PART 1 Continuities and Change

Children are often thought of in terms of number of key questions and debates of change, representing the future. Indeed, this is significance for anyone wishing to engage one of the stable features of modern discourses with children’s media culture from a time- on childhood. In a similar manner, since the based perspective. This introduction maps early days of print, media have been defined out some of the questions and debates that and debated in terms of innovation. These underpin most historical studies of children’s continual mappings of change are themselves media culture in order to clarify the theoretical indications of the dilemmas and challenges and empirical landscape and draw out some of which are taken up and analysed in this first the main implications for future research. part of the Handbook. The contributors set The first argument concerns the very notion children’s media culture within a historical of historical enquiry itself. A popular claim perspective in order to trace the continuities is that we need systematic studies of the and possible changes in the ways in which past in order to understand the present these cultures have been positioned by adults better, and even be in a position to predict and practised by children. In so doing, they the future. Historical studies are based on stress that historical analysis is a necessary an underlying understanding of research in antidote to any simple accounts of the rela- which comparisons across time appear valid, tions between children and media, balancing and so a salient issue is on what grounds such the often grand claims made regarding the comparisons may be made. Most prevalent beneficial or detrimental implications for through much of the past two centuries has children. In pursuing this main argument, been a teleological view of history whereby the authors range widely across theoretical historical development is understood as new conceptions, from a mainly deconstructionist events adding to existing states of affairs like focus on discourses on childhood (Prout) to pearls on a string. Such a view frames standard a mainly socio-cultural focus on practices of histories of childhood (Aries, 1973; Walvin, appropriation (Fleming). These four chapters 1982) as well as most media histories (Briggs were selected in order to display some of these and Burke, 2002). Inspired by philosophers key conceptual approaches and to represent such as Nietzsche and Foucault, historical some of the main fields pursuing historical scholarship from the 1980s onwards began to studies of the relations between childhood argue for the adoption of an archaeological and media culture (sociology, visual culture, view of history. Here, the focus is on literary criticism, film studies). In their deconstruction rather than construction, on differing accounts, the authors take up a detecting possible sediments of practices and

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excavating conflicting claims to power, with discourse of modernity to Reid-Walsh’s the present operating as the starting and end incisive and eye-opening empirical study of point of enquiry.This change of focus is part of analogies of interactivity in children’s media a wider scholarly reorientation in the history since the advent of moveable books in the of science towards shifting ramifications of eighteenth century. power and claims-making, and it surfaces, for If it is, indeed, possible to conduct historical example, in new histories of women (Offen studies of children’s media and their social et al., 1991), children (Stearns, 2006) and uses, then we may begin to ask more ethnic minorities (Gilroy, 1993). In media pragmatic questions about what it is we studies, the clearest examples of this more may learn about today’s media (and even deconstructionist approach appear in histories tomorrow’s) by investigating media in the of technology and new media (Marvin, 1988; past. How have media operated in children’s Winston, 1998). everyday lives in the past, and may we identify The archaeological approach to history has similar functions today? Which aspects of served to undermine a determinist view of children’s relation to media have changed both childhood and media, and it has offered and for what reasons? Comparing media a welcome reflexive component to histori- cultures across time is to begin asking cal scholarship by insisting that analytical questions about the grounds on which we complexity is no less when studying the may study empirical continuities and changes. past that in understanding the present. In so The possible correlations between continuity doing, histories of childhood, for example, and change remain among the most vexed have gained in analytical insight by tracing debates in historiography; this is perhaps commonalities across generations and by the historians’ equivalent of social science highlighting shifting definitions. For example, debates about structure and agency. As Prout the pre-modern definition of youth according (this volume) cogently states, these very oppo- to social status may be resurfacing in late- sitions are not neutral conceptualizations, modern societies permeated by discourses of but are modern constructions. He links the youthfulness to a degree that it becomes less discussion of continuity and change to a relevant to define youth in terms of age, as wider epistemological debate on universalism has been common in modern, industrialized and particularism in which universalism is societies. linked to biological laws and particularism is The archaeological approach to history linked to socio-cultural factors; and he argues tends to offer fairly abstract, macro-level for an inclusive understanding of childhood forms of analysis. Its popularity over the as ‘a heterogeneous biological-discursive- past two decades has meant that academic social-technological ensemble’. attention has moved away from studying This inclusiveness is productive, in that children’s media and their social uses in a it stresses the value of conceptual com- historical context towards critiquing discur- plexity in understanding childhood. Still, in sive constructions of childhood and media terms of empirical analysis, it leaves the culture. This shifting focus brings into view problematic of development, or formative another key question in historical scholarship. change, unresolved; or, rather, it transports Is it at all possible to make distinctions it into a discussion of universalism and between historical discourses and practices, particularism which may be helpful in framing or, as Swedish ethnologist Orvar Löfgren research questions but which is less felic- terms it, Sunday culture and everyday culture itous in seeking to unpack more mundane (Löfgren, 2001)? The authors in this part dimensions of empirical analysis. So, the of the Handbook offer differing answers, question of continuity and change raises ranging from Prout’s meta-discursive stand in fundamental epistemological issues about deconstructing historical notions of childhood the knowledge claims made within different as varying inflections of a dichotomous scientific paradigms (Danermark et al., 2002;

