Editorial

The articles in this edition truly reflect the aims and scope of Global Studies of Childhood that pertain to contemporary childhoods in a globalized era. We are concerned with the impact of global imperatives on the lives of children. The experiences of childhood occur within the situated spaces of geographic locales and culturally specific frames of reference and are subject to global forces that complicate, disrupt, and reconfigure the meanings associated with childhoods worldwide. In this edition we can read papers from Finland, the United States, the United Kingdom, Jamaica, and Tanzania with topics including; the glocalization of political events, conflict resolution, aspects of quality education from an African community perspective and volunteering with children.

In the first paper, entitled; The imaginaries that survived: Societal roles of early childhood education in an era of intensification, Maiju Paananen shares her ethnography of kindergartens in Finland. She deploys the concept of “imaginary” to analyze discourses that have challenged traditional tropes and proposes a consideration of social processes that impact on justice in each country under study. This work provides significant insight in a consideration of the role of theoretical and political discussions around early childhood education.

In Problematizing child-centeredness: Discourses the critical sociology of childhood, Marguerite Anne Fillion-Wilson provides an ethnographic and discursive analysis of the multitude of cultural meanings associated with child-centeredness in the context of US American early childhood education with Waldorf education providing the context.

Delores Smith considers bullying in Jamaican schools, which she analyzes using an ecological lens. Her article begins with a discussion of the context of the school bullying in Jamaica. She argues that there is a compelling need for anti-bullying policies and programs to be implemented in schools to reduce the levels of violence that children are exposed to. Smith suggests a theoretical and data-driven anti-bullying set of protocols that have proven to be useful in preventing and reducing bullying in schools.

In “He wasn’t nice to our country”: Children’s discourses about the “glocalized” nature of political events in the Global North, Ruth Barley reflets on the ways in which new media is used in the contexts of emerging patterns of migration. Barley suggests that uses of new media are challenging current conceptualizations that reflect more diverse “glocalized” networks.

The paper, Developing conflict resolution skills among pre-primary children: Views and practices of naturalized refugee parents and teachers in Tanzania by Laurent Gabriel Ndijuye, explores the strategies of parents and teachers’ deployed to resolve conflict between naturalized refugee pre-primary children in Tanzania. The findings from this work emphasize that the strategies need to be deliberate and explicit to support the children to reach their fullest potentials in an integrated society.

Ejuu, Apolot, and Serpell examine the Early childhood education quality indicators in the context of an African community perspective. Specifically, they remind us that the concept of quality is contested, and in some contexts impacts on local communities’ perspective of educational provision in which the use of quality indicators in early childhood education contexts can have negative effects.

In volunteering for children or volunteering with children? A co-creation initiative to prepare student volunteers, Amigó, Bilous, and Rawlings-Sanaei reflect on the controversies of student volunteers working for/with children in developing world contexts. They propose a model whereby organizations who send and/or receive volunteers can collaborate to ensure volunteers’ purposeful involvement.

Also in this edition Nicola Wallis reviews the book by Abigail Hackett entitled; More-Than-Human Literacies in Early Childhood.