ABSTRACT
An important implication of my argument is that childhood studies, a field that has been emerging for well over a century, may now be able to find a conceptual apparatus for overcoming the narrow and fragmenting disciplinary gaze through which childhood has been seen for over a century. Where previously there was a collection of more or less incommensurable discourses between the natural sciences, the social sciences and the humanities, it is possible to see how a more coherent (though not necessarily unified) field of enquiry might emerge. The last part of the twentieth century saw an erosion of the boundaries between many categories that in modernist thought had been seen as mutually exclusive. This gave rise to a new fluidity in ontological assumptions, such that, for example, the distinction between the human and the non-human could be treated as shifting and negotiable rather than fixed and given. Theoretical and conceptual languages, such as those drawn on throughout this book, have emerged that can speak across oppositional dualisms, including the distinction between nature and culture, without reducing one to the other or creating a priori relations of dominance between them. It remains to be seen how successful this effort will be and where it will lead but I have little doubt that childhood studies should join in, draw from and contribute to it. Through this process childhood studies might gather the potential to be a genuinely interdisciplinary field.