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Schrøder et al., 2003); and it points to scholarship immediately prompts discussions, the necessity of defining which dimension not only of empirical contextualization and of analysis are appropriate for conducting its limits, but of analytical contextualiza- particular types of research. The contributions tion and its possibilities. How much does to this part of the Handbook represent forms the researcher need to know about which of analysis ranging from macro-level (Prout, contextual aspects in order to make a valid Holland) to meso-level (Fleming) and micro- analysis of, for example, children’s film of level (Reid-Walsh). the 1920s? Knowing very little, one detects All contributors to this part of the Handbook only difference; knowing too much, one may endorse the formative role played by media recognize only commonalities. There is room in children’s lives both today and in the past. for reflection on these demarcations in the Prout emphasizes the conceptual importance following chapters, since they illuminate var- played by Vygotsky’s notion of material and ious historical moments in children’s culture symbolic technologies, including language, and offer analytical insights about childhood text and images, mediating between inner across a wide temporal and spatial spectrum. and outer realities through joint practices. The authors in this first part of the Fleming and Reid-Walsh both note how tech- Handbook make a claim for the usefulness nologies of play, such as toys, help constitute of historical studies in understanding the modern, Westernized definitions of childhood complexity of children’s mediatized cultures as an age-bound phase of life defined by of today. In doing so, they also illustrate the removal from economic production, yet important debates for future study. First, all preparing for its gendered realities; and the accounts are by adults and are framed by they both offer insightful examples of the adult eyes and experiences, while children’s conflation of toys as objects of play and media own voices are absent. Attempts have been as symbolic resources for play. The insistence made by oral historians and others to collect on (mediatized) play as a defining feature interviews with children, their diaries and of modern childhood is specifically linked autobiographies (Stickland, 1973; Burnett, by Holland to the visual representation of 1982) and this material, though piecemeal and children as playful innocents set in the midst partial, may operate as a contextual frame of nature, supposedly untainted by civilization for more child-centred histories of children’s and its perceived discontents. Speaking about culture, including irreverent or subversive ‘the marketing of sentiment’, she notes how uses of official cultural forms handed down this imagery has been reappropriated by to the young. When it comes to historical media corporations for posters, press footage, takes on children’s media cultures, children’s and film, offering contemporary audiences own accounts are even sparser, and historical a mental map against which other images audience studies focusing on children are few may be set: of the deviant, the rebellious, the and far between (Drotner, 1988). promiscuous, the victim. The bias of sources may become even When conducting empirical historical stud- more difficult to tackle in future. For while ies, the opposition between continuity and many children around the world produce change quickly transforms into a more an abundance of mediatized communication mundane question of defining and under- today, just how many text messages or chat standing the relations between differences strings are stored, and by which criteria? and commonalities. Moveable books of the How will we know about the significance early eighteenth century display ‘strange’ young people pay to being offline or online, characters such as Clown and Columbine; if studying their social uses is decoupled from dolls dating from the 1920s seem oddly their textual practices? The current focus in lifeless to an untrained eye; while images of internet and mobile research on political and teenagers from the 1950s look exotic with economic implications of new media and on ‘strange’ postures and hair style. Historical the more spectacular cultural practices may

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easily result in a research perspective where REFERENCES children’s own voices figure just as partially as in research on children’s cultures of the past. Aries, P. (1973) Centuries of Childhood. Harmonds- The chapters in this first part of the Hand- worth: Penguin. (Orig. 1960.) book attempt to convey a holistic research Bolter, J.D. and Grusin, R. (1999) Remediation: perspective in studying children’s media Understanding New Media. Cambridge, MA: MIT cultures. Such an ideal prompts discussions Press. Briggs, A. and Burke, P. (2002) A Social History of the over social context and its limits, as we Media: From Gutenberg to the Internet Cambridge: have noted. It equally prompts discussions Polity. on textual boundaries. While it is widely Burnett, J. (ed.) (1982) Destiny Obscure: Autobiogra- recognized that today’s complex empirical phies of Childhood, Education and Family from the media landscape requires equally complex 1820s to the 1920s. London: Allen Lane. theoretical approaches (Drotner, 2002), it is Danermark, B., Ekstrom, M., Jokobsen, L. and less debated what this entails for studies of Karlsson, J.C. (2002). Explaining Society: Critical children’s media cultures in the past. Can we Realism in the Social Sciences. London, Routledge. speak about a simpler media landscape in, for Drotner, K. (1988) English Children and Their Maga- example, the 1920s than the 1960s; and, if zines, 1751–1945. New Haven, CT: Yale University so, does this make it more valid to select a Press. (Orig. 1985.) Drotner, K. (2002) ‘New media, new options, new single medium or genre when studying the communities? Towards a convergent media and 1920s? Questions such as these beg us to ICT research’. Nordicom, 24(2–3): 11–22 (rpt. in reflect on the interlocking and transmuting Nordicom Review, 23(1–2) (2002): 11–22). processes of mediatized meaning-making, on Gilroy, P. (1993) The Black Atlantic: Modernity and the ways in which textual practices have been Double Consciousness. Cambridge, MA: Harvard interlaced also in the past (Bolter and Grusin, University Press. 1999; Peters, 1999). Evidently, the challenges Löfgren, O. (2001) ‘The nation as home or motel? are no less when studying children’s media Metaphors and media of belonging’. Yearbook of practices. As Fleming notes, reflecting on Sociology, 2001: 1–34. his own reminiscences of a favourite toy, Marvin, C. (1988) When Old Technologies Were New: to articulate the child’s perspective at the Thinking About Electronic Communication in the Late Nineteenth Century Oxford: Oxford University time would not be accessible to any research Press. technique in the methodological toolkit. Offen, K., Roach Pierson, R. and Rendall, J. (eds) (1991) In this introduction we have mapped out Writing Women’s History: International Perspectives. some of the main challenges that are involved Basingstoke: Macmillan. when approaching the relations between chil- Peters, J.D. (1999) Speaking into the Air: A History of dren and media from a historical perspective. the Idea of Communication. Chicago, IL: University of A number of these issues tread on ground Chicago Press. familiar to media studies and historiography Schrøder, K.C., Drotner, K., Kline, S. and Murray, C. in general. Others are more specifically linked (2003) Researching Audiences. London: Edward to the particular socio-cultural position of Arnold. children in modern, Westernized societies. Stearns, P.N. (2006) Childhood in World History. New York: Routledge. This demonstrates that the research agenda Stickland, I. (1982). The Voices of Children, 1700–1914. that the authors of this first part draw up Oxford: Blackwell. has much to offer major research traditions, Walvin, J. (1982). A Child’s World: A Social History just as it feeds on their conceptual advances. of English Childhood, 1800–1914. Harmondsworth: Children’s media culture, now, as in the past, Penguin. cannot feasibly be understood in splendid Winston, B. (1998) Media, Technology and Society: isolation from other scholarly insights and a History. From the Telegraph to the Internet interventions. London: Routledge.

