childhood and children: between movements, thresholds, and borders

Abstract

We present the dossier “Studies of Childhood: movements, limits and frontiers”, a theme discussed in the III Brazilian Congress Childhood Studies (CEI). The Congress was organized by members of the Department of Childhood Studies (DEDI) and the Graduate Program in Education (ProPEd) of the State University of Rio de Janeiro. The articles that compose the dossier review the debates that took place during the event in the fields of education, international relations, and ethno-racial issues. In this presentation, inspired by Mario Benedetti's poem “The Bridge”, we explore the power of three words to think about childhood and the relationship we establish with children: borders, strangeness and movements. How many borders do childhood and children cross into the political, cultural, social, and biological order of life? Which movements or changes do they produce, reproduce, and spread? How to destrange childhood, in the sense of challenging the actions and discursive productions that promote exclusions of various forms? Which movements – in the field of research and in society in general – are instituted to encourage the agency of childhood? Starting from the idea that both our culture and our subjectivity are constituted in the relationship between an interior and an exterior that are placed in tension, we draw on philosophy, literature, psychoanalysis, and cultural studies to explore these questions. In this dossier, the texts compose a set that dialogues with the philosophy of childhood and goes beyond conceptual and methodological limits, in the sense of making moves to understand children and childhood through their perspectives, actions, languages and positions, in an objective and subjective form.