Abstract
My call in this editorial is for Childhood Studies to become more public with the added caveat that it should retain its critical rigor while doing so. Yet, despite my stated preference, my interest with this editorial is less to convince that this is indeed a good move for the field and more to encourage a discussion around the issue—in that sense, my call is meant to be preliminary. After all, fields do not follow individual injunctions, but move and develop in ways which are impacted by multiple forces which coalesce at particular times, many of which escape any individual’s control.
A concern with becoming more public has been an ongoing preoccupation for many disciplines and fields of study. Much of the discussion often revolves around questions of relevance and impact. How relevant is our discipline or field beyond academia? What kinds of public concerns are we responding to and how much impact do we have? In recent decades, there has been a more systematic attempt to address such questions in fields like sociology and anthropology, where explicit fears of becoming too obscure and irrelevant to the ongoing challenges faced by humanity, have sparked productive dialogues.
In a much influential presidential address in 2004, Michael Burawoy (2005a) called for a public sociology that would address diverse publics and become a legitimate enterprise within the field. Burawoy argued that a public sociology would not negate but rather complement the work of professional, critical and policy sociology. Burawoy’s address has been discussed and debated since then with both supporters and critics contributing towards a more productive dialogue about sociology’s mission and trajectory as a discipline. In anthropology, Robert Borofsky (2019) has recently levelled a harsh critique on the field calling for a paradigm shift and a move towards a public anthropology which does not seek to sharply differentiate itself from a well-established applied anthropology but attempts to become more relevant and responsive to contemporary public concerns in public ways. That Borofsky’s book was endorsed by 35 prominent anthropologists is perhaps suggestive about the recognition and consensus around this need. I suggest that Childhood Studies might also benefit from a more explicit discussion around this issue which expands on Karl Hanson’s recent editorial in Childhood (Hanson 2019) on the societal impact of academic childhood and children’s rights research. If nothing else, a dialogue around this issue will encourage the field to reflect on its own practices and interventions as well as its overall remit.
So what does it mean then to call for a public Childhood Studies? It first and foremost means to engage with diverse publics beyond the scholarly worlds of academia and research. Those of us who work in academic settings already engage with a significant public, namely our students, but depending on the research work we do, with other publics as well: NGOs, policy-makers, and practitioners are some obvious examples for our field. Likewise, those of us who carry out more critically-oriented work engage directly with a variety of other publics, often the very groups of children we work with. When such groups are marginalized or oppressed, we frequently take it upon ourselves to defend and support them or to advocate on their behalf. In that sense, Childhood Studies is already, one could argue, a field which engages with diverse publics. So, to call for a public Childhood Studies might be, after all, a question of scope and degree rather than a proposition for a radical new direction for the field. With this qualifier in mind, I would argue then that a more concerted effort to become more public would not only benefit Childhood Studies by expanding its scope and reach but also potentially revitalize it and offer new insights into its remit.
At one level, and in order to initiate this conversation, we might ask: for whom do we produce knowledge as a field? Are we simply producing knowledge for a specialized audience of other scholars in the form of books, journal articles or book chapters? The question is important, not simply because it forces us to acknowledge our current limited ability to reach beyond the academy but also because it asks whether we can envision, as a field, a more expanded mission which encompasses other publics.
Granted, each field or discipline might become more accessible and even popular as a result of those few public figures who become iconic because they can speak to wider publics with a voice that can be heard. Sociology had W.E.B Dubois, anthropology had Margaret Mead—gifted public intellectuals whose work reached non-specialists beyond their respective disciplines, entered public debates, and affected public opinion. However, these are exceptional cases and quite rare.