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Culture–Nature and the Construction of Childhood

Alan Prout

… simultaneously real, like nature, narrated, about what today would be referred to as like discourse and collective, like society (Latour, evolutionary biology. The heyday of Child 1993: 6). Study, as the movement inspired by Darwin came to be known, lasted from the 1880s through to the second decade of the twentieth INTRODUCTION century, though its influence lasted much longer than this. During the intervening How childhood has been constructed and period, childhood has continued to exert a understood, both contemporaneously and in fascination over scholars from a wide range the past, is a key concern for scholars of disciplines, a range so wide in fact that it of children and the mass media. Changing encompasses the natural and social sciences childhood and changing media, and the as well as the humanities. Over this time, the shifting and reciprocal relationships between leading discipline (in the sense that it imparted them, is the context for many of the different a new vigour to the effort) has changed, with strands of study discussed in this volume. In the baton being taken up at various times by this chapter I will focus on one side of that medicine, psychology and sociology. Along relationship: the constitution of childhood as the way, important, indeed crucial, insights a phenomenon and the problem of studying its have come from anthropology and history, complexity, heterogeneity and ambiguity. The whilst many other disciplines (for example, purpose of this, however, is to sketch out the geography and literary studies) have made theoretical grounds for an enhanced dialogue significant contributions. Today, childhood between childhood and media studies. studies is emerging as a distinct multi- or inter- Although there were antecedents, the study disciplinary field of study in its own right. of childhood in its modern form is often Its ambition and promise, difficult though understood as beginning with Darwin’s efforts it is to accomplish, is to draw on these to understand child development, an effort different disciplinary perspectives, holding

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them together in a more or less coherent modernist thinking, but also has, I want to whole. suggest, a particular salience to the trajectory One way to understand the emergence of taken by childhood studies during the modern contemporary childhood studies as an inter- or period. This has, in its different phases, tended multi-disciplinary field is to trace its historical to zigzag between the poles of culture and development through the nineteenth and nature. It is, I suggest, by breaking out of the twentieth centuries. In the chapter, therefore, conceptual limitation of this culture–nature I will sketch its different moments and phases. opposition that childhood studies can traverse In particular, I will examine three key strands and project itself across a wide range of of thinking: the Darwin-inspired Child Study disciplines. However, the means that allow movement and the later re-emergence of an thinking of childhood in a complex way, as evolutionary biology of childhood; the cre- a biological–discursive–social–technological ation of paediatric medicine, its relationship ensemble, have taken almost the whole of the with child psychology and its extension into twentieth century to appear, assembling and concerns with the social conditions of chil- accreting along a circuitous route. dren’s lives; and, finally, the development of Why should such a theoretical reconfigu- social constructionist accounts of childhood ration be of concern to those interested in at the end the twentieth century. children and the media? The answer to this At each phase of its emergence, the perspec- question lies in the relationship between child- tive, with both its strengths and limitations, of hood and media studies. A number of media whatever discipline happened to be dominant studies scholars (for example, see Hengst at a particular time shaped how children have (2000) and Livingstone (1998)) have been been studied. Nevertheless, despite the wax- critical of contemporary childhood studies for ing and waning of disciplinary contributions, its neglect of the media in children’s lives. the process of forming childhood studies In this vein, for example, Buckingham (2000: took place in a framework characteristically 118) writes: modernist in its mode of thinking. According to Bauman (1991), the basic project of … it has paid very little attention to culture, to modernity was the search for order, purity the media, or even children’s use of commercially produced artefacts more generally… In the process, and the drive to exclude ambivalence. As a it has effectively neglected the mediated nature of consequence Bauman (1991: 14) writes: contemporary childhood.

The horror of mixing reflects the obsession with True, this criticism is aimed specifically at that separating… The central frame of both modern relatively recent strand of childhood studies intellect and modern practice is opposition – more precisely, dichotomy. that has been shaped by the sociological tradition. Nevertheless, the point is well Modernist thinking is marked by the pro- made. For, if contemporary studies of children liferation of such dichotomies. The division have neglected mediatization and the artefacts between childhood and adulthood, and their associated with it, this is, I contend, part of a association with various qualities (such as more general tendency in childhood studies rationality, dependency and competence) is to eclipse the role of material entities (such as an example of this. It is also well illustrated bodies, technologies, artefacts) in constituting by modernist social theory (see Jenks (1998)), childhood. In line with much sociological which proceeds by dividing the social world thinking, emphasis is placed more on the into discrete aspects, each set in relation to its linguistic and symbolic aspects of social opposite: structure versus agency; local versus construction than on the material aspects, global; identity versus difference; continuity especially technological aspects. Unlocking versus change; … and so on. A particular that conundrum, one deeply entangled with dualism, that of nature and culture, is, modernity’s tendency to hold nature and however, not only a very important axis of culture in opposition, is, I suggest, in

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the interests of both childhood and media Lavalette, 1994; Cunningham and Viazzo, studies. 1996; Hendrick, 1997; Heywood, 2003). This Such a move is currently being made within process, which took most of the nineteenth childhood studies. Prout (2000, 2005) and Lee century and some of the twentieth century (2001), for example, draw on ideas such ‘actor to achieve even in the then industrializing networks’ (Latour, 1993) or ‘assemblages’ societies, was a continuation of the course of (Deleuze and Guattari, 1988) to explore events described by Aries. By the end of the the potential for understanding childhood nineteenth century, conceptions of children as a complex, heterogeneously constructed as innocent, ignorant, dependent, vulnerable, phenomenon. Such concepts break down the incompetent and in need of protection and boundaries that separate the material and the discipline were widespread. In general terms, discursive, the biological and the cultural, by the start of the twentieth century these the technological and the social, and open up ideas had been diffused through most of the the possibility of merging these different per- different social classes and groupings within spectives and their disciplinary correlates. My industrial societies. They supported and were, suggestion is that both childhood and the mass in turn, reinforced by the effort to construct media will benefit from such an approach and the school and the family as the ‘proper place’ that it could form a set of shared conceptual for children. This emerged as an intended and resources that will deepen their dialogue. unintended effect of many different strategies and practices, including the struggles of the early labour movement (Montanari, 2000), CHILDHOOD AND MODERNITY attempts at social reform and efforts at ‘child saving’ (Platt, 1977; Pearson, 1983). The Before enquiring into the trajectory that overall effect of these practices was the childhood studies has taken it is necessary establishment of the idea that children do to note that its emergence took place during not properly belong in the public space but a historical period when childhood, or at should be located in the private domestic least the modern form of it, was itself under space of home or in the specialized and age- construction. The ground-breaking research segregated institution of the school and related of the French historian Aries (1962) is institutions. This idea of childhood, as an ideal generally credited with first recognizing the if not a reality, has been propogated globally. historical specificities of childhood. Later As Cunningham (1997: 7) comments: work (Archard, 1993; Cunningham, 1991; Hendrick, 1997; Heywood, 2001) has ques- … between the late seventeenth and mid-twentieth centuries there occurred a major and irreversible tioned some of his assumptions, methods shift in the representations of childhood, to the and conclusions. Nevertheless, the idea that point where all children throughout the world were between the seventeenth and twentieth cen- thought to be entitled to certain common elements turies there took place the construction of a and rights of childhood. distinctively modern conception of childhood remains a powerful one. This modern form of childhood was characterized by its heightened DARWINISM AND THE CHILD STUDY separation from adulthood, a state of affairs MOVEMENT accomplished through a labour of division carried out in many different spheres. One Childhood studies, then, emerged alongside very important arena of this was the prolonged the modern idea of childhood.As noted above, process by which children, first in Europe its beginnings are often located in Darwin’s and the USA and then increasingly but very work, produced at a time when the mass of unevenly across the globe, were excluded children did not in fact experience childhood from full-time paid employment but included as a distinct, protected and extended period in compulsory schooling (Cunningham, 1991; of ‘growing up’. This kind of childhood was

