The future of childhood studies? Reconstructing childhood with ideological dilemmas and metaphorical expressions

The politics of interdisciplinarity

The time has come, it has been said, for us to enhance our engagement with the ‘real world’ threats (Bammer, 2013; Graff, 2015) since we live in an ‘age of uncertainty’ (Nowotny et al., 2001). To address the ‘myriad of major problems’ facing human societies, we need to reject our traditional and inadequate ways in which we devote ourselves to scientific research; disciplinarian thinking is to be blamed for the inability to cope with the unprecedented complexity in a chaotic world, some claim. How, then, are we to handle these uncertain and threatening ‘grand challenges’ in the 21st century? What will save us from these crises and lead us to the ‘paradise lost’ (Finkenthal, 2001; Frodeman, 2014; Gleed and Marchant, 2016)?

Interdisciplinary approaches are often promoted in relation to this particular version of the world, and this powerful trend is today both a key political preoccupation and a prominent element in contemporary scientific discourse. This kind of collaborative activity is often backed with substantial funding, for example, €30 billion is devoted to the interdisciplinary and transdisciplinary research program titled Tackling Societal Challenges (Frodeman, 2014, 2016; Hvidtfelt, 2017). The increasing number of centers for interdisciplinary studies and numerous efforts to promote more interdisciplinarity through published reports, articles, and handbooks are no longer easy to keep track of (Aldrich, 2014; Jacobs and Frickel, 2009). In common, they raise a criticism against overspecialization and fragmentation in the disciplines, which shape boundaries and limit the scope of research problems (Bammer, 2013; Graff, 2015). Instead, an attitude is encouraged where one is willing not only to recognize but also to “embrace the incompleteness of our learned perspectives” (Cook, 2010: 222).

The interdisciplinary hype is typically staged through mantras of ‘integration,’ ‘convergence,’ ‘renegotiation,’ ‘reorganization,’ and ‘reconfiguration’ and in terms of ‘blending’ and ‘bridging’ different types of disciplinary knowledge. Multiple approaches are merged together, although different perspectives do not always fit nicely in the blend (Frodeman, 2014; Graff, 2015; Hvidtfelt, 2017; Weingart, 2000). We are witnessing a current construction of an interdisciplinary discipline by “specialists whose expertise lies in the analysis of how to communicate with and integrate across the disciplines, and between the disciplines and society” (Frodeman, 2014: 39). Simultaneously, we find requests for new conceptual vocabulary, suited for interdisciplinary theories and methods (Weingart, 2000).

In this article, I intend to problematize this request by examining how the discourse of interdisciplinarity is manifested in the field of childhood studies by some theoretically driven researchers. My intention is in no way to oppose to their work or to interdisciplinarity per se but to investigate how a change in ontological and epistemological positions is constructed and rhetorically organized in their discursive practice and thereby open up for a discussion about the proposed changes. The study might be seen as a response to Mäki’s (2016) call for research on the philosophical aspects of interdisciplinarity in science and also as a contribution to the few studies that examine the rhetoric of interdisciplinary inquiry (Klein, 2009). The explicit aim is thus to highlight how an interdisciplinary discourse is staged and legitimized in the requested re-direction in the field of childhood studies and with an attempt to answer the following research questions: (1) How do researchers define important research missions? (2) How is the rhetorical organization surrounding these research tasks made? (3) Concerning theory of science, what are the consequences of questions 1 and 2?

Childhood studies and interdisciplinarity

In the 1980s and 1990s, the introduction of a programmatic statement in terms of a ‘new research paradigm’ called the ‘new social study of childhood’ was established with a claim that children and childhood had previously been marginalized in the conventional disciplines (mainly pointing to development psychology, anthropology, and sociology). There was thus a desire to take a step away from the current tradition of examining the child and childhood through a biological and decontextualized lens, framed by adult concerns and treated as universal. A group of pioneering researchers argued in favor of children being regarded as actors and rights holders, with their childhoods studied as social constructions and in their own right. Their approach had a rapid academic impact and quickly became the legitimate way to study children and childhood (Hammersley, 2017; James et al., 1998; James and Prout, 2015 [1990]; Qvortrup, 2005).

