Productive encounters: Examining and disrupting socio-cultural perspectives on childhood(s) and youth across global societies

Editorial introduction

Childhood, or a socio-cultural view of childhood, is in desperate need of new ways of theorizing and understanding children’s role in various cultural and social contexts. As this editorial discusses, sociology of childhood has long struggled to find its ways into the normative discourses in sociology, for example, child-study, children’s rights, and child–adult relations and to be inclusive of socio-cultural traditions that connect to an anthropological discipline. In this Special Issue, I argue that additional caution and disruption needs to occur as scholars think about the constructs of childhood, youth and adolescence and the traveling ideas about these constructs across global contexts. In this Special Issue, scholars take on the task of theorizing childhood/children in relation to various socio-cultural contexts. While I do not claim a particular or “right” sociology or anthropology of childhood here, I instead argue for a disruptive socio-cultural view of global childhood(s). I also raise concerns about commonplace sociological perspectives, such as the status and role of children and childhood in global societies, which often reify childhood, children, and young people as vulnerable, nonagentic subjects in society. As the articles in this issue illustrate, childhood, adolescence, and youth are categories that cannot be fixed across global societies.

Mayall (2013) asks, “What is a sociology of childhood?” She and others such as Alanen (2014) argue that to understand society at large, we as researchers and scholars must consider children and youth as central fixtures in society. This task remains a challenge given that a dearth of theorizing on childhood exists. Part of this challenge, from a researcher perspective, is the lack of theories available in the discipline of sociology for analyzing childhood. If childhood or youth are analyzed at all, it is common to draw from, for example, Marx, Bourdieu, Durkheim, and Weber, limiting the ability to examine cultural dimensions of childhood and youth, and the ways young people and children make sense of the world. More recently, however, a recent collection of essays attempts to use Bourdieuian concepts of capital in childhood studies in order to advance the argument that childhood is a central structural component in society and to posit that we must understand how societies conceive of childhood since such conceptions influence social relations and practices (Alanen et al., 2015). From here, common ways that children and childhood were examined relate to the children’s role in the division of labor in society and the children’s socialization for society. Concerns over how social scientists in particular are under-theorizing or are offering “atheoretical” explanations of childhood continue to plague the discipline (Alanen, 2014: 4). Even in its nascent history, the sociology of childhood makes children a “problem” and thus a category to build knowledge on (Mayall, 2013). Such a view of childhood, or children and youth as problems, often intersects with political discourses that are also often deficit based (Rodriguez, 2015). Below, I describe the mini-history of the sociology of childhood in order to explain the problems with how children and childhood are conceived and then suggest the move to disrupt the problematic categories of child/hood and youth and with that the disciplinary divisions of sociology and anthropology to offer a socio-cultural view of global childhood(s). I also consider how we might “problematize” the categories of child/childhood and youth (as cited in Foucault et al, 1997: 164, 165).

Early ways of studying childhood assumed a child–adult binary (Baker, 2001). In other words, children were viewed as incomplete beings on their way to adulthood rather than social actors within society (James and Prout, 1990). This assumption about children and the spaces of childhood allowed for the child’s low status in society. This first theme in the study of childhood as it relates to developmental psychology and assumes a child–adult binary has a central role in educational philosophy. That is, children are not studied or perceived to have a valuable status in society, but rather they are presumed to be mini or not-yet adults and thus are viewed from a deficit perspective. Moreover, Baker (2001) posits this child–adult binary has roots in Rousseau’s classic, and problematically canonical text, Emile. Rousseau positions the child as susceptible to society/man’s corruption. She argues that this “child-sympathy” approach only perpetuates the low status of children in society and certainly has implications for teacher–student relationships as well as curriculum and pedagogy.

