Childhood Studies

Making Young Subjects

Karen Wells

• Publisher: Polity
• Year: 2017
• Print ISBN: 9780745670249, 9780745670232
• eBook ISBN: 9781509525355
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Psychology
• Subtopic: Developmental Psychology
• Index: Psychology

What does it mean to think of children as social subjects and how should we go about studying childhood in society? Childhood is a key site where children come to understand themselves as particular kinds of people, not only as individuals but also as members of social and cultural groups. This compelling and accessible book explores how immature humans enter into political, economic, social and cultural life. Integrating key theories from a range of disciplines, Karen Wells provides a set of analytical tools to explore how culture, society, politics and economics shape childhood and children's lives. She explains how childhood is not only culturally shaped, but also formed at the intersection of politics and economics. At this intersection between governing practices and the affordances of children's bodies, young subjects are made. Childhood Studies will be essential reading for students and scholars in childhood and youth studies and related disciplines, and for anyone who wants to understand the impacts of social inequality on children and what it means to be a child in the contemporary world.

1
Making Young Subjects

Introduction

This book is about how Childhood Studies has conceptualized the figure of the child, the social field of childhood, and the relationship between age as a category of subjectivity and other categories of subjectivity, including race, class and gender. The book is interested in understanding how subjects are formed, how children come to understand themselves as particular kinds of people through the ways that the structures of class, racism and sexism are pressed upon them by different social, political and cultural forces.

Childhood Studies

Childhood Studies is a multidisciplinary and interdisciplinary field with a shared focus on childhood as a social category or structure and children as social agents or actors. The ‘old’ social studies of childhood developed out of the child-study movement and the psy-sciences that made the child an object (rather than a subject) of investigation. Their core concern was the education and appropriate development of the child that were central to the disciplines of pedagogy and psychology. Children mainly figured, if at all, as an (often silent) part of the sociology of the family. Sociology connected with psychology and pedagogy in its interest in normal socialization.

What is widely called the ‘new social studies of childhood’ rejected this interest in children as emergent or developing subjects and focused instead on children and childhood in their own right. Children are conceptualized within Childhood Studies as agents who are constrained by the social structures that they are situated within