Notions Of Childhood Research Articles

Who Counts as Child? Using Child as Method and Fanon to Challenge Figurations of Childhood

Child as method is a critical and interdisciplinary approach interrogating figurations of childhood that engage, organize, justify (and perhaps even resist) sociopolitical processes. In this article, we start by presenting Child as method as a conceptual and methodological tool for critical research in childhood, education, and psychological studies and then show how it informed discussions of and about childhood in two different projects. The first concerns Legal Gender Recognition in the United Kingdom where a Child as method perspective highlights how the idea of developmentalism is embedded in figurations of childhood. This aligns with age conformities of “being more like adults than children,” while also showing how gender recognition and childhood have been built in opposition to each other. The second project mobilizes Child as method as a conceptual and methodological orientation to critically reflect on the role-played by age assessment practices in migration control in Greece. This highlights how “the child” becomes a trope within forced migration policies and practices, and how “childhood” performs a social condition in which children are represented as victims in state and humanitarian discourse. In doing so, this not only creates a “universalised” notion of childhood but also enacts epistemic violence. Indeed, these discourses mobilize action in the form of age assessment for those young people who do not look or perform like “real children,” establishing, in essence, who is and is not welcomed in the Western territory. The article ends by discussing Frantz Fanon as a critical childhood theorist. It depicts how Fanon’s contribution informs, conceptually and methodologically, the research analytic of Child as method. Together with Child as method, we put forward Fanon’s contribution to critical childhood studies while highlighting Fanon’s call for action from everyone, including children.

Colonialism, Racism, and Childhoods: Introduction

Over the past two decades, pressing questions around childhood, age, difference, and power have traversed the multidisciplinary study of childhood, and have come to overlap increasingly with writings on colonialism. While children remain relatively under-analyzed across this scholarship, children and notions of childhood are always implicated in colonialism and its vestiges. Moreover, legacies of colonialism shape the images of children who dominate headlines today, from cruel policies which separate migrant children from their families at the United States—Mexico border, to Israel’s continued assault on Gaza and the deliberate targeting of Palestinian children, to young climate activists who have mobilized around the globe. Our special issue explores questions around colonialism and childhood, and specifically their processes of racialization; and argues for a general practice of decolonizing the study of childhood. The authors—representing several disciplines and regions—have contributed essays which cover two broad themes. The first three articles speak to histories of colonialism and their entwinement with childhood, and the challenges actors face in attempting to reckon with those histories. The next three articles take up discussions concerning childhood as a colonialist racialized concept, and pose questions about who is deserving of care and whose care should be recognized as good for children. Our queries recognize the important work already being done by childhood studies scholars, invite newer researchers to the field to consider childist concerns, and welcome all to imagine futures beyond our present crises.

Childhoods, Cultures, and Critical Qualitative Inquiry: Researching the Political and Life Worlds of Children

The purpose of this special issue is to present work that moves beyond the dominant logic of childhoods as imposed on those who are younger, and instead, to demonstrate how critical empirical qualitative investigations that honor, as well as answer, the complex political and life worlds of children in the present and the past offer a way forward; a path that supports communities and the public institutions important to them so that all children can thrive and become the persons they want to be. To do so, these articles draw on different theoretical and methodological critical orientations and traditions to broadly consider the ways in which cultural studies rooted in critical qualitative research can generate knowledges that expand conceptualizations of/for multiple worlds of children/childhood. In doing so, these pieces examine the contemporary, multiple, and immanent cultural worlds and life conditions of children and notions of childhood—both past and present. Such work speaks to the complex, and often unjust, worlds of children and childhoods, and in doing so, the authors propose and illuminate discourse, policy, and relationship changes and actions required to address the complex pressing needs faced by children across a range of communities and/or public institutions.

