Abstract
Childhood, youth and adolescence are contested notions and constructs. These constructs are tainted with ontological and epistemological histories and ideas about ‘real children’ and childhoods. In this Special Issue, we argue that the categories of childhood, youth and adolescence need to be rethought as concepts, and that philosophy, sociology and anthropology are some of the disciplines that can allow us to do so. There are a number of concerns that need to be considered: what these constructs do and how they perform, what they represent and how these categories and brackets are perceived by all actors, both those that are inside and those who are outside of them. These disciplines allow scholars and thinkers to theorize these troubled categories in unexpected, innovative and cutting edge ways, in relation to the complicated globalized contexts of local experiences and lives.
We cannot really consider these terms outside of the realm of the current world of politics and policy. The questions of ‘what do we mean by these terms and how do we employ them’ and ‘how do/did we come to know these categories’ are pertinent in the contemporary conditions where there is a growing pressure to both managerialize and marginalize childhood, youth and adolescence in order to demarcate, govern and police these categories. What we argue is that perhaps philosophy as a discipline can rupture established settings, binaries, categories, terms and brackets, by challenging the boundaries of these established constructs. Philosophy presents a disciplinary possibility for theorizing and disrupting categories of the child/childhood, youth and adolescence at ontological, epistemological and ethical levels. The terms child, childhood, youth and adolescence are not only contested and challenged through philosophy but also undone and unworked, undeveloped and de-demarcated and importantly reified through a philosophical lens. As Matthews (1994) argues, to understand philosophy of childhood is perhaps to understand philosophy itself.
One of the fundamental framings of childhood and the child occurs in the United Nations Convention on the Rights of the Child (UNCRC; The United Nations, 1989). This document in article 1 defines a child (and therefore also ‘childhood’) as persons who are under the biological age of 18 years. This document is signed (and ratified) by almost all countries in the world and hence is one of the most widely accepted documents in the world, that is, however, often misinterpreted and breached. Nevertheless, article 1 – the definition of the child – provides a framework, and a policy disruption, to the idea of clear boundaries. Adolescence is considered to be the teenage years (13–19 years) and youth according to the United Nations is from 15 to 24 years old, however, both of these constructs are considered to be transitions between ‘childhood and adulthood’. Are adolescence and youth the periods where tensions between maturity and policy, local and global, marginalized and privileged play out in the most unexpected ways? In any case, it is these overlaps, uncertainty, troubled language and definitions that benefit from examination through a philosophical lens, as a potential productive space.
There are a number of theories that have been disrupted and considered to be old-fashioned, developmental, if not somehow dangerous. One of those is Piaget’s theory, which is often considered by critical scholars, pedagogues and others to be very narrowing and remains consistently challenged. However, as Matthews (1994) states, parts and ideas and particular contexts of Piaget’s thinking are quite philosophical. And developmentalism is thus just another philosophical proposition and wondering, both ontological and epistemological, however, as we have learnt in the past decades, it has clear ethical implications. Policies and pedagogies embedded in the Piagetian legacy are still the most common theoretical manifestations of childhood, leading to considerable tensions, resistance and even revolt amongst practitioners and scholars. In order to understand the contemporary conditions of the landscape of childhood, youth and adolescence, as this special issue argues, we need to consider a range of traditional constructions of children and childhoods and their manifestations.
