Challenging North-South Binaries and the Implications for Studies of Childhood Globally

The binary between childhoods in the Global South and those in the Global North has long dominated the framing of discussions around childhoods that go beyond national or regional scales. While such a binary can be useful in explaining and discussing children’s lives from a global perspective, not least because of the important differences that exist between much of these two worlds, such a framing of discussions on global childhoods is limiting in our world today. Thus, there is a need to identify alternative framings in discussing and studying global childhoods which allow us to acknowledge the differences that do exist in the lives of many children across the two worlds, but also enable us to gain insights into the layered levels of nuance that can be seen when we start examining the plurality of childhoods that can be identified in each world area. Therefore, this chapter seeks to explore not only the limitations of the Global North-South binary, especially in relation to studies and discussions of childhoods globally, but it also calls for the need to move beyond this binary, outlining the attendant benefits to the health of the multidisciplinary field of childhood studies if we do so. The chapter ends by proposing a possible alternative framing that allows us to move beyond such dichotomous thinking about global childhoods within the multidisciplinary field of childhood studies.