This clear ontological and epistemological agenda was supposed to offer a break from the traditional framing, opening a door for interdisciplinary collaborations (James, 2004, 2010a). Whether this break can be considered a ‘paradigm shift’ and therefore groundbreaking, or just different opinions leading to debates between conflicting truth claims, can be called into question. For an in-depth discussion about how new this new social study of childhood actually is/was, see Ryan (2008).

Eventually, some researchers within this newly established research field recognized how a problem encountered this effort; the turn away from the constraining biology had simply moved childhood to the opposite pole—the social. By shifting the emphasis entirely, a “wall of silence” (Thorne, 2007: 150) in this nature–culture dichotomy became a burden since it precluded a dialogue between developmental psychology and the social sciences of childhood, thus failing “to move the study of childhood beyond the limitations of binary thought and dualistic modes of representation” (Ryan, 2011: 440). We are here facing an ontological and epistemological rebirth. The ongoing attempts to open the field for previously locked out disciplines is what Ryan (2011) points to as a ‘new wave’ in childhood studies. According to Wyness (2015), this was due to more self-consciousness, and it connected to the view that the “nature of the field of childhood studies is such that no single discipline can go it alone” (Korbin, 2010: 217) and that it “has to be, fundamentally, an interdisciplinary field of study” (James, 2010a: 215). In line with the discourse of interdisciplinarity, which states the inability to cope with ‘real world’ complexities without cross-border collaborations, the issues surrounding children and childhood are said to be so complex and multifaceted that no single discipline can claim primary rights or handle the topics on its own (Thorne, 2007):

The recognition is that childhood and ‘the child’ are indeed complex phenomena; understanding them properly, and not just partially, compels any disciplinarian to consult researchers from other disciplinary fields, and to develop efficient forms of communication and collaboration with them. The goal would be […] an integrated, overarching framework for interdisciplinary childhood research. (Alanen, 2012: 219)

Some uncertainties, though, remain, since when examining the possibilities of a productive relationship there seems to be a lack of consensus, and it is not clear which disciplines to involve and to what extent they should collaborate to create a genuinely interdisciplinary framework (Wyness, 2015). What are the grounds for fruitful and solidifying links of meaningful communication, and how far away is such a collaborative dialogue open for different ways of answering questions? (Alanen, 2012; Gagen, 2010; Thorne, 2007). Amid these issues, models for interdisciplinarity are emerging, aiming to stage a more boundless scenery by bringing together the best from many disciplines in creating a holistic field of childhood studies (Korbin, 2010). But the question is; wherein lies this wholeness, and what is it?

Managing challenges and adaptions with ideological dilemmas

In what follows, the first and second research questions—how do the researchers define important research missions for the field of childhood studies, and how is the rhetorical organization built up—will guide the analysis; the third question will mainly be discussed in the concluding remarks.

I will now pick up reasoning from the selected texts to point to how the researchers proclaim a need for change in the research agenda by using political claims about today’s society and its problems. This will be followed by an illumination of their retake on ontological statements. To begin with, the research field is described as “increasingly troubled” (Prout, 2005: 67) and finding itself in a new environment with new conditions. This environment is defined by two major tendencies:

The first tendency is the increasing recognition that human societies, lifestyles and identities are inseparably bound to the wider life of the planet. […] The second tendency is the growing desire that both shapes and is shaped by bioscience, to intervene in human life processes so as to prevent disease, prolong life or enhance our capabilities. (Lee, 2013: 9)