Platforming pickiness: the digitally mediated enactment of childhood avoidant eating

ABSTRACT Steve Woolgar has argued that science and technology studies is a prime place for studying the relationship between children and consumption [2012 “Ontological Child Consumption.” In Situating Child Consumption: Rethinking Values and Notions of Children, Childhood and Consumption, edited by B. Sandin, A. Sparrman, and J. Sjöberg, 33–51. Lund: Nordic Academic Press]. Yet this project remains largely unfulfilled, mirroring the broader absence of children as a serious object of study in the discipline. This extends to the analysis of childhood eating. So-called ‘picky’ eating, which I refer to as ‘avoidant’ eating, involves varying degrees of food refusal, often experienced by carers as highly distressing. In response, many parents are turning to digital platforms for support. This paper analyses how parents’ encounters with avoidant eating become entangled with digital platforms, centring on a digital autoethnography of the author’s own information seeking practices via Google search. Not only does the paper respond to the neglect of parent–child relations as a site for research within STS, it also demonstrates that the so-called ‘new social studies of childhood’ could benefit from further analysing the way in which parent–child relations are entangled with relations between people and things, including digital platforms.

Children’s interests and early childhood curriculum: A critical analysis of the relationship between research, policy, and practice

Policy makers have a powerful influence on educational practice. When such bodies are vague about the evidence-base for their policies they may uncritically rely on outdated theories, beliefs, and selective research evidence. A tension may then exist where practitioners become undermined as agents in curricular decision-making. Practitioners may aim to provide curriculum and pedagogy aligned with contemporary knowledge, but are also bound to the policy bodies who hold persuasive power. In England and Aotearoa New Zealand, two particular organisations in each country have most influence on early childhood education. Focused on the notion of children’s interests, this article questions the basis for the key curricular policy, accompanying advice and guidance, and evaluation standards of these organisations. We do so having discussed children’s interests from historical and contemporary research perspectives. We then trace and critique ways children’s interests present in significant policy documents. We suggest that both policy and practice adopt contemporary perspectives of children’s interests and move towards a middle space between curriculum-as-plan and curriculum-as-lived (Aoki, 2005). Such a space provides a way forward for ongoing curriculum conversations about children’s interests.

Hogyan tehetünk szert közvetlen tapasztalatra egy tapasztalatvesztett korban? A dialektika kritikája és a tapasztalat destrukciója Agambennél

In Agamben’s 1978 book Infancy and History: On the Destruction of Experience, the unusual pair of concepts can be equated with transcendental categories of experience: language and time (or the lack of them), although the question of their relationship to each other is left open. Yet, what stands at the intersection of the two is, for Agamben, initially, the notion of childhood, and afterwards the notion of potentiality, which extends later in his work into a philosophy of possibility. The work takes account of the problem of experience in three chapters: the destruction of aesthetics, then of tradition, and finally of experience itself. While for Benjamin the ‘devaluation of experience’ was caused by a humanitarian and environmental catastrophe, the First World War, for Agamben the loss of experience has become a ‘basic experience’ of the bleak everyday: the loss of personal experience means that it has become untellable and inexpressible. The present paper reconstructs the destruction of experience in Agamben’s essay and attempts to connect it with Agamben’s theory of power, known from his long-run philosophical project Homo sacer thus giving both contemporary theories a new relevance.

The Notion of Child in International Relations Discipline

Çocuk Çalışmaları (Childhood Studies) bir dizi akademik disiplinde görece olarak kendine yer bulmuş olmasına rağmen, Uluslararası İlişkiler disiplini açısından durum biraz daha farklıdır. Uluslararası ilişkiler disiplini bağlamında çocukluk ve çocuklara ilişkin analizlerin oldukça sınırlı olduğu görülmektedir. Nitekim çocuğun uluslararası sistemdeki rolünden bahsedildiğinde, genellikle verilen yanıt böyle bir rolün var olup olmadığını sorgulamak olmaktadır. Öte yandan çocukların evrensel insan haklarına ilişkin siyasi tartışma bağlamında ciddi anlamda önem verilen aktörler olarak öne çıktıkları ve merkezi bir konumda oldukları ileri sürülebilir. Ancak her ne kadar uluslararası örgütler nezdindeki kodifikasyon çalışmalarıyla uluslararası çocuk hakları rejimi giderek artan biçimde gelişme gösterse de, bu rejimin çocukları yalnızca pasif ‘kurbanlar’ olarak gören yaklaşımının, çocuklara ihtiyaç duydukları şekilde ve etkin bir biçimde yardım edebileceği belirsizdir. Bununla birlikte, uluslararası ilişkiler disiplininin geleneksel devlet merkezli yaklaşımlarında daha önce büyük ölçüde ihmal edilen çocukların ve çocukların failliğinin -diğer disiplinlere kıyasla geç olsa- giderek daha fazla öne çıkmaya başladığı gözlemlenmektedir. Bu itibarla çalışma, uluslararası ilişkiler disiplinine çocuğun aktör olarak dâhil edilmesinin elzem olduğunu ileri süren bir anlayışla, Uluslararası İlişkiler disiplininin çocuk ve çocukluk bağlamındaki bakış açısının ne yönde ve nasıl geliştiğini ele almaktadır. Bu bağlamda öncelikle çocukluğun sosyal inşasına ilişkin literatürdeki gelişmeye ve sonra da uluslararası ilişkiler disiplininde özellikle savaş ve çatışma bağlamında çocuk ve çocukluk nosyonuna ilişkin çalışmaların kapsamına odaklanmaktadır.