Constructions of philosophy of childhoods
Beginning with the political writings of Thomas Hobbes in the 17th century, children and childhoods have historically been produced as unruly, empty or innocent; concomitantly, the roles of parents and society have, in response to these childhoods, variably served as monitors, minders and corruptors. Hobbes saw children as evil or savage, arising from the fact that all people are born in original sin. Here, the child is in need of control and regulation, notably by the mother; Hobbes clearly delineated the work of raising children in terms of the mother’s domain, in concert with his assertion that both men and women were equal but with different social priorities. By contrast, Locke characterized childhood as empty, in that children functioned as blank slates (the fabled tabula rasa) that required knowledge supplied by the family and the society so that they could ultimately become productive parts of the social fabric. Here, Locke produces childhood as dependent, as the child has no natural capacities and must be ever minded and directed by parents and the community. In response to these constructions of child/hoods, Rousseau inverted the wild state of nature (distinguished by a state of war) asserted by Hobbes and the vacuousness of the child put forth by Locke through a depiction of the child as living in a perfected state of nature and possessing essential goodness and beneficence. While the child in Rousseau was still dependent and in need of protection, the danger lay in the dilemma that adults, and especially those who made up the apparatus of education, served primarily to corrupt the child; thus, childhoods are constructively naïve, but they ultimately require protection from the very forces that purport to nurture and develop them. Indeed, it is not until Dewey in the early 20th century that we find the child as capable and imbued with a form of individual agency. This is expressed most compellingly in Dewey’s explication of experience as a goal of education, coupled with his position that processes of learning occur most effectively when children are given the space to explore, play and construct their own learning. While Dewey argued that this learning needs to be directed and purposeful, his work marks a shift in the subjectivation of child/hood that had previously relegated it to a sort of uncritical, unthinking stage of human development that had to be tolerated, at best, if not subjugated, at worst.
In the contemporary thinking, the philosophy of childhoods often portrays childhoods as socially constructed, invented and produced within governing rationalities. This focus differentiates the philosophy of childhood from psychological, biological and developmental perspectives. The questions of how to define childhoods, what childhoods are and how they are produced have been extensively researched also from a sociological perspective and as a critique of developmental psychology (Burman, 2008; James et al., 1998; James and James, 2008; Jenks, 2005). An interesting argument is presented by Cunningham (2005), who uses a child’s voice to problematize what childhood is. He quotes Zlata, an 11-year-old girl living in Sarajevo during the Yugoslavian war conflict, who writes about her childhood in her diary:
A schoolgirl without a school, without the fun and excitement of school. A child without games, without friends, without the sun, without birds, without nature, without fruit, without chocolate or sweets, with just a little powdered milk. In short a child without a childhood. (Filipovic, cited in Cunningham, 2005: 1)
Similarly, outlining the complexities of childhood and childhood experiences and contesting the singularity of children and childhoods, the following quote from a memoir of a particular ideological context plays with the notions of death and pleasure:
I was exactly 5 years and 2 days old, when [Brezhnev] had a funeral. I was crying in kindergarten [when I found out], but then I was the only child who did not want to watch his funeral. The teacher hit my bum with a ruler, so I went to watch. … When Andropov and Chernenko died a year later, it was spring holidays, and a state of mourning was declared and there were no fairy tales on TV. I remember that I was really upset … but during Andropov’s funeral I kissed a girl, a fellow kindergartener, for the very first time. (Tesar, 2015: 193)
Cunningham’s and Tesar’s analysis suggest that children, like Zlata, realize that a child living in conditions like hers is not living what she considers to be a ‘real’ childhood. Her perception does not refer simply to her biological age, but to the actual moral, material and practical conceptualizations that represent, construct and produce childhoods. Zlata ‘knows’ that without chocolate and school, there is no childhood. What Cunningham argues is that Zlata would consider different factors as essential components of childhood if she were living in the 1500s or 1700s, or perhaps in another culture or society under a different ideology. Cunningham claims that childhood is a set of constantly shifting notions. We utilize this theoretical standpoint of the construction of childhoods from James and Prout’s (1997) study that suggests a paradigm for researching childhood:
Childhood is understood as a social construction. As such it provides an interpretive frame for contextualising the early years of human life. Childhood, as distinct from biological immaturity, is neither a natural nor universal feature of human groups but appears as a specific structural and cultural component of many societies. (p. 8)
This Special Issue demonstrates that childhoods are produced within societies and cultures, through many varied technologies and analyzed in diverse ways. In this sense, we briefly explore the genealogies of constructions of childhoods, using Stables’ (2008) classification of modern and post-modern approaches to understanding genealogies of childhoods, as what shapes the current philosophy of childhoods.
