Social Studies Of Childhood Research Articles

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.

Vaulting the turnstiles: dialoguing and translating childhood and agencies from Chile, Latin America

ABSTRACT When aiming to create spaces for dialogue between social studies of childhood in the Global North and South, there are many aspects to consider. One of them is the complexities of bringing together different histories and languages as they shape differentiated understandings of the field. In this article, we focus on agency, one of the main concepts that has shaped the New Social Studies of Childhood (NSSC). We discuss how childhood studies in the Global South have contributed to the development of agency in NSSC within English-speaking dialogues. We introduce the notion of agencia, the Spanish equivalent of agency, exploring its connotations in childhood studies and advocacy groups in Latin America. Finally, we bring together the different aspects of agency and agencia as they have been discussed throughout the paper, exploring how from these perspectives we can approach one specific event: secondary school students vaulting over the turnstiles at the metro stations in Santiago, Chile. This event initiated what has been known as the Chilean outbreak of October 2019, and the origin of the current constitutional process from which children have been ambiguously included/excluded.

Deprivation and intra‐family conflict: Children as agents in the Family Stress Model

AbstractObjectiveThe study applies an adapted Family Stress Model (FSM) to analyze the relationship between child material deprivation and intra‐family conflict about money using a nationally representative survey of children in England in 2018.BackgroundThe standard FSM holds that poverty is experienced by parents who, in turn, impact children. Drawing on new social studies of childhood, the authors posit that the model does not recognize children as social actors—with direct experiences of poverty—nor as social agents who co‐construct parent–child relationships in a context of poverty.MethodThe authors use secondary survey data from Fair Shares and Families, which investigated children's and parents' experiences of, and involvement in, the sharing of family resources. The authors estimate linear structural equation models to test an adapted FSM, which includes separate pathways (for parents and children) from economic hardship to intra‐family conflict.ResultsBoth parent‐ and child‐reported economic pressure and psychological distress have significant direct and indirect associations with intra‐family conflict. The adapted model works the same way in lower and higher income households, as well as in lone parent and couple‐headed families.ConclusionChildren's experiences as social actors and influence as social agents are important in shaping parent–child relationships. This suggests that the standard FSM is limited in its insights about how economic hardship affects children and families and its policy applications for interventions to mitigate the impacts of child poverty. Research applying the FSM should seek to conceptualize children as active “child‐beings,” rather than as passive “adult‐becomings.”

Being (with) batman – entangled research relations in ethnographic research in early childhood education and care

ABSTRACT This paper engages with the question of how ethnographers in the field of Early Childhood Education and Care (ECEC) can respond to the ontological turn in the social studies of childhood. Against the background of ECEC’s deeply sedimented orientation towards the uniqueness of the individual child, the paper wishes to complicate the rationale of de-centring the child and childhood-research’s child-centredness. Building on ethnographic field notes from a nursery class in the Early Years Unit of an Infant School in England, the authors discuss how ethnographers become entangled into the phenomenon of child-centredness, and how this entanglement is central for ethnographers to become answerable and response-able to the field of ECEC. The paper suggests that Karen Barad’s concept of agential seperability offers possibilities to explore how the individual child is enacted in ECEC and to understand, how ECEC is entangled into performing and producing children’s need for education.

A educação e o cuidado dos bebês na pandemia: uma análise a partir das relações geracionais, raciais e de gênero

O objetivo do artigo é discutir a educação e o cuidado dos bebês no período da pandemia da COVID-19 tomando como referência as categorias raça, geração e gênero. A base teórica interdisciplinar se situa nos campos da educação das relações étnico-raciais, dos estudos de gênero, especialmente os feministas, e dos estudos sociais da infância. Trata-se de um estudo de abordagem mista, quanti-quali, que explora os dados estatísticos sobre o acesso dos bebês à creche e sobre as condições de vida das mulheres com filhos/as. As análises tomam ainda como referência entrevistas com mulheres negras que têm seus bebês em uma creche pública municipal em Florianópolis. A partir da análise dos dados, indica-se que os fatores de desigualdade que marcam o acesso dos bebês à creche já estavam presentes desde antes a pandemia e no caso das condições de vida das mulheres negras com filhos/as, observa-se um processo de precarização da vida, sendo que no contexto estudado destaca-se uma intensa ocupação do tempo das mulheres com os cuidados com os seus bebês e com outras pessoas, a diminuição dos recursos para a subsistência e um processo de confinamento social.