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confined primarily to aristocratic children a juvenile stage in which individuals are no and those of the emerging middle classes. longer dependent on parental care for survival Nevertheless, childhood as an idea and but are not sexually mature is an important as an ideal against which the lives of evolutionary puzzle in search of a solution. poor children were measured exercised an At first blush such a phenomenon would animating influence. Darwin seems to have seem contrary to evolutionary theory, because been caught by its fascination. Based on the main direction of evolutionary pressures observations of his son, he published two would seem to be towards reproducing books, The Expression of Emotions in Man as much and as quickly as possible – a and Animals (1872) and Biographical Sketch pattern that is, indeed, seen in many species. of an Infant (1877). These triggered a wave of However, as Pereira insists, the emergence interest in child development in the form of the of a juvenile stage of development can also Child Study movement. In large measure, this be understood as an evolutionary strategy Darwinian legacy tied childhood studies in its (Pereira, 2002: 26): earliest phase to a largely biological view of childhood. Hendrick (1997: 48) sums up the The general function of animal juvenility is modu- lation of growth and the onset of reproduction. In situation thus: many cases it functions to maximize the rate and/or extend the duration of growth, therefore allowing it In effect, Child Study helped to spread the tech- to escape the period during which small size renders niques of natural history to the study of children, it particularly vulnerable to predation and virtually showing them to be ‘natural creatures’; through its ineligible to compete for reproductive opportunity lectures, literature and the practice of its influential …. Conversely, when small size entails little cost or members, it popularized the view that the child’s when large size is penalised by the environment, conception differed from that of adults, that there juvenility often is abbreviated or does not occur were marked stages in normal mental development; in a life history. Juvenility is also diminished when and that there were similarities between the mental adult size can be attained by or soon after the worlds of children and primitives…. exhaustion of parental provision, as in many birds and mammals, or when early reproductive effort The Child Study movement per se was in does not compromise further growth. decline by the first decade of the twentieth century. Its legacy was its emphasis on In this sense, an extended period of juvenility the biological roots of behaviour and its in humans, longer than that found even in preference for an (albeit nineteenth century) other primates, is a key feature of the idea of scientific knowledge – themes that evolution of the human species and is continued, primarily through polarized dis- associated with other species characteristics, cussions about ‘nature’ and ‘nurture’, to swirl such as the development of sophisticated around childhood studies until the present linguistic communication and the use of day. However, it was not until the end of tools. This human evolutionary strategy can the twentieth century that a more completely be understood as resulting in a long life, realized evolutionary biological account of a long period of immaturity, few offspring childhood started to be expounded. Like but high levels of care, survival, mental Darwinist Child Study, this has its starting agility and culture. The distinctive human point in the idea that humans are a species with pattern of growth and development over an evolutionary history, but it adds elements life course has some specific features that from contemporary mathematics (especially make it different from even close relatives games theory, see Maynard Smith (1982) and such as chimps. In particular, Bogin (1998) Axelrod (1984)), primatology (Pereira, 2002), argues that, compared with other primates, and physical anthropology (especially work human evolution has involved the creation on the co-emergence of human language, of a new phase, which he terms ‘childhood’, sociality and tool use – see Ingold (1993)). in the ontogenic pattern. For example, the Through this combination it is suggested human child uses an enormous proportion that the observation that some species have of metabolic effort on brain development,

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greater even than chimps, and this continues However, at the time, viewing children as rapidly after birth. Human children, therefore, natural primitives played into nineteenth and display a pattern involving very extended twentieth century concerns with Empire and juvenility, the intense acquisition of skills race. The child became an instance of the and a prolonged period of socialization and ‘Other’, a homologue for all such ‘primitives’ developmental plasticity. As a reproductive and a demonstration of the gulf that divided strategy this allows mothers to share care the ‘civilized’ from the ‘uncivilized’ (see of young with other competent members Christensen (1994)). This divide was applied of the social group (fathers, grandmothers, both to internal social divisions, such as the other young), freeing them to give birth abiding concern of nineteenth and twentieth to other young. Developmental plasticity century social policy with how to handle allows a long period of interaction between the ‘troublesome classes’, and to external the individual and the environment, leading ‘Others’, like the subjects of imperial rule, to greater adaptedness and greater survival deemed racially inferior. However, alongside rates. its ideological kinship with such ideas, the Child Study movement can also be seen as part of another key development CHILDREN, BIOPOLITICS AND THE of the nineteenth century: the construction NATION STATE of children as a concern of the Nation. The advent of compulsory schooling in the At the end of the twentieth century, this industrializing societies of Europe and North reappearance of an evolutionary biological America gave children as a social group an account of childhood, together with new unprecedented visibility. Much ‘biopolitical’ ideas about the role of language, tech- concern, to use Foucault’s term, was generated nology and material artefacts in human through research and discussion about the life (see also below), created the pos- physical and mental state of what came to be sibility of thinking of childhood as a seen as a national resource for international heterogeneous biological–discursive–social– military and economic competition. Children technological ensemble. However, this possi- became a target for investment and were seen bility took almost the whole of the twentieth as the ‘children of the nation’ (Hendrick, century to appear, unevenly accreting along a 1997: 49). complex and circuitous route. So, at the start Armstrong’s (1983) work suggests that this of the twentieth century the proximal effect of trajectory can be seen particularly in the the Child Study movement was paradoxical, development of paediatric medicine from the for, despite its roots in a biological conception late-nineteenth to mid-twentieth century. A of the child, it helped to create an intellectual crucial step in it was the migration of child climate in which childhood was no longer seen surveillance from the clinic to the community to occur naturally. It did this by promoting the setting, a move that created an enormous idea that childhood needed the attention and new terrain for panoptical practices. This, he intervention of experts. The opening of this writes: space accounts for many of the developments in the study of children in the decades up … further refined this (medical) gaze, these techniques of analysis, to fix them, not on individual to and beyond the Second World War. What bodies so much as the interstices of society; (it) started as an essentially biological project, was a mechanism of power which imposed on locating childhood as a natural phenomenon, the spatial arrangements of bodies the social was marked by a growing awareness of the configuration of their relationship … a device, social and cultural ramifications of childhood. above all else, for making visible to constant surveillance the interaction between people, normal Childhood studies thus described an uneven and abnormal, and thereby transforming the trajectory during which it gradually accreted physical space between bodies into social space such elements. traversed by power. At the beginning of the