According to Lee (2013), childhood studies has not yet paid enough attention to these issues and is therefore put in a troublesome situation since these tendencies are related to “one of the world’s biggest problems” (p. 23). Consequently, this is something that childhood researchers should devote themselves to if they want to avoid the risk of “appear[ing] to be doing nothing at all” (Lee, 2013: 115). From a realistic point of view, this arguing invokes an objective world as given, an out-there-ness independent of any processes of representation. Considering these problems in a relativist manner seems to be equal to moral bankruptcy, with the researcher at risk of being considered indifferent (Edwards et al., 1995):

Research fields either respond productively to changes in the world around them or fade into irrelevance. […] Sometimes all the adaptation that is required is a further elaboration of an existing set of questions and methods. Occasionally something bolder is called for. In my view, recent developments in the life sciences and around climate change make this one of those occasions. (Lee, 2013: 15)

Attached to this, we find attempts to legitimize a certain way for the field to respond to the discursive practice of the selected researchers; these are ontological adaptions that fit in ‘a biological age’ (Rose, 2013). Just like the new social study of childhood was part of the scientific turn to social constructionism in the 1980s and 1990s, it seems like this new wave wants to make itself a part of a turn to ‘neuro.’ The emerging ontology of neuro is not determining or fatalistic—like the universal biological perspective that childhood studies rejected in its early years—but rather enhancing and full of possibilities (Rose, 2013; Rose and Abi-Rached, 2013) and therefore a possible way to retain credibility for the research field today. However, when turning to life sciences, one is not turning away from the view of children and childhood as social constructions; instead, the ontological position includes both parts:

If the way forward for childhood studies that I advocate in this book is to be productive, it requires some re-conceptualization of childhood’s ontology. Childhood should be seen as neither ‘natural’ nor ‘cultural’ but a multiplicity of ‘nature-cultures’, that is a variety of complex hybrids […]. (Prout, 2005: 144)

Here, the ideological dilemma nature–culture is defined as a problem that can be solved with the change proposed by these researchers and used as a rhetorical resource when building the ontological claim that childhood is made up of complex hybrids. In dichotomies like this, both poles are potentially positive, and thus, there might be a risk in advocating just one side to the exclusion of the other (Billig et al., 1988). This is something childhood studies in retrospect is said to have experienced when rejecting nature in favor for culture in their earlier days. In the ontological adaption, we also find another noteworthy aspect. As shown in the introduction, the first wave of childhood studies made a big number of their social constructionist perspective; however, today this seems to have lost its significance to a more essentialist worldview. In this account, we find a description of an absolute reality, of how things are. This is a fundamental claim that researchers in childhood studies must assume and build their work around.

Articulated as a key point in the arguments is further a more general discard of the use of dichotomies: “The key point I will develop is that childhood studies need to move beyond these (modernistic) dichotomies and deploy non-dualistic analytical resources” (Prout, 2005: 59). When rejecting these dichotomies, the rhetorical balancing game is once again put into play—one shall reject but still retain some of the binary distinctions:

Even as we reject the twin monoliths of ‘nature’ and ‘society’, we may yet wish to retain a heuristic distinction between ‘life processes’ and ‘social processes’. To draw this distinction is not to commit oneself to the idea that such processes are always distinct, but to allow oneself to remain articulate in raising empirical questions about bio-social relations. (Lee, 2013: 69–70)

In the example, the argument about how to ‘remain articulate’ is built up with dichotomies used as rhetorical resources, and although dichotomies are rhetorically denied, one still depends on them in one way or another because of their general function as analytical tools in social sciences; a change of vocabulary does not make them disappear.

