Editorial

Childhood

Critical Childhood Studies? 18(2) 147–150

© The Author(s) 2011
Reprints and permission: sagepub.
co.uk/journalsPermissions.nav
DOI: 10.1177/0907568211404511
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In the first article of this issue of Childhood, Spyros Spyrou contends that the raison
d’être around which the interdisciplinary field of Childhood Studies has been built is the
notion of children’s voices. And because of the central place of this notion in childhood
research, he argues, researchers need to critically scrutinize the way they represent chil-
dren’s voices in their work and the assumptions that underpin these representations.
Critical awareness is necessary for researchers who aim to produce a better understand-
ing of childhood and higher quality research, he further argues, and this is all the more
vital if the stated rationale behind the social study of children and childhood is not just to
produce better knowledge, but to contribute to empowerment and social justice for chil-
dren, within the research process but, importantly, also in societal practice.
Such a statement is a welcome invitation to discuss the definition and the rationale of
Childhood Studies. The definition continues to be open to debate, which is hardly surpris-
ing for a relatively new area of scholarship such as ours. The interests in and rationales
for studying children and childhood in an interdisciplinary Childhood Studies frame can
themselves can be various, as also Martin Woodhead writes in the Foreword to a book-
length Introduction to Childhood Studies, published by the Open University Press in the
UK (Kehily, 2004). For some of us, he writes, the interest has been born out of frustration
with the narrow versions of ‘the child’ that are offered by established academic discourses
and methods of inquiry; the appeal of an interdisciplinary Childhood Studies for them is
about a more integrated approach to research and reaching around children’s lives and
well-being, a more ‘joined-up view’ of ‘the child in context’. Such a view has by now also
become a priority for policy and for professional training. For other scholars, Woodhead
(2004) contends, Childhood Studies is built around a rejection of the ‘essentialism’ that is
endemic in traditional theorizing; they favour the recognition of the multiple ways in
which childhood is socially constructed and reconstructed in relation to time and place,
age, gender, ethnicity, class, etc. What has long been ‘hidden’ and naturalized in chil-
dren’s lives could now be seen as socially and historically constructed, therefore always
also ‘political’. Thereby Childhood Studies has been felt also to represent a critique of the
ways children’s lives are organized and regulated, and childhood undervalued in modern
societies. The new, alternative knowledge produced by childhood researchers, by way of
listening to children and conveying their perspectives into the knowledge of the state of
childhood, is meant – and believed – to help in improving the social standing of children
and childhood in social life, and to enhance children’s well-being in their actual every-
day circumstances. In this sense, we might argue that Childhood Studies has the self-
understanding of being critical social science, destined to make a difference in the world.
The belief that Childhood Studies is a critical social science in that it actually is able
to make a critical difference in the world seems evident in much of the Childhood Studies
148 Childhood 18(2)

literature, most obviously perhaps in the choice of research topics which often relate to
issues of children’s rights, social justice and well-being. Still, while being a widely
shared belief, it is to a large extent an unexamined belief. So is Childhood Studies a criti-
cal science? Does the researcher’s commitment to reflexivity make it critical? Which
ways of being reflexive would qualify as critical reflexivity? What, all in all, is implied
by ‘critique’ and by being ‘critical’? These questions have now made a new appearance
within the social sciences.
There is a long tradition of critique and critical inquiry in the social sciences. The
sense of ‘critique’ however derives from an earlier history. According to A Dictionary of
Modern Terms (Fowler, 1987: 49-51) ‘critique’ is a word that came to the English lan-
guage from French, and referred to a piece of writing in the manner of an essay of review,
concerned with the description and judgement of a work of art or literature. The connec-
tion with writing was maintained in the transfer of the word from noun to verb. The
precise reasons for borrowing the term ‘critique’ from French are unclear. The word
appeared in English during a period when a new form of literary culture was appearing,
marked by the emergence of new reviews and by new audiences for literary works, who
were felt to need guidance in matters of taste and judgement. Literature became a two-fold
process: the production of novels, plays, poetry and works of philosophy and history, and
the production of a commentary on them in the form of essays and reviews. Critique,
then, may have been a useful word to describe this relatively new kind of writing, a lit-
erature about literature, concerned with matters of taste, judgement, and advertisement,
a new form for the promotion and circulation of opinion.
A new meaning for critique emerged in England during the 19th century, and again,
the Dictionary tells us, the reasons for this had to do with intellectual developments out-
side England. The German philosopher Immanuel Kant published a series of what, in
translation, became known as critiques. The word recently borrowed from French was
used to translate the German word ‘Kritik’. The provenance of critique now moved away
from literature and towards philosophy, where it designated a mode of inquiry designed
to reveal the conditions of existence for certain ideas and perceptions. Kantian critique
was concerned to discover the nature and limits of human understanding, and found these
in what were claimed as the fundamental structures of human mind. Karl Marx changed
the direction of critique by locating such fundamental structures, not in the human mind,
but in the economic organization of society (Das Kapital. Kritik der politischen Ökonomie,
1867). This became the explanatory ground for why we think, feel and act the way we do,
and in Marx’s writing critique becomes closely concerned with ideology: the purpose of
critique was to reveal ideology at work in thought by referring it to its base in economi-
cally determined antagonisms of class. Thus Marx’s writing forms one episode in the
transformation of Kantian critique into what has subsequently become known as the soci-
ology of science. (Also Weber and Durkheim are central figures in this transformation.)
More recently, the different modalities of critique (here the Dictionary refers to
Marxism, feminism, linguistics, structuralism and psychoanalysis) have all produced
‘critical theory’ which is concerned not only with the detailed analysis and evaluation of
literary works but also their conditions of existence, whether these are discovered in the
structures of culture or language, in the laws of narrative, or in the ideologies produced by
societies divided by class (and gender, ethnicity, etc.). New forms of ‘critical’ study have
Editorial 149