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twentieth century the ‘social’ was born as an although these were still relatively small autonomous realm. (Armstrong, 1983: 9–10) samples and often carried out in special observation domes rather than in the settings Armstrong is, of course, not the first to and communities in which the children lived. borrow this account of the emergence of However, the surveying of children in the disciplinary society from Foucault. Donzelot family and community found its clearest (1979) makes essentially the same point in expression internationally in the post-1945 relation to the surveillance of the family in era with the institution of the longitudinal France. As he points out, children were the survey. For example, in England, four main points of access for the surveillance of the studies have been started, in 1946, 1958, 1970 French family, the great moral cause that and 2000. These continue to track cohorts sanctioned the breaching of its privacy. In the of children and their descendants. The 1958 USA too, child saving was an influential and study, for example, is currently tracking the important social movement (Platt, 1977) that grandchildren of those born at the start of opened up the family to inspection. the study. These longitudinal studies had their In addition to health and the family, counterparts in countries around the world children were also enmeshed in another set and were added to by many cross-sectional of panoptical powers, exercised through mass studies looking at different aspects of child schooling. Indeed, all the areas of surveillance growth, development and rearing. During the overlapped. The understanding of childhood second half of the twentieth century, then, disease as a specific and separate branch of a vast amount of data on many of the key medicine emerged alongside the extension physical, behavioural and emotional patterns of the modern ideal of childhood to greater of growth were established, especially for and greater numbers of children from a children growing up in the industrialized wider and wider range of social classes. countries. Normal development and growth, Through the intersection of educational and the product of hundreds of thousands of medical regimes childhood became one of the individual measurements, was used as the main targets for new practices of preventive template against which the abnormal could be medicine, applied, for instance in surveillance identified. practices such as health visiting, school In such studies the development and health inspections, clinics for mothers and growth of nationally representative samples children, and so on. By the first quarter of of children could be tracked over time. the twentieth century, then, mechanisms were Through this the object that was constructed in place in the UK, and with parallels in was not the pathology of the individual other countries, through which the health of child, as had proliferated in the pre-war children could become a topic in its own right period, but a picture of the ‘normal child’. and be monitored, studied and measured in It was this emphasis on the normal, together systematic ways. with the developmental perspective, that However, it was not until the Second World gave paediatrics its distinction as a medical War that a panoptical device was created specialism. Even more crucially, through this through which the social aspect of childhood it was possible to draw together a range was brought to a high level of refinement. of disciplinary inputs under the umbrella of This device was the child development survey. paediatrics: In the UK, the survey technique can be traced back to the nineteenth century, where … such diverse aspects of growth as the bio- the work of Rowntree and Booth springs chemical and immunological, the intellectual, the emotional and the social. (Apley, cited in Armstrong immediately to mind, and in the medical (1983: 59)) sphere was developed in the inter-war period. Studies of child development had been carried This broad multidimensional perspective out in the USA by Gesell during the 1920s, could be and was readily endorsed by social

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scientists. Indeed, such a statement describes concentrated in nurseries and schools. Their the arc from the biological to the social, which object of intervention was often the family, paediatrics had described over the previous and, as many have noted, the child became period. the entry point for the state and other agencies Interwoven in the growth and extension of into the family. From the 1920s onwards, and medical studies of children was the emergence up to the present day, there was a proliferation of psychology, the discipline that perhaps of professions concerned with identifying most directly took on the mantle of the children’s abnormality and attending in some Child Study movement. The history of child way to it: Child Guidance Clinics, educational psychology in the twentieth century is a highly psychology services, school attendance offi- complex matter, which it is here possible cers and so on. These practices have, in turn, merely to gesture towards. In the UK, as demonstrated a huge appetite for childhood well as other industrial societies of the time, studies, represented in the libraries of books its growth overlaps substantially with the and papers, and the hundreds of professional developments in paediatrics described above. associations and research institutes that are its In 1944, for example, the British Paediatric inheritance. Association created a Child Psychology Sub- However, towards the end of the twentieth Committee concerned to challenge too firm century there was growing academic criticism a line between physical and psychological of how psychology handled childhood. This disabilities. Illingworth’s (1986) landmark came from both within and outside psy- paediatric text, The Normal Child, was as chology as a discipline. Rather than seeing concerned with psychological development as childhood as a universal constant, whether it was with the physical, and these concerns biological or cultural, in the post-Aries were both rolled up into the wave of surveys intellectual landscape it became possible that aimed to establish patterns of growth and to think of childhood as a variable and their correlates. changing entity. This insight was greatly Whilst child psychology has developed strengthened by the findings of social and a large number of different theoretical cultural anthropology, which reinforced this schools and strands (Freudianism, Skinnerian possibility. These arguments marked psy- behaviourism, Piagetian developmentalism, chology in many ways, such that by the Vygotskian activity theory and so on), its 1970s a critical psychology began to emerge concern with the individual child won an that was much more sensitive to the social almost hegemonic position among the emerg- context of individual behaviour. Significant ing social sciences of the early twentieth and influential statements of this new thinking century. As Rose (1989) has suggested, its in psychology were, for example, found wide range of topics and approaches to in volumes edited by Richards (1974) and children, which he terms the ‘psy complex’, Richards and Light (1986). In the second became closely entwined with the emergence collection, Richards and Light (1986: 3) of health and welfare policies and practices commented: around children. These too were, according to Rose, a form of biopolitics through which the A central theme in the earlier volume was the crit- icism of a psychology based on universal laws that state and other organizations sought to define were supposed to hold good across all societies and and regulate normality. Like paediatricians, at all historical times. It was argued that terms such psychologists set about examining and testing as “the mother” and “the child” not only conveyed children in order to define the ‘normal’ a meaningless generality but misrepresented the range of functioning and behaviour. In the relationship between individuals and social worlds and portrayed social arrangements as if they were process, they constituted what was abnormal, fixed laws of nature. pathological and in need of intervention. These processes straddled the main locales Another statement of this approach came of children’s lives, but they were especially from Bronfenbrenner (1979) in the so-called

