Conceptualizations of Childhood in the Modern and the Postmodern

Over the last fifty years the debate between modernism and postmodernism has surfaced in the disciplines of social sciences. Epistemologically, there is a shift away from the concept of a “found” world“ out there”, objective, knowable and factual, towards a concept of “constructed” worlds, thus problematizing postulates based on the autonomous, stable, unified, essentialized, coherent and integrated subject capable of rational action, and opening up spaces for a new understanding of subjectivity that is based on provisionality and contingency. From the ashes of these tendencies for fragmentation has arisen what is called the New Sociology of Childhood and new spaces for constructing notions of children and childhoods. The emergent child has an active agency making it possible to construct a more dynamic child, located in a multiplicity of domains. I am therefore undertaking a critical reading of texts in the area of childhood and childhood research located within the modern and the postmodern. I aim to reconstruct the concept of childhood both historically and within modernist and postmodernist paradigm. I finally try to sift out and document some of the implications for the study of childhood.