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.
Children in the Global South continue to be affected by social disadvantage in our unequal post-colonial world order. With a focus on working-class children in Latin America, this book explores the challenges of promoting children’s rights in a context of decolonization. Liebel and colleagues give insights into the political lives of children and demonstrate ways in which the concept of children’s rights can be made meaningful at the grassroots level. Looking to the future, they consider how collaborative research with children can counteract their marginalization and oppression in society.
The book provides an advanced, accessible text for childhood studies, which is suitable and challenging for those coming from practice, different parts of the world and from a range of disciplines. Key ideas within childhood studies are introduced, from agency to intersectionality to children's rights. Addressing children and young people under the age of 18, the book combines concepts from seminal texts with challenging, critical views and alternatives, to stimulate readers to develop their own analysis and apply the results to their own interests. It reveals how childhood studies draws on a rich and diverse range of perspectives from child development, educational studies, history, human rights, media studies, philosophy, public health, race and ethnicity studies, to social anthropology. The book is organised around five sections: Foundations of Childhood Studies Childhood Studies Meets Other Disciplines Childhood Studies Meets Children's Rights Studies Intersectional Perspectives on Childhood Childhood Studies in Practice Each section includes commentaries from international experts based in Australia (Amanda Third), Brazil (Irene Rizzini), the UK (Erica Burman), the USA (Sarada Balagopalan) and Zimbabwe (Tendai Charity Nhenga). The book has a range of pedagogical features including guiding questions and challenge tasks, quotes from students and other experts, and a glossary of terms. The book has a companion website with videos from authors, students and those working in practice and policy, interactive tasks and other resources.
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.
Many scholars have critiqued the neocolonial assumptions embedded in global development agendas. These often focus on the bodies and lives of poor, racialized adolescent girls in the global south as ideal sites for intervention based on these girls’ potential to multiply investment, interrupt intergenerational poverty, and predict economic growth. Girls in Global Development presents case studies from established and emerging scholars to collectively theorize and examine the concept of “Girls in Development” (GID), a distinctive way of approaching notions of girls and girlhoods in locations around the globe, at various points in history, through a critical feminist lens.
Focusing on Ghana, the first country in sub-Saharan Africa to gain independence from European colonial rule and the first in the world to ratify the UN Convention on the Rights of the Child, this book explores how dominant children's rights principles interact with the lived realities of a range of children’s lives. The author considers the changeability and inconsistencies of childhoods within this context and the factors that underpin these varied intersections, including cultural norms, British colonial legacy, the influence of Christianity, urbanization, and social, economic and political transformations. Challenging one-dimensional portrayals of childhoods in the Global South, the author highlights the need for more holistic approaches to the study of children’s lives and children’s rights realization in Southern contexts.
EPDF and EPUB available Open Access under CC-BY-NC-ND licence. Millions of children throughout Africa undertake many forms of farm and domestic work. Some of this work is for wages, some is on their family’s own small plots and some is forced and/or harmful. This book examines children’s involvement in such work. It argues that framing all children’s engagement in economic activity as ‘child labour’, with all the associated negative connotations, is problematic. This is particularly the case in Africa where many rural children must work to survive and where, the contributors argue, much of the work undertaken is not harmful. The conceptual and case-based chapters reframe the debate about children’s work and harm in rural Africa with the aim of shifting research, public discourse and policy so that they better serve the interest of rural children and their families.
The Routledge Handbook on Livelihoods in the Global South presents a unique, timely, comprehensive overview of livelihoods in low- and middle-income countries. Since their widespread adoption in the 1990s, livelihoods perspectives, frameworks and methods have influenced diverse areas of research, policy and practice. The concept of livelihoods reflects the complexity of strategies and practices used by individuals, households and communities to meet their needs and live their lives. The Handbook brings together insights and critical analysis from diverse approaches and experiences, learning from research and practice over the last 30 years. The Handbook comprises an introductory section on key concepts and frameworks, followed by five parts, on researching livelihoods, negotiating livelihoods, generating livelihoods, enabling livelihoods and contextualising livelihoods. The introduction provides readers with an appreciation of concepts researched and applied in the five parts, including chapters on vulnerability and resilience, social capital and networks, and institutions. Each part reflects the diversity of approaches taken to understanding livelihoods, whilst recognising commonalities, including the centrality of power in shaping, enabling and constraining livelihoods. The book also reflects diversity of context, including conflict, climate change and religion, as well as in generating livelihoods, through agriculture, small-scale mining and pastoralism. The aim of each chapter is to provide a critically informed introduction and overview of key concepts, issues and debates of relevance to the topic, with each chapter concluding with suggestions for further reading. It will be an essential resource to students, researchers and practitioners of international development and related fields. Researchers and practitioners will also benefit from the book's diverse disciplinary contributions and by the wide and contemporary coverage.