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‘ecological model’ of child development, social to thinking about childhood did not which envisions child development at the happen uniformly. The process was more akin centre of a set of social contexts, including to a genealogy in which certain branches local ones such as the family, household or practitioners of the disciplines concerned and neighbourhood, and more distant ones were able to create new, more socially aware such as social structure and policy. Another, versions of their craft whilst leaving other perhaps more radical, has emerged from streams of thinking more or less untouched. Vygotsky’s (1962, 1978) concern to develop The picture was one in which the addi- a psychology that could encompass social tion of the social to the biological and and biological concerns, and which assigns psychological formed a blurred and frag- crucial importance to the mediating role mented mosaic. Perhaps the underlying reason of artefacts and technologies. According to for this was that, in general (and apart Vygotsky, society provides the symbolic tools, from pioneers such as Vygotsky, who was both material and linguistic, which shape the only just becoming recognized in Western development of thinking. Cognition can, thus, thinking), the methodology was generally not be separated from the conditions and additive. In a characteristically modernist practices of life with which a child grows up. mode of thought, nature and culture were Indeed, thinking is not seen as located in the thought of as two more or less equivalent head of an individual, but in the interaction, but opposite principles. The key questions including the material practices, taking place were about ‘how much’ of each could be between the individual and the collectively seen as constituting the mix. The implicit constituted and historically situated culture dualism of such an additive method is well created through joint activity (for example, captured by Cole’s (1998) discussion of the see Engeström (2001)). three models of nature and culture that he sees as dominating theory about children’s psychological development in the twentieth SOCIAL CONSTRUCTIONISM AND THE century. Each sees an interaction between SOCIOLOGY OF CHILDHOOD ‘biology’ and ‘culture’, but gives a different weighting to them. The first is represented By the 1980s it was clear that childhood by Gessell, who recognizes both biology studies, through its engagement with children and culture as important but who places as biological and psychological entities, had most weight on endogenous processes of brought itself, in both paediatrics and psychol- biological growth. In this view, whilst the ogy, and the practices of biopolitical surveil- social environment can affect the intensity and lance associated with them, to a position timing of development it cannot influence its where the importance of society and culture basic direction, because this is determined by was clearly recognized. This is not to say, inherent, maturational mechanisms. The basic however, that the way in which the social was picture is the same in the second stream of incorporated into thinking was necessarily psychological thought, behaviourism, except adequate. Social life was usually imported that in this case the estimate of quantity is into medical and psychological thinking under reversed. The biological material is likened the rubric of a shared scientific method, which to an inert lump of clay, which is shaped and claimed the production of objective and value- sculpted by the action of operant conditioning, free facts in relation to social, psychological whose source is the social environment. The and biological phenomena.Although the outer third, represented by Piaget, is a somewhat reaches of these disciplines may have started more sophisticated but still dualistic account. to question the universal applicability of Here, equal weight is given to biological science, in general terms social life was and social environmental factors, which admitted to knowledge only on the same terms are pictured as interacting together, with as nature. Furthermore, the accretion of the individuals also an active factor in shaping

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their developmental pathway as they adapt to as social actors has given rise to a rich variety their environments. of empirical studies that re-examine familiar Inadequate though these dualistic formu- settings of children’s lives with greater lations may be, they each had the merit sensitivity to children’s active participation in of viewing the child as heterogeneous, as them, often finding evidence for their agency somehow both biological and social. This and co-constructive capacities, as well as additive approach to culture and nature was, exploring the limits of them. however, to be radically disturbed in the final The second approach to be critiqued decades of the twentieth century through the by social constructionists was the devel- appearance of an influential set of ideas that opmentalism dominant within psychological came to be known as ‘social constructionism’. discourses of childhood. It was argued that In its most general sense this term refers to developmentalism tends to set up adulthood what is almost axiomatic in the sociological as the standard of rationality against which tradition: that reality is made in specific social children are judged deficient, that it renders circumstances, varies across both history putative stages of growth as natural, and and culture, and is open to change, both assumes a universality to childhood which intended and unintended. Building on the historical, social and cultural studies suggest historical insights of Aries (1962), social that it does not have. constructionism in childhood studies stressed These critiques were informed by a number the variable, culturally relative and plural of theoretical resources deployed to high- character of childhood. It did this, as Wyness light the social character of childhood. The (2006: 20) notes, by ‘… separat(ing) the sociology of childhood drew heavily on the cultural and biological aspects of childhood, interactionist sociology, developed primarily with the former taking precedence over the in the USA during the 1970s, which had latter… (a)ccentuating ideas, sentiments and problematized the concept of socialization as meaning rather than the material elements …’. rendering children too passive (for example, Although social constructionism was see Dreitzel (1973)). Another strand of widely influential across the social sciences, thinking applied the basic sociological notion it played an especially important role in the of social structure to childhood by arguing creation of the sociology of childhood (Jenks, that it should be seen as a permanent feature 1980, 1990; Prout and James, 1990/1997; of society (Qvortrup et al., 1994). Writers Stainton Rogers and Stainton Rogers, 1992; such as Mayall (1994) combined this with Thorne, 1993; Mayall, 1994; Frones, 1995; the influence of feminist ideas in order to Corsaro, 1997; James et al., 1998; Christensen portray children as a minority group, subject and James, 2000; Lee, 2001; Wyness, 2006). to oppression by adults. This body of ideas, emerging in the 1980s and Prout and James (1990/1997) synthesized 1990s, was critical of two concepts that had a number of different critical elements in dominated academic discussion of children in a programmatic statement for the ‘new the previous period. The first, socialization, paradigm in the sociology of childhood’. I will was criticized primarily for rendering children quote its six points in their entirety: as passive; it was argued that children should be seen as active participants in social life and as actors with the potential for agency. 1 Childhood is understood as a social construction. In addition, because socialization focuses As such it provides an interpretive frame for contextualizing the early years of human life. attention on its outcome in adulthood, it Childhood, as distinct from biological immaturity, marginalizes the process of growing up and is neither a natural nor universal feature of human sidelines children’s own actions, meanings groups but appears as a specific structural and and cultures. For this reason it was suggested cultural component of many societies. that children should be seen as ‘beings’ rather 2 Childhood is a variable of social analysis. It can than ‘becomings’.1 The emphasis on children never be divorced from other variables such as

