In much of the global north the conversations about young people facing adversity have come to sound somewhat predictable. A few theoretical frameworks and conceptual ideas have become deeply entrenched in how we approach scholarship and research about the complex and multi-layered contexts in which young people live their lives. We hear a great deal about attachment, resilience, trauma, and various evidence-based practices aiming to mitigate, and sometimes cure, the implications of these concepts. As much as one tries to expand the conversation, the research keeps reinforcing existing ideas, so much so that before long, these ideas become ‘truths’ of their own. Perhaps this is the consequence of research funding approaches that are based on promising practices and interventions backed by previous research. Perhaps it is the consequence of a social order in which binary, normative, and generally individualistic ideas are given value than more nuanced, less judgmental, and much more social ideas. Whatever the cause of this reductionism, the consequences to the young people subject to that research are worrisome.
While there is much activity in the child and youth-focused academic sectors, there is not much evidence that the lived experience of young people facing adversity is improving much. Quite the contrary, we seem to be investing ever-increasing resources to demonstrate our ‘truths’ while ignoring the voices and experiences of young people, their families, and sometimes their communities who are not finding our research reflective of their lives. Having diagnosed just about every young person living in a residential service, a homeless shelter, or on the streets as attachment-disordered in some way, we seem intent on producing knowledge about the depth of this deficit and the unfortunate limitations of child and youth services to address such lifespan misfortune. The emergent identities of young people who may have experienced attachment outside of the ideal models constructed long ago become largely irrelevant and any activities or behaviors they exhibit outside of the norm are simply attributed to their attachment problems. When young people do well in spite of having faced considerable adversity, they are deemed resilient. In this way, we can explain their success within our normative constructs of right and wrong, good and bad, success and failure. Furthermore, the range of behaviors deemed resilient often includes only those actions labeled pro-social or otherwise normative. Harm reduction, for instance, is seldom considered indicative of resilience; it is instead further demonstration of a young person's persistent pathology. And finally, the industry growing up around trauma and trauma-informed care has obscured the lines between and among daily life stress, manageable psychological distress, and trauma. In the process, as all young people become interpreted through the lens of trauma, the very construct of trauma risks losing its meaning, and its real and legitimate manifestations are minimized by their association with non-traumatic stressor events and responses.
These kinds of simple explanations for the diversity of context and identity among young people seem just a little too convenient; for one thing, talk of attachment and trauma maintain an entire industry of psychologists, psychiatrists, and of course the pharmacological innovators. They also provide order and purpose for the child and youth serving sectors seeking to frame their activities around the latest evidence and research. And they maintain the status quo in our fields by offering go-to “obvious” responses and diagnoses to circumstances that actually demand more critical inquiry. But what else are the consequences of this?
In the process of reducing people's lives to rhetorical references, and of positioning otherness at the margins of social relations, we reinforce and indeed, reproduce, relations of power and influence, as well as relations of exclusion and oppression. Research, held up as the ultimate wisdom, takes the form of scholarship that is inaccessible to those the research pronounces as ‘other’. The objectification of research subjects, often young people as seen through professionally generated case files, continues unabatedly. The multiplicity of identities in the context of gender, race, sexual orientation, disability, citizenship, religion, body shapes, sizes, and contours, and a host of other factors is reduced to a series of controlled variables in nomothetic epistemologies. The results of this research are then disseminated through academic articles that highlight findings but often stop far short of genuine discussion (including informed speculation) about their significant implications for the actual lives of young people and their communities. The experience of life, with its relational, momentary and situational constellations is put aside in favour of ‘strong theory’ and outcomes targeted toward others in the research and scholarly communities.
As editors of a major journal, we are of course interested in research; this is why we continue to promote research in all its forms. Like all journal editors, however, we have a unique vantage point on how research is produced, valued, and disseminated. We see a lot of research, and we can readily identify the patterns. We know that what we read every day is subject to many different motivational dynamics that include passion for the betterment of the world, but also career building, responsiveness to funders, and a not insignificant level of conformity to real or perceived expectations of the scholarly community. We even encounter reviews that appear to promote thought-policing over critical evaluation of the context, method, and quality of the scholarship itself. Given these varied elements in the motivational context of producing scholarship, we are not surprised that orthodox research, designed to fit the categorizations and normative context of the global north, is the dominant form that comes across our desks or laptops. We are grateful for all the research we are privileged to review and often publish. But we also want to be clear that we are open to – and indeed our field demands – something else.
Critical scholarship is not a commonly used term in academia. Critical perspectives may be common, but they often don't make it into the research journals that build the knowledge base of societies and to which service providers and cultural systems seek to conform. Critical scholarship is less an approach and more an invitation; it is a way of thinking about research as a form of resistance. While resistance is usually associated with the politics of the day, with tangible forms of oppression or with nuanced forms of manipulation, we believe that we must balance the production of the orthodoxy with resistance to system-preserving truths. And so we invite you to submit your scholarship that is critical not in its conclusions but in its starting points: Is attachment really the framework in which we must see the entire life form of youth? Is trauma a universal concept? Does resilience explain something in particular or is it a way of identifying the economic, social, and cultural processes that re-produce a colonial, white, heterosexist, ableist social order? How do binary constructs of ways of being and of living impact on the full diversity of humanity? Are we either male or female? Are we racialized or white? Are we religious or atheist? Are we rich or poor? Are we perpetrator or victim?
Critical scholarship can perhaps be characterized in another way. It is a way of approaching knowledge that is inherently not certain, always fluid, rooted in the lived experienced of people with multiplicity of life-contexts and informed by dialogue, relationship, and connection with those who have a stake in the knowledge being generated. Critical research is not out to create truth; it aims to consider the moment and looks forward to a way of seeing that moment in ways we could not have imagined. Finally, it invites into the research process an active identification of and engagement with power, with the social systems and structures, ideologies and paradigms that uphold the status quo.
We need critical scholarship. We need this because and in spite of the evidence that tells us about attachment, trauma, and resilience. We need this because the relations of power in global society have turned decidedly one way. And we need this because we have come to accept that the world has children and youth who can be saved because they fit the paradigms, and it has other children and youth who cannot be saved because they are different, or they live in Yemen, or they are dying in South Sudan, or their spirit, identity, or way of life won't build our careers.