Childhoods Today, Volume 5 (2), 2011 1 Re-Exploring Childhood Studies Anandini Dar Patrick Cox anandini@camden.rutgers.edu ptcox@camden.rutgers.edu Introduction As graduate students in Childhood Studies, ongoing changes in the field are as much a part of our study as our own research. In the Department of Childhood Studies at Rutgers University, we have explored and observed various trends that have defined this field. A starting point might be Allison James and Alan Prout‟s (1997) emphatic explication of the field as an „emergent paradigm‟ in the 1980s. More recently the field has increasingly been re- evaluated as inter, multi, trans, and cross-disciplinary, as in the 2010 special issue of Children‟s Geographies, „Viewpoints‟. The past 30 years of scholarship and departmental developments have contributed toward creating a definition of the still nascent field, but have also opened pathways for constructive engagement, questioning of past paradigms, and continued work on the definition of the field by emerging scholars who constitute it through our own research and writing. This special issue is part of the editors' and authors‟ reflexive work as graduate students to work both in, and on, the field of Childhood Studies. Rather than focusing exclusively on our individual research and allowing the field to develop around us, we choose to deliberately engage with the field and actively take on the work of its development. The papers collected here were first presented at the Exploring Childhood Studies conference, a graduate student conference held in 2010 which was chaired by the editors on behalf of the Graduate Student Organization of the Department of Childhood Studies at Rutgers University- Camden, New Jersey, USA (http://clam.rutgers.edu/~childgso/conference/index.html ).