Studies of Childhoods in the Global South: Towards an Epistemic Turn in Transnational Childhood Research?

What would a body of literature, focusing on Southern childhoods, look like when epistemologically driven by the demands (social, cultural, economic, political) of the localities in which they are shaped and produced? To answer this question, this book explores locally driven perspectives of childhoods in diverse contexts in the Global South to produce knowledge of Southern childhoods determined, not by Northern priorities and frameworks, but by local needs and contexts.

Given the intensification of global processes and the extent to which the local and the global intersect in the everyday lives of children and their families, this edited volume demonstrates that a focus on the epistemological demands of localities necessarily grapples with global as well as local processes and concepts. Chapters in this collection include empirical research on child participation and activism, schooling/educational experiences, child work and street children. They use methodologies ranging from arts-based methods to participant observation, and engage with theories relating to child participation, agency and vulnerability to produce a key resource on Southern childhoods.

The chapters in this book were originally published as a special issue of Third World Thematics.

Afua Twum-Danso Imoh is Associate Professor in Global Childhoods and Welfare at the University of Bristol. Much of Afua’s work focuses on constructions of childhoods; children’s rights and social and cultural norms; and problematising the binary between the Global North and the Global South as it relates to childhood studies.

Lucia Rabello de Castro is Professor of Childhood and Youth at the Instituto de Psicologia at the Federal University of Rio de Janeiro. She is also Chief Editor of DESIDADES, a Latin American journal on childhood and youth. Her research interests focus on childhood theories and methodologies, childhood and decoloniality, children’s and youth’s social and political participation.

Orna Naftali is the Abraham Miller Chair in Chinese Studies and Associate Professor in the Department of Asian Studies at the Hebrew University of Jerusalem. Her research interests include the anthropology of childhood and youth, gender and the family, nationalism, militarisation, and the nation-state, and children’s rights and legal consciousness in the People’s Republic of China.