1. family and parenting
2. children

Childhood studies – time for a
new paradigm?
PROF. ALLISON JAMES, UNIVERSITY OF
SHEFFIELD
ICRYNET CONFERENCE, SEPTEMBER 2012
Overview: Childhood Studies
 Where did we come from?
 Short history, some revisions
 Where are we now?
 Diverse fields or interdisciplinary fields
 Where might we go?
 New paradigm –(s)?
In the beginning…..

Childhood studies’ mythology….:
 1970s-80s –
 scholars from sociology, anthropology, psychology, history, law, health gradually
come together
 Ethnography of Childhood Workshops


1990s – new paradigm?
 Childhood as a social construction
 Children as social actors
Other studies of children:
 Late 1800s – children & evolutionary perspectives
 1920s –2000s Piaget & growth of developmental psychology
 1930s –50s anthropology ( Mead, Bateson, Benedict) culture and personality
 1950s –2000s– child-rearing & culture ( LeVine et al; e.g.Tudge 2008)
 1960s – 1980s interpretive sociology (Denzin); ethnography of schooling etc
 1979 – International Year of the Child – global perspective on children's rights
What was new about the new paradigm?
 ‘Childhood’ as a descriptor for a structural feature of
society, not just the phase of biological immaturity
 Ideas about childhood change, reflected in practices
towards children
 Children to be considered as articulate informants
about their own experiences & as co-constructors of
childhood as a social space
 Therefore….

Dominant discourse of childhood as universally shared
experience challenged by all of the above
What was new about the new paradigm?
 Interdisciplinary potential
 James and Prout 1990:
 consider potential ‘emergent paradigm’ has for future
developments in childhood sociology’ (1990:8)
 BUT
 needs to draw on the debates of the social sciences at large –
and contribute to them…if it is not to become an isolated and
esoteric specialism’ (1990:24).
Old shoes…….
 Radicalism of 1980-90s, now commonplace in 2000s
 ‘Children’s voices’ ‘children’s perspectives’

In research:


Shared ontology – childhood as a social phenomenon, children as
social actors
 Growth of child-centred methodologies
In policy:
Children’s rights – UNCRC (1989)
 Best interests

Fractures……..
 Interdisciplinary potential not being fully realised
with re-assertion of ‘disciplinary’ perspectives &
dominance
 Potential for fracture within the academy:
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Geographies of Childhood ( including journal)
Sociology & anthropology special interest groups
History of childhood groups
Early Childhood (as distinct from middle & later)
Children’s advocacy & children's rights links to policy, politics
and practice
Neuro-science developments & resurgence of biologism
Risks…..
 Privileging of discipline over topic risks
marginalizing children once again:

Children as research objects of neuro-science, rather than their
subjects

Childhood as phase in the life course to consider…ideas of
space & place, the role of culture in social reproduction, how
class works as a social division etc.

Childhood as a research laboratory, children’s interests risk
becoming marginalised
Risks….
 Irony of privileging of children’s rights & children’s
advocacy discourses within policy risks:


Return to biological essentialism, potentially threatening to
individual children's rights by downplaying differences
between children

Return to universalism potentially threatening to individual
children's rights by down-playing cultural contexts
What next….?
 Is it time for a new paradigm to avoid childhood studies
 Either
being swallowed up and its insights dissipated
 Or
 Becoming an esoteric backwater…..

Possible futures….
 Focus on generations ( Alanen & Mayall)
Temporality and relationality of childhood – child-adult relations
 Life course & biographical perspectives

 Re-focus on the primacy of topic, rather than
discipline

using a range of disciplinary tools to understand children and
childhood, rather than the other way round, as is becoming
increasingly common.
Interdisciplinary futures
 Prout (2005) The Future of Childhood
 Childhood’s history has witnessed the rise of a ‘radical disjunction
between society and biology’
 does not represent a sustainable way forward for childhood studies’
 childhood studies needs to come to grips with complexity of what
childhood is – a ‘mix of cultural, biological social, individual, historical,
technological, spatial, material discursive’ constructions’
 Does not mean abandoning ‘disciplinary-based studies’ but, instead,
ensuring a ‘meeting place’ of ideas (2005:146).
Interdisciplinary futures
 James ( 2013/4) !!
 Current project: Re-visiting socialization as core to
children's experiences of childhood
 Aiming for child-centred perspective: how do
children grow up and make sense of the world
 Coming to grips with children as both being and
becoming (Uprichard 2007)
Past perspectives (Psychology, social psychology,
sociology)
 Bodily & cognitive development
 Internal rather than external
 Nature with a bit of nurture
 Isolated individuals
 Socialization
 External more than internal
 Nurture with a bit of nature
 Children’s active agency ignored
 Position children at the centre of their lives
 See children as belonging to particular times and
places
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Social, structural , material, economic, political, environmental
conditions
Choices children make
Choices others make for children
Making sense of life experiences for the self & identity
Participating in life as children in the world
Academic interdisciplinary bricolage….
 (1) children have personal lives which, as individuals, they
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reflect on from time to time;
(2) children’s life experiences are fundamentally embodied;
(3) children have biographies i.e. their personal lives are
lived in historical time and encompass changing social and
material environments;
(4) children’s lives are lived in interaction with other people
and other lives, where decisions are taken and choices made,
by children themselves as well as other people;
(5) the structures and institutions that comprise the human
world are experienced by children through the interactions
that they have with them, experiences which are both diverse
and multifaceted.
Sociology and anthropology
 Smart (2007)

