Editorial

The world is experiencing multiple ideological, political, cultural and economic conflicts. Among these conflicts, there are ongoing wars and military conflicts that are creating detrimental impacts and effects in children’s lives as well as destroying/restructuring multiple ways of be(com)ing. Hence, contemporary constructions of childhoods around the world are nested within multiple trajectories of social, economic, cultural and education discourses. How ‘we’ understand childhoods is certainly intertwined within the context(s) of how ‘we’ see children in relation to the way we perceive ourselves. Through ‘our’ subjectivity, expectations of educational outcomes, new rules, sociocultural norms and the like are formed to create a different worldview for all children to understand themselves as well as be understood by others.

In this issue, the collection of articles and book reviews come together to build momentum for ongoing global and local circulations of critical perspectives and reflections respecting children’s multiplicity. For instance, Wall’s article raised the need to look at the deep political interdependence of understanding the child and adult through both childhood and global studies to reconstruct the notion of global citizens. Taking a different angle of discussion on how children are culturally perceived, Omobewale, Omobowale and Falase’s paper offered a specific cultural example from the Yoruba of Southwestern Nigeria to illustrate a different way of be(com)ing for children. Along a similar yet different discourse on be(com)ing through the discussion of the identification processes of Albanian-origin teenagers in Thessaloniki, Vathi investigated the politics of identity through intersectionality of the local, the national and the global among immigrant children and youth. In the fourth paper, Jirata looked at how an African indigenous knowledge system among the Guji people of Ethiopia offers a different cultural construction of children in which cultural spaces of care, play and learning traditions are of significant importance for Guji children.

With references to African childhoods, Murris’ paper used multiple different conceptual frameworks to unpack the notion of child development within the context of South Africa. She proposed and argued for an alternative but critical framework that acknowledges an ethics of care for all (humans and nonhuman) to deconstruct/reconstruct a different conception of development. Along a similar yet somewhat different trajectory of thought, Knight’s article looked at the idea of the ‘problem child’ to understand the colonial entanglements between childhood and construction of time to challenge how dominant Western understandings of the child are entangled in colonialism and imperialism. In the final article of this issue, David and Kilderry investigated childhood identity from an intergenerational family migration story to problematize what constitutes an ‘othered’ narrative as a way of un/belonging.

These articles along with the book reviews in this issue shed light on how contemporary understandings of and about the child and childhoods can be further challenged towards a less restricted view of be(com)ing. In this era of uncertainty, the capacity to think outside the box will create ruptures to destabilise dominant but dangerous prescriptions for ‘normal’ childhoods.