Professores homens da Educação Infantil: narrativas e (des)encontros entre corpos, brincadeiras e cuidados

As narrativas de professores homens da Educação Infantil sobre as imposições e expectativas conferidas a eles e às professoras mulheres no exercício da docência, nestes espaços públicos, educativos e coletivos, são o centro deste artigo. Produzidas por meio de entrevistas semiestruturadas e problematizadas à luz das pesquisas do campo da Educação Infantil e dos estudos sociais da infância, as narrativas revelam diferentes maneiras com que o sexismo e as discriminações de gênero podem impactar na atuação dos professores, como a necessidade de legitimar continuamente suas capacidades profissionais e a vigilância e/ou negação da dimensão do cuidado. Além disso, os professores entrevistados revelam e reconhecem promover e provocar corporalmente diferentes experiências e brincadeiras junto às crianças, contribuindo para ampliação das reflexões sobre a dimensão brincalhona na docência, para a valorização e reconhecimento dos professores e para uma Pedagogia da Educação Infantil em que cuidar e educar de meninas e meninos pequenos seja indissociável para professores e professoras.

Mapping Child-Animal Care Relations in Shaun Tan’s Tales from Outer Suburbia

This article explores caring relations between child characters and sentient animals in two tales by Australian author-illustrator Shaun Tan. Each of Tan’s 15 Tales from Outer Suburbia are set in an “outer” suburban world replete with curious critters. These include a silent and stoic water buffalo, an unmoving dugong (manatee), and other surprising companion species. In this article, the author unpacks the caring relationships between child protagonists and the sentient creatures they encounter in two selected tales by focusing specifically on those processes that bring these characters together in curious encounters: that is, processes of embodied mapping. Emphasis is placed on enchantment and movement, and, in particular, moments given to pausing, lingering, and reflection. The author argues that both the fields of human-animal studies and the social studies of childhood can gain from exploration of the subtleties of these moments.

”Det viktigaste är att växterna får leva och sånt”: en studie om att förebygga barns växtblindhet

Studien syftar till att bidra med en fördjupad förståelse av hur barns växtblindhet kan förebyggas genom en närstudie av hur barn uppfattar och använder en skogsträdgård. Det teoretiska ramverket utgår från barndomsforskning och dess antagande om det aktiva, sociala och kompetenta barnet. Studien omfattar 28 barn, varav majoriteten är 9 år, som medverkat via samtalspromenader med fotografering. Gibsons begrepp affordances har använts som analysverktyg. Analysen tar avstamp i de fotograferade företeelser som barnen anser är betydelsefulla, minnesvärda och speciella i skogsträdgården. Studiens resultat visar att växterna inklusive träd och buskar är framträdande företeelser genom de sinnliga, estetiska och emotionella affordances som de enligt barnens beskrivningar erbjuder. Denna studie indikerar att skogsträdgårdens miljö och skogsträdgårdspedagogernas edagogiska arbetssätt i olika miniprojekt med växter kan förebygga barns växtblindhet. Studiens slutsats är att det är dags att planera för att plantera i barns närliggande utomhusmiljö.

Entanglements between Agency and Vulnerability in the Phenomenon of Birth. Reflections on Children’s Expressions about ‘Being Born’

Analogously to the works in the field of new social studies of childhood, this contribution deals with the concept of childhood as a social construction, in which children are considered as social actors in their own living environment, engaged in interpretive reproduction of the social. In this perspective the concept of agency is strongly stressed, and the vulnerability of children is not sufficiently taken into account. But in combining vulnerability and agency lies the possibility to consider the perspective of the subjects in the context of their social, political and cultural embeddedness. In this paper we show that what children say, what is important to them in general and for their well-being, is shaped by the care experiences within the family and by their social contexts. The argumentation for the intertwining of vulnerability and agency is exemplified by the expressions of an interviewed girl about her birth and by reference to philosophical concepts about birth and natality.

Vulnerability and autonomy: theoretical considerations based on children’s narrations about sport in adult-dominated contexts

Starting from the perspective of the new social studies of childhood and their strong focus on agency of children this article follows the critical voices on the agency concept and reconceptualises children’s autonomy under conditions of vulnerability. Within the adult dominated field of sport the phenomenon of children’s vulnerability as well as children’s autonomy can be seen and discussed empirically. The authors analyse what and how children’s autonomy is enabled or limited e.g. through organisational aspects or through the superior position of adults. This leads to new findings concerning children’s emotional and physical vulnerability, children’s decisions about leisure time and adult-free spaces as well as the limitation of children’s autonomy. As a conclusion or in the sense of an outlook, thoughts towards theories of professionalism are considered.

Ethnographic research in childhood institutions: participations and entanglements

ABSTRACT Drawing on a critical debate in the social studies of childhood on the empowerment of children to participate in research, the paper illustrates how ethnographic research in childhood institutions has the potential to destabilise hierarchic power relationships towards an open, dynamic, playful engagement between ethnographer, children, and the material of the classroom. Ultimately, we suggest that conceptualizations from new posthumanist materialism open up new ways of theorising participation in ethnographic research in childhood institutions and fine-tune its capacity for reflecting processes of knowledge production with children.

