Intersectionality and Difference in Childhood and Youth

Global Perspectives

Nadia von Benzon, Catherine Wilkinson, Nadia von Benzon, Catherine Wilkinson

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2019
• eBook ISBN: 9780429882067
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Physical Sciences
• Subtopic: Geography
• Index: Geography

This book explores the alternative experiences of children and young people whose everyday lives contradict ideas and ideals of normalcy from the local to the global context.

Presenting empirical research and conceptual interventions from a variety of international contexts, this book seeks to contribute to understandings of alterity, agency and everyday precarity. The young lives foregrounded in this volume include the experiences of transnational families, children in ethnic minority communities, street-living young people, disabled children, child soldiers, victims of abuse, politically active young people, working children and those engaging with alternative education. By exploring 'other' ways of being, doing, and thinking about childhood, this book addresses questions around what it is to be a child and what it is to be marginalised in society. The narratives explore the everydayness and the mundanity of difference as they are experienced through social structures and relationships, simultaneously recognizing and critiquing notions of agency and power.

This book, including a discussion resource for teaching or peer reading groups, will appeal to academics, students and researchers across subject disciplines including Human Geography, Children's Geography, Social Care and Childhood Studies.

1 Introduction

Nadia von Benzon and Catherine Wilkinson

This book is concerned with intersectionality and difference in childhood, presenting empirical research and conceptual interventions from a variety of international perspectives. Building on the now burgeoning body of discourse concerning intersectionality within feminist and broader social geography, this book seeks to explore the lived experiences of children facing ‘multiple discriminations’ (Valentine, 2007, p. 10) or stigmatised experiences in their day-to-day lives. Whilst the feminist concern at the heart of intersectionality has been gender,¹ the pivotal discriminatory identity at the heart of this volume is childhood. Children’s geography, alongside allied social science disciplines, has sought in recent decades to demonstrate the ways in which the social constructions of childhood, alongside the material reality of a juvenile physiology and psychology, have led to the systematic and structural marginalisation of children and young people in societies (Valentine, 1996; Matthews, 2000; Collins and Kearns, 2001). The focus of this book is the lives of children and youth who face additional marginalisation, through their association with stigmatised identities or activities, or through their engagement with activities that are not widely deemed normalised or acceptable for children’s participation.

There is a growing area of work in the study of childhood which has been concerned with childhoods that are ‘different’ or ‘other’ (see for example, the special edition of Children’s Geographies in 2011 Diverse Spaces of Childhood and Youth: Gender and socio-cultural difference edited by Ruth Evans and Louise Holt; the 2017 special edition of the same journal Intersectionality in Childhood Studies edited by Kristina Konstantoni and colleagues; Kraftl, 2015). Whilst alterity does not necessarily lead to stigma and marginalisation (your childhood could be ‘other’ due to participation in elite activities, access to exclusive spaces or possession of prodigious abilities), difference for any reason may render a child vulnerable. This vulnerability is due to their potential lack of inclusion in policies and practices designed to safeguard children framed within a notional construction of a ‘normal’ childhood, or the fragility and alterity of their relationships with other children and adults. The vulnerability inherent in difference in childhood has been painfully illustrated in the #MeToo movement which has seen (former) child actors and athletes coming forward to expose the perpetrators who were able to assault them due to the power they held over children who were trying to succeed in an adult-dominated environment, or who felt intimately reliant on them for their coaching and ultimate success.

However, research addressing childhood difference, particularly from geographers, has typically focused on differences that may manifest in stigma and marginalisation. The exception to this in terms of a conflation of difference and marginalised experience has largely concerned education, particularly with Peter Kraftl’s recent work on alternative education (Kraftl, 2014; Kraftl, 2015), and some reflection on youth engagement with politics (e.g. Skelton, 2010). The primary geographical focus of difference in terms of stigma and marginalisation is likely to reflect a political attempt by geographers to listen to children with the quietest voices, and a desire to magnify these children’s voices for emancipatory ends. Thus, an imperative towards social justice, alongside the development of social theory – or academic pontification – underpins much of the children’s geographies research addressing lived experiences of difference (Holt, 2007; Beazley et al., 2009; Klocker, 2011; Bradbury-Jones and Taylor, 2015).

Key themes within this broad children’s geographies literature on marginalised childhoods have included: race, ethnicity and religion (Dwyer, 1999; Hopkins et al., 2017); disability, health, and caring responsibilities (Robson, 2000; Holt, 2010; Worth, 2013; Pyer and Tucker, 2017; von Benzon, 2017a); gender and sexuality (Skelton, 2000; de Montigny and Podmore, 2014); and poverty and class (McDowell, 2003; Pimlott-Wilson and Hall, 2017). The work of Maria Rodó-de-Zárate (2017) demonstrates that for some children and young people, it is their non-age-related identity, particularly their sexuality, ethnicity and gender, that provokes considerably more discrimination than their youthful age. Indeed, Hopkins and Pain (2007, p. 290) argue: ‘some markers may intersect with age in very powerful ways; others may make age far less significant in relation’. Thus, geographers have demonstrated the potential of a hierarchy of identities, but stress (Valentine, 2007) that the articulations between social categories are complex and dynamic and contingent upon time and space. Many of these themes are covered in the chapters herein as they seek to address alternative experiences of childhood that contest the construction of a ‘normal’ childhood which dominates within a particular community or locality.