Another way to cater for a view that acknowledges the difficulty in abandoning binary thinking (in favor of complexities), but still points out its limitations, is to say that dichotomies are valuable and simultaneously false, a paradox between what is said and what should be done in future childhood studies:

In many ways, such dichotomies are valuable heuristic devices: they enable us to compare and contrast important structural and theoretical concepts, to highlight their key features and to map out their interrelationships and interdependencies. They are also, however, false dichotomies. While they help us to understand some things, they serve to obscure others […]. (James, 2010b: 490)

In consequence, an understanding of the complexity of a phenomenon like childhood “requires a broad set of intellectual resources, an interdisciplinary approach and an open-minded process of enquiry” (Prout, 2005: 2). So, for this adapted ontological construction to be applicable in childhood studies, a new epistemology that allows appropriate descriptions of the knowledge production is needed. Here, we find an internal challenge, integrating competing perspectives and agendas into one epistemological unit:

[…] we must move beyond the struggle between competing theoretical positions and engage in the task of developing a conceptual framework that will enable the integration of what are, all too often, presented as oppositional perspectives. (James, 2010b: 491)

This challenge also consists of the task of finding a trustworthy replacement of the binary frame. In the next section, I will take a closer look at efforts made to address this challenge, but first a brief summary of the analysis so far.

The requested change of direction in the research field is depicted as a necessity due to societal problems. The research tasks therefore become politically defined. If climate change is high on the political agenda, then this is what childhood studies should engage in. Through an essentialist point of departure, the ontological adaption thus consists of a denial and, at the same time, a recalcitrant use of dichotomies managed as a rhetorical resource with ideological dilemmas.

Reinventing interdisciplinarity using metaphorical explanations

The replacements of the binary frame found in the analyzed texts all involve a demand for more interdisciplinarity in childhood studies. To enable this and thereby provide solutions for how to handle ‘complex real world problems,’ the researchers make use of abstract metaphorical expressions in their rhetorical organization. Three metaphorical parables of how a reinvented interdisciplinary approach can be staged and legitimized are at hand. I will examine them separately, starting with the version provided by Prout (2005, 2011), then continuing with the contribution by Lee and Motskau (2011) and Lee (2013), and finally moving on to the one that James (2010b) has made available.

To justify a “need to intensify the interdisciplinarity of childhood studies” (Prout, 2011: 9) built on the premises highlighted in the previous section, Prout introduces a metaphor useful for explicit discursive management of ideological dilemmas—the hitherto absent ‘middle.’ The argument that motivates the missing middle is produced with yet another metaphor used as a rhetorical resource when recommending researchers to ‘take a step away’ from the modernist dichotomies:

The language of interdisciplinarity, symmetry, networks, mobility and relationality seems to me to be an important one if we are concerned to re-include the excluded middle of childhood sociology. This approach is less likely to recapitulate the oppositional dichotomies of modernist social theory. It is more in keeping with the destabilization and pluralization of both childhood and adulthood that mark our times, and it is more likely to grasp the processes that have produced them. In short, it is part of the ‘step from modernity’ that the sociology of childhood has, in my view, now to make. (Prout, 2011: 12)

Exactly where this void is located, and what it is, is not accounted for, but to re-include it one shall use abstract language built on metaphors like symmetry, networks, mobility, and relationality. These are all expressions that usually pass as ‘common sense’ in social science today, where they are hardly at risk of being questioned. But what do they mean? Why are these better than other dualisms, and who is to decide which ones are ‘false’? Just like the term nature has an opposite pole in culture, symmetry has its opposite pole in asymmetry; network stands in relation to atomism, mobility is the opposite of something that is fixed and immobile, and so on. So, this vocabulary is inclusive as well as exclusive, as is the outdated dichotomies that we are suggested to abandon. Notwithstanding, with an inclusion of the middle comes, in Prout’s (2005) opinion, the possibility to establish a theoretical way of speaking “that can handle the hybridity of childhood, that can tolerate its ambiguity without lapsing very quickly into the ‘purification’ that dichotomies demand” (p. 64). This enables a scientific approach that is able to “speak across oppositional dualisms, including the distinction between nature and culture, without reducing one to the other or creating a priori relations of dominance between them” (Prout, 2005: 143). This is obviously required from the researcher in childhood studies since the dichotomies, when given agency, otherwise demand—the no longer wanted—‘purification.’

