Relationality has become central to Childhood Studies and even described as its ontological ground. Feminist theories offer articulate theorizing on relationalities, yet feminist ideas of relationality have not had a significant impact on Childhood Studies. Through focusing on feminist notions of corporeal specificity, sexual-temporal difference and asymmetry, and transcorporeality, this paper argues that feminist theorizations open up a space to engage with childhood and children’s lives as not only relational or entangled, but as inevitably imbricated in relations of power.
This study explores the ‘sex-map’, a didactic object developed in Sweden. The analysis focuses on teacher guidelines and an animated movie for classroom use and how the sex-map becomes a method for emphasizing students as actors in defining sexuality. Building on Mol’s notion of ontonorms, the emphasis is on ways in which the ontology of young sexuality is associated with arguments about what is ‘good’ in and for sex education. The sex-map incorporates ideal students’ experiences, discoveries, and positive feelings. Via students, a critique is mounted against one-path sexuality, underscoring the importance of ‘good’ non-hierarchical sexuality as exemplary sex education.
This article explores a paradox that was identified during an ethnographic study of two Danish therapeutic residential institutions for children with emotional and behavioural problems. The key objective of these institutions is to provide specialized treatment for the individual child. However, the task of organizing everyday life for a group of troubled children is so demanding that little room is left for individualization. In practice, treatment takes the shape of a rather standardized package. Analysing individual treatment as a powerful kind of `institutional thinking', the authors delve into the meaning of an apparent contradiction in terms: standardized individual therapy.
Ideas of nature, nation and childhood are intertwined in Nordic early childhood education. We explore in ethnographic data the ways nature is taught in Swedish mobile preschools. We show how everyday nationalism manifests in the teaching practices of ‘good’ pedagogy in nature. We argue that depending on who is teaching and learning, various constructions of nationhood emerge enabling the re-imagination of a single national imaginary to a plural one.
This article draws attention to the way some theoretically driven researchers discuss an insistent need for reframing the ontological and epistemological assumptions in the field of research known as childhood studies. Using a rhetorical approach, I will take a closer look at how their vocabulary is constructed and made credible through an attempt to find a cohesive language applicable in an interdisciplinary discourse. The article points to the paradoxical claim of taking a step away from a modernist way of thinking, while the arguing is based on a modernist approach. In addition, it also highlights constructions of a certain ideal researcher.
This study explores how siblings in Tanzania actively engage in their own socialization through the negotiation and local design of caregiving practices and control between younger siblings (age 1-3), older siblings (age 3-13) and adults. Analyses of moment-to-moment embodied, multimodal sequences of interaction illustrate how caregiving responsibility is negotiated. The analysis is multidisciplinary drawing on concepts developed in the traditions of sociology, language socialization and applied linguistics. The findings highlight the usefulness of a concept of socialization which recognizes the agency of the child and are discussed in relation to constructions of the caregiving child as both being and becoming.
This study explores how children navigate institutional regulation at an asylum centre and how their political acts of resistance are expressed through their struggle to access play. It shows that the children used tactical awareness to identify the displayed strategies of the institutional regulation, which was conditional for their development of tactical acts, through which they handled that regulation. The children’s political acts of resistance and struggle for play, which were hidden to the institution, demonstrated how they claimed their right to play, although this right was still structurally denied. Consequently, their politics is a politics of impediment.
This article explores how five children born in Sweden whose parents were born in Iran talk about their own cultural and ethnic backgrounds, and the role these play in their lives. The different ways in which they do so exemplify the complexity involved in the ongoing construction and performance of identities when certain identity options seem compulsory while others are made unavailable to them. The findings show that agency and choice are crucial issues for these children, and that they resist oversimplification, reductionism and categorization based on their cultural or ethnic backgrounds. Furthermore they draw attention to the fact that their reflective choices and self-chosen identities are often challenged both at home and in their schools. This study is intended to expand knowledge of children's lives and experiences and would be useful for both teachers and other professionals working with children.
This article analyses identity constructions in two manual-based universal parenting training programmes in Sweden, Connect (U) and All Children in Focus (ABC). The analysis was performed with discourse analysis of oral messages during parent training courses. The findings revealed that the parents' subject positions altered between troubled and good while the children's subject positions altered between ambiguous and natural in a confessional discourse of uncertainty and competence. Conclusively, pastoral power operated to support parental self-reflexivity and adult control in a process to improve parenting skills.
This article asks questions about the ontology of child culture. It aims to position the concept of child culture at the forefront of theoretical research without creating a true' or singular definition of the concept. It is rather a conceptual exploration of partial consistencies of child culture in and through practices. The focus of the analyses is on five institutional cultural practices created for children: two children's museums, a science centre, a theme park and an amusement park. A cross-analysis of these practices provides the empirical material for proposing the notion of child culture multiple'.
This article examines how people in childhood responded emotionally to family members’ drinking in Finland, Italy, and Sweden. The data consist of retrospective childhood memories told and shared in a focus group context. The results suggest that in the Mediterranean drinking cultures, children develop a neutral and safe emotional contact with drinking. In the intoxication-oriented drinking cultures, in turn, children build an ambivalent contact with drinking with more or less positive or negative emotions. However, the results also reveal that this ambivalence does not need to be per se a threatening circumstance regarding children’s safety.
This article offers the first quantitative analysis of European Union external strategies for children's rights. Drawing on original data, it finds that European Union diplomatic pressure and economic aid have increased over time but that the European Union still lacks independent policy positions on children's rights. European Union strategies target states to different degrees and international non-governmental organizations are favoured over domestic organizations. Findings suggest that the European Union is becoming a more significant actor of child rights governance, underscoring the value of a comparative approach.