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Interdisciplinarity – for better or worse

In order to begin to understand why childhood studies, in my view, has to be, fundamentally, an interdisciplinary field of study I return to the 1980s, which marks the beginning of ‘childhood studies’ as distinct from the disciplinary study of children and childhood. The latter has a far longer history and represents a rather different tradition – or set of traditions – from social psychology, cultural anthropology, developmental psychology and educational ethnography (Prout and James 1990). All of these had different things to say about children and childhood through the discrete lens of their individual disciplines. To take just one example, the culture and personality school of anthropology, made famous by the work of Margaret Mead and Ruth Benedict in the 1930–1940s, saw in the study of children and childhood a context within which the paramountcy of culture, as an intervening variable in human development, might be demonstrated. Childhood studies, by contrast, begins, and to some extent ends, with the study of children and childhood. This was a result of the emergence of the new paradigm (Prout and James 1990) that had its intellectual roots in a very interdisciplinary context – the Ethnography of Childhood Workshops that were organised by Judith Ennew and held in Cambridge in the 1980s. And while the rallying call might have come from anthropology, its reach was extensive – for example, into sociology, psychology, history, geography, social policy, law and health. Researchers and practitioners from these diverse fields came together because they shared an interest in a topic – ‘children’ and ‘childhood’. For many, if not most, these workshops were a critical turning point; they offered the opportunity for people to discuss a topic that was neglected in terms of the disciplines from whence they came. Very few anthropologists, sociologists or historians were, at that time, interested in children and childhood; and even mainstream psychology was more focused on child development as a psychological process, rather than on children as subjects of research. So, at the outset, it was a shared interest in a topic that brought disciplines together. The volume Constructing and Reconstructing Childhood (1990), where the ‘new paradigm’ is first elaborated, arose out of these workshops. The papers in that volume represent a heady disciplinary mix that was revolutionary at the time and gave birth to what we now recognise as childhood studies. Thus, although the intellectual roots of the ‘new paradigm’ were predominantly ‘sociological’ and ‘anthropological’ – Prout and James (1990), for example, explicitly state that they are Children’s Geographies Vol. 8, No. 2, May 2010, 215–216