The modern ethos of childhood
Perhaps the most influential, as well as the most contested text that explores the constructions of childhoods, is Ariès’ (1962) work Centuries of Childhood, where he analyzes the history of childhoods (or, as Jenks (2005) notes, an archaeology of childhood). Ariès paradoxically argues for the non-existence of the concept of childhood in the history of mankind, particularly up to (and including) the Middle Ages (James and James, 2008). The conclusions of Ariès’ research are drawn from artwork, pictures, texts and photographs of the Western past, where, for example, children were not dressed in children’s clothes but as ‘little adults’. Ariès argues that during the Middle Ages, for example, no specific clothes were produced for children, as an indicator of minimal societal inclination to mark the difference between childhood and adulthood. Ariès’ work is criticized not only because of the constructs that he argued for but also for the methodology he used (James and James, 2008). Furthermore, Ariès’ history of childhood is mainly the history of French culture and a collection of local discourses presumed to apply to all Western cultures. Stables (2008) states that Ariès’ argument considers childhood as ‘essentially a modern construct’ (p. 41). Ariès (1962) claims that children (and childhoods) were invisible and that therefore childhoods were invented:
In medieval [European] society the idea of childhood did not exist; this is not to suggest that children were neglected, forsaken or despised. The idea of childhood is not to be confused with affection for children: it corresponds to an awareness of the particular nature of childhood, that particular nature which distinguishes the child from the adult, even the young adult. In medieval society this awareness was lacking. That is why, as soon as the child could live without the constant solicitude of his mother, his nanny or his cradle-rocker, he belonged to adult society. (p. 128)
The History of Childhood by Lloyd DeMause is another seminal text of the modernist era researching childhoods. DeMause (1976) emphasizes the cruel, dark and gloomy history of European childhoods from a psychoanalytical perspective. For him, the history of childhoods is
a nightmare from which we have only recently begun to awaken. The further back in European history one goes, the lower the level of child care, and the more likely children are to be killed, abandoned, beaten, terrorised, and sexually abused. (p. 1)
He argues that recent positive changes in the perceptions of childhoods occurred ‘because of successive generations of parent-child interactions’ (p. 3), and this ‘evolution’ of parenting contributed to the shift in the separation between childhood and adulthood. In an analysis of DeMause’s argument, Jenks (2005) concludes that ‘now, for children, there is “heaven” and once there was “hell”’ (p. 59). DeMause’s text was also heavily critiqued, particularly for its argument of the brutality of medieval childhoods that have been contested by other researchers (Stables, 2008).
The postmodern ethos of childhood
The production of European childhoods has been further problematized in recent decades. Postman (1994) draws a very gloomy vision of disappearing childhoods. He argues that as the line between childhood and adulthood erodes, the end of childhoods can be envisioned in an almost apocalyptic sense (Jenks, 2005). Postman (1994) argues that
[f]rom a biological point of view it is inconceivable that any culture will forget that it needs to reproduce itself. But it is quite possible for a culture to exist without a social idea of children. Unlike infancy, childhood is a social artefact, not a biological category. (p. xi)
His argument is that conceptions of childhood, schooling and education were impacted by the development of the print culture. The importance of reading is thus the key component in the invention of childhood as it ‘creates private space and individuality’ (Stables, 2008: 45), while in the past most activities were done in public. The visual media then causes another shift that shapes childhoods. Postman (1994) argues that
… in a literature world to be an adult implies having access to cultural secrets codified in unnatural symbols. In a literature world children must become adults. But in a non-literature world there is no need to distinguish sharply between the child and the adult, for there are few secrets. (p. 13)
Postman notes the modern prevalence of adult themes in children’s literature and programmes, the disappearance of children’s movies, games and clothes and the exploitation of children’s sexuality as sites where the erosion of childhoods occurred in the 20th century. However, the major blame for the disappearance of the boundaries between childhood and adulthood is television, which put an end to the ‘good and innocent’ years of childhood of 1850–1950. Postman (1994) is concerned with visual media’s ‘undifferentiated accessibility’ (p. 80) as watching television does not need to be learnt, and he claims that it is neither challenging nor demanding. His argument is simple: without learning there are no secrets, and ‘without secrets, of course, there can be no such thing as childhood’ (p. 80). Stables (2008) and Buckingham (2000) problematize Postman’s argument and question if the notion of ‘disappearing childhood’ can be transferred into the age of multimedia and the Internet. Buckingham (2000) argues that Postman’s analyses concerning television are extremely one-dimensional, and that those about literacy are very problematic. For Buckingham, childhoods are now produced in a dramatically different world from the late 20th century. He agrees that childhood is a socially constructed concept negotiated within discourses and notes that constructs of childhood and adulthood are both ‘shifting terms’ (p. 7). Buckingham disputes Postman’s claims that the new media such as television ‘lacks secrets’ and that they only produce passive and consumerist childhood subjectivities. In addition, Buckingham (2000) recognizes, as do others (see Rose, 1999), that childhoods are extremely governed:
The attempt to exclude children applies most obviously to the domains of violence and sexuality, of the economy and politics. And the significance of the electronic media in this context is, of course, that they provide one of the primary sources of knowledge about these things. Both in relation to the media, and in these other social domains, this leads to a situation in which the fundamental dilemmas are seen to be those of access and control. (p. 15)
What the above and current discourses suggest is that childhood is a contested area of research, and philosophy and pedagogy of childhoods very multifaceted. Jones (2009) addresses recent shifts in conceptions of childhoods as visible and manifested in government policies, and then subsequently in the ways that adults treat children in educational or medical institutions. The concern that childhood is in crisis is also problematized by Scraton (1997). He responds to the problem by arguing that adults tend to ‘lie to themselves’, as they use their power position to produce and support children’s rights to create what they consider to be the ‘best’ policies to protect ‘ideals’ of childhoods. Scraton claims that it is critical this ‘self-lie’ is exposed and publicly debated. Similarly, Cassidy (2007) argues that it is not that children and adults are different and opposed to each other, but that ‘until now’ (p. 182) public discourse emphasized such a difference. She argues for the importance of children becoming political and participating citizens, whose childhoods, as Hartas (2008) concludes in her research, are manifested ‘in many sizes and colours’ (p. 178). Duhn’s (2006) claim that ‘the modern child has been shaped by political rationalities that emphasize the child’s potential as resource’ (p. ii) shape this theoretical standpoint of constructions of childhoods, as we now return to Jenks (2005) who merges the ideas of powerful and powerless childhoods:
Childhood becomes an interesting metaphor for a post-structuralist, post-modern identity at both an analytic and concrete level. Analytically children have become, through our burgeoning contemporary studies, a way in which we explore missing, unexpressed and disempowered aspects of ourselves. Concretely children are seen to present with an increasing intensity of ‘challenging behaviour’ and adult populations respond with increasingly complex and penetrating means of control, all conducted through an ideology of care. (p. 150)
The shifts in understanding childhoods as a social construct in Western culture are produced within particular government rationalities. These ideas open up spaces to research childhoods as politically produced, within ideological sites (Bloch and Popkewitz, 2000; Cannella and Viruru, 2004; Popkewitz and Brennan, 1998). The above analyses exemplify the framework that the articles in this collection utilize, including the new materialist and posthuman turns recently explored by a number of scholars of childhoods, thinking with philosophy as a method, perhaps articulated by Prout’s (2005) The Future of Childhood work and his claim for the consideration of biology, material and child and childhood as hybrid (Tesar and Arndt, 2016; Tesar and Koro-Ljungberg, 2015).
Contemporary conditions of philosophy of childhoods
Each of the articles in this special issue dehistoricizes and decentres the child-subject from the normative adult-child, developmental paradigms and contest notions of childhood’s innocence by experimenting with theories beyond commonplace discourses. Brophy’s article explores the ways that the figure of the child stands in for societal wishes, regrets, anxieties and phantasies or memories of lost childhoods for adults. Drawing on Maurice Sendak, author of Where the Wild Things Are, and Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein, Brophy argues that these stories offer a vision of the child as an enigmatic figure that ‘serves as both an emotional site for phantasies and as a place to turn phantasies into action’. In her provocative discussion of Frankenstein, Brophy turns to the monster as narrative of memory and remembering what it is like to be a child. She goes onto consider the monster, in Frankenstein, as a representation the child that helps us resist othering children. This means we might rethink children/childhood as without origin or history, and rather a creation of adult desires and obsessions. Arguing that this important aesthetic constellation produces transformative visions and memories of childhood, this philosophical analysis offers an interesting perspective of childhood beyond the child and positions the child as an enigmatic object, a site for projections, a placeholder for wishes, dreams, regrets, anxieties and a possible representation of forgetting and loss. Similarly, Rooney reflects on the categories of childhood, youth and adolescence and contests the emphasis of linearity in representations of childhood and the life stages approach. Utilizing the example of the Australian curriculum standards, she challenges the developmental, linear application of the notion of becoming, suggesting we shift away from the dominance on time towards a nonlinear way of becoming. Drawing on Braidotti, among others, Rooney details the multiple configurations in which children ‘become other’ and can engage in wordly relations, revealing the relational and material aspects and dimensions of childhood. By engaging with nonlinear notions of time coupled with a posthuman approach, Rooney helps us move away from the overly saturated social constructionist accounts of childhood because, she argues, a posthuman subject/approach is non-dualistic.
