Social Construction Of Childhood Research Articles

Sideways Listening: Doing Space Sideways to the Norm with Superhero Franchise Kamen Rider

This article asserts that the social construction of space and the social construction of childhood are mutually informing. Different social practices within the broader domain of childhood reflect different constructions of childhood through their construction of space. These practices include watching television in the family home, attending an educational institution, or playing in a park. Sound, however, affords the possibility of non-linear development as it imbues a child’s experience of sites with affect carried over from different situations. The authors use social practice theory to reconceptualize the relationship between the social practices of childhood and their sites, space, and the role of sound in facilitating sideways growth. They focus on the Japanese children’s superhero franchise Kamen Rider and its use of sound both onscreen and in the design of its tie-in merchandise. The authors argue that combining affect (through sound) with space in this way allows us to see moments in which the child practices space disobediently and non-lineally. The portable affect created by the media design of the Kamen Rider tie-products, the authors argue, offers an excellent case study of how sound can create non-linear, crosswise movement between the sites at which childhood is practised. We further argue that the retention and pretension of affect associated with Kamen Rider sounds facilitate an experience of space sideways to its dominant construction.

Street-Level Workers and Unaccompanied Minors: Between Vulnerability and Suspicion

Abstract Focusing on practices and representations mobilized by street-level workers in the management of North African unaccompanied minor migrants (UAMs) in Geneva, I take a closer look at the everyday assessment and production of UAMs’ deservingness in the context of humanitarianism. I show the importance of doubt and of perceived vulnerability in the informal evaluation process of UAMs’ right for protection. I further demonstrate how the social construction of childhood, race, and gender influence street-level workers’ perceptions.

Inter-American Children and their Rights: A Critical Discourse Analysis of Judicial Decisions of the Inter-American Court of Human Rights

Abstract This article focuses on the influence of courts and the achr in the social construction of childhood and children’s rights. Using critical discourse analysis, it explores the meanings and understandings of childhood and children’s rights that emerge from the judgments of the Inter-American Court of Human Rights on family care, custody, adoption, deprivation of liberty and detention conditions. From this analysis, I argue that the iachr constructs a normative notion of the child according to which she is understood as being between the categories of human being, human becoming, subject of rights and object of protection and a concept of children’s rights according to which these are primarily thought of as their right to receive special measures of protection. The tensions between this complex view on childhood and a paternalistic approach to children’s rights reveals the need for a children’s rights specific international human rights law instrument for the Inter-American human rights system.

Roots, Rights and Risk: Canada, Childhood and the COVID-19 Global Pandemic.

The COVID-19 global pandemic highlights pre-existing inequities as well as the challenge of ensuring the protection of children’s human rights in countries like Canada that have ratified the United Nations Convention on the Rights of the Child. SARS-CoV-2, referred to as the 2019 novel Coronavirus disease or COVID-19, presents a significant threat to public health. Although children are considered to be low risk of contracting, spreading, and serious complications of the disease, are considerably impacted by COVID-19 government-sanctioned distancing measures. COVID-19 is a persistent public health threat, thus, the long-term consequences are largely unknown. This qualitative research study, a content analysis of online Canadian media reports of COVID-19 and children, engaged transdisciplinary social justice methodology, social constructions of childhood at the intersection of race, socio-economic status, gender, and disability. The findings suggest COVID-19 reinforces the impact of social exclusion and economic disparity on equity-seeking young people and families in Canada.