Additionally, developmental psychology focuses on the journey of children to adulthood. The assumption with this approach to studying/understanding children/childhood is that there is a normative discourse built in order to measure a child’s progress toward adulthood. This places a burden on the individual to progress, “normally,” and highlights the deviations from normal development. If children deviate from this normal development process, then they require interventions to restore them to normality. Mayall (2013) argues that the child–adult binary approach (child-sympathy or child-study) lacks a fully “interactive set of theories of agency and structure, and attention to the politics of childhood” (pp. 34, 35). Finally, this child-study movement with its assumptions from developmental psychology positions children as projects. The child-study movement also assumes that children’s bodies need to be fixed and intervened on. It also sets up conditions for children to be included as “normal” and excluded as “abnormal” or “deviant.” These processes of exclusion are imperative for researchers to critique (Popkewitz and Brennan, 1998).

A second theme of studying childhood, where childhood is considered a problematic category, relates to both the conceptual study of childhood and the emergence of studying children’s lives. This theme relates to the emergence of the sociological study of childhood as a political enterprise with a focus on improving respect and awareness for children’s rights in society (Mayall, 2013). By understanding children’s perspectives as political and considering their roles and responsibilities in society, some argue that children’s status in society will be elevated. As such, a study of childhood and children’s lives, we will see a reconfiguration of social relations. A key connection to the sociological study of childhood is that sociology examines social systems, and how social groups interrelate within various power structures (Mayall, 2013: 35). As part of this, new paradigms, in sociology specifically, emerged such as the “social constructionist” approach to studying children’s lives; these paradigms grappled with their own dilemmas regarding essentializing children or framing childhood in normative, universalistic ways (James and Prout, 1990) as they attempted to explain how childhoods are differentially constructed across cultural contexts. And, of course, an additional challenge is to continue to consider the child as a social actor that could produce his/her own dimension of a childhood or youth-culture rather than being just a product or outcome of a particular societal or cultural process of socialization.

A third theme, thus, becomes how to understand childhood as a social phenomenon, and how children participate in society as political and moral agents. This theme has taken on new forms in the realm of children’s rights discourses and the ways in which childhood and youth become “targets of transnational governance” through political projects such as youth development, youth activism, and civic engagement (Sobe, 2011; see also, Lesko and Talburt, 2011). The challenge that remains in this area of study is how to question who or what institutional agent is determining the “interests,” “needs,” and “rights” of young people. The move to target the category of youth was consecrated on a global scale in several UN documents (see, for example, Sobe, 2011). Sobe (2011) argues that given the focus on youth as a site of transnational and global governing mentalities, researchers and scholars have an obligation to consider the cultural and societal practices being advanced through this focus on how to develop children and youth in global societies. Through this focus on youth development and participation in the global peace process, youth are simultaneously positioned as assets and social agents of change and as potential dangers to society or vulnerable to social toxins in society. Sobe (2011) further argues,

The conceptualization of youth “participation,” UN texts echoed one of the most persistent problematizations of youth, which is that they represent both a societal hope and a social danger […] youthness is located in the body and that youth bodies need to be properly directed—with progress and national development the intended outcome of the proper harnessing” of youth bodies. (p. 99)

Sobe’s analysis illuminates how a youth body becomes globalized and also how it becomes a site of struggle for nation-building, focusing on how developing such youth bodies by inscribing them with values of freedom, peace, rights, and respect. This shift to a rights-based approach to studying children and youth perpetuates a characterization of youth as “victims” in need of protection or development to avoid living in the margins or ruins of society. This deficit discourse, rooted still in a binary—logic that argues youth lack something and need the state or the family to shape them—continues to circulate in policy and practice as well as social science research (Rodriguez, 2015). Yet the rights-based approach to studying children seemingly allows for youth-led and organized social movements and activism; this has been witnessed in American society as they defend public education from the corporatization of education policy and address systemic inequalities in American society (Kirshner, 2015). Moving beyond a globalized body that is subject to intervention by nation-states, then, are activist bodies that are shaping and being shaped by globalized social movements. In other words, more recently, youth are reconfiguring cultural, social, and political spaces globally (Epstein, 2015). These less formalized spaces of youth activism are increasingly transnational and often operate on the ground as young people hit the streets in countries such as Iran, Turkey, Chile, and Tunisia (Costanza-Chock, 2012). Understanding the socio-cultural and political endeavors from children and young people’s perspectives is imperative to reconfiguring socio-cultural views of global childhood(s).

