Abstract
Researchers who work at higher education institutions in the field of children’s rights and childhood studies are frequently asked, or ask themselves, what the social relevance is of their academic work. Has our work at the university contributed to making changes in child welfare services, child rights legislation or childhood and youth policies? At the end, did all of this make a difference in children’s lives? There are no simple answers to these questions that we will address by dissecting the intersection between long- and short-term impact and by looking at the impact of new demands for societal impact on the university and how these, in turn, produce contradictory claims on academic scholarship.
Over the last two decades, calls to demonstrate how academic activities have contributed to improving society have drastically increased in all scientific fields and for universities in general and are expected to intensify in the years to come (Van den Akker and Spaapen, 2017). The funding of research is no longer solely based on the assessment of the academic merits of a research proposal but also on its potential social relevance and impact. This might be seen as excellent news for university departments and research centres in the field of children’s rights and childhood studies that have a long tradition to making sure that their research has social impact and contributes to improving children’s position in society. One can argue that the expertise in undertaking research that explicitly aims at impacting policy developments or that originated from collaborations with child rights non-governmental organizations (NGOs) or intergovernmental bodies has given academic children’s rights and childhood studies a comparative advantage over other fields or disciplines that were less concerned with the societal impact of their work. In her account of the history of the sociology of childhood, Berry Mayall (2013) points at the field’s ambition from its origins to contribute not only to the empirical and theoretical study of children and childhood but also to informing policies and practices that have an impact on children’s status around the globe. The field’s utility is relatively undisputed among many people with different backgrounds and interests, including policy makers, child service providers, education professionals or the general public. Discussions about the status and image of childhood or about the competences and rights of children have a bearing on, for instance, discussions about citizenship, intergenerational distributive justice, the limits to state interventions in people’s private and family lives to name just a few (Prout, 2019). Today, childhood studies and children’s rights are socially useful, and one might ascribe the field’s relative academic success, at least in part, to its with hindsight precursory role in social relevant research.
The academic fields of Childhood Studies and Children’s Rights Studies have gained a small but relatively well-established place in the university landscape, even if efforts to maintaining its presence and academic prestige need to continue. In Children’s Rights Studies, a growing number of universities propose higher education programmes, undertake innovative research projects and collaborate with various stakeholders from outside academia. An example that underscores the evolution towards the institutionalization of the field is the establishment of the Children’s Rights European Academic Network (CREAN) that aims to further integrate children’s rights and childhood studies research, education and outreach activities in academia. The network encourages university teaching courses and programmes and acts as a platform for the promotion and exchange of information on scientific research, fosters research collaborations between its members and encourages the use of research in social policy. 1 Another example of how the field has gained academic standing is the establishment of Research Committee 53 Sociology of Childhood within the International Sociological Association (ISA). This group, which was first established in 1990 as a thematic group and became recognized in 1994 as a working group, aims to contribute to the development of sociological and interdisciplinary childhood research. The Research Committee engages with the promotion and dissemination of research on children’s presence and participation in social life that sees children in their social relationships as permanent social structure of society, as social actors in daily interactions and/or as agents of social change, in family, institutions, groups, and communities. 2
To explain the growing demand on higher education institutions to show their societal impact, The League of European Research Universities (LERU) points in a recent position paper at the dramatically changing contexts in which universities operate. The authors refer to the consequences of globalization, the dynamics of the knowledge society in a neo-liberal economic environment and its prioritization of economic growth and job creation as well as various global social challenges such as climate change, migration crisis and political insecurity (Van den Akker and Spaapen, 2017). In other words, the same globalization patterns and their related power dynamics that have consequences for children and childhood everywhere – including the effects of the international children’s rights regime on how people both locally and globally think about children and childhood (Hanson et al., 2018) – have impacted childhood studies and higher education alike.
