Lexington Books Refusing the Limits of Contemporary Childhood: Beyond Innocence (Critical Childhood & Youth Studies: Theoretical Explorations and Practices in Clinical, Educational, Social, and Cultural Settings)

Each of the essays in this collection considers what lies beyond the limiting discourses of childhood innocence. Instead of focusing on how children “grow up,” as has been the focus of developmental science for over a century, we ask what it might mean for discourses of childhood to finally “grow out” of childhood innocence? The authors featured in this volume explore this question through critical approaches that actively refuse the limits of normative and normalizing conceptions of the child by surfacing and centering complex, multiplicitous configurations of childhood. Together, these perspectives challenge existing discourses and social practices to reveal how power operates in and through the child and its uses.