This book explores children’s lives across the Global North and Global South in the context of academic discussions of childhoods. The edited volume offers a unique selection of materials suitable for teaching in the areas of children, childhoods, young people, families, and education in a global context, as well as specific aspects of international development and social policy. While the focus of the project is conceptual rather than practical, the holistic understanding of childhoods that it encourages should also enable practitioners to better ensure that they are improving the lives of the children.
What would a body of literature, focusing on Southern childhoods, look like when epistemologically driven by the demands (social, cultural, economic, political) of the localities in which they are shaped and produced? To answer this question, this book explores locally driven perspectives of childhoods in diverse contexts in the Global South to produce knowledge of Southern childhoods determined, not by Northern priorities and frameworks, but by local needs and contexts. Given the intensification of global processes and the extent to which the local and the global intersect in the everyday lives of children and their families, this edited volume demonstrates that a focus on the epistemological demands of localities necessarily grapples with global as well as local processes and concepts. Chapters in this collection include empirical research on child participation and activism, schooling/educational experiences, child work and street children. They use methodologies ranging from arts-based methods to participant observation, and engage with theories relating to child participation, agency and vulnerability to produce a key resource on Southern childhoods. The chapters in this book were originally published as a special issue of Third World Thematics.
European colonization of other continents has had far-reaching and lasting consequences for the construction of childhoods and children’s lives throughout the world. Liebel presents critical postcolonial and decolonial thought currents along with international case studies from countries in Africa, Latin America, and former British settler colonies to examine the complex and multiple ways that children throughout the Global South continue to live with the legacy of colonialism. Building on the work of Cannella and Viruru, he explores how these children are affected by unequal power relations, paternalistic policies and violence by state and non-state actors, before showing how we can work to ensure that children’s rights are better promoted and protected, globally.
This Handbook explores the multidisciplinary field of childhood studies through a uniquely global lens. It focuses on enquiries and investigations into the everyday lives of young children in the age range of birth to 8 years of age, giving space to their voices and involving interrogations about the various aspect of their lives. This Handbook engages with the interdisciplinary field of childhood studies, education, cultural studies, ethnography, and philosophy, with contributions from scholars from across the globe who have focused their work on the complexities of childhoods in contemporary times. By considering a range of epistemologies, ontologies and perspectives to present the contemporary & systematic research on the topic from a wide range of academics and authors in the field, this Handbook provides a significant contribution to the international dialogue of Global Childhoods. Part 1: Global Childhoods Part 2: Researching Global Childhoods Part 3: Contemporary Childhoods Part 4: Pedagogies and Practice Part 5: Creating Communities for Global Children
This book examines how and why, in the context of International Relations, children’s subjecthood has all too often been relegated to marginal terrains and children themselves automatically associated with the need for protection in vulnerable situations: as child soldiers, refugees, and conflated with women, all typically with the accent on the Global South. Challenging us to think critically about childhood as a technology of global governance, the authors explore alternative ways of finding children and their agency in a more central position in IR, in terms of various forms of children’s activism, children and climate change, children and security, children and resilience, and in their inevitable role in governing the future. Focusing on the problems, pitfalls, promises, and prospects of addressing children and childhoods in International Relations, this book places children more squarely in the purview of political subjecthood and hence more centrally in IR.
"An exciting and engagingly written book. The case studies are intriguing and the discussion of previous theories impeccable." - Dr. Heather Montgomery, The Open University "What is a child? Kate Cregan and Denise Cuthbert begin this path-breaking and compelling work with a deceptively simple question. From this seemingly straightforward formulation, they unravel, interrogate and engage with some of the most pressing issues related to children in the early 21st century... This book is an absolute must for scholars in all the fields of childhood studies." - Professor Joy Damousi, University of Melbourne Global Childhoods draws on the authors’ interdisciplinary backgrounds and original research in the fields of embodiment, theorisations of childhood, children′s policy, child placement and adoption, and family formation. The book critically demonstrates how following from the modern construction of childhood which emerged unevenly from the late eighteenth century, the twentieth century saw the emergence of the conception of the normative global child, a figure finally enshrined in the United Nations Convention on the Rights of the Child. The book offers a wide-ranging critical analysis of approaches to children and childhood across the social sciences. Through stimulating case studies which include the experiences of child soldiers, orphans, forced child migrants, and children and biomedicine, Cregan and Cuthbert critically test the notion of the ‘global child’ against the lived experiences of children around the globe. Kate Cregan and Denise Cuthbert draw on and contributes to debates on children and the idea of the child in a wide range of disciplines: sociology, anthropology, education, children′s studies, cultural studies, history, psychology, law and development studies. In its historical coverage of the rise of the concepts of the child and the global child, its critical engagement with the theorisation of childhood, and its detailed case studies, the book is essential reading for the study of children and childhood.
This edited volume examines child exploitation in the Global South. It introduces several case studies and interviews articulated around two features: exploitation within the family and exploitation in relation to social contexts. The research shows that both of the features are linked and, generally, they are not separate. It makes several important arguments which challenge the most common view on how children are perceived and exploited in Africa, Latin America, and the Middle East. Additionally, it explores the social representation of exploited children as well as their general well-being.
The second edition of this compelling and popular book offers a unique global perspective on children’s lives throughout the world. It shows how the notion of childhood is being radically re-shaped, in part as a consequence of globalization. Taking an engaging historical and comparative approach, the book explores social issues such as how children are constituted as raced, classed and gendered subjects; how children’s involvement in war is connected to the globalization of capitalism and organized crime; and how school and work operate as sites for the governing of childhood. The book discusses wide-ranging topics including children’s rights, the family, children and war, child labour and young people’s activism around the globe. In addition to updated literature throughout, the revised edition includes new chapters on migration and trafficking, and the role of play. The book will continue to be of great value to students and scholars in the fields of sociology, geography, social policy and development studies. It will also be a valuable companion to practitioners of international development and social work, as well as to anyone interested in childhood in the contemporary world.
This book explores how humanitarian interventions for children in difficult circumstances engage in affective commodification of disadvantaged childhoods. The chapters consider how transnational charitable industries are created and mobilized around childhood need—highlighting children in situations of war and poverty, and with indeterminate access to health and education—to redirect global resource flows and sentiments in order to address concerns of child suffering. The authors discuss examples from around the world to show how, as much as these processes can help achieve the goals of aid organizations, such practices can also perpetuate the conditions that organizations seek to alleviate and thereby endanger the very children they intend to help.
