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A global journal of local and global child research
HANSON, Karl
HANSON, Karl. A global journal of local and global child research. Childhood , 2018, vol. 25, no.
3, p. 269-271
DOI : 10.1177/0907568218779481
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https://doi.org/10.1177/0907568218779481 Childhood 2018, Vol. 25(3) 269 –271
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A global journal of local and global child research
At its launch in 1993, now 25 years ago, the subtitle of Childhood was ‘A global journal of child research,’ but later the editors decided to rearrange the subtitle a bit and changed it into ‘A journal of global child research.’ In her editorial that accompanied this adjust- ment, Virginia Morrow (2007) explained that the mobility of the word ‘global,’ which is since volume 14 attached to ‘child research’ instead of to ‘journal,’ reflects Childhood’s aspiration to promote and publish research on children and childhood ‘in every part of the world’ and by scholars ‘across the globe’ (p. 10). We also find the world ‘global’ in the journal’s lead text that presents Childhood as an international forum for research relating to children in ‘global society.’ Research published in Childhood is indeed not restricted to a specific part of the world but includes theoretical and empirical studies on children and childhood from many different localities as well as from a global perspec- tive. The use of the term ‘global,’ alone or in conjunction with its antonym ‘local,’ is seldom neutral as it can refer to many different meanings (see Albrow, 2012). These range from frames with positive connotations, such as the importance to address world- wide social, economic, and environmental concerns that are important for humankind, or to respect the distinct views and interests of indigenous people, to more depreciative understandings of the impact of neoliberal market globalization, or of narrowminded parochial apprehensions.
What is important for scholarship is the study of the different layers and the complex interconnections between local and global social relations rather than approaching both as exclusionary binaries. This is the aim of the academic field of Global Studies that adopts ‘an interdisciplinary approach to understanding the relation between the local and the global across the domains of social life’ (James, 2012: 757). Established at the turn of the 21th century, Global Studies has several characteristics in common with Childhood Studies, such as the adoption of an interdisciplinary approach (which was the theme of our previous conversation, see Alanen et al. 2018), the inclusion of contemporary and historical configurations and the embracing of critical and of postcolonial perspectives in their study fields. Parallel to the journal Childhood’s incorporation of the study of multiple childhoods, leading journals in the field of Global Studies, such as Globalizations or The Global Studies Journal, that are this year celebrating their 15th and 10th anniver- sary, respectively, also aim to include multiple points of view and multiple interpreta- tions, from many different locations, to the study of many possible trends and patterns in globalization.1 Even if the field of Global Studies aims to look at how globalization impacts the entire social life, it seems to have been only very little engaged with under- standing its consequences for children and childhood. A quick search in Globalizations 779481CHD0010.1177/0907568218779481ChildhoodEditorial
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270 Childhood 25(3) and in The Global Studies Journal, for instance, reveals that none of the published arti- cles had the words ‘child,’ ‘children,’ or ‘childhood’ in its title or among its keywords. As was observed many times elsewhere, the themes that are central for the field of Childhood Studies have only marginally been addressed in broader social science approaches.
As our journal’s subtitle reveals, Childhood has since its beginning reflected on the implications of past and contemporary globalization processes on the lives of children and on our understanding of childhood. In this issue of the 25th anniversary year of Childhood, we publish a third conversation on one of the central concerns of the field, entitled ‘Global/local’ research on children and childhood in a ‘global society.’ It contrib- utes to the aims that we have set with the anniversary volume, that is, as Daniel Thomas Cook (2018) wrote in his editorial that introduced the series of conversations, ‘that ideas must continue to flow in order to have life and to be generative so as to reach out beyond the boundaries of their original inception’ (p. 4). The conversation is the result of an online exchange about how to recognize ‘the global in the local’ and the ‘local in the global.’ The four participants in this conversation, each relying on their empirical research in minority world and majority world contexts as well as on their strong theo- retical backgrounds, have all contributed to enlightening the main stakes of this debate.
They are Tatek Abebe, an Ethiopian social geographer who works at the intersection of youth studies and development studies at Norwegian University of Science and Technology; Stuart C. Aitken, a geographer from San Diego State University in the USA, who conducted extended fieldwork in Latin America; Sarada Balagopalan, a scholar from India who specializes in postcolonial childhoods and works at the Department of Childhood Studies at Rutgers University Camden, USA; and Samantha Punch, a sociolo- gist from the University of Sterling, UK with field expertise in Latin America and in the United Kingdom. The conversation sets off with a series of simple questions about the meaning and usefulness of the terms local, global, and globalized and asks what the major consequences are of global changes for children and childhood. We also investi- gate the sites of knowledge production on children and childhood that for the largest part are situated in the global North/minority world and reflect on how this influences empiri- cal research and theoretical concepts.
When asked about the global evolutions of the last 25 years that have impacted chil- dren and childhood most, the participants indicate how the international children’s rights regime has durably reworked local ideas of what it means to be a child and has influ- enced how we think about childhood. In addition, they also point at the increased social, political, and scholarly attention for the mobility and migration of children as an expres- sion of the intensification of exchanges between the different regions of the world that contributes to distorting the boundaries between the local and the global. Both themes are intimately linked, as Stuart Aitkin observes in his contribution to the conversation by referring to children’s spatial rights that for him not only refer to children’s right to occupy suitable spaces but also include the right to stay put, as well as the right to move.
The globalized economy and its incitement for the global circulation of goods and capital necessitates the globalized mobility of people, including children, who need social and legal recognition of their right to mobility and migration as a global human right that urgently requires further conceptualization (Golash-Boza and Menjívar, 2012). The rec- ognition of children’s right to mobility, that would enable them to have access elsewhere
Editorial 271 to the rights they are locally deprived of, is then only one of the global ideas that might contribute to further connect local and global claims for social justice. By providing a forum for the global circulation of ideas on the junctures between the local and the global, Childhood’s original subtitle could have been amended even further, by seeing it as a global journal of both local and global child research.
Note
1. See the journals’ websites: www.tandfonline.com/toc/rglo20/current (Globalizations) and www.onglobalization.com/journal (The Global Studies Journal).
References
Alanen L, Baraldi C, de Coninck-Smith N, et al. (2018) Cross-disciplinary conversation in child- hood studies: Views, hopes, experiences, reflections. Childhood 25(2): 127–141.
Albrow M (2012) Global Terminology. In: Anheier HK and Juergensmeyer M (eds) Encyclopedia of Global Studies. Thousand Oaks, CA: SAGE, pp. 744–748.
Cook D (2018) This ‘kind of thing’: Twenty-five years of Childhood and counting… Childhood 25(1): 3–5.
Golsh-Boza T and Menjívar C (2012) Causes and consequences of international migration:
Sociological evidence for the right to mobility. The International Journal of Human Rights 16(8): 1213–1227.
James P (2012) Globalization, approaches to. In: Anheier HK and Juergensmeyer M (eds) Encyclopedia of Global Studies. Thousand Oaks, CA: SAGE, pp. 754–757.
Morrow V (2007) At the crossroads. Childhood 14(1): 5–10.
Karl Hanson, Co-editor University of Geneva, Switzerland April 2018
