which to understand society differently, as well as a diffractive, sociological microscope for studying social change. Thus, in the first article, I explain that the term ‘childhood prism research’ constitutes a research program that embraces various more or less opposing positions in ongoing conversations about the reinvigoration of theoretical thinking in the field of childhood studies for the purpose of enabling unique, multiple contributions to the wider scholarly field. In the second article, John Wall explains and develops the concept of ‘childism’ as a broad scholarly and societal methodology that can be used to critique ageism and challenge fundamental epistemological and ontological assumptions. In the article ‘Child as method’, Erica Burman draws on feminist and post-colonial perspectives to unfold the idea that by exploring how cultural-political contexts and dynamics produce and interact with meanings and practices of childhood, new perspectives are enabled both on childhood and on broader cultural-political issues and changes.

The next five articles feature analyses conducted through the childhood prism. The first two, by Charlotte Højholt (2020), and Gilliam and Gulløv (2019), respectively, focus on children’s school lives. The former uses this as a case for exploring how historical and ongoing political discussions frame experiences, (inter)actions and negotiations in everyday life; the latter as a sociological microscope for studying visions, ideals and fears related to ongoing societal changes, as well as the power conflicts inherent in these. The idea of studying visions, ideals and fears through the lens of children’s mundane everyday lives is further developed in the next article by Millei, Silova, and Gannon (2019), which focuses on (and theorises) everyday nationalism. In the article after that, Ida Hammen (2019) analyses everyday kinship practices using Barad’s agential realism approach, showing how this framework can both help to theorise kinship in ways that better fit new, more complex family relations in postmodernity, and to rethink the foundations of childhood research. Together, these four articles – in line with the arguments in the three previous articles – demonstrate how social-material analysis of the mundane everydayness of children’s lives and intergenerational relations reaches beyond childhood and contributes to ongoing theoretical development. This is also the case in the last article, by Maaheen Ahmed (2021) – although this is situated within a different scholarly field, namely literature and graphics. Here, the author demonstrates how the analysis of comics can help to illuminate children’s geographies and beyond, and thereby how interdisciplinary approaches can reinvigorate methodological and theoretical thinking in the field. This shows how interdisciplinarity is essential to childhood prism research – an interdisciplinarity that is not restricted to what we have presented in this special issue, but which could also include philosophy, religion, media studies, music and art history as well as the health sciences and microbiology, to mention but a few areas.

My hope is that this special issue will be read as an invitation for contributions to, debates about, and initiatives to further develop a childhood prism research program that can leverage children’s geographies and the broader field of childhood studies as a platform for offering significant and distinct contributions to the wider scholarly field.

Disclosure statement

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

Notes

1 This quote is from a call for papers for RN04 (Research Network on Children and Childhood) sessions at the European Sociology Congress in Athens in 2017, formulated by the network coordinators, Griet Roet and Nigel Thomas.