Emerging, then, is a need to focus on how conceptions of childhood and youth are defying traditional modes of analysis and inquiry, especially in the sociology and anthropology of childhood scholarship, to account for these nuanced, culturally situated scenarios in which children and youth are engaging in socio-political action and educational encounters. The wave of global youth activism (Abu-Lughod, 2012; Epstein, 2015) continues to impress on societies that notions of children and youth are culturally situated, imaginative, and productive. Youth and childhood—as categories of knowledge—are shifting and as such inquiry into the spaces of youth and childhood is necessary. The notions of childhood and youth become sites of contestation, from theoretical and empirical perspectives, as various actors attempt to imbue values of neoliberal societies—freedom, participation, and rights—on youth and various childhood(s) globally. But what if societies do not enact certain western models of childhood and youth? Or what if a globalized body, such as a youth or child, arrives to a nation with different values and complicates a nation’s perception of itself and how it views childhood as is the case with undocumented youth and their activism in American society? This Special Issue begins to chart a path of inquiry into socially and culturally situated spaces in order to uncover new ways of thinking and theorizing from children and young people’s perspectives in places such as rural Argentina, tribal India, the new Latino South in the United States, and in hidden spaces in the United Kingdom.

Disrupting categories of childhood and youth: a socio-cultural view of global childhood(s)

To account for variation and to think about children’s and youth lives in the context of an understanding of global childhood(s), we must actually talk to children and young people and consider their thoughts, desires, and movement across social spaces. Given this range of thoughts and ideas about youth and children, academic social science research has minimally attempted to understand youth and children’s perspectives.

I wish here in this editorial introduction to experiment with how we might conceptualize or theorize youth and childhood differently and to set the stage for a multiplicity of theoretical strands in each of this issue’s articles by offering a new ontological positioning here. That is, rather than think of youth and children as problems to be understood, fixed, and made knowable (Lather, 1991), I challenge researchers, policy makers, and educators to think of children and youth experiences in culturally situated, politically entrenched contexts and to think in terms of difference rather than how their experiences are the same. Following Deleuze (1990), when he argues that instead thinking of problems, as many of the previous ways of studying children and youth and societies have done, and solutions to those problems, we ought to focus on how philosophical and theoretical thinking can encourage us to consider childhood and youth-hood as an ongoing process of repetition and difference. And, in that process of thinking and thinking-again/differently, creativity lives. This means that solutions to problems of children and youth or figuring out how to manage children’s lives should not be an end goal. Rather, we should seek to understand how young people and children are constantly in the process of understanding, expressing, and making meaning. To do this, we must consider how things become problems, and under which socio-cultural and political conditions (policies, practices, power dynamics, assumptions, and beliefs), youth and children become problems and instead challenge these discourses and uncover young people’s experiences from their perspectives.

This process, in Deleuzian terms, is an “event” (Deleuze, 1990). Event is a process and set of intersections of thought and action that often individuals engage in around a problem in society. Elsewhere, I have theorized this process of youth activism as event (Rodriguez, 2016) and continue to explore the usefulness of thinking about youth and childhood as ongoing processes in productive global spaces, disrupting normative logics and rejecting, or complicating, notions of time in relation to previously held understandings of childhood and youth.

From here, this issue invited authors to explore such spaces and to disrupt normative truth-telling about childhood and youth across a diverse set of cultural contexts. In considering this compilation of articles in the spirit of Deleuzian event, we aim to open up spaces of possibility for new understandings of socio-cultural, global childhood(s) beyond the normative and often deficit-based perspectives of the past. The articles in this Special Issue offer both theoretical and conceptual arguments (Straubhaar and Portes and Dyer in this issue) as well as uniquely theorized perspectives based on culturally situated, empirical research (Finnan et al., Padawer, and Skyme in this issue). Taken together, we see the “event” of meaning-making for young people and children across global contexts.

