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SPYROS SPYROU: Thank you for accepting to participate in this special anniversary conversation of Childhood. All of you are actively participating in the ongoing discussions that are taking place in the interdisciplinary field of Childhood Studies through your own scholarly work and efforts to shape this dynamic field. What has brought you to this field and what do you find particularly interesting and fascinating in the work produced today in Childhood Studies? Feel free to refer to your own work and interests when discussing this. AFUA TWUM-DANSO IMOH: My interest in Childhood Studies was rather accidental I would say. After completing my BA degree in History and Sociology, I decided to embark on a Masters in Development Studies as I felt that was the career path I wanted to follow. This was a decision I made after spending 10 weeks in Ghana the previous summer undertaking fieldwork for my undergraduate dissertation. At this point, I was not aware of any debates in Childhood Studies and I was not especially driven to study development due to any special interest in children’s wellbeing or welfare in the South. However, early on during my Master’s degree, one of my modules focused on complex emergencies and the issue of children involved in armed conflicts was raised. For some reason, this topic struck a chord within me and I became somewhat fixated on this issue. What seemed to interest me in particular was how childhood was understood in societies where children were involved in armed conflict. I completed my MSc dissertation on the issue of child soldiers, focusing on Sierra Leone and Liberia (Twum-Danso, 2000). However, the question of how childhood is constructed and understood in different societies remained on my mind and eventually I embarked on a PhD project which sought to explore constructions of childhood in Ghana and the implications for the Convention on the Rights of the Child (Twum-Danso, 2008). It was when I started my PhD that I began to engage with the Childhood Studies literature (theoretical and methodological). It was at this point that I encountered the works of key thinkers of the time in Childhood Studies: Allison James and her various colleagues (James et al., 1998; James and Prout, 1990); Alanen, 1988; Alanen and Mayall, 2001; 788210 CHD0010.1177/0907568218788210ChildhoodSpyrou et al. other2018