Children's autonomous mobility and their well-being

The notion of children's independent mobility is often used to help to understand how much freedom children have in their neighbourhoods, but it does not provide evidence on how autonomous and in control they are over their actions. This is important when considering the influence of children's neighbourhood mobility on their well-being, with autonomy known to be an important element of children's psychological well-being.This paper draws on findings from a research study working with 9 and 10 year olds living in inner London, England. Findings from the study highlight the importance of children's autonomous time within their neighbourhoods. They suggest that this measure is more reflective of the children's experiences of their neighbourhoods and more closely linked to their well-being than their independent mobility. Analysis highlights the importance of active travel and play within the neighbourhood, whether independent or not.

A Long, Long Journey

Abstract This article considers the practical implications and effectiveness of a rights-based approach to delivering child protection programming in communities in which notions of children’s rights and child protection concerns may sit awkwardly with pre-existing cultural traditions. It reports on the findings of a qualitative study of child protection practitioners in two poor rural districts of Uganda and uses these to reflect on the key differences between international children’s rights norms as expressed in the United Nations Convention on the Rights of the Child and traditional African values as reflected in the African Charter for the Rights and Welfare of Children. It explores the perceived challenges posed by a children’s rights-based approach to parental authority and community practices in the context of the Ugandan legislation and the culture of the study communities and considers the key factors that appear to be influential in enabling changes in attitudes and behaviours towards children.

Reading Black Childhoods in Chains and Crongton Knights

This essay reads Chains by Laurie Halse Anderson (2008) and Crongton Knights by Alex Wheatle (2016) as texts in the young adult (YA) genre that provocatively render black childhood legible. It contends that Anderson and Wheatle destabilise the presumed authority of first-person narratives through the formal choices that structure their novels. Through these choices, the essay argues, creative representations of black childhood in these two texts subvert and challenge perceptions of black children as so mature and resilient as to be outside or beyond notions of childhood or innocence — what is known as ‘adultification’.

Online Game Based Learning: Quizzicle

Abstract: Quizzicle: An internet site for children to learn and understand topics and statistics using online video games. nowadays, children of gen-z lose interest easily and have a very less interest span, which leads them to now not take note of instructors inside the school room. due to this problem game-based totally mastering has been introduced to have interaction with youngsters to learn successfully and successfully. This paper fosters a sport-based totally getting to know framework to paintings on studying and education. The game-based studying is joined with instructive and statistics innovation. The sportprimarily based studying is standing out enough to be observed. In online game-based studying, the course content material is deliberate into the sport to give a scenario of getting to know in sport thru thrilling activities and the non-stop conversation and input which can build the getting to know interest and notion of children. In the end, video game-based mastering could arrive on the goal of adapting correctly. For assessing the learning influences, this paper utilizes the gaming model that is presented within the shape of racing games and answering quizzes, in order that the youngsters getting old from 8-12 years can study from it while having less technical understanding and spending extra display screen time on analyzing stuff on-line. Keywords: Оnline Gаme-bаsed leаrning, Eduсаtiоnаl gаmes and Quizzes , Holistic Development

Transitional Safeguarding: The Case for Change

Recent developments within safeguarding policy and practice have included changes to the law regarding safeguarding adults, and a variety of innovations in safeguarding adolescents. Despite these developments, safeguarding has retained a distinctly binary notion of childhood and adulthood with little attention paid to the period of transition. Harm, nor its effects, cease at 18. Yet safeguarding support is usually withdrawn as young people approach 18. For many young adults, there is little or no support available through statutory adult services, creating a gap through which young people fall. This article sets out the case for a more transitional approach to safeguarding young people into adulthood. It argues that there are compelling moral and economic drivers for an ecologically and developmentally informed approach, which is participatory by default, and in which the design challenge is to create not a discrete service, but a whole system approach.