In the first article, Padawer proposes a theoretical and empirical approach to studies on contemporary childhoods, youths and adolescences, based on the idea that these categories respond to a modern and hegemonic western expression of classification that accounts for biologically conditioned stages, through which ethnic, class, and gender particularities influence the way these social subjects experience the world. She theorizes notions of experience and transition alongside empirical data from fieldwork in the rural location of San Ignacio, a province of Misiones in northeastern Argentina. Padawer emphasizes that young people live and express the world around them, underscoring how the concept of transition is at odds with the life-stages approach, which rooted in developmental psychological and some socio-anthropological approaches. Instead, she argues for a redefining of childhood and youth experiences marked by milestones.

Similarly, Finnan, Sahoo, and Pramanik experiment with the notion of time in childhood studies as children from tribal village in Odisha, India, experience childhood in relation to the future while attending a residential school. These authors take readers into the experience of these children at the school, Kalinga Institute of Social Sciences (KISS), and theorize the notion of time as they extend it to include “future projects” and “hope.” They problematize the tribal Indian experience of childhood by asserting the possibilities that occur as these young children view themselves in relation to “imagined futures.”

In the article by Straubhaar and Portes, the authors speak to new experiences childhood in the American South. As globalized, immigrant bodies move to places in the United States for economic reasons, larger numbers of Latino, immigrant children and youth are inhabiting the American South and thus challenging conceptions of middle class, white childhood(s) in the United States (Lareau, 2003). These authors thus build on Vygotsky’s premise that identity, specifically the concept of ethnic identity, is cultivated through a cultural–historical lens, and as such, they begin to chart a construction of Southern Latino childhood.

The article by Skyme challenges deficit discourses of childhood and youth by examining the experiences of boys and men with muscular dystrophy, a condition that only affects boys and has implications for their childhood. This unique qualitative research project invited participants with muscular dystrophy to speak to issues of agency and participation in medical research as a way to reclaim their experience. Their stories highlight agency and contextualized competence and challenge assumptions of vulnerability and immaturity of those who are young and disabled. The findings, based on fieldwork in England, showcase how these young people make meaning about their lives despite the fact that their experience and meaning-making may be different than “mainstream” notions of decision making and agency.

In the final article, Dyer challenges heteronormative conceptions of childhood by tending to what she calls queer futurity. Relating to Padawer and Finnan to some extent, Dyer theoretically experiments with the notion of time (temporality) in relation to the experiences of lesbian, gay, bisexual, trans, and queer (LGBTQ) children and youth. Dyer attempts to deepen more recent scholarly endeavors that merge childhood studies with queer theory. She promotes that educators’ attention to sex/sexuality as part of children’s education can be productive. By criticizing the “It Gets Better Campaign” and engaging with Eve Sedgwick’s (1991) seminal essay, “How to Bring Your Kids Up Gay,” Dyer traces how contemporary queer theory uses the figure of the child and its alleged innocence, arguing for productive complexities in relation to queering childhood studies.

Taken together, each of these articles expresses concerns over traditional, limited conceptions and understandings of childhood—as if childhood is just one thing in one place at one time. Additionally, each of these articles disrupts (hetero)normative, western models of childhood, youth, and adolescence. The aim of this Special Issue is to focus on difference and creativity in the scholarship. And, as mentioned, considering global, socio-cultural childhood(s) and youth experiences in the spirit of Deleuzian difference and event allowed for creativity. These articles in this Special Issue open up spaces of possibility, nonlinearity, and newly conceived expressions of time and transition along with productive encounters with diverse groups that are a part of the story of childhood across global contexts.