The chapters in this volume might, to some extent, be considered accidental interventions in the development of intersectionality theory. Unlike Valentine (2007) and Rodó-de-Zárate (2014), none of the chapters herein set out explicitly to explore the impact of intersectionality on individuals’ lives nor do they knowingly balance or make judgements about the relative importance of different sorts of marginalisation, whether ‘spoiled identity’ or less detrimental lived experiences of difference. However, the chapters all, if only unwittingly, serve to respond to Hopkins’ (2018) call to recognise the relationality and the chronological and spatial context of marginalisation. These chapters speak to the importance of locality in the way in which identity manifests as lived social experience. Bernadine Satariano’s contribution to this volume is particularly powerful in demonstrating the way in which a particular identity – as a child of a ‘broken’ home, may manifest as ‘spoiled’ in one community, whilst in the same country, a matter of miles away, the same identity is considered normal, unremarkable, or even as positive. Thus, this volume addresses the issue of socio-spatial context as a syphon for intersecting identity and experiences of difference, not only at an international scale but at a local and community scale. At once, culture is positioned as a crucial mediator in social experience of difference, whilst these lived experiences of difference are positioned as a lens through which localised cultures can be understood.

As a geographical contribution to this literature, Intersectionality and Difference in Childhood and Youth offers a critical exploration of research with children and young people who may be considered ‘out of place’ within their local context. Thus, this book approaches ‘normalcy’ and ‘difference’ as relational terms with the notion of the ‘normal’ child encompassing specific assumptions about agency, rights and responsibilities within different communities. Looking outside the global north, what constitutes a ‘normal’, ‘mainstream’ or ‘acceptable’ childhood may be a broader spectrum of experience, requiring a more nuanced ethical, methodological and theoretical interpretation. Whilst ‘global expectations’ might be a difficult concept to define or morally justify, one example illustrating such are the rights enshrined within the UN Convention on the Rights of the Child, the most widely ratified of all international conventions. Considering ‘other’ childhoods, both in the global north and the global south, can call into question many of the pre-conceived and socially constructed values and assertions concerning childhood that underpin national and institutional policies and dictate the ways in which children and adults interact. We hope that a broader recognition of the range of experiences of childhood, and a better understanding of the lived experience of these ‘other’ childhoods, will create space for rigorous debate around core geographical issues such as mobilities, agency, risk, work, education and play.

Much of the published work in this field to date has reflected on the difficulty to engage marginalised children in research – whether the difficulty of access through gatekeepers, social and spatial challenges in communicating directly and independently with children, and overcoming unbalanced power relations to develop researcher-child relationships with integrity (Barker and Weller, 2003; Lomax et al., 2011; Skovdal and Abebe, 2012; von Benzon, 2017b). These challenges are reflected on by authors in this volume, who discuss the assumptions made by participants that the research will bring a family material benefit (Boampong, Afroze), or the difficulty of accessing children’s own internet-published material (von Benzon). Some chapters never made it to the final volume, due to irreducible challenges in undertaking the fieldwork, whilst others were almost curtailed due to issues over rights and permission. Thus, the empirical research and the conceptual interventions presented through this book are valuable – these narratives were hard won through engagement with fieldwork, or ideas, that were often deemed risky. In engaging with these children – through real-world interaction, documentary analysis and fiction, researchers themselves experience vulnerability; emotionally, bodily and cognitively. The risk, the precarity, and the emotional investment of research with marginalised children must become embedded within the pages of the subsequent publications. Whilst this investment will not, of course, have an automatic impact on the quality of the outputs, the cost of producing them must have an inherent impact on their ultimate value.

The book contributes to both the developing discussions concerning the precarious nature of marginalised children’s lives, and the ways in which this precarity might be exacerbated or managed through the child’s broader relationships with both people and non-human agents. We recognise children as independent actors capable of managing themselves in uncertain spaces, whilst also being influenced and constrained by broader social, political and economic factors over which they have no control. The chapters in this book are concerned with exploring the everydayness of precarity, revealing the reality of the emotional and embodied experience of precarity whilst also demonstrating how ‘other’ children routinely develop strategies that limit the experience of uncertainty in particular spaces. The authors in this volume do not shy away from the challenge of approaching some of the most ethically complex experiences of difference, uncertainty, agency and vulnerability faced by children in contemporary society. Chapters address child soldiers (Markowska-Manista), sexual assault (McRobert), child labour (Willman) and the lives of street-connected youth (Pearson).