A humbler and more realistic, yet no less significant, attempt at moving beyond the status quo of knowledge production and consumption in Childhood Studies could come from a collective reflection on how we wish to act on the world as a field. No doubt, this is easier said than done! Some will readily dismiss such a move as unnecessary for our scholarly work whose parameters should remain more clearly and narrowly delineated. Others might object on the grounds that public engagement is rarely if ever supported or rewarded by the institutional structures, universities included, in which we work. And, even others might pinpoint the dangers of diluting the quality of the knowledge we produce when we reach out beyond the academy. Thus, to be fair, the institutional structures in which we operate often discourage (and rarely reward) the development of a more public profile for us as scholars and for the fields we work in, despite proclamations to the contrary. Nancy Scheper-Hughes, a well-known public anthropologist, sums up the constraints and biases which work against scholars who seek to play a more public role. Though her reflections focus on anthropology, the same could safely be said for other disciplines and fields as well: Scholars who want to reach diverse publics – through popular writing, speaking, or participating in social activism – are not only under-rewarded by their universities, they are often penalized for ‘dumbing down’ anthropological thinking, cutting social theory into bite-sized ‘sound bites’, ‘vulgarizing’ anthropology, sacrificing academic standards or (in the US) for playing to the anti-intellectual, illiberal American popular (working) classes (Scheper-Hughes 2009:2).
Paradoxically, at the same time, there are calls from various stakeholders about the need for research to increase its social impact and for scholarship to become more socially engaged. Funding schemes, for instance, increasingly ask that applicants demonstrate the social relevance and potential impact of their proposed research. In that sense, there are both constraints and opportunities and there is clearly much to ponder on when considering whether it is advisable or important to move in the direction I propose (see Hanson 2019). But despite reservations and objections, I would still argue that there are important benefits that could accrue to the field with such a move.
In one important sense, by becoming more public, Childhood Studies has a great deal to offer by informing and illuminating public debates concerning children, their families and communities but also wider issues of public interest in which the field has a stake whether that is climate change or surveillance capitalism. If Childhood Studies’ scholars fail to engage with such issues, there is no doubt the gap will be filled by others. The immense knowledge that we accumulate as researchers about the lives of children need not be restricted to certain narrow, pre-defined audiences—most often academic ones—nor should its quality be threatened or compromised because it escapes the narrow confines of academia. The challenge is to channel the field’s critical insights through accessible public interventions, a point I will discuss more further down.
However, becoming more public is not just about offering the world knowledge that we produce from our privileged standpoints. It is also about informing our theories and practice with public concerns that stem from children’s everyday lives and, likewise, informing their struggles with our research work and findings. Work on children’s rights (but not just), including participatory approaches to research, have often been used by Childhood Studies’ scholars (though not always with the necessary critical rigor) to come closer to and engage meaningfully with diverse publics of children. There is certainly much potential in the field to broaden and enhance these engagements in ways that foster new knowledge productions which speak to public concerns. The new understandings that emerge from such public encounters can help Childhood Studies become more decentered yet also more connected to issues of public interest that transgress a mere focus on children and childhood, a move in itself which might increase the field’s public relevance (see Spyrou 2017).
Undoubtedly, to engage in mutually transformative dialogues with our publics we need to overcome our conventional modes of scholarly communication and make our knowledge productions more accessible to our various audiences, including lay ones. We might seek, for instance, new and more expressive forms of communication ranging from writing blogs, public essays or op-eds to giving public interviews, creating and participating in podcasts or even experimenting with more performative, artistic styles when and where that is possible. Today, social media affords new and unprecedented ways of communicating our research to diverse publics though that potential should be treated with the necessary care. As Kieran Healy points out, Social media, as a communications technology, disintermediates you, your colleagues, and your publics. It lets you talk to one another and to the wider world, not as a form of publicity in the old-fashioned sense, but rather as part of an ongoing conversation that in principle can be seen and joined by others, for good and bad (2017:777).
These new affordances might entail new skills which are necessary for communicating our research to such diverse publics. It is one thing to write for a scientific journal and another thing to write a blog or create a podcast. But though much of our professional training prepares us for the former, quite often drying out our expressive capacities, rather than the latter, that is not a challenge which is insurmountable. Academic teachers, for instance, are often called upon to teach at different levels and adapt their messages to different audiences not only within the university but also to various audiences in the communities they work in. Communicating effectively with new publics in new ways can certainly be learned!
