Global Studies of Childhood

This article proposes a theoretical and empirical approach to studies on contemporary childhood, youth, and adolescence, based on the idea that these categories respond to a modern and hegemonic Western expression of classification that accounts for biologically conditioned stages, through which ethnic, class, and gender particularities influence the way these social subjects experience the world. This statement implies establishing a relation between two concepts: “experiences” and “transitions.” I will explore the notion of experience as the way in which children, adolescents, and youth live through and express the world that surrounds them, emphasizing on the individuals going through the early stages of their life as active subjects in a conscious relationship with the world. The transition concept allows questioning the approach of life ages as successive and discrete stages, whether they are defined on the grounds of biology, developmental psychology, or socio-anthropological studies, and understanding ages as an ongoing process, although marked by milestones that define the life stages acknowledged in each institutional, sociocultural, and historical background. I will illustrate my argument by some fragments of my ethnographic fieldwork with children in San Ignacio, a predominantly rural location in the province of Misiones (northeastern Argentina), in the southern part of the Paraná jungle.

This article builds on Allison James and Alan Prout’s call to focus more on theorizing the social construction of time in childhood and explores how school, as an organization and an experience, influences students’ conceptions of childhood and experiences of being a child. Extending the conception of time of childhood to include their future projections, we assert that aspiring to become an adult, while seeming to diminish the experience of childhood, actually provides motivation and hope to children. We also posit that school’s emphasis on “preparation to become” influences children’s experience in school and “imagined futures” as adults. The article is based on interviews with Indian tribal students between the ages of 9 and 15 who attended school at a residential school serving 25,000 students and at government day schools in Odisha, India.

Childhood in the United States, and in the American South more particularly, has several well-known and popularized constructions, typically divided by social class and ethnic identity. More specifically, Southern childhood is constructed as an either white or black experience, with one’s social world being extremely ethnically segregated in either case. Over the last several decades, as a post–North American Free Trade Agreement immigration boom has brought several generations of Latinos into the American South (in part because of these shifting demographics, the area is now often called the “New South”), this bifurcated popular conceptualization of childhood has been disrupted by the growing presence of Latino children in Southern schools and communities. Building upon Vygotsky’s premise that identity (including ethnic identity) is constructed through a cultural–historical lens, we here use the nascent literature on Latino education in the New South to outline an initial construction of Southern Latino childhood.

Duchenne muscular dystrophy is a progressive muscle-wasting condition that only affects boys, most use a wheelchair by the age of 12 and increasing levels of support and medical intervention are needed as they mature into young adulthood. Medical research is working to find treatments and an eventual cure for Duchenne muscular dystrophy, and this research can require the participation of those with the condition. Therefore, boys and young men who have Duchenne muscular dystrophy were invited to discuss their thoughts on how they might make a decision to take part in medical research, and to explore issues impacting their daily lives. Their accounts highlight experiences of agency and contextualised competence, challenging assumptions of vulnerability and immaturity in those who are young and severely disabled. The findings, based on fieldwork in England, enrich understandings of how such lives have meaning, wherein agency, independence and decision-making capabilities are present and exercised, albeit in ways that may be different to ‘mainstream’ notions of the terms.

Because it is so often said that children are the future, queer theory’s attention to (and searing debates on) queer futurity offers something new and important to studies of childhood. Drawing on and deepening recent attempts to meld the fields of childhood studies and queer theory, I dwell on the contradiction that results from the synchronous assumptions of the child’s a-sexuality and proto-heterosexuality to show how emphasizing sexuality within a discussion of children’s education is constructive. In the service of my interest in the renewal of thought concerning children’s psychosexual development, I offer a critical reading of the It Gets Better social media campaign (particularly, its consequent critiques and revisions). I begin with engagement of Eve Sedgwick’s 1991 seminal essay on queer childhood “How to Bring Your Kids Up Gay” and then, from there, trace contemporary queer theory’s use of the figure of the child and consideration of the impact of “innocence” on childhood. In an effort to consider the contemporary residues of historical violence on theories of “healthy” child development, I also consider how histories of colonialism and trans-Atlantic slavery extend into the future and leave traces on contemporary theories of child development.