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This text is an exploration of collaborative thinking and writing through theories, methods, and experiences on the topic of the child, children, and childhood. It is a collaborative written text (with 32 authors) that sprang out of the experimental workshop Child Studies Multiple. The workshop and this text are about daring to stay with mess, “un-closure” , and uncertainty in order to investigate the (e)motions and complexities of being either a child or a researcher. The theoretical and methodological processes presented here offer an opportunity to shake the ground on which individual researchers stand by raising questions about scientific inspiration, theoretical and methodological productivity, and thinking through focusing on process, play, and collaboration. The effect of this is a questioning of the singular academic ‘I’ by exploring and showing what a plural ‘I’ can look like. It is about what the multiplicity of voice can offer research in a highly individualistic time. The article allows the reader to follow and watch the unconventional trial-and-error path of the ongoing-ness of exploring theories and methods together as a research community via methods of drama, palimpsest, and fictionary.

This article explores the question of the empirical in the context of its related notion of experience, inasmuch as the latter explicitly brings into play issues about subjectivity. The article focuses directly on the ideas of the Italian philosopher Giorgio Agamben concerning infancy and experience, voice and speech, and bare life and politics. In doing so, an argument is made that questions Agamben's recourse to a particular form of linguistic model and makes evident the limitations that such a model poses for an understanding of significant transformations in modern forms of sovereignty regarding the socio-political articulation of highly domesticated voices. The study aims to provide some sociological and social theoretical ground for a consideration of the voice of infancy in contemporary forms of biopolitical sovereignty. In doing so, it suggests that infancy is more than a figuration of experimentation, inasmuch as its voice (hovering between babble and the comprehensible) may resonate across an empirical domain, which is reconfigured through such a voice (or voices) heard, taken seriously and touching others.

This paper considers the question of how to protect our children in conditions of information and communication technology convergence. It focuses on three traditional centres of action- government, industry and parent - in the context of the European Union. Firstly, it argues how the European Commission, in tackling the issue of internet content regulation and child protection, draws on an 'advanced liberal' form of governance. Drawing on a particular example from the UK, it secondly considers how industry has been constructed as a responsible actor and thus how the internet industry in the UK has aligned itself with the programmatic objectives of the European Commission. However, industry has also come up with regulatory solutions which are more ambivalent with regard to the European Commission objectives and the traditional principles of media and communication content regulation. Thirdly, it argues that the European Commission objective of making parents responsible for children's internet use in the home faces considerable resistance, inasmuch as the agency and geography of domestic supervision are both changing and highly contested.

In this chapter we will consider the school, not so much as a site of learning and teaching but as a particular kind of social setting. As a particular kind of institution, it has brought children together and aligned them with regard to their measured and differentiated cognitive capacity. Far from producing docile subjects, modern schools facilitate children’s agency, not least inasmuch as this has constituted both an explicit philosophy of the modern school (i.e. learning is through doing) and as this provides the umbrella for a number of innovations regarding children’s agency. Moreover, as a social setting, the school has constituted a diagram through which social and cultural practices more generally are, and have been, made intelligible as a pedagology or subject to educational measure, but also importantly through which spaces of innovation and resistance have been constructed. The emergence and standardisation of a common childhood The medieval historian Didier Lett opens a chapter on the education of children between the fifth and thirteenth centuries by declaring: ‘Contrary to what Philippe Aries affirmed, people of the high Middle Ages had not forgotten the meaning of education’ (Alexandre-Bidon and Lett, 1999: 39). The male offspring of noble families would start doing menial work in the household of another noble family from the age of 11 or 12 years, and would then gradually be trained in the responsibilities of knighthood. Girls would similarly be trained in reading, riding and dancing in the service of relatives (Heywood, 2001: 157). Children from non-aristocratic families would also be sent to relatives or to other households in order to learn through informal apprenticeships or forms of service. Children were instructed in particular crafts and skills; some were adopted into the family and instructed more generally in spiritual and moral matters; others were treated harshly and used only for their labour (Heywood, 2001: 158). As Heywood notes, the education of children through apprenticeship, in which ‘each generation merely handed down what it knew from its own experience in a particular calling and region’, ‘gradually withered on the vine from the sixteenth century onwards’; such a system was suited to a ‘stable agrarian society’ but was unable to cope with a changing and growing mercantile and urban economy (Heywood, 2001: 160).

The idea of children's agency is central to the growing field of childhood studies. In this book David Oswell argues for new understandings of children's agency. He traces the transformation of children and childhood across the nineteenth, twentieth and early twenty-first centuries and explores the dramatic changes in recent years to children's everyday lives as a consequence of new networked, mobile technologies and new forms of globalisation. The author reviews existing theories of children's agency as well as providing the theoretical tools for thinking of children's agency as spatially, temporally and materially complex. With this in mind, he surveys the main issues in childhood studies, with chapters covering family, schooling, crime, health, consumer culture, work and human rights. This is a comprehensive text intended for students and academic researchers across the humanities and social sciences interested in the study of children and childhood.

In this chapter I consider the issue of children’s rights and political participation. Of course, although we might endow ceteris paribus any persons or even things with legal rights, not everyone or thing is deemed to have the capacity for political participation. Initially, we will consider some of the philosophical and cultural history attached to the question of children as rights bearers and as political animals. We then consider how the capacity for modern rights and political participation is distributed unevenly across the globe and discuss this in the context of the universalisation of children’s rights, as enshrined, for example, in the United Nations Convention on the Rights of the Child (UNCRC). Finally in this chapter we ground the questions of children’s rights and politics in the context of national sovereignty, modern forms of governmentality and forms of political enunciation, or expression. As Hannah Arendt declared after the Second World War, ‘only with a completely organized humanity could the loss of home and political status become identical with expulsion from humanity altogether’ (Arendt, 1962: 297). The question regarding children, though, is doubly confounded in that ordinarily the constitution of their very being (with regard to their infancy and lack of maturity) places them a priori outside of both the political and global humanity.

The arrest of Pete Townshend, lead guitarist for The Who, for downloading and possessing Internet child pornography and the publicity surrounding the case provides an initial point of discussion concerning the emergence of an ethics of the image that is not predicated on the actual evidential status of that image but on more virtual forms of observation. The discussion in this article focuses on three substantive aspects of this event - legislation in the UK and the US, expert psychological discourse, and public discussion in the UK press - in order to present a particular and situated rendering of forms of virtual observation. The context to this discussion concerns the notion that digital imaging technology presages a need for new legislation, law enforcement and social analytical frameworks for understanding and tackling the production, distribution and consumption of images of child sexual abuse.