In addition, another metaphor is used by Lee (2013), with reference to Deleuze, to describe the no longer desirable dichotomies—‘clothes’:

I don’t find the binary frame particularly credible. As Deleuze (1991) has it, two-category schemes hang on the world ‘like baggy clothes’, making contact here and there, but mostly just pursuing their own line. It is important to recognise those few places where a binary frame looks like a good match for a state of affairs. But it will be just as important for my argument to find ways to avoid overapplication of a binary frame so as to make space for new habits of thought and conceptual methodologies. (p. 19)

Lee (2013) states that this binary frame should not be used in childhood studies, and if the field “is to make a serious contribution to the emerging world, then it will need to change” (p. 21). When moving beyond the grip of modernist thinking, a redefining of the ontological status of not only childhood but thereto of the child becomes urgent, that is, to make “the social scientific study of childhood comfortable with seeing children as life-forms” (Lee, 2013: 4). Again, a metaphorical expression, ‘life-forms,’ is offered as an alternative that, although in a vague manner, is supposed to help the field adapt to an emerging world.

Lee and Motskau (2011) also present a solution that makes rhetorical use of traveling as a metaphorical image. Research is to be considered as a “‘journey’ into the relatively unknown” (Lee and Motskau, 2011: 8). Together with terms like ‘exploring’ and ‘orienting,’ Lee and Motzkau intend to develop a ‘navigational aid’ aimed to serve as an alternative to the bio-social dualism that consists of a framework of three key ‘multiplicities’ called ‘life,’ ‘resource,’ and ‘voice’:

Where the binary frame helped navigate the uncharted space of ‘human nature’, these multiplicities allow for connections and comparisons in a complex and emergent, but far less mysterious, space—the material world in which designs, desires and life processes meet and mix. (Lee, 2013: 26–27)

In analytical terms of ideological dilemmas that function as rhetorical resources, this ‘navigational aid’ is supposed to be both simultaneously flexible and structured, or in the metaphorical figure—‘pathfinding’ and ‘orientational’:

It is intended to be flexible enough to recognize emergent bio-political formations of childhood but also structured enough to allow researchers to organize their exploration of unfamiliar emergent formations and to provide common points of reference when comparing findings about otherwise unrelated research topics. In terms of the navigational metaphor, then, the three multiplicities should assist both ‘path-finding’ and ‘orientation’. (Lee and Motskau, 2011: 9)

The ‘multiplicities’ as a way to put hybridization into practice are said to enable the traveling researcher to go ‘North’ and ‘South’ pari passu. In their discursive practice, they both balance the dichotomy of the geographic counter poles and also argue that uniting contradictions—in Prout’s words re-including the excluded middle—is a scientifically desirable way to address children and childhood in research:

As a strategy for avoiding dualism, hybridization works by collapsing both poles—biological and social, for example—of the relevant dualism into the entity under consideration, be it child, adult or the division between child and adult. Each hybrid entity is understood to contain both ‘magnetic poles’ within itself. Thus, whatever way the researcher travels s/he is always travelling ‘North’ and ‘South’ at the same time. (Lee and Motskau, 2011: 15)

Furthermore, Lee and Motskau (2011) develop their metaphorical description by referring to ‘stick charts’ which, according to the them, is today a more appropriate metaphor than a ‘compass,’ since its area of use is similar to the function of the ‘multiplicities’ they have developed:

We suggest that rather than divide the territory of childhood with compasses, the set of multiplicities we have described earlier should itself be treated as a navigational aid. […] Such a navigational practice resembles one described by Thrower (2008), who reports the use of ‘stick charts’ by the Marshall Islanders to navigate between low-lying Pacific atolls. These charts illustrated the distribution of wave patterns produced by interactions of wind, water and the islands themselves. The navigators periodically lay down in their boats to feel the rhythm and pattern of the sea, compared their impressions with the appropriate stick chart and thereby deduced their proper direction of travel. (p. 15)