The critique of Sociology of Childhood: Human capital as the concrete ‘social construction of childhood’

The ‘New Paradigm’ of Sociology of Childhood famously maintains that childhood is socially constructed and supposedly places a much greater emphasis on the agency of children: children should not simply be framed as the passive receivers of socialisation. The aim of this article is to demonstrate that such a ‘social construction’ of childhood is not concretely articulated and that the theoretical understanding of the ‘social construction’ of childhood is simply delegated to historiographical or ethnographic accounts. In doing so, it advances a new criticism of the New Paradigm and radicalises previous ones. Here, key is the theoretical engagement with the concept of ‘human capital’: foregrounding its critique, this article proposes the link between ‘human capital’ as a neoliberal version of labour power and the concept of socialisation. The aim is to show that the ‘social construction’ of childhood is central, but the New Paradigm uses categories that are at the same time founded on neo-liberal views and abstracted from concrete social relations. This article maintains that a concrete critique of processes of socialisation (which is here understood as the socialisation of childhood as human capital) is needed instead of abstract critique of reified childhood. Two alternative pedagogical practices are used to provide an example of such a concrete critique.

The Criminalization of Black Children: Race, Gender and Delinquency in Chicago's Juvenile Justice System, 1899-1945 by Tera Eva Agyepong

Reviewed by: The Criminalization of Black Children: Race, Gender and Delinquency in Chicago's Juvenile Justice System, 1899-1945 by Tera Eva Agyepong Toby Rollo The Criminalization of Black Children: Race, Gender and Delinquency in Chicago's Juvenile Justice System, 1899-1945. By Tera Eva Agyepong. Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2018. xvi + 180 pp. Paper $24.95, e-book $18.99. Tera Agyepong's book The Criminalization of Black Children is a genuine contribution to and an outstanding example of historical scholarship. Agyepong [End Page 137] argues that when black children migrated north to Chicago in the wake of abolition, they encountered a fledgling set of juvenile justice and child-welfare institutions that gradually adopted differential treatment toward black and white youth. One of the many highlights of Agyepong's work is the use of case studies of particular children to illustrate how institutions shifted their conceptions and treatment of children in an attempt to distance white youth from the conditions of newly freed black youth. The first two chapters introduce readers to the moment in the late nineteenth century when popular ideals of childhood innocence informed the development of juvenile justice. It was not long after the arrival of black children from the South that the qualified sentencing and numerous sites of rehabilitation for youth became functionally denied to black children, leaving black communities to form their own networks of support and care. In chapter 3, Agyepong argues that white girls in these systems benefited from notions of innocence and vulnerability that were denied to black girls, who were treated as deviant and beyond rehabilitation. Likewise, in chapter 4, Agyepong explains how black boys were constructed as inherently criminal and, again, beyond rehabilitation. As a contribution to the literature on intersectional approaches to institutional racism, the book offers rich corroboration of the lived experience of black boys and girls as well as providing empirical support for long-standing abstract theories of structural racism. As with all historical work, the choice of where one begins does shape the argument. Agyepong begins with early-nineteenth-century shifts in social constructions of childhood and explores how those conceptions were deployed in the work of child-saving movements. The era of child saving, along with the discovery of childhood innocence, are common and very productive starting points, but they also involve certain hazards that Agyepong does not fully navigate. One significant problem in appealing to the discourses of childhood innocence is the risk of conflating the many distinct and sometimes conflicting notions of innocence found in law, various branches of philosophy, theology, and literature. Any attempt to deduce the legal realities or lived experiences of childhood from complex popular discourses of innocence must take care to disaggregate these different notions. Agyepong does at times presuppose a more unified notion of childhood innocence and this has some minor implications for her argument. A number of distinct ideals of innocence feature in historical conceptions of childhood, each with their own specific connotations: legal (presumption of innocence: ei incumbit probatio qui dicit, non qui negat); moral (virtuous); sexual (chastity, purity); physical (diminutive, vulnerable); epistemological [End Page 138] (ignorance); and theological (without sin or evil). Historians of childhood must be careful to disaggregate these and other ideals to expose how they serve to both secure and compromise the safety of gendered and racialized groups. Since at least the seventeenth century, for example, the sexual innocence of young girls was the leading pretense behind popular sexual fetishization of female children, fantasies of violation, and an aesthetic of sexual purity in art and popular culture. Moreover, and paradoxically, the same fetishization of sexual innocence informed the oppressive Victorian obsession with chastity. And so, for centuries, extremely high rates of sexual abuse in white society went virtually ignored, all while civil society was enforcing a tyrannical regime of chastity and virtuous conduct on young girls. Likewise, in the seventeenth century, racialized indigenous children were deemed epistemologically innocent (i.e., ignorant rather than corrupt) and were, as a result, forcibly removed from their communities to be placed in draconian boarding and residential schools designed to "kill the Indian in the child." The point here is that in those...