continued to appear and the meanings of critical science have multiplied. Andrew Sayer
(2009: 768) now argues that since the 1970s, there has been a remarkable change within
the social sciences as the rationales for critical research have become increasingly cau-
tious and timid. Before these shifts, in the 1970s, there was considerable enthusiasm for
critical social science that would be avowedly ‘emancipatory’ in intent, and contribute to
the liberation of people from various kinds of domination and oppression. (It is possible to
understand the emergence of the (‘new’) Childhood Studies in the 1980s, at least partly, as
a response to and continuation of the critical thinking in the social sciences of the 1970s.)
Since the 1970s, Sayer (2009) writes, the optimism waned, and with hindsight, some of
the advocates of the 1970s’ critical social science now acknowledge that the critical sci-
ence of the time was insufficiently reflexive and self-critical, and hence too ready to rush
in and diagnose and evaluate social life. Also, the growing timidity in the three recent
decades has been seen to be associated with a growing suspicion of normativity in science
as potentially authoritarian and ethnocentric. The result of this is that critique has often
been reduced to little more than scepticism, coupled with a concern to be ‘reflexive’
(Sayer, 2009). Also the words ‘critique’ and ‘critical’ have become more widely used and
because of this also vastly devalued, the fashion now being to attach the prefix ‘critical’ to
almost any kind of study - for who would not want to claim that their work was critical,
when to refuse it would be to imply that they were ‘uncritical’! (Sayer, 2009).
In his assessment on the causes of this retreat from stronger versions of critique in the
social sciences, Sayer argues that it surely is not just a consequence of the discovery of
dangers of earlier, perhaps rather naïve versions of critical social science, and even less
does the retreat seem a result of any revival of positivist beliefs in value-freedom as a
realizable or desirable goal in the social sciences. The postmodern suspicion that critique
necessarily brings in normativity into the research process may be understood to have
caused some of the retreat, but it may be much more a symptom than a cause of retreat
from critique. Sayer suggests, instead, that the causes of the current uncertainty about the
nature and rationale of critical social research are a product of certain common tenden-
cies in modernism that treat values and ethics as beyond the scope of reason and hence
induce a reluctance to discuss conceptions of the good life, or of well-being, or human
flourishing in social science (on the ‘rise and fall of the fact/value distinction’ see
Davydova and Sharrock, 2003). His conclusion is that critical social science has in fact
never adequately established its rationale, and it is now that its long-standing weaknesses
have been exposed. Even when social scientific critiques were bolder than they are now,
they rarely set out their normative standpoints or their conceptions of the good; instead,
it was widely believed that critiques do not need to be based on such conceptions.
Sayer is in agreement with several other scholars across the social sciences in arguing
that critique may well hide or fail to notice its own normative standpoints, but it cannot
avoid them. The ‘normative turn’ that he and others are now advocating in the social sci-
ences also implies more than just reflexivity, however deepened, in uncovering the pre-
suppositions that underlie research work.
There are some hurdles, however, for a ‘normative turn’ to take place very soon. A
central obstacle is the historic divide between science and ethics that has been institution-
alized in the division of labour in higher education. This makes for difficulties in trying
to unite them. There is also clear resistance to such reunion, evident in worries about
150 Childhood 18(2)

openly normative arguments in the context of science, he concludes. Nonetheless, a

renewed interest in discussing the issue is apparent as an increasing number of books and
journals of various disciplinary backgrounds testify, and researchers engage in develop-
ing openly normative frames for critical research (see, e.g. Bellamy and Castiglione,
2000; Carmalt and Faubion, 2010; Gerring and Yesnowitz, 2006; Olson and Sayer, 2009).
Reflexivity has become a standard requirement in Childhood Studies, as is also articu-
lated by numerous authors of articles published in this journal. However, the discussion
around critical research suggests that also in Childhood Studies steps should be taken
beyond deepened reflexivity.
Childhood Studies has a deep and sustained interest in using scholarship for positive
change in the world. Is Childhood Studies then a critical science? The answer today must
be, in my opinion: not sufficiently so. Critical Childhood Studies implies being critical not
only of our own research practices but the very practices and social arrangements that we
study in the ‘real’ world of children and childhood. Thus, making explicit the normative
foundations of childhood research requires that we also address a number of normative
issues concerning the practices and arrangements ‘out there’, and specify in what particular
respects and for what specific reasons they are problematic. It also asks us to specify what
constitutes a good, or at least a better life for children and for human beings in general. This
means to endorse a ‘normative turn’ also in Childhood Studies. To do so is in line also with
the very interdisciplinary nature of Childhood Studies as it would engage childhood
researchers in discussions on issues that need to be explored and developed in a multi- and
interdisciplinary frame, with colleagues in a range of other disciplines from philosophy
and political studies to psychology, human geography, health sciences and so on.

References
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Human Geography 34(3): 292-308.
Davydova I and Sharrock W (2003) The rise and fall of the fact/value distinction. The Sociological
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Maidenhead: Open University Press, x-xi.
Leena Alanen
University of Jyväskylä, Finland
December, 2010