Editorial - (2021) Volume 6, Issue 2
Department of childhood obesity, china
Received Date: February 08, 2021; Accepted Date: February 17, 2021; Published Date: February 28 2021
Citation: Spyros T. Editorial Note on critical public childhood studies, J Child Obes. 6:2. doi:10.21767/2572-5394.6.2.43
Copyright: © 2021 Spyros T. This is an open-access article distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution License, which permits unrestricted use, distribution, and reproduction in any medium, provided the original author and source are credited.
Childhood Studies to become more public with the added caveat that it should retain its critical rigor while doing so. Yet, despite my stated preference, my interest with this editorial is less to convince that this is indeed a good move for the field and more to encourage a discussion around the issue.
Unbalanced diet, dizziness
Academic settings already engage with a significant public, namely our students, but depending on the research work we do, with other publics as well: NGOs, policy-makers, and practitioners are some obvious examples for our field. Likewise, those of us who carry out more critically-oriented work engage directly with a variety of other publics, often the very groups of children we work with. When such groups are marginalized or oppressed, we frequently take it upon ourselves to defend and support them or to advocate on their behalf. In that sense, Childhood Studies is already, one could argue, a field which engages with diverse publics. So, to call for a public Childhood Studies might be, after all, a question of scope and degree rather than a proposition for a radical new direction for the field. With this qualifier in mind, I would argue then that a more concerted effort to become more public would not only benefit Childhood Studies by expanding its scope and reach but also potentially revitalize it and offer new insights into its remit. At one level, and in order to initiate this conversation, we might ask: for whom do we produce knowledge as a field? Are we simply producing knowledge for a specialized audience of other scholars in the form of books, journal articles or book chapters? The question is important, not simply because it forces us to acknowledge our current limited ability to reach beyond the academy but also because it asks whether we can envision, as a field, a more expanded mission which encompasses other publics.
Granted, each field or discipline might become more accessible and even popular as a result of those few public figures who become iconic because they can speak to wider publics with a voice that can be heard. Sociology had W.E.B Dubois, anthropology had Margaret Mead— gifted public intellectuals whose work reached non-specialists beyond their respective disciplines, entered public debates, and affected public opinion. However, these are exceptional rare.
