Reimagining Childhood Studies

Reimagining Childhood Studies incites, and provides a forum for, dialogue and debate about the direction and impetus for critical and global approaches to social-cultural studies of children and their childhoods. Set against the backdrop of a quarter century of research and theorising arising out of the “new” social studies of childhood, each of the 13 original contributions strives to extend the conceptual reach and relevance of the work being undertaken in the dynamic and expanding field of childhood studies in the 21st century. Internationally renowned contributors engage with contemporary scholarship from both the global north and south to address questions of power, inequity, reflexivity, subjectivities and representation from poststructuralist, posthumanist, postcolonial, feminist, queer studies and political economy perspectives. In so doing, the book provides a deconstructive and reconstructive dialogue, offering a renewed agenda for future scholarship. The book also moves the insights of childhood studies beyond the boundaries of this field, helping to mainstream insights about children's everyday lives from this burgeoning area of study and avoid the dangers of marginalizing both children and scholarship about childhood. This carefully curated collection extends beyond critiques of specified research arenas, traditions, concepts or approaches to serve as a bridge in the transformation of childhood studies at this important juncture in its history.

Table of Contents:
Preface 1. Introduction: Connectivities…Relationalities…Linkages..., Spyros Spyrou (European University Cyprus, Cyprus), Rachel Rosen (UCL Institute of Education, UK) and Daniel Thomas Cook (Rutgers University, USA) Part I: Spatial and Temporal Challenges and Interventions 2. Childhood, Culture, History: Re-thinking 'Multiple Childhoods', Sarada Balagopalan (Rutgers University, USA) 3. Geographies of Play: Scales of Imagination in the Study of Child-made Things, Karen Sánchez-Eppler(Amherst College, USA) 4. Thinking the Adult-Child Relationship with Existentialism, Clémentine Beauvais (University of York, UK) Part II: Rethinking Materiality and Political Economy 5. Childhood (re)materialized: Bringing Political-Economy into the Field, Jason Hart (University of Bath, UK) and Jo Boyden (University of Oxford, UK) 6. Decolonizing Childhood Studies: Overcoming Patriarchy and Prejudice in Child-related Research and Practice, Kristen Cheney (International Institute of Social Studies, Netherlands) 7. Children's Geographies and the 'New Wave' of Childhood Studies, Peter Kraftl (University of Birmingham) and John Horton (University of Northampton, UK) Part III: Decentering the Agentic Subject of Childhood Studies 8. Panaceas of Play: Stepping Past the Creative Child, Daniel Thomas Cook (Rutgers University, USA) 9. Queer Young People of Color and the Affects of Agency, Stephen B. Bernardini (Rutgers University, USA) 10. Politics and the Interview: Unraveling Immigrant Children's Narrations and Identity Performances, Stavroula Kontovourki (University of Cyprus, Cyprus) and Eleni Theodorou (European University Cyprus, Cyprus) Part IV: Engagements with Political Subjects and Subjectivities 11. Who is (to be) the Subject of Children's Rights?, Matías Cordero Arce (Independent Scholar, Young Offenders Institution (14-17 years), Spain) 12. Reimagining Disabled Children within Childhood Studies: The Challenge of Difference, Mary Wickenden (UCL Institute of Education, UK) 13. What Space for a Children's Politics? Rethinking Infancy in Childhood Studies, David Oswell (Goldsmiths, University of London, UK) References Index

About the Author :
Spyros Spyrou is Professor of Anthropology and Sociology at the European University Cyprus, Cyprus. He is also the founder of the International Childhood and Youth Research Network. Rachel Rosen is Associate Professor in Childhood at IOE, UCL's Faculty of Education and Society, University College London, UK. Daniel Thomas Cook is Professor and founding faculty of Childhood Studies at Rutgers University –Camden, USA. He is co-editor of Childhood: A Journal of Global Child Research.

Review :
This book is a very welcome addition to the critical literature in Childhood Studies, timely in the questions raised and insights provided. Disruption, dialogue and descent are core, lending an authoritative focus to re-thinking the field to a more outward looking stance, scaling up and confident assertion of its contribution to knowledge. A thorough and highly engaging read that I will have as core reading for my students. In recent years, the excitement and possibility that characterized the emergence of the 'new childhood studies' in the 1990s have largely been replaced by stagnant frameworks, self-referential methodologies, and an often celebratory focus on the figure of the agentic child. Reimagining Childhood Studies diagnoses and offers multiple ways out of this academic mid-life crisis. A provocative and forward-looking response to big questions from a range of disciplines, this book is a must-read for every scholar researching with and about young people in the twenty-first century. This is a genuinely important volume. Transdisciplinary in its reach and ambitious in its breadth, it challenges the reader to think anew on topics from materiality to agency and children's rights. Reimagining Childhood Studies signals a maturing field of study, and is essential reading not only for scholars of childhood, but for all those interested in new thinking on the structure societies and social relations. Reimagining Childhood Studies revisits key debates while charting a more complex and nuanced future for childhood studies. It raises rarely asked questions and puts forward perspectives that seem to be marginal within the current debates in the field. By bringing together interdisciplinary approaches and conceptual lenses, the book is replete with innovative ideas that postgraduate students and researchers of childhood will certainly engage with for decades to come.