Abstract
In an eloquently articulated text, Lee presents his argument for (re)framing the changing and complex notion of childhood within a complex and changing world. He draws our attention to the situating of childhood in relation to futures, particularly the political notion of children and childhood in relation to what they will become and time–work investment being made into childhood through the architecture of the state. In doing so, Lee highlights, and provides a compelling challenge to, childhood studies research situated within the narrow binary frame where the difference between nature and nurture, social and biological are too distinct.
Acknowledging the consensus and conflict in global childhood studies, Lee alerts us to two trends that he suggests will change the relationships that society holds with futures and with childhood and which underlie the need to engage differently with the narrow binary frame: climate change and plasticity. In highlighting these two areas, Lee draws us to the ‘speculative extremes’ (p. 7) of futures, from that of Lovelock (2009) and a future of uncertain external, natural forces wreaking changes in the ways that we consume, relate to the world around us and make assumptions about increases in generational wealth to that of De Grey and Rae (2008) and the evolution in understanding and bio-science advancement leading to the genetic potentials of future shaping. Lee poses that within and across these extremes are a wide range of challenges and opportunities that affect our relationships with the future – and as consumers and biological creatures, this situates the politics of childhood within the biopolitical.
Lee engages in the intersection of the social, political, material and natural to suggest what changeability in each of these means to the other, and the implications that this has for researchers of childhood. With intent to challenge and provoke, Lee takes us on a journey to explore what can replace the binary frame of childhood and children. Challenging the notion that just two categories are enough to describe the diversity of global childhoods or children, Lee provides compelling justification of the need to explore alternative frames for inquiry about childhoods, material, natural and social life processes, and thus the need for childhood studies to engage in more relevant and contemporary inquiry in order to contribute ‘to understanding and shaping the emerging future’ (p. 22).
I found the raising of the impacts of futures of childhood and children, for example, the population displacements where Lee suggests future decisions of states may need to consider which children are a time–work investment and which are allowed to die, both confronting and disturbing. However, such discussion was nonetheless necessary and important and serves to remind, perhaps again for some, the risks of heading into the future with our current, destructive frames on.
Sensitive to the losses in the reframing of the binaries of childhood studies as much as the gains, Lee provides an assembly of new navigational and organisational resources for childhood studies in Chapter 2, through a detailed discussion of the notion of biopolitics and the contributions of Foucault (2007, 2008) and Agamben (1998). Here, Lee introduces ‘life’, ‘voice’ and ‘resource’ as key multiplicities of knowledge and practice that allow for complex and emerging connection and comparison with the binary frame of childhood that has developed through the structures of states and populations in constructing childhoods.
With the contention that the binary frame in childhood studies is only one such ‘biosocial imagination’ relevant to childhood, in Chapter 3, Lee explores, through a ‘necessarily selective’ (p. 57) comparison, some other bio-social imaginings of childhood. This includes temporalities through Buss’ (1995) frame of evolutionary psychology, life processes and lifestyle through Bjorklund and Pellegrini’s (2000) frame of child development and epigenetics, Gluckman and Hanson’s (2006) ‘mismatch thesis’ in the relation between adaptive capacities and lifestyles diseases and Lee’s own ‘biosocial event’ frame (Lee and Motzkau, 2012). In exploring this, Lee has illustrated the ways that different frames imagine life processes and lifestyles differently.
In Chapters 4 and 5, Lee explores further forms of bio-social imagination that have implications for and frame life processes in childhood. In Chapter 4, he draws to our attention an example of childhood biopolitics, cognitive enhancement and mental ability in childhood and through this opens up the frame mental capital to critical inquiry. Some interesting comparisons are drawn from the mental capital frame to that of the resource of human mental ability in international competition and global economies. Chapter 5 provides a fascinating consideration of the philanthropic relationship as shaping children’s outcomes and the matter of voice, or its unwitting silencing or depoliticising, through such shaping.
Through Chapters 6 and 7, Lee explores further the topic of climate change, addressing it as not a problem to be solved, but an ‘open-ended, dynamic and changing phenomenon’ (p. 114). It is presented as an example of a complex phenomenon situated outside of binary frames – it is never just social or just natural. Lee challenges the reader to reconsider their frames of climate change away from that which considers it to have had a linear development – and thus a linear future to a solution – and instead to reframe the imaginations of human capacities, perceptions and assumptions. This importantly leads to consideration of the agency and role that children have in a changing climate, and the concomitant responsibility for childhood studies in reframing children as future makers.
A phrase that I found particularly poignant was Lee’s question, ‘how can we stimulate and foster children’s practical imaginations to face up to the question of how to live well in the context of changing climate and resource scarcity?’ (p. 157). Throughout this text, the thoughtful, critical and considered way in which Lee weaves together a diverse range of ideas provides a challenge to reframe our own thinking so that we might in our research begin to respond meaningfully to the future.