There is a lot of attractivity in a simplistic linear model of knowledge production that asks universities to produce knowledge that can be as prompt as possible made useful for the economy or contribute to solving urgent social problems. However, such a view that links knowledge production to a direct, almost immediate economic or social advancement meets growing resistance and is not thought to be part of the main aim of universities (Van den Akker and Spaapen, 2017). Directing universities to respond to societal challenges is in tension with their academic autonomy and independence needed for curiosity-driven research. At the exact moment when Children’s Rights and Childhood Studies are being praised by rectors and vice chancellors for responding so well to outside requests for social impact, demands have concomitantly been asked also from within the universities that emerging and socially motivated study fields such as ours include sufficient theoretical and methodological rigour and depth in their endeavours. In parallel with approaches from within Childhood Studies that aim at social impact of its research findings and from within Children’s Rights Studies that lends its academic support for the international children’s rights framework, also more self-reflective perspectives have emerged that critically engage with the contexts in which childhood discourses and children’s rights practices are produced and applied (Hanson, 2014). At least part of the academic research is worried about the field’s slow theoretical advancements or the little influence it has on academic debates within social sciences and humanities more generally. Even if research on children, childhood and children’s rights is attractive for universities because of the field’s social utility and the growing demand from undergraduate students (Prout, 2019) for childhood and children’s rights programmes, the academic ecosystem disposes of incentives to push the field towards the other, enlightenment side of the balance.
Critique on the importance universities should attach to the social impact of their education and research often hints at the market logic that lies behind such demands. Antti Hautamäki (2012), for instance, criticizes the entrepreneurial university that is imbued by the market logic aiming to maximize research and education’s economic value and that stands in contrast to what he calls the ‘science logic’. The latter refers to the ideas that were central in the Humboldtian model of the universities and concern intellectual curiosity, academic freedom and the quest for knowledge as providing the basis for culture, civilization and education. Is there sufficient room for children’s rights and childhood study research that is critical of the categories of thinking employed in childhood and youth policy or that is interested in the study of children and childhood for the mere sake of knowledge itself rather than because there is a need for? (Prout, 2019). Furthermore, if the aim is to have profound, long-lasting societal impact, the most important work would be to engage with the forms of thought and categories and concepts in which we think about children, childhood and children’s rights, for which Leena Alanen uses the German notion ‘Gedankenform’ (Smith and Greene, 2014: 18–19). In other words, the highest level of purchasing societal impact would be to turn away from short-term social impact but engage with the slow work needed to think through epistemological frameworks that potentially have the strongest impact of all.
The call on universities to have social impact is not new and exists at least since the 19th century, but the time span in which social impact should be realized has dramatically shortened. Achieving societal impact was even the raison d’être of universities but this could at least conceptually be achieved not by chasing a linear knowledge production model but through basic research and high-quality education (Van den Akker and Spaapen, 2017). University’s social relevance was not to be measured by the immediate social impact of research programmes but was to be achieved by providing advanced education to the next generation of thinkers, policy makers, managers or problem solvers. There is, in other words, a utilitarian ideal behind both the contemporary demand for the economic and social utility of research results and the historical demand for social impact through the production of new knowledge and the education of future elites. The difference lies in the perspective of a short-term or long-term impact.
What is paradoxical for our field of studies is that during the last 20 years when children’s rights and childhood studies had to gain their academic credentials and hence had to move towards enlightenment or ‘science logic’, the university, as an institution, has, under the influence of globalization, economic neoliberalism and the concomitant increasing marketization of higher education and research, been moving towards the opposite engineering side or ‘market logic’. No wonder that this double movement can lead to uncertainties. As explained in the above mentioned LERU paper, Many individual academics have become uncertain how to attune their various roles within the missions of their institution. As teachers, they want their students to be imbued with the highest levels of knowledge, skills and experience to face major societal challenges in their future careers. As scholars, they want their research to be excellent and to contribute to the global reservoir of knowledge, and at the same time their research should address and help solving societal problems and issues. (Van den Akker and Spaapen, 2017: 9)
One might want Childhood Studies to aim at both long- and short-term social impact. However, in a world with limited resources, this might not always be possible. If choices must be made, should childhood studies preserve its legacy for social impact which has contributed to giving the field legitimacy within contemporary universities? Or should it give up on its ambitions to have short-term social impact and instead buttress its more abstract theoretical ambitions by producing critical curiosity-driven knowledge that engages with the ‘Gedankenformen’ in which we think about children, childhood and children’s rights and explaining these phenomena by relating them to social and economic power structures? And can we include children as meaningful participants in the co-production of new forms of ‘decolonized knowledge’ and hence further enlarge the field’s epistemic diversity (Cheney, 2019)? There are probably as many answers as there are researchers, as the field’s diversity not only concerns theoretical, disciplinary or methodological differences but also ontological, epistemological and axiological ones.