At the same time, learning new skills in communicating and sharing our research goes hand in hand with the need to forge new, collaborative alignments beyond academia with key publics such as journalists, TV and radio producers, documentary filmmakers, artists, and activists. A critical public Childhood Studies would need to engage with such key publics to tap into public debates and conversations. Scholarship in its conventional form will certainly achieve limited reach without such facilitators, mediators, and translators.
By now the reader might wonder why I specifically call for a “critical” public Childhood Studies. My argument would be that while a public Childhood Studies will need to foster relations with diverse publics and produce knowledge which is accessible to these publics, it would also have to maintain its scientific rigor and critical capacities. Put another way, while it is important to engage in social critique and to be oriented towards social justice that seeks to overcome the oppression of subaltern publics, a critical public Childhood Studies would also have to be robust and reflexive as a result of being public (Feagin, Elias and Mueller 2009:82–83; see also Burawoy 2005b); it will have to retain, in other words, a critical and reflexive stance towards its own knowledge practices and engagements (see Spyrou 2018). In practice, for example, this might also mean that, as scholars, we avoid becoming partisan even when we stand in solidarity with social movements struggling for children’s rights while still not shying away from being critical towards these same movements when warranted.
To publicly engage with issues about which the field has a stake by offering informed perspectives based on research insights should not, in my opinion, be construed as violating one’s legitimacy as a scholar. On the contrary, it is a responsible act afforded to those who are privileged to have such insights. If politicians, policymakers, and ordinary citizens have a right to participate in debates about the normative foundations of society, there is no good reason why scholars could not offer their informed perspectives on matters of social significance. For instance, a critical public Childhood Studies can facilitate the translation of children’s worlds and perspectives to wider audiences as well as more specialized and specific publics and offer informed interpretations which speak to issues of political significance. Moreover, our unique insights into children’s lives offer us unparalleled opportunities to make, and not just respond to, public issues (Scheper-Hughes 2009:2). As Burawoy (2005a:264) explains, the task in that case may be “to make visible the invisible, to make the private public, to validate these organic connections” and in the process create or even transform the publics we engage with (Burawoy 2005:265).
My call for a more critical public Childhood Studies however is not a call for popularizing the field, at least not in the sense of becoming more appealing to the masses. Popularizing a field of studies entails its own risks because of the danger that what we produce for the masses fails to meet the standards of scientific rigour and critical scrutiny. Rather, my call is about the need to enter public debates and to offer critical perspectives which are currently absent, and which would illustrate the value of the field’s knowledge productions. It is about challenging the taken-for-granted worldviews held by people and offering informed alternatives and possibilities for the future. The insistence on maintaining a critical outlook while engaging with wider and more diverse publics ensures the field’s integrity and renders it responsible and accountable for its interventions and engagements. It is also a responsible act, to the extent at least that all scholarship entails a sense of responsibility to others. And, last but not least, it is a recognition that we are not simply accountable to our profession but to various stakeholders and publics who are in one way or another implicated in our knowledge productions. As childhood researchers working in a world confronted with multiple and pressing problems, we need to wrestle with the political and ethical implications of our work with children and do so responsibly (Green 2018).
My preliminary call for a critical public Childhood Studies is a call for making this expanded vision for the field a legitimate and integral part of its evolving mission. A more socially engaged and public Childhood Studies that insists on being critical—at times, a force of discomfort which seeks to alert, unsettle, and provoke, at other times, a force of possibility, imagination and change—and accountable to the publics it seeks to serve, might be able to harness its untapped potential as a field and to remain current and relevant for our times. If, like other social scientists, we are story tellers of sorts, and if we think that the stories we tell are important, we need to think not just about what we say but also about how we say it and to whom. This might be, at the end of the day, yet another challenge for Childhood Studies, and one it might decide against; nevertheless, it is in my opinion a question worth reflecting on now that it has reached maturity as a field and might benefit from a renewed, inspiring and engaged agenda for the years to come.