In so doing, the volume seeks to emphasise the importance of focusing resources in support of those children whose lives differ from the normative, or at least, normalised, view of childhood present in the internationalised discourse that underpins child-focused regulation, policies and services. However, in opening discourse on everyday alterity and contingent precarity, the volume seeks to contribute to the growing geographical discourse calling for a queering of children’s lives (Taylor and Blaise, 2014; Shillington and Murnaghan, 2016). That is a picking apart of the assumptions that are made, not just about children’s sexuality, but about ability, opportunity and desire, each underpinned by children’s intersectional identities of class, race, impairment, wealth, religion, and the many other axes of difference illuminated in the chapters of this book. The existence of so much difference – the vast heterogeneity of children’s experiences, not only internationally but also at a highly localised scale, calls into question the utility of the notion of childhood itself – and certainly of the value of international and national policies that seek to bind particular lived experiences to the construct of ‘the child’.

Through presentation of a variety of experiences of childhood that contradict the multiple and context-specific constructions of ‘normal childhoods’, Intersectionality and Difference seeks to demonstrate the way in which precarity and agency can be concurrently experienced in the lives of out-of-place children. The lives presented in this collection should neither be considered tragic, nor heroic, but everyday lives in which children are agential actors employing what capital they can access, and drawing on complex networks of human and non-human relationships, in order to address the challenges they face. As such many of these children are at once fragile, vulnerable to (further) upheaval, abuse or stigmatisation and also coping. Their capacity to ‘get by’ is based on a complex interweaving of personal resiliency, interpersonal support and sometimes structural interventions available through outside agencies. Ultimately though, agency suggests choice, and for many of the protagonists of this volume, choice, and thus meaningful agency, is limited (see Barker et al., 2010). This book presents a timely intervention in a period when the idea of agency, a core concept in the development of children’s geographies to date, is being interrogated (Kraftl, 2013) and reframed (Holloway et al., 2018).

The book collates a series of different narratives exploring the ways in which experiences of childhood can counter the hegemonic narratives of normal childhood that are plural on a global-scale, but often singular at the local. This book moves away from a vision of a single, idealised, normalised childhood in favour of multiple childhoods, and considers the way in which children and young people experience childhood and youth in a variety of contexts. Looking from both majority and minority world perspectives, the book demonstrates children as both passive and active agents of their lived experience, illustrating the way in which agency is underpinned by social and economic capital and relationships, which vary according to geo-social contexts.

Structure of the book

Each contribution to this edited collection presents a discourse based on research addressing children who are marginalised and stigmatised due to difference, or for whom difference is the result of personal or familial choices that contradict social norms. The chapters each demonstrate the ways in which children’s lives are shaped by intersecting identities and notions of difference. For these out of place children, their lived experience is as much about vulnerability and precarity as it is a story of tenacity, agency and the deployment of social capital. This book includes chapters that discuss the experiences of children and childhoods that are ‘other’. Each individual chapter provides a lens on a particular context in which young people are constructed, sometimes by themselves, their families or through choice, but more often by the actions and discourse of wider society, as ‘different’. The chapters focus in on a particular childhood identity or a particular event or activity experienced by a child that may mark them out as different. The chapters draw on a variety of geographical contexts, from Bolivian working and lower middle-class families, to minority ethnic children living in encampments in Bangladesh, to wealthy children in suburban Australia. The chapters also draw out a variety of key themes in children’s geographies, including education, play, work and mobilities,...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half Title
• Series Page
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Dedication
• Table of Contents
• List of figures
• List of contributors
• Foreword
• Acknowledgements
• 1. Introduction
• PART I: Stigma
• 2. Childhood disability and clothing: (un)dressing debates
• 3. ‘They should have stayed’: blaming street children and disruption of the intergenerational contract
• 4. Subverting neighbourhood normalcy and the impacts on child wellbeing in Malta
• 5. ‘Bad children’: international stigmatisation of children trained to kill during war and armed conflict
• PART II: Work, education and activism
• 6. Other(ed) childhoods: supplementary schools and the politics of learning
• 7. Not an ‘other’ childhood: child labour laws, working children and childhood in Bolivia
• 8. Unschooling and the simultaneous development and mitigation of ‘otherness’ amongst home-schooling families
• 9. Being seen, being heard: Engaging and valuing young people as political actors and activists
• PART III: Out of place
• 10. Young survivors of sexual abuse as ‘children out of place’
• 11. Realising childhood in an Urdu-speaking Bihari community in Bangladesh
• 12. Discovering difference in outer suburbia: mapping, intra-activity and alternative directedness in Shaun Tan’s Eric
• 13. Transnational practices and children’s local lives in times of economic crisis
• 14. Conclusion
• Appendix
• Index