The social construction of childhood and Maricota sem dona: narrative fragments in education research

The social construction of childhood and Maricota sem dona: narrative fragments in education research

The Sociology of Childhood and Youth in Canada

Book and Film Reviews 135 The Sociology of Childhood and Youth in Canada Xiaobei Chen, Rebecca Raby, and Patrizia Albanese, Editors (2017). Toronto: Canadian Scholars. 425 pages. $74.95 (print). ISBN 978-1-77338-018-6 (softcover). 978-1-77338-019-3 (PDF). 978-1-77338-020-9 (EPUB). The editors and contributors to The Sociology of Childhood and Youth in Canada seek to revise childhood and youth studies through inversion of their developmental stages. We see child-centered stories that revamp the criteria that one uses to define what young folks need to know and be in society. The contributors treat us to a wealth of sources and methods for representation of youngsters’ lives. The volume has 20 chapters in four sections, an introductory essay, and a glossary at the end. The introductory chapter notifies the reader that children and youth are individuals whose lives do not neatly fit the contexts that experts assign. The editors depict the very real challenges that any student of research with children, youth, and their families faces. There is a perennial topic in Section I: Research on and with Children and Youth, which concerns how researchers form relationships with youngsters. The writing in the five chapters is quite lively, and contributors write to the research neophyte. Section II: Social Constructions of Childhood and Youth, investigates experiences and texts in children’s lives. We look at studies in disability, friendships, and storybooks. Section III: Inequalities and Intersections in Experiences of Childhood and Youth, shakes the assumption of benevolence in institutions. Section IV: Citizenship, Rights, and Social Engagement, points out that international standards such as those in the United Nations Convention on the Rights of the Child (CRC) buttress the need for recognition of children as participants in determination of their life courses. There is a perennial reminder that international law like the CRC may articulate Western norms and ideals of childhood. The editors give us a wide scope of topics, and possibilities for further research programs may be imagined. It is laudable to draw in readers who are students as active participants in creation of research questions and consideration of ethical issues. I carefully read the glossary, and it is an enjoyable read on its own. Its writing reminds readers of key methods and lessons from the studies in the collection. I applaud inclusion of research in Francophone educational contexts. Investigators decouple a traditional relationship between pedagogy and Quebec nationalism. This pairing is being ruptured through focus on the child as a “unit of analysis” (p. 51) who depicts the school environment and not “the other way around.” I like that methods are part of the stories because all researchers make and remake plans as they collect and analyze data. Such weaving of methodological insights into story shows how research actually occurs. The authors make great effort to ensure that their unique studies pose arguments and questions of interest to readers. Unfortunately, there is a significant problem: Book and Film Reviews 136 there is simply too much information in the chapters. To illustrate my criticism, I refer to chapter 16 by Cameron Greensmith and Adam Davies. There is brief mention of a student, David, who did once attend his school’s gay-straight alliance (GSA) meetings but decided not to continue involvement because in his opinion, lesbians and tea dominated the club’s rhythm. In sum, he did not feel included in the club. I did really enjoy reading this anecdote, and Greensmith and Davies are correct that it deserves picking apart, as there are issues of sexism, racism, power, diversity, and complexity that affect development of GSAs in schools. This story could be the focus of the entire chapter, but the authors introduce it and then leap to another topic. A counterpoint to chapter 16 is Jihan Abbas’ superb chapter six, which begins with her memories of her brother, her home, and her childhood. She uses literature to comprehend her experiences, frustrations, and hopes for children with disabilities. Significant topics that are likely to interest readers get short shrift. In chapter five, Jacqueline Kennelly, Valerie Stam, and Lynette Schick have a relationship that transcends standard understandings of roles and responsibilities of faculty, their...