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class, gender, or ethnicity. Comparative and cross- are told, stories that we recount and stories that we cultural analysis reveals a variety of childhoods create. rather than a single and universal phenomenon. The implication of this statement for a 3 Children’s social relationships are worthy of study in their own right, independent of the perspective social constructionist view of childhood is and concerns of adults. clearly spelt out: ‘we regard “childhood” as 4 Children must be seen as active in the construction constructed through its telling … there can and determination of their own social lives, the only be stories and storytellers of childhood’ lives of those around them and of the societies (Stainton Rogers and Stainton Rogers, 1992: in which they live. Children are not just passive 12, my emphasis). This position entails a subjects of social structures and processes. double move: culture is made dominant, 5 Ethnography is a particularly useful methodology whilst nature is excluded (except perhaps as for the study of childhood. It allows children a more stories about nature); at the same time, culture direct voice and participation in the production of is itself reduced to narrative practices. sociological data than is usually possible through Of course, the insight that childhood is experimental or survey styles of research. 6 Childhood is a phenomenon in relation to which discursively constructed is very important. the double hermeneutic of the social sciences is Showing how socially situated discursive acutely present (see Giddens, 1976). That is to say practices apprehend and construct different to proclaim a new paradigm of childhood sociology aspects of childhood is illuminating. Nev- is also to engage in and respond to the process ertheless, it stands in danger of becoming of reconstructing childhood in society. (Prout and merely a reverse discourse, declaring ‘culture’ James, 1990: 8) (reduced to language or even narrative) where previously had been written ‘nature’. Equally In addition to creating a new emphasis on important, because the world is divided into children as social actors and highlighting the natural and the social/cultural, the char- children’s agency, social contructionism’s acter of the world in which children actually benefit was that it problematized and destabi- grow up is misapprehended. Consider, for lized taken-for-granted concepts of childhood. example, the following statements (Maybin It insisted on the historical and temporal and Woodhead, 2003): specificity of childhoods and focused on Childhood is a social phenomenon ... Childhood their construction through discourse (for contexts and social practices are socially con- example, see Jenks (1982, 1990)). However, structed. There is not much ‘natural’ about the whilst this energized an important new environments in which children grow-up in and wave of social studies of childhood, it spend their time: for children in Western societies mainly centred around home, classroom, and unwittingly entrenched the culture–nature playground, as well as in cars, buses and other forms dualism through which childhood studies had of transport, in shopping malls and discos. These are zizzagged throughout the twentieth century. human creations that regulate children’s lives. Through it, the separation between nature and Although these statements usefully draw culture was heightened in an overreaching work of attention to the population of children’s lives purification. The mediation that goes on by artefacts of one sort or another (like between culture and nature, which the additive the ones listed above), by gathering them approach of paediatrics and psychology had up under the category of the ‘social’ it at least recognized, was occluded. A strong misrepresents what an artefact is. In fact, statement of this perspective came from Rex such a statement only makes sense if one and Wendy Stainton Rogers (Stainton Rogers wishes to separate out nature and culture, and Stainton Rogers, 1992: 6–7). For them, forcing all entities to belong to either one or the childhood is created through narrative the other. In reality, there is much (but not practices. They write, for example, that: everything) about technological artefacts that The basic thesis … is very simple. We live in a world is ‘natural’, just as there is much (but not that is produced through stories – stories that we everything) that is ‘social’. In them, natural

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materials and processes are ordered (more terms, modernist thinking seems to block all or less successfully) around human purposes, the escape routes and cover all possibilities. interests and meanings. As such, they have Critically, however, Latour suggests that an ambiguous quality, neither purely natural this credo has eventually been undermined by nor purely cultural; they are exactly hybrids another great but unacknowledged work of of culture and nature. modernity – that of mediation – for, whilst modernity separated Nature and Culture in its conceptual schema, it simultaneously CULTURE AND NATURE proliferated actual, real, material hybrids of RECONFIGURED them. Every device, machine, technology is neither pure nature nor pure culture, but a net- This point has obvious relevance to the worked set of natural and social associations. mass media, which depend upon and operate Modernity’s submerged, unacknowledged but through material artefacts – be they based crucial work is the proliferation of such hybrid on ‘old’ technologies like print or the ‘new’ culture–nature entities, which Latour terms ones like electronic and digital devices. As hybrid socio-technical networks. The scale of the proliferation of technologies and artefacts their proliferation has now become so great proceeded through the twentieth century, that the modernist edifice of Nature–Culture social scientists began to ask new questions opposition has become insupportable. about the role of technology in social life. In making this general point Latour is not Their answers have produced new ways alone. For example, Haraway (1991) urges of thinking, not just about artefacts and the importance of the ‘cyborg image’ for technological devices, but through this also understanding feminist politics in an age when about the relationship between culture and the human and the technical are conspicuously nature. These new formulations challenge the merging. We cannot, she suggests, understand assumption that the world can be divided modern societies except by understanding the into these two mutually exclusive kinds of ways in which we, as humans, are produced entity. A number of different thinkers have within and are inseparable from socio- addressed this possibility, but Latour (1993), technical and biological networks. Similarly, in his book We Have Never Been Modern, in Deleuze and Guattari’s (1988) writing, the makes a comprehensive case for reconfiguring world, including its human and social parts, the relationship. The essence of his argument is seen as a set of assemblages constituted is that what has been called modernity consists from heterogeneous elements. Their vision is of a double set of practices. On the one a very broad one, taking in wide sweeps of hand, there is the work of purification, human and pre-human history, encompassing through which the spheres of nature and a Darwinian view of human life in which culture have been kept separate, with nature human existence is seen in the context of assigned to ‘science’, thought of as a culture- the evolution of life. The Enlightenment free, socially neutral practice that produces belief in the uniqueness and separateness of truth. Modernist discourse is constructed as humans is no longer regarded as tenable, a set of extremely powerful interlocking but and human life has to be seen in terms of paradoxical concepts, which until recently its emergence from, connections with and have proved difficult to crack open. Nature is dependence on the heterogeneous materials simultaneously treated as both transcendent that make up the world. Deluze and Guattari of society and immanent in the practices decentre the human world, seeing it in the of science, a human activity that promises context of broader physical and biological unlimited possibilities. Society is similarly processes. Their discussion pays a great deal both immanent (with humans free to construct of attention to characteristics of the human it as they wish) and transcendent (with humans species, such as technology and language. unable to act against its laws). Seen in these Indeed, they see the emergence of the human

