2024-03-20

In childhood studies, the central category of theoretical and empirical inquiry is the child as an active social agent. During the formative period of the field’s development, the obviousness and significance of children's agency were treated unquestionably. However, with the advent of the so-called "new wave" of childhood studies (Ryan 2012) the notion of agency became rather a starting point for a critical reflection on the logic, conditions, meanings, and consequences of children's subjectivity and the child's perspective. This reflection is inspired, among other things, by the ontological turn in childhood studies (Spyrou 2018), non-essentialist approaches to agency, or the vocabulary of complexity studies.

Childhood studies are a form of commitment, a public social science. They aim not only to develop dense, interdisciplinary knowledge about the social position of children, their relationships and experiences, ways of conceptualizing childhood and its consequences, but also to engage in action to increase the presence of children as social actors in public and scientific discourse, highlighting the importance of children's perspectives and rights in all their complexity.

In this issue, we want to examine how the idea of childhood studies resonates in research practice (e.g., how it forces/enables the renegotiation of roles of researcher and researched, what ethical challenges the frameworks of childhood studies pose to researchers, what status researchers give to the child's perspective and the possibilities of accessing it in the course of research, what potentials and limitations of methodology are associated with considering this scientific approach); how it supports the exploration of various areas of children's presence (pl.) and the child (sg.) as well as spaces of producing knowledge about childhood as a social phenomenon. We want to see how intersections between childhood studies and other areas of producing social knowledge generate new understandings and critical reinterpretations of key concepts for childhood studies, such as agency, subjectivity, and participation. We are also interested in examining how this scientific perspective resonates with other approaches and/or disciplines.

We invite submissions of texts focused on the following areas:

• Intersections of childhood studies with other research areas, fields, disciplines (e.g., disability studies, social geography, queer studies, gender studies, cultural studies, posthumanism, etc.);
• Recompositions and new approaches to key concepts in childhood studies: agency, participation, subjectivity, voice;
• Theory and practice of research involving children, as well as methodological and theoretical inspirations in childhood studies, and the potentials and limitations of the childhood studies perspective in studying childhood/ies;
• Childhood studies as a form of public sociology/engaged scholarship: dilemmas of engagement and reporting/disclosing children's perspectives in research practice;
• Troublesome locations of childhood (children in the crisis of homelessness, grassroots movements of young people, childhood in the context of gender identity and psychosexual orientation, etc.).

The editors of the issue (planned as no. 1/25) are:
Aleksandra Zalewska-Królak (University of Warsaw) aleksandra.zalewska@uw.edu.pl
Maja Brzozowska-Brywczyńska (Adam Mickiewicz University) maja.brzozowska-brywczynska@amu.edu.pl

Please prepare your texts according to the editorial requirements available on the website: http://www.kulturaispoleczenstwo.pl/

Deadline for submissions: June 30, 2024.