Abstract
Dear Childhood Readers
In 2013, Childhood will be celebrating it 20th year as a leader in scholarship relating to children and their childhoods. Over the years, the journal has strived to be innovative in research and writing crucial to the lives of children the world over. We have published work that both defined and reflected the ethos and interests of childhood scholars and, in the process, helped shape a growing, emergent field that has now come into its own.
In the contemporary global climate, the fates of children and their childhoods continue to be enmeshed in economics, politics and the moral rhetorics of governments, NGOs and entrepreneurs, making our efforts all the more relevant. Seemingly endless armed conflicts and forced migrations, coupled with regressive and inequitable economic policies and global shifts in wealth, disproportionately impress their burdens on the lives of the young and their caretakers. Concomitantly, a spreading neoliberal ideology threatens to lay all responsibility at the feet of individual children and caretakers who increasingly are left without recourse to government or access to resources. At the same time it is clear – from research and from experience – that children continue to exhibit creative and energetic responses to these and other life circumstances, having to constantly reinvent and reimagine their own childhoods in order to make sense of their lives.
It is at this crucial juncture that we at Childhood seek to rededicate ourselves to the mission of making scholarship matter and of recognizing and incorporating the perspectives of children in scholarship about them. We are therefore looking to extend and expand the nature and scope of the kinds of work we publish and the kinds of conversations we hope to engender.
To that end, we invite submissions from a variety of fields and perspectives that address themselves to the lives, problems and possibilities affecting children and those around them. In addition to anthropological and sociological approaches, we welcome writing and research from history, literary studies, feminism, development studies, micro- and macro-economic research, queer studies, education, communication and media, consumer studies, among many possible others. We welcome research that befits Childhood’s focus on children as socially constituted subjects and that addresses children’s social relations and culture, with an emphasis on their rights and generational position in society.
Entering its third decade, Childhood remains open to the dynamic, changing contours of child-oriented and child-informed scholarship. We therefore will be looking to enable conversation among colleagues with an occasional Special Section (several papers on a similar topic or issue), with Research Notes (short statements or summaries of ongoing work) and with a Commentary section whereby authors and critics can engage in discussion and debate.
We at Childhood most of all wish to extend our appreciation to all those who have submitted, published, reviewed and edited papers for the journal over the years. It is through the collective efforts of all that a community of scholarship can thrive.