Detskaya agentnost kak predmet teoreticheskoy diskussii i prakticheskaya problema (antropologicheskiy kommentariy)

The introduction opens the proceedings for the conference on childhood studies “‘Through Children’s Eyes’: The Child’s Subjectivity in Social Studies and in the Public Sphere” (December 21–22, 2018, EUSPb, St Petersburg). The paper traces the history of the New Social Studies of Childhood, a research paradigm which has put forward the notion of children as competent social actors and has made claims for its universality as a conceptual framework for studying children. A close examination of the discipline formation shows that—in an attempt to draw attention to the worthiness of childhood as a research subject—proponents of the new paradigm have used politically informed arguments and have drawn on the “adult” model of rational subjects for the conceptualization of children’s practices. These, in turn, have led to the loss of specificity in the accounts of childhood experiences. Several theoretical efforts made both within and outside the “new sociology of childhood” to overcome the conceptual crisis are considered. The present collection consists of four ethnographic studies related to the issue of children’s agency. Two of these examine the soviet pedagogical disputes on the meaning of children’s independency (which in many ways are congruent to the theoretical discussion of children’s agency) and the two others explore the different forms and formats agency takes in natural settings within peer interaction.

Городское и сельское пространства в представлении детей: по материалам географических сочинений

The article considers the organization of urban and rural space in terms of their friendliness towards children and adolescents. The spatial characteristics of places, their assessment is studied in line with a new interdisciplinary direction - the geography of childhood, formed at the intersection of humanitarian geography and social studies of childhood. To collect empirical data, an essay method was chosen that provides children with the opportunity to describe their favorite place in the city. In total, 140 compositions were collected by schoolchildren aged 9–17 from the cities of Komsomolsk-on-Amur, Astrakhan, Kaliningrad, Moscow, St. Petersburg, Cheremkhovo and the village of Dolgorukovo. The presented locations differ in their size, remoteness from the European part of Russia and the socio-economic opportunities for organizing space for children. Through geographical essays of children, which described their favorite places, the problems of studying the territory of residence in terms of spatial, socio-economic and subjective characteristics were solved.

Mulheres na escuta de crianças: considerações acerca do perfil de quem pesquisa com crianças nas ciências humanas e sociais brasileiras

Os estudos sociais da infância evidenciam a intenção crescente de abordar diferentes temas sob a ótica das crianças. Salvo em casos muito específicos, crianças não participam da condução de pesquisas. Quem, então, as escuta, interpreta e amplifica suas vozes? Buscando responder a essa pergunta, realizou-se um levantamento dos artigos que relatam pesquisas com crianças nas áreas de Antropologia, Educação, Psicologia e Sociologia publicados por revistas brasileiras classificadas como Qualis A pela CAPES. Partindo das técnicas da análise de conteúdo, tais artigos foram, em seguida, categorizados, inclusive em relação às características de seus autores. Os números mostram que são, quase sempre, pesquisadoras mulheres. O artigo reflete sobre implicações desse entrelaçamento entre mulheres e crianças e argumenta ser fundamental fortalecer linhas de pesquisa direcionadas a apreender as maneiras pelas quais o fato das crianças se constituírem como uma “temática feminina” impacta o nosso conhecimento sobre infância e, mais indiretamente, a própria vida das crianças.

Sociocultural constructs of children and childhood

Interpretations of the concepts of children and childhood have significantly changed over the past centuries. In the eighteenth century childhood was ascribed a status of a separate phase of human life in which human beings learn, grow and develop. Research conducted within the developmental psychology paradigm based on the notion of childhood’s ‘naturalness’ and on the necessity and normality of development has contributed to the emergence of a universal vision of the child and childhood. This vision has been challenged by the research conducted within the sociocultural paradigm in which childhood, understood as a social construction, is neither a natural nor a universal feature of human groups but appears as a specific structural and cultural component of many societies. We focused our attention on the sociocultural interpretations of the concepts of children and childhood. Our aim is, therefore, to show the ways in which children and childhood are understood in a sociocultural perspective. In the introductory part of the paper we briefly describe a universal vision of child development as well as the criticism it met from the supporters of the social childhood studies. In the main part of the article we focus our attention on the issue of social constructing of children and childhood. Sociocultural approach to childhood reveals a multitude and diversity of images of children and childhood constructed by adults in a variety of places, contexts and social spaces.

