Being a (Female) Child in Baku: Social Order and Understandings of Well-Being

Abstract

What does it mean to be a (female) child in the city of Baku, Azerbaijan? How can we critically interpret the girls’ understandings of well-being considering different forms of compliance with unequal social orders? What conclusions may be drawn from understandings of well- being about the nature of welfare state structures and there-in children’s specific positioning? To answer this question, we conducted qualitative interviews with 13 girls during their various leisure activities. The study shows that parents and in particular mothers are children’s key reference persons, while there are hardly any spaces the girls can explore or reference persons outside their immediate families. The article reconstructs how the 13 girls view the social practices of adults and how they relate these practices to their own perceptions of well-being. We inductively reconstruct different forms of compliance, i.e., the extent to which social practices are consistent with the symbolic representations (norms and values) of a specific social order and specific relations of power and hegemony. The analysis shows how girls make differentiations between adult social practices based on their knowledge orders: some practices they justify through a sort of complicity with adultist structures (competent compliance), others they must accept due to their own vulnerabilities as children (compliance and constitutive vulnerability), still others irritate, are rejected, or sabotaged (fragile compliance).