Introduction

This introduction presents an overview of the key concepts discussed in the subsequent chapters of this book. This book aims to show how useful DCR and childhood can be to one another. The book works between assumed divisions imposed in mainstream sociology, between positivism and social constructionism, and between politics, morality, natural science and social science. This book ventures into alternatives, potentials, futures and utopias, which especially concern the youngest generations. Dialectical Critical Realism (DCR) is not a version of social science, but a philosophy, which does the groundwork and helps to illuminate and clarify theories and underlying assumptions, and to work through contradictions in the social and natural sciences. DCR also analyses connections between the many large and small aspects of social life, and processes of change. DCR extends the dialectic from three parts into four moments in the acronym MELD: IM first moment, 2E second edge, 3L third level, 4D fourth dimension.