Dzieciństwo z niepełnosprawnością – problem realizacji praw dziecka niepełnosprawnego w praktyce społecznej

Dzieciństwo z niepełnosprawnością z całą pewnością jest „starym” problemem, który powoduje określone konsekwencje społeczne, ale w obliczu upowszechniających się praw dziecka, w tym także niepełnosprawnego, pojawiają się nowe okoliczności i wyzwania. Podejście oparte na prawach człowieka uwzględnia i akcentuje podmiotowość dziecka jako obywatela i przysługujące mu prawa w myśl nowoczesnej koncepcji dzieciństwa (Corsaro 1997; Jenks 2008; Prout, James 1997). Dzieci uzyskały w tym nowym podejściu pozycję aktywnych uczestników społecznego konstruowania dzieciństwa (Kwak, Mościskier 2002). Prawa dziecka są traktowane jako integralna część praw człowieka, przysługujących każdej istocie ludzkiej, także dzieciom niepełnosprawnym. Upowszechnianie się praw dziecka jako obywatela pozwala na wyeksponowanie trudnych doświadczeń najsłabszych fizycznie i/lub umysłowo dzieci i młodzieży (Callus, Farrugia 2016). Doświadczenia młodych niepełnosprawnych dają wiedzę na temat tego, co oni myślą o edukacji, służbie zdrowia i polityce społecznej. W większości są to negatywne doświadczenia, które potwierdzają wykluczenie dzieci i młodzieży niepełnosprawnej praktycznie we wszystkich dziedzinach życia, ale trzeba też podkreślić, iż grupa młodych niepełnosprawnych jest niejednorodna i ich doświadczenia nie zawsze są tylko negatywne (Davis 2004). Prezentowany artykuł podejmuje tematykę sytuacji dziecka niepełnosprawnego i jego rodziny, koncentrując się na specyficznych trudnościach, które stają się ich udziałem i w konsekwencji utrudniają, a czasem wręcz uniemożliwiają realizację praw im przynależnych.

Social Constructions of Childhood: From Not-Yet-Adults to People in Their Own Right

Across the globe it is clear that children are a marginalized group. Children are not allowed to vote or be taken seriously in political circles (Sharpe, 2015), are kept away from public spaces (Valentine 2004), navigate inhospitable working conditions (Gamlin et. al., 2015), and are rapidly losing the time and space to foster their own child culture (Woolley and Griffin, 2014). Adults continue to institutionalize children’s play and restrict children’s access to public space. This serves to reinforce children’s position as second-class citizens. A mounting body of work shows that children are suffering in their physical and social development due to this continued marginalization (Clements, 2004; Corsaro, 1997; Evaldsson, 1998; Goodwin, 1990; Staempfli, 2008). This naturalized and troubling dynamic between children and adults needs to be critically examined in order to foster a healthy, socially just society.

The Polemics of Real and Imagined Childhood(s) in India

This essay attempts to map historical, literary and social constructions of childhood in India and to explore ways in which these differ from Western-dominated, globalised attitudes to childhood. Evidence about Indian childhood is drawn from across a narrative spectrum including children's books and films and some adult writing and media. Notions of childhood are different within and across the cultures of the world; while there is no ‘correct’ version of childhood, many have common features and sometimes the influences of one culture can be strongly felt in another. In India, for example, a dominant construction of childhood was imported through Western education. 1 After Independence (1947), Indian children's literature in English became caught up in the mass postcolonial project of nation-building. As part of becoming emancipated from colonial rule, a dominant image of the child in fiction based on Western childhood had to be replaced by one that is hybrid and multicultural. This construction of Indian childhood is now itself being buffeted by forces of cultural homogenisation. 2