To live a personal life is to have agency, and to make choices,
but the personhood implicit in the concept requires the presence of
others to respond to and to contextualise these actions and choices.’
(2007:28)
 Rapport (1997)

‘There is no ontologisation, institutionalization, sacralisation,
objectification or negotiation which does not manifest itself through
personal relations, and which is not animated, maintained, originated
– in a word, caused, by personal relations .’(1997:25).
Sociology, anthropology and history
 Personal lives are not private lives but lived through interactions
 Smart:

[people’s) …self-reflection and also their connectedness with others’
(2007:28
 Rapport:

‘the actual nature of the human world is of individuals in
interaction. This is its causation – the cause of there being human
worlds of culture and society- and its manifestation – the practice of
human worlds is individual’s interactions with one another’
(1997:25)
Importance of history
 Do institutions determine what children do?
 Rapport (2003)

‘individuals are not determined by prior or extraneous conditions
but are always in active relationship with them’ …. ‘the experience
of these conditions is neither preconditioned nor passive’ (2003:
67)
 Stones (2005)

reproduction is contingent , inter alia, on the activity of positiontaking and making and is by no means automatic .’(2005:63)

‘[individuals] should always be thought of as caught up in flow of,
position practices and relations.’ ( 2005:93)
Parallels in cognitive psychology
 Lave and Wenger (1991)



Social interaction critical to learning
Communities of practice
Learning by doing
 Wenger (1998)

‘we cannot become human by ourselves’ (1998:148)
 Smart (2007)

The term ‘personal’ is… significant in denoting the centrality of the individual,
yet avoiding the sense in which it can convey ideas of separateness, autonomy
and the conceptual slide into individualization. So the term ‘personal’ allows
for the role of agency and personal meanings, but also retains notions of
connectedness and embeddedness in and with the social and the cultural.’
(2007:188)
………and narrative analysis techniques!
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HS26FP1SRD
Mm. Yeah. I like say, now I’ve got cereal but I don’t like cereal. Well I like one but like
that’s so (laugh) expensive so.
KE
Which one do you like?
HS26FP1SRD
Erm, you know the crunchy nut clusters?
KE
Yeah.
HS26FP1SRD
Mm.
KE
You like those do you?
HS26FP1SRD
Yeah. Yeah, 'cause we’ve started having pocket money. And, erm, I wanted pineapple.
Erm, er, but then, and my Mum said well get it if you like and I said well, it’s two pound seventy five (laugh) or
something.
KE
Yeah.
HS26FP1SRD
And I s (incomplete word) and I didn’t want to risk my pocket money because of the
cereal.
KE
Yeah.
HS26FP1SRD
So I just kept with the pineapple.
KE
Did you (laugh)
HS26FP1SRD
Yeah, 'cause it
KE
Oh (laugh)
HS26FP1SRD
was cheaper and stuff so.
KE
Would your Mum have bought you pineapple but you had to buy the cereal?
HS26FP1SRD
No. But like I was ju (incomplete word) er, n (incomplete word) n (incomplete word)
Sorry. Erm, well no, she’d buy it t (incomplete word) for me anyway but I didn’t want to risk losing the five
pounds (laugh) if you know what I mean.
 And he hasn’t like he doesn’t contri (incomplete
word) you know how like divorced couples are
meant to give like say a thousand pounds to the
mum. Or whoever’s looking after them, a month.
Then he doesn’t do anything like that so. Over six
months he’s only (incomplete word) he’s only paid
fifty. So that’s like horrific really isn’t it.
 Mum said that like well he’s only got a few years
(laugh) to live and he’s gonna have a massive
heart attack soon. Because he’s like, 'cause he
doesn’t do anything to help himself so
Interdisciplinary approaches – a new (er) paradigm?
 Enables analysis to remain child- centred
 Enables exploration of process over time… how children
get to know about the world
 Enables explanation of individual children’s use of the
knowledge they acquire
 Should help – in the end – theorise how children, in
general, participate in the world and their role in its
reproduction