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species as involving the modification of the from heterogeneous materials (biological, function of the hand and the mouth in a social, individual, historical, technological, way that makes possible the use of tools and spatial, material, discursive, …) and emergent language. This led to the creation of what through time. In this approach, childhood is they term a ‘social technological machine’(an not seen as a unitary phenomenon, but as a ensemble of ‘man–tool–animal–thing’) and multiple set of constructions emergent from a ‘semiotic machine’ (or ‘regime of signs’). the connection and disconnection, fusion and These assemble heterogeneous materials – separation of these heterogeneous materials. humans, animals, plants, minerals – in entities Each particular construction, and these come that mediate nature and culture and which in scales running from the individual child produce new capacities to act and new fields to historically constituted forms of childhood, of power. Technologies, artefacts and devices have a non-linear history, a being in becoming of various kinds, including those associated that is open ended and non-teleological. with the media, play a central role in this Second, such a perspective could link process. What it is to be human is thus childhood and media studies across these decentred. Rather than seeing humans as different scales of social research and enquiry. isolated from the world, human capacities and At the relatively large scale, information and powers derive from their connection with it. communication technologies play a crucial Human history is the process of borrowing role in the changing (material and symbolic) from the non-human world and thus creating construction of contemporary childhoods. new combinations and new extensions of the During the early and mid-twentieth century, human body and the mind. children were wrapped up in layers of Bringing these insights to the study of protection, including family, home, school childhood, Lee (2001: 115) has noted that: and welfare institutions. However, towards the end of the twentieth century this set of … humans find themselves in an open-ended swirl arrangements began to unravel. The strong of extensions and supplementations, changing their boundary around the family home, which powers and characteristics as they pass through different assemblages …. Looking through Deleuze constituted it as a private sphere, began and Guattari’s … eyes we do not see a single to weaken. The growing entry of women incomplete natural order waiting to be finished by into the labour market significantly affected human beings, we see many incomplete orderings the division between the public, secular that remain open to change…a picture of human world of work, which had previously been life, whether adult or child, as an involvement in multiple becomings …. Deleuze and Guattari have monopolized by men, and the private sphere of given us a framework within which to compare the family. The home increasingly became the (…) various childhoods…. Whether children are in locus for the consumption of all sorts of new or out of place, or whether new places are being technologies. ‘Labour saving’ technologies, made for them, we can ask what assemblages they such as the refrigerator and the washing are involved in and what extensions they are living through. machine, responded to, but also helped to make possible, the emergence of a new This perspective (see also Prout (2005)) has division of labour between men and women. a number of implications for the relationship This created the possibility of further and between childhood studies and media studies. broader forms of consumption; and with First, it opens the way for a more coherent this, ideas about choice, rights and decision- (but not necessarily more unified) multidisci- making arose. The media played an important plinary practice of childhood studies. Through role in this, conveying into the ‘private’sphere a reconceptualization of childhood’s ontol- of the home ideas about consumer choice, ogy, it could move towards seeing children as well as information and values about a as neither ‘natural’ nor ‘cultural’, but rather multitude of other topics. So it was that as a multiplicity of ‘nature–cultures’; that the split between the public and the private, is, as a variety of complex hybrids constituted one of the oppositional dichotomies through

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which modern childhood was represented and skates, wrestling figures and wrestling rings, Barbie constructed, began to weaken. As Lee (2001) dolls, Gameboys and so on …. notes: Media-related artefacts are just a part of this The form of patriarchy practised in the family heterogeneously populated world. But, as she home was dependent on the sustainability of men’s shows, whatever their specific affordances, position as exclusive interface between the family they are not merely props for social inter- and the world of production. As long as productive action; rather, they are embedded in and are work belonged to men, and as long as men could rely on finding employment, the family home could part of social processes as much as the human remain a place of ‘innocence’ and all within it actors are. Throughout her ethnography she could remain trivial. The private, secret space of the explores how the field of possibilities from family home involved an infantalisation of children which children can draw such supplements as much as it did an infantalisation of women. and extensions is limited. Some people and The outcome of the encounter between child- things are available to some children but not hood and the information and communication to others, and it is often, she argues, these technologies is uncertain and still emergent. limitations that shape the outcome of inter- However, it is clear that, whatever direction actions, especially the struggles that children it takes in the future, it has, for the moment, engage in with each other and with adults. begun to create shifts in children’s position Ogilvie-Whyte (2003) shows how the agency and the character of childhood. Through their of children is, in part, an effect of their rela- associations with media and communications tionship with such artefacts, commenting that technologies the reach of their experience is … in their discussions of such issues (whether it be extended and the range of the images, facts football boots, trainers or any other things) children and values that they encounter is multiplied. have an implicit recognition that they can extend This occurs within the context of their existing their agency as collective in some senses. At times everyday lives and not as a disjuncture from they recognize that they can extend their agency through assemblages with some actants but also it, suggesting that it can be played out in that, likewise, some assemblages – some actants – many different ways. It is clear, however, may impair their agentic powers. that new socio-technical assemblages can extend children’s reach into worlds of ideas In drawing attention to this, her analysis and information previously unavailable to maintains the focus on children as social them, giving them the potential power to actors, retaining this valuable and energizing multiply these beyond those contained within contribution of social constructionism the physical and temporal boundaries of their to the study of childhood. However, by everyday locales (Prout, 2005). showing how children’s agency is produced In the smaller-scale settings of children’s through both linguistic practices and their lives the perspective offers a way of under- relationships with material artefacts, she standing how children enrol and are enrolled overcomes and renders unnecessary its by a large range of artefacts. This point is tendency to one-sidedly emphasize the role emphasized by Ogilvie-Whyte (2003) in her of language in social relations. ethnography of a Scottish school, where she comments: CONCLUSION In the micro setting of the Hillend playground it becomes more than apparent that the majority of social relations are held together in the interaction In this chapter I have sought ways in which of humans and non-humans. A cursory glance to merge the concerns of childhood studies shows that the landscape of the playground is char- with those of researchers in the field of acterized by small groups of children – each group bound together by an object or objects of sorts. children and the mass media. To do this The types of objects are diverse indeed – footballs, I have retraced the steps of childhood studies, beyblades, beyblade stadiums, skateboards, inline uncovering its history of multidisciplinarity

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