Thinking About Children and Youth

This section highlights critical and reflexive approaches to the concepts of childhood and youth, framing the scholarship that is reflected in this section and throughout this handbook. In this section, chapters draw attention to the way in which conceptual frameworks constitute what is researched and what knowledge is produced, troubling theoretical orthodoxies and conceptual certainties. From a sociocultural perspective, childhood, youth, and adulthood are fluid categories given definition and meaning by their social, cultural, political, institutional, locational, governmental, and economic contexts. As the chapters in this section and throughout the handbook illustrate, the experience of being a child or young person differs across time and place, but how researchers make sense of this rests on the sets of assumptions, concepts, and frameworks they use. Conceptual frameworks create truths and naturalize ways of thinking, creating the discursive frameworks within which children and young people are understood, managed, and administered. Interrogating dominant conceptual frameworks, the chapters in this section set new agendas for childhood and youth research, engaging in relational analyses and taking a reflexive approach to resist conceptual orthodoxies, rejecting settler colonial perspectives on children and young people, and signaling what a reimagined sociological imagination might look like: one that disrupts traditional concepts of transition to make visible the hopes for and work of making “future presents” that sustain life.