Working Children in Europe: A Socio-Legal Approach to the Regulation of Child Work

Since the beginning of the 2008 economic crisis, reports of child work across Europe have increased. This article looks into the European Union (eu) legal framework that applies to children who work, and offers a socio-legal analysis of child work regulation more generally. In so doing, it considers the role of a range of factors relevant to the regulation of child work, including children’s rights, cultural relativism, social constructions of childhood, empirical evidence of the benefits and harm of child work, and the different contexts in which children are found working. Crucially, the article advances a justification for retaining a restrictive approach in relation to child work in the European context on the basis of legal, social, economic and cultural factors.

The biopolitical construction of infancy and adulthood: The child as paradigm and Utopia

The purpose of this article is to establish a clear distinction between the concepts of childhood and infancy; this distinction can allow us to observe through the study of biopolitics, the radical changes that differ Foucault’s classical analysis regarding children to Agamben’s reflections on infancy. In the line of Agamben’s theory, the association of child–infancy does not have an adult–non-infancy reciprocal association; furthermore, the notion of infancy as a chronological stage that the child and/or the adult have both left behind depends not only on a social construction of childhood but also on an ancient Greek biopolitical production of life itself. This ancient concept of life contains the binarism of zoē/bios, nature/culture, animal/man that leads to an obscuring eclipse of the concept of human being as a form-of-life, characterized by the permanent update of infancy that functions as a link between this binarism. Since infancy has no chronological association, either historically or age-related, this essay aims to review the type of relation that both children and adults have with infancy.

The dangers of unlimited access: Fiction, the Internet and the social construction of childhood

At the beginning of the twentieth century, librarians, teachers, and parents wrote about the dangers to children of unlimited access to what was termed “sensational literature.” At the beginning of the next century, they struggled to deal with the dangers to children of unlimited access to the Internet. Although separated by a hundred years, they appear to be making much the same argument about the much the same issue, that of the public library providing unlimited access to minors to what some view as inappropriate or dangerous materials. However, a closer analysis of the discourse in the professional media regarding these two controversies, one that investigates the mechanisms underlying the changes in attitudes and practice, reveals that any similarities are primarily cosmetic.Such an analysis reveals that different issues were addressed and debated utilizing different social constructions of childhood and different social constructions of the public library and public librarians held by society as a whole and by librarians at the turn of the twentieth and twenty-first centuries.

Children's agency and its contradictions in the context of transnational labour migration from Vietnam

AbstractIn this article, we contribute to the growing and diverse literature on the lived experiences of children and their agency in the context of migration. Drawing on in‐depth interviews with children whose migrant parents have left them behind, as well as with those who care for them in Vietnam, we demonstrate that the various ways in which they affect migration decision‐making and transnational communication shape the children's imaginations of migration. The context‐specific social construction of childhood, or more specifically adult perceptions of children's agency and needs, in turn structures these processes. We emphasize the need for debates on children's agency to take into account both broader socio‐economic processes at the macro level and the concrete and local scale at which children's lives unfold. By outlining how children's experiences of parental migration are constitutive of their attitudes toward this livelihood strategy, we also argue that the ability of those ‘left‐behind’ to exercise agency is closely intertwined with processes of social becoming and navigation in the transnational social fields constructed for them by adults.

Remediating Tinker Bell: Exploring Childhood and Commodification through a Century-Long Transmedia Narrative

The one-hundred-year trajectory of the mischievous Tinker Bell, from J. M. Barrie’s 1904 play Peter Pan, or the Boy Who Would Not Grow Up to the present-day Disney Fairies franchise, is a metanarrative of adaptation and remediation through which media and “childhood” can be seen to interrelate as mutually constitutive forces. With a focus on contemporary children’s narratives and media, this paper examines incarnations of this media franchise at fifty-year intervals. Our close reading yields insights into the reflexive relationship between the social constructions of childhood, the evolution of narrative in children’s literature, and the development of media for child audiences since the Edwardian era. Using Tinker Bell as an exemplar for a phenomenon, we find that as children’s narratives and media evolve in ways that increase the potential for childhood agency, commercial formulations shape this agency strategically by structuring access and participation.