Этнографический взгляд на роль эмоций в российском детском доме


 Том Дисней – PhD, научный сотрудник, Департамент социальной работы и социальной защиты, Университет Бирмингема, Великобритания. Электронная почта: t.n.disney@bham.ac.uk
 
 Со второй половины XX в. на Западе широкое распространение получила политика деинституциализации ухода за детьми-сиротами, в контексте которой детские дома рассматриваются как места эмоциональной депривации, способные причинить значительный вред проживающим в них детям. Тем не менее масштабная институциализация детей-сирот по-прежнему сохраняется во многих странах мира, в том числе в России. Рассматривая роль эмоций в системе ухода за детьми-сиротами, автор статьи вносит вклад в научную дискуссию по двум направлениям. Во-первых, в работе с опорой на психологические теории социальной привязанности прослежено, как макроинституциальная картина социальной поддержки детей-сирот и детей, оставшихся без попечения родителей, (де)конструируется в Европе и России. Во-вторых, основываясь на материалах этнографического исследования, проведенного в детском доме для детей с интеллектуальной инвалидностью, автор статьи исследует значение эмоций в жизни трех групп индивидов, а именно персонала, волонтеров и детей-сирот, а также влияние межличностных отношений на детей, живущих в детском доме. Рассматривая детский дом как гибридное пространство, совмещающее домашнюю и рабочую среды, и опираясь на социальные исследования детства, автор изучает влияние эмоций на жизнь уязвимой категории детей и показывает, как эмоциональные конфликты между персоналом и волонтерами могут воздействовать на организацию ухода за детьми и его качество. Этнографический метод дополняет научную дискуссию о детских домах, в настоящее время локализованную в поле количественных и биопсихологических исследований, в части понимания рутины этой жизни. Собранные в ходе исследования материалы позволяют заглянуть в закрытый мир учреждений для детей-сирот с инвалидностью и в то же время обрисовывают задачу переустройства подобных пространств, поставленную перед российским правительством в рамках законодательных изменений последних лет.

Making health information meaningful: Children's health literacy practices

Children's health and wellbeing is high on the research and policy agenda of many nations. There is a wealth of epidemiological research linking childhood circumstances and health practices with adult health. However, echoing a broader picture within child health research where children have typically been viewed as objects rather than subjects of enquiry, we know very little of how, in their everyday lives, children make sense of health-relevant information.This paper reports key findings from a qualitative study exploring how children understand food in everyday life and their ideas about the relationship between food and health. 53 children aged 9-10, attending two socio-economically contrasting schools in Northern England, participated during 2010 and 2011. Data were generated in schools through interviews and debates in small friendship groups and in the home through individual interviews. Data were analysed thematically using cross-sectional, categorical indexing.Moving beyond a focus on what children know the paper mobilises the concept of health literacy (Nutbeam, 2000), explored very little in relation to children, to conceptualise how children actively construct meaning from health information through their own embodied experiences. It draws on insights from the Social Studies of Childhood (James and Prout, 2015), which emphasise children's active participation in their everyday lives as well as New Literacy Studies (Pahl and Rowsell, 2012), which focus on literacy as a social practice. Recognising children as active health literacy practitioners has important implications for policy and practice geared towards improving child health.

Rejecting ‘the child’, embracing ‘childhood’: Conceptual and methodological considerations for social work research with young people

This article examines how the social studies of childhood can inform social work research. The first half of the article considers how notions of ‘childhood’ as a social construction diverge from normative, uniform and universal ideas of what might otherwise constitute ‘the child’. The second half then considers this discussion in regards to social work research. It considers the extent to which childhood scholarship has been used within the discipline of social work and illustrates this point by drawing upon recent empirical contributions to the foster care literature in the UK.

ELEMENTOS CONSTITUTIVOS DA EXPERIÊNCIA INFANTIL

O artigo apresenta os elementos que compõem as experiências produzidas pelas crianças no ambiente da Educação Infantil. A categoria experiência foi refinada a partir da crítica da cultura e da modernidade de Walter Benjamin e dos Estudos Sociais da Infância. O estudo de caráter qualitativo buscou captar a densidade das ações das crianças. Identificou-se que as experiências das crianças são resultantes da combinatória de ações que elas desenvolvem nas relações que estabelecem com os artefatos, nas relações vivenciadas entre elas e os adultos e por último nas relações entre as próprias crianças. Ao vivenciar as experiências no âmbito da instituição, as crianças articulam-nas a situações vividas em temporalidades distintas das dos adultos, criando, assim, campos de experiências.

Approaches to promoting ideas about children’s rights and participation: Can the education of undergraduate students contribute to raising the visibility of the child in relation to child participation in Canada?

This paper compares children’s participation rights in England and in Canada. It argues that the increasing participation of children in English policy and legislation is linked to research and publishing from those working in the new paradigm of the social study of childhood. We consider that one effect of the relatively low take up from Canadian academics in this sub-discipline may be one reason as to why child participation has somewhere to go in Canada. We describe an undergraduate program that has recently added a Child Advocacy Certificate or Diploma, and contend that undergraduate education grounded in the new paradigm can positively impact advocacy and participation, as well as feeding into wider societal understandings of childhood.