Understanding inequalities through childhood studies: a review essay

As an interdisciplinary field, childhood studies has proved to be resilient – often hosted within higher education institutions by departments of education or social work/ social policy and drawing in contributions from across university curricula. It also finds synergies with professional training programmes in teacher, early years and social work training. Childhood studies is a training as well as an education, producing practitioners, researchers, advocates and theorists – sometimes all in the same person. It also convenes an intellectual space where questions of inequality can be approached in a broad and inclusive manner tracing how family life, culture, economy, history and politics intersect in the stark inequities that are captured in measurements of educational performance and life chances. Ideally, the interdisciplinary lens of childhood studies enables us to look at education in historical and cross cultural context, revealing, for example, how schooling becomes implicated in projects of colonialism, nationalism and reform, enabling us to distinguish between the figure of the child as a focus for the national imaginary and the lives of actual children. The three texts reviewed here all have their roots in the pool of interdisciplinary childhood studies, yet express distinct approaches and possibilities of the project. Each engage with the making and remaking of inequality as a focus, yet employ very different methods of enquiry. I approached the task of reviewing these new contributions to the field with excitement but also trepidation. What might they tell us about the state of the field? Do we still want to know these difficult truths during the current ‘war on woke’? In this review I hope to provide useful overviews of the texts while also considering common themes and reflecting on what they might tell us about critical theory within the field of educational research and childhood studies.