Employment of Adolescents and Children in the Aspect of Polish Educational Reform – Chosen Legal Problems

The employment of adolescents is an extremely important phenomenon, although doctrine rarely discusses it. This solution enables young people to gain qualifications early and promises long and successful cooperation for the employer. It should be remembered, however, that at such a young age the most important sphere of life is not work, but education and appropriate psycho-physical development. Bearing in mind the delicacy of children and adolescents, it is necessary to create legal constructions which will protect young people from too early collision with problems connected with work such as: stress, exhaustion, and pressure.
 The notion of adolescence is constantly intertwined with the notion of child and it is not easy to judge when these terms are used. This article intends to discuss these terms, and to present them through the applicable laws. In addition, the article presents research on the employment of adolescents and children in Poland based on reports from the National Labour Inspectorate.
 The legislator had a difficult task - to create appropriate regulations which would not only make work possible, but at the same time properly secure the already mentioned most important spheres of life of adolescents and children. This task undoubtedly becomes even more difficult when the change of other legal acts forces a rush to regulate such a delicate legal sphere. The aim of this article is to present advantages and disadvantages of current legal constructions based on the analysis of regulations and statistics.

‘Take up the Man and lay down the Boy’: Defining Rural Childhood in Northern Scotland during the Enlightenment

Despite the theorising of Enlightenment and Romantic thinkers, no crystallised notion of childhood was particularly widespread or applied in the rural north. However, the evidence does suggest gradual phases, contingent on class, gender and circumstance, which tended to commence between the ages of five and eight and were distinguished by formal education or starting to assist in the family economy in a meaningful way. At the other end of childhood, taking up full-time employment or leaving home to work, study or marry therefore tended to be the rite of passage through which youngsters entered either adolescence or adulthood, but the ages at which this happened were highly circumstantial. The evidence suggests that there was no widespread dominant notion of childhood as a distinct life stage requiring specialised care and attention in rural communities during the period in which it was becoming established among theorists and the urban middle classes. For most the daily realities of labour, challenging economic circumstances, densely populated households, let alone the upheavals of clearance and emigration that affected so many, meant there was little time, energy or mental and emotional space to absorb and implement new philosophies. Rather, the needs of families meant that continuing older practices of gradually increasing responsibilities and responding to circumstances made most sense among the thatched longhouses and blackhouses of Scotland's rural north.

Who’s normal and who’s not? Notions of children’s intellectual development in the context of emerging special education at the turn of the twentieth century in Switzerland

ABSTRACT The article explores the notions of children’s intellectual ‘ab/normality’ that were conceptualised in the context of emerging special educational measures at the turn of the twentieth century and the concomitant notions of child development. From the mid-nineteenth century onwards, the medical classification of ‘idiocy’ provided the framework for the establishment of different educational facilities, including special classes for ‘feebleminded’ children. The present analysis focuses on the allocation of pupils to these classes in Switzerland guided by the premise that a one-year-long trial period, during which thousands of children of the same age were observed in school, had shaped the notion of ‘normal’ and ‘abnormal’ child development. This notion in turn provided the basis for assessing intellectual ability at the individual level. In other words, no scientific metrics teachers could use to separate the ‘normal’ from the ‘abnormal’ existed when this separation process began, but rather emerged from the process itself.

Turning 18 in specialised residential therapeutic care: Independence or a cliff edge?

AbstractThis article describes research undertaken in 2018 in a therapeutic residential home for young women with multiple and complex needs in out‐of‐home care in England. Based on qualitative interviews with five young women, aged 16–18, and four professionals working with the home, the article analyses the under‐researched leaving care needs and experiences of this group of young women. The findings highlight the tensions between notions of childhood and expectations of adulthood surrounding this group of young people. These converge around reaching the age of 18 and foreground vulnerability on the one side, and responsibility on the other.

