Abstract
The communication theorist Robert T. Craig (2008) observes that Disciplines are commonly discussed using certain metaphors. Along with arboreal metaphors (each discipline a branch on the tree of knowledge), what we might call real estate metaphors are ubiquitous in the discourse of disciplines. We speak of disciplinary ‘foundations’, ‘fields’ of knowledge, ‘turf wars’ among disciplines with competing claims to overlapping curricular ‘territories’ and so on. (Craig 2008: 8)
Such metaphors, Craig contends, may in some ways be useful but if taken too literally they are deeply misleading. For disciplines do not occupy clearly bounded, mutually exclusive territories and they also are not built on solid conceptual foundations. We should therefore prefer an alternative cluster of metaphors, and Craig suggests, referring to Shotter (1993), that we speak of a discipline as ‘a conversational community with a tradition of argumentation’. Within this conversation a discipline draws on a specific mixture of intellectual, institutional, and socio-cultural discursive resources. As a conversational community, a discipline participates – along with other disciplines – in a broader conversational community, the conversation of disciplines, from which every discipline derives its identity and coherence.
Childhood studies may be too young a research field yet to claim an identity as a scientific discipline (but perhaps a discipline in-the-making?). However, the growth of the childhood studies field – appearing in the form of study programmes, research centres, journals, scientific associations and organizations, all of them intent on establishing children and childhood as issues of, in and for science – demonstrates at any rate the existence of an animated ‘conversational community’. Childhood too has, from its very start, aimed at sustaining such a community. This is what I wrote in the Editorial for the Childhood issue 19(4), in 2012: From its beginning in 1993, this journal was ‘intended to act as a forum for research on childhood and children, as a forum where disciplines can meet, where findings can be presented and where new understandings and new perspectives can be generated’ (Frønes, 1993). By providing a meeting-place for researchers from different disciplinary backgrounds, the journal would assist in developing the study of children and childhood into a multidisciplinary field and, with increasing familiarity with the work of others and enhanced collaboration across disciplinary boundaries, even towards interdisciplinarity.
In this 25th anniversary year of Childhood, we wish to sustain childhood studies as a conversational community by featuring in each issue of Volume 25 a special section of Conversations. For this second issue, four colleagues from four countries and with different (multi-)disciplinary backgrounds, kindly agreed to participate in an online conversation to take stock of the state of this community, by addressing the topic ‘Cross-disciplinarity in childhood studies: Views, hopes, experiences, reflections’. The participants in the conversation are Claudio Baraldi, a sociologist at the University of Modena and Reggio Emilia (Italy), Ning de Coninck-Smith, an historian of education at Aarhus University (Denmark), Caitríona Ní Laoire, an Applied Social Studies scholar at the University College Cork (Ireland) and Kay Tisdall, a Childhood Policy scholar at the University of Edinburgh (Scotland). – My warm thanks to all of you for endorsing childhood studies as a multi-/inter-/cross-disciplinary conversational community.