The essay by Alderson engages philosophical analyses of childhood with social science methodologies through the use of critical realism. Underscoring the idea that philosophical questions lie at the heart of all forms of research, the piece traces the trajectories of different approaches to constructing the child and childhood in relation to critical realism’s explication of the various understandings of the reality of these concepts. By so doing, Alderson is able to both situate childhood in multiple contexts, as well as pose new and unfamiliar questions about child agency, with the ultimate goal of providing researchers with an alternate set of tools with which to conduct grounded qualitative research that is simultaneously rooted in theory. Mantilla’s article also considers the binaries and dualisms that undergird conceptions of chronological and developmental time distinguishing and occasionally blurring infancy and childhood. Deploying Foucault’s notions of biopolitics and the regulation of the self, in light of Agamben’s writings on infancy, the essay argues that infancy is not synonymous with childhood, and that infancy in fact is situated ontologically between natural and socially constructed conceptions. The article calls ultimately for a philosophy of infancy, such that infancy in the social imaginary comes to be defined not by its negative constructions, of what it is not, but by its position across binaries.
In the essay by Tesar, Kupferman, Rodriguez and Arndt, childhoods are considered in terms of the effects of multiple forms of fairy tales as primers on how children’s habits and practices of the self should be constructed. Here, the authors ‘read’ three different types of contemporary fairy tale: a pair of early childhood stories produced and distributed by the New Zealand Ministry of Education, the film Toy Story 3 and an underground tale of horror that tells of the indoctrination of children in the socialist school system in Czechoslovakia in the 1970s and 1980s. Using a bricolage of philosophical lenses, including biopolitics, imagination and Rousseauian notions of freedom, the essay argues that fairy tales are complex and influential narratives that produce a ‘proper’ assemblage of childhood, while at the same time foreclosing on the possibility of alternative subjectivities. Alternatives are also present in the Saul’s article. He engages the intersecting sociologies of adolescence and time and asks, ‘Can new orientations to time – that concept so foundational to definitional notions of adolescence – complicate contemporary understandings about what it means to be young?’ Saul theorizes time by introducing the notion of timescape. He argues that rather than traditional notions of Clocktime, we ought to consider timescapes as multiple, relationally constructed rather than as measurable, quantitative units. Timescape also enables us to think about the spatial dimensions of childhood rather than the merely temporal. Given the vast connectedness in our globalized world, rethinking time and space are necessary, and yet, this expansive, relational world is muddied and constrained by the traditional Clocktime that governs our daily lives. With the notion of timescape, Saul offers a multiperspectival approach of time that can help us rethink the ways in which childhoods and youth experiences have internalized the routinization of everyday lives in limiting ways.
The aim of this special issue is to focus on the various ways in which the child and childhood are constructed and the role that philosophical perspectives both contribute to our understandings of these subjectivities as well as open up new spaces in which to consider possible alternatives that are neither prescriptive nor proscriptive. The articles in this volume each contribute to an analysis of the ways in which philosophy has produced the child/childhood from a multiplicity of perspectives by deploying distinct lenses. Taken as a whole, this volume seeks to provide a space in which these perspectives can both complement each other and overlap and at the same time engage other methodologies in new and exciting ways. Our purpose here is to find creative forms of interrupting the conventional discourses so that we can think of the child and childhoods differently, in productive ways that allow for new conceptions of what is all too often an assumed set of subjectivities and experiences.