The key features to look for when on this journey are—unsurprisingly—also explained with a metaphorical expression, ‘bio-social events.’ This concept is, again, a strategy to manage the ideological dilemma nature–culture:

A bio-social event is a meeting of one or more life processes and one or more social processes to create a new relationship of mutual relevance between the two. (Lee, 2013: 74)

This kind of event is claimed to be committed to diversity and to adaption, in line with the ‘stick chart’ metaphor, and an example of such a meeting point is in Lee’s (2013) statement the climate change, a phenomenon that is never only natural nor only social.

Referring to the same field of research, a completely different analogy can be found in the text produced by James (2010b). In his account, the childhood researcher shall not be a traveler but rather one that ‘weaves.’ Just like the journey, this metaphorical parable gives an opportunity to handle dilemmatic aspects rhetorically. Here, woven together as one piece of ‘cloth,’ both commonalities and diversities can be managed at the same time through separate ‘threads’ that integrate into the construction of a ‘fabric.’ The detailed metaphor equates with desirable studies of childhood the weaving of a dense fabric without holes:

This use of the word ‘fabric’ is carefully considered, since I want to use the analogy of weaving in order to suggest a way in which the different threads that separately contribute to what we refer to as childhood studies can be woven together and integrated into a single piece of cloth. […] To develop this analogy a little further, in weaving, the warp of a fabric comprises the threads that are extended lengthwise in the loom, which are usually twisted harder and are therefore stronger than the weft. Thus they provide the foundations of the material and it is the number and length of the strands in the warp that determine the dimensions of the material being woven. The weft comprises the threads that cross from side to side of the material, running at right-angles to the warp threads with which they are interlaced. In proposing this as a model for understanding the complex but integrated nature of childhood studies, I envisage the warp as the commonalities of childhood, the stronger analytical and conceptual strands from which the fabric is made and that run through all aspects of the fabric of childhood, and the weft as the finer strands that create the detailed patterns that describe the diversities of childhood. (James, 2010b: 492–493)

James is careful to point out that this way of describing childhood studies shall not be confused with the structure–agent dichotomy, although the warp can be compared to structural determinants and the weft can seem to be agency. He states that this perspective deals with both parts in one take “recognizing the importance of both macro and micro issues” (James, 2010b: 493–494), and in analytical terms, he wards of potential criticism by responding to both sides of the polarities. Prout’s (2005, 2011) request for ‘the excluded middle’ as a reassertion of interdisciplinarity in the shape of a meeting place that bridges tensions in childhood studies is just in line with what James (2010b) claims to offer with this metaphorical language:

The conceptualization of childhood studies in this way might therefore offer a way forward for childhood studies as an interdisciplinary project, offering the prospect of a structure within which currently competing and even potentially contradictory perspectives can be woven into the fabric of childhood studies, in a way that enables the apparent tensions between them to make a constructive contribution to the structure of the fabric. […] In the process, it will ensure the continued academic rigour and theoretical development of childhood studies, without the need for creating and sustaining false dichotomies, or sacrificing the potential political power that comes from the recognition of childhood as a single social category, which must be distinguished from adulthood. (p. 497)

And finally we are, once more, witnessing the seemingly impossible project of denying and avoiding the use of dualistic thinking, since—in the same sentence—they are both said to be false and also recognized as having political power in terms of distinguishing childhood from adulthood.

To sum up this part of the analysis, the old binary frame is replaced with one where the duality is skillfully ignored. The existence of polar opposites is treated as non-existent, like when the concept of multiplicities is staged as a middle between dichotomies—although it has its counter pole (singularities)—or in the ignorance that (bio-social) events are in fact part of the dichotomy event-stillness/similarity. The rhetorical operation manages to exclude the counterparts in the vocabulary that are advocated for via metaphorical expressions, legitimizing and also obscuring the interdisciplinary solution given through abstractions.