Remediating Tinker Bell: Exploring Childhood and Commodification through a Century-Long Transmedia Narrative

The one-hundred-year trajectory of the mischievous Tinker Bell, from J. M. Barrie’s 1904 play Peter Pan, or the Boy Who Would Not Grow Up to the present-day Disney Fairies franchise, is a metanarrative of adaptation and remediation through which media and “childhood” can be seen to interrelate as mutually constitutive forces. With a focus on contemporary children’s narratives and media, this paper examines incarnations of this media franchise at fifty-year intervals. Our close reading yields insights into the reflexive relationship between the social constructions of childhood, the evolution of narrative in children’s literature, and the development of media for child audiences since the Edwardian era. Using Tinker Bell as an exemplar for a phenomenon, we find that as children’s narratives and media evolve in ways that increase the potential for childhood agency, commercial formulations shape this agency strategically by structuring access and participation.

Doli Incapax and Its Vicissitudes: Childhood and Criminal Responsibility in England, Germany and Australia

This paper examines the various ways in which the criminal responsibility of children has been understood in England, Australia and Germany, developed a comparative legal culture analysis of the legal construction of childhood and moral community. It examines whether we have been able to lay the social foundations for the political, moral and legal capacity to reflect on the normative complexities of crimes committed by children and what they mean for all of us as a moral community, rather then approaching them with an over-simplified model of full, isolated and individual legal subjectivity. It argues that the abolition of the doli incapax presumption and the reduction of the age of criminal incapacity simply makes particular children bear the full weight of the social disappointment in the disjunction between ideal and real children. Only a social order which promotes a considered engagement with the complexities of concepts such as doli incapax and Strafunmundigkeit within a changing social construction of childhood, one which allows us to disentangle societal concerns with the guilt and innocence of an abstract ‘childhood in general’ from the practical response to particular real children, will begin to provide a foundation for approaching it with some civilized integrity.

The Changing Value of the Child – A Review of the Literature Regarding Social Perceptions of Sick and Dying Children

AbstractThis article reviews the literature pertaining to the changing value of the child in England since the 19th century, highlighting the relative policy neglect of contemporary sick and dying children. The review discusses the relationship between the value of the child, social constructions of childhood and social policy. The review demonstrates how the value of the child has altered from one of utility to a contemporary position of sacralisation, illustrated by mortality statistics as a measure of associated policy impact. However, large reductions in mortality rates conceal the more complex picture of contemporary child health. Children die each year from life‐limiting and life‐threatening disorders. Moreover, technological developments increasingly allow children to live longer with such conditions, albeit with ever more complex ill health. Such children are therefore dying over protracted periods of time. However, they are largely absent from policy, which tends towards standardised outcome measures which may not reflect the needs of this minority group. Therefore, although contemporary constructions of childhood focus upon sacralisation, reflecting psychological value to parents and society, the most vulnerable child members of society remain neglected in policy and service provision.

Childhood and Family in Contemporary Children's Fiction: Resilience, Agency, and Emerging Gender Norms

New awareness of re-thinking childhood in the emergent field of childhood studies inspires production of new discourse on social construction of childhood in literature. This paper looks at contemporary children’s literature in the Philippines from this perspective and within the context of the globalization and transnationalization of care giving. Its interrogation of selected children’s books and literature for young adult reveals that the traditional concept of childhood is now being challenged and resisted. Cognizant of the need to sustain this direction of literary production, this paper posits that children’s literature in the country should mainstream this new thinking so that it can become a meaningful venue for Filipino children’s socialization and construction in light of the increasingly complex world that children need to deal with.