Special Issue: Caring for Children Outside the Home – From Institutions to Nations

Abstract

This special issue began its life in 2015 in a series of workshops funded by the University of Adelaide that ran under the theme ‘Dis/located Children: Children in/and Care’. The goal of the workshops was to take seriously the concept of ‘care’ as it applied to the lives of children. The workshops had a particular focus on childhoods that were in some sense beyond the normative, whether that was migrant or refugee children adapting to a new culture, children who lived outside the nuclear household, or children whose identities marked them as ‘different’. They were underpinned by developments in both childhood and emotions studies that seek to destabilise the ‘naturalness’ of both childhood and emotion by exploring the ways that both are contingent, shaped by culture, and situated in historical time (Davin, 1999; Rosenwein, 2010). Over four events, the workshops brought together over 40 scholars and practitioners from a variety of disciplines, including history, literature, gender studies, law, education, social work, and psychology. The articles brought together in this special issue reflect this diversity of disciplinary approach.