Productive encounters: Examining and disrupting socio-cultural perspectives on childhood(s) and youth across global societies (original) (raw)

Childhood, or a socio-cultural view of childhood, is in desperate need of new ways of theorizing and understanding children's role in various cultural and social contexts. As this editorial discusses, sociology of childhood has long struggled to find its ways into the normative discourses in sociology, for example, child-study, children's rights, and child-adult relations and to be inclusive of socio-cultural traditions that connect to an anthropological discipline. In this Special Issue, I argue that additional caution and disruption needs to occur as scholars think about the constructs of childhood, youth and adolescence and the traveling ideas about these constructs across global contexts. In this Special Issue, scholars take on the task of theorizing childhood/children in relation to various socio-cultural contexts. While I do not claim a particular or "right" sociology or anthropology of childhood here, I instead argue for a disruptive socio-cultural view of global childhood(s). I also raise concerns about commonplace sociological perspectives, such as the status and role of children and childhood in global societies, which often reify childhood, children, and young people as vulnerable, nonagentic subjects in society. As the articles in this issue illustrate, childhood, adolescence, and youth are categories that cannot be fixed across global societies.