At the dawn of the twenty-first century, we live in a time of fear, what many scholars, especially in the US, have referred to as “The Culture of Fear” (Bourke 2005, Furedi 1997, Glassner 1999). Whether it is the fear of natural disasters, the fear of environmental catastrophes or the fear of terrorist attacks, we currently live in a state of constant anxiety about the dangers that could strike unannounced and at any moment. Living with constant anxiety and fear is also a reality for many children and teenagers who, as several surveys have shown, fear the present as well as the future.

By focusing on children ́s narratives and adult memories of fears in childhood, this paper aims to examine fears as cultural and embodied experiences. In what way are emotions (i.e. fears) socially and culturally conditioned? What cultural narratives concerning fear are articulated in the children´s accounts, and what narratives are available in different social and cultural settings? How do children make sense of fear as an embodied perception and experience and in what ways do fears create identification and special conditions of everyday life? I understand emotions as a set of communicative symbols whose meaning is not obvious but depends on individual experiences. Feelings of fear is thus not something that the individual has, in itself, independent of the surrounding community, but are here understood as a cultural phenomenon and something that takes place in actions, in interaction with and dependence on other people (eg Ahmed 2004).

This dissertation examines the developmental controls of Swedish children; primarily of four-year-olds. The aim is to show how these controls have constituted children as normal or deviant, and on what epistemological and social bases this ordering has taken place. The history of the child development control demonstrates how certain children have been identified and addressed as in need of special support. Therefore this study departs from extant works theoretically through examining who owns the privilege of assigning definitions.

As in many other contexts, ideas about development and normality are vital in child health care. In this study, these themes have been analysed in relation to the establishment and maintenance of child health care as well as to general historical processes. That the responsibility for children’s development shifted from charity organisations to become a public societal issue was part of a larger national and welfare state establishment. One inherent aim of this process was to craft conditions for a functional and strong population on norms built on the middle classes’ generic setup and work ethic. Notwithstanding today’s different language, the empirical findings of the study indicate that children’s health issues are still part of a general process of national construction and that Swedish middle-class standards on children and parenthood still provide cultural models.

The empirical sources of the study are mainly documents from 1923-2007. It concerns child health care directives, annual reports, educational materials, articles, official reports and audits, 1000 systematically chosen child health care journals, interviews with child health care nurses and paediatricians and a small amount of observed and filmed four-year-old controls.

There are intersecting and shifting reasons behind why and how produced knowledge and knowledge producers are credited or discredited. Here, I will reflect over how and in what ways the ever-changing position of the researcher has an impact on how the produced knowledge is perceived within the discipline of ethnology. Furthermore, I will analyse what shape the prio-ritization of knowledge has within the field of ethnological research. I will particularly focus on the hierarchy of knowledge production based on (a.) the research subject matter and (b.) researchers’ intersecting and shifting subject positions. Drawing on discussions of reflexivity and positionality in some of the contemporary ethnological research, for the purpose of this presentation, I aim to demonstrate how some researchers’ positions in regards to their research subject is emphasized while others go untouched. Why is it that some researchers embody the knowledgeable subject regardless what type of research subject they choose to conduct? For instance, while feminist and postcolonial researchers’ knowledge productions have often been disqualified as both subjective and highly political, the other researchers easily can disclaim their subjective position and political agenda. In other words, who is perceived as ‘insider researcher’ and how this has an impact on how the produced knowledge is perceived is therefore closely linked to notions of gender, age, race, and sexuality.