"Children are Humanbeings”: Yaşar Kemal's Contributions to Childhood Studies

The discipline of Childhood Studies has adopted different methods and theories in childhood research throughout its historical development. When it was founded as the New Sociology of Childhood in the west in the 1980s, through a child-centred approach, it advocated the recognition of children's agency in societal life. In that period, the manifesto of the new sociology of childhood was built on the view that children were social actors and raised socio-critical academic debates on whether children were 'human becomings' or ‘human beings'. Years before these developments, Yaşar Kemal had given a concrete answer to this debate, both through his statement 'children are human beings' and the technique he employed in his interviews, which granted the floor to the children themselves. In this study, based on the book titled Children are Human Beings, composed of an interview with Yaşar Kemal as a journal interviewer and literary author as well as his own interviews with children in 1970s, the similarities between Yaşar Kemal’s approach to his fieldwork with children and the central arguments of Childhood Studies as a discipline rooted in the west will be discussed. Those findings of Kemal which preceded the birth of the discipline and hold the potential to advance it will be addressed. Drawing on the book, the paper will argue Kemal's contributions to Childhood Studies in two ways; theoretically and methodologically. Conveying from their own eyes the experiences of the children who had to live on the streets, he suggested that childhood experiences were not homogeneous; and it was not possible to understand childhoods without studying power relations and social context. Furthermore, the contributions of the method that Kemal developed upon his own experiences and observations to a methodology widely applied in childhood research especially within social sciences, referred to as ethnography in academic publications, gives substantial lessons to today's childhood researchers. By sharing the advantages, challenges and obstacles of the approach he developed, which was founded on listening to children and participating in their daily life, he sheds light on the methodologies of research on the social phenomenon of childhood. It is of significance to make visible Yaşar Kemal's contributions to social sciences at this international congress to be held on April 23, National Sovereignty and Children's Day in Türkiye.