The Importance of Kinetic Treatment for Integrating Children with SEN into Education

Any child may encounter learning difficulties at some time, but they are usually overcome due to the support and encouragement provided by parents and the educational establishments where children are enrolled depending on their age (kindergarten, school). The notion of children with special educational needs (SEN) is used to describe a category of people with learning problems in relation to age or with a handicap/ a disability/ an impairment compared to most of the population. For children with SEN, the intervention through kinetic means represents an effective therapy that can be equally used by parents and teachers in order to facilitate the integration of these children into mainstream education. The purpose of this paper is to carry out a bibliographic study regarding the improvement of the quality of life in children with SEN by applying specific kinetic means that consist of physical exercise and massage, but also by the intervention of other types of therapy, depending on the disability of each subject. Individualisation of physical activities is a general principle applicable to all participants and especially to people with SEN who suffer from various conditions. In conclusion, we claim that the beneficial effects of the movement performed in any form and in any context are undeniable for any child but particularly for those with SEN.

Everybody’s Child: An Exploration of Images of Children that Shocked the World

Despite the passivity and vulnerability of childhood as a social construction, the image of the child is both powerful and transformative. Such is the power of images of the child they can and have shaped the history of nation states, shifted policy and become emblematic of a cry for change. In journalism, filmmaking, and news media the child can become the symbol of a nation, a conflict, a tragedy and the failure of policy, or indeed the adult world, to care and protect childhood itself. Using evocative images from across the 20th and 21st century, this paper interrogates how idealised notions of childhood become focal and challenged by images which reveal the death, deprivation and destruction of children. The image of 3-year-old Alan Kurdi’s body on a Turkish Beach in 2015 resonated around the world. It became the biggest trending photo on Twitter within 24 h and graced the front of hundreds of global newspapers the following day. It also demanded a political response, as presidents and prime ministers scrambled to hold press conferences and generate policy to respond to the Syrian and wider so-called Mediterranean crisis. This is just a recent example in a long line of iconic images of ‘the child’ that have shaped policy and shifted hearts and minds. The power and influence of these photographs is traced here to highlight where the discursive vulnerability of a single child becomes emblematic of the failures of the powerful: adults, governments, nation states, and global governance. Using the examples of famine stricken South Sudan (1993) and the ‘migrant crisis’ of the Mediterranean Sea (2015), how these hitherto anonymous children briefly become everybody’s child is explored here.

Química acessível para crianças

Levando em consideração o desenvolvimento do pensamento científico desde a época que os estudantes são crianças, neste trabalho são apresentados os resultados de um projeto de extensão que foi elaborado com o objetivo contribuir para a melhoria da qualidade do ensino de química. O projeto contou com a elaboração de um material didático e um kit experimental desenvolvido com materiais de baixo custo e fácil acesso, sendo entregue nas Escolas Estaduais de Bambuí e região. De acordo com os resultados apresentados, os envolvidos no projeto compreenderam as noções das crianças e puderam verificar que os conhecimentos prévios das mesmas contribuíram para a construção do processo de ensino-aprendizagem, sendo apresentados resultados satisfatórios nas respostas das atividades do material didático bem como na explicação das experiências conduzidas nas Feiras de Ciências, as quais foram apresentadas nas escolas contempladas. O projeto motivou os estudantes conceberem a química como uma ciência prática e aplicável em situações cotidianas. Os objetivos coincidiram com o plano estratégico que envolve o IFMG- Campus Bambuí, o qual vincula a relação entre aprender para fazer e fazer para aprender, com a extensão ampliada para a formação de cidadãos críticos que pudessem contribuir com o conhecimento químico construído de forma contínua.

Lonely Young American: Queer Terrorist Recruitment and the Trope of the Child

Abstract The trope of the Child is contradictory and marked by considerable ambivalence. To reckon with the Child’s place in public culture is to bear witness to its myriad permutations. One such permutation presents itself in the story of “Alex,” a 23-year-old white U.S. American woman who nearly left her Washington State home to join the Islamic State (ISIS) after sustained online contact with several Caliphate members. Alex’s story is a representative anecdote regarding white civil society’s affective investments in and anxieties about the Child, and is strikingly homologous to popular narratives of online sexual predators who target children. Within the white Western heteronormative imaginary, the figures of the pedophile and the terrorist recruiter seek to defile the Child and, in so doing, undermine the normative foundations of white Western civil society. To mark the ISIS recruiter as a queer threat to the Child is to mobilize the latter in the service of Western hegemony and tether heteronormative notions of child and family to the politics of empire.