Foreword: childhood and social exclusion – a sociology of the south?

Over the last two decades, in Central and Northern Europe, the sociology of childhood has been developing, placing its main focus of analysis on childhood as a generation in contrast to the adult generation.1 It is understandable why this polarity has become a shining principle of this new area of sociology, considering the previous invisibility of childhood and children in the social sciences. However, one of the effects of focusing on intergenerational relations has been the concealment of social differences; the erasure of the effects of class on childhood conceptualization; and the exclusion of issues such as child poverty from mainstream studies in the field. These themes have been confined to subject areas such as social work and social policy. Not long ago, Qvortrup (2009) rejected the ‘temptation of diversity’ to defend the unitary character of childhood as a sociogenerational category and to sustain the focus of sociological analysis on the processes of social constitution of the structural relation between childhood and other generational categories. However, the sociology of childhood developed in the countries of Southern Europe always gave priority to class differences in its approach to childhood. Issues such as child labour, child poverty, public policies and discrimination against children of low social status, ill-treatment, migrant, minority and oppressed children, have been central in this sociological work. In Portugal and Brazil, the focus on the poor child is a structuring characteristic of this Lusophone linguistic variant within the discipline (Sirota, 2012). Considering the universalistic scientific focus in sociology of childhood, the combination of social, cultural and epistemological factors creates variations in knowledge production in countries with linguistic specificities. In this sense, it is possible to speak about a ‘southern’ sociology of childhood, characterized by the particular contribution it makes to the scientific field of childhood studies. The countries from Southern Europe (in particular, Greece and Portugal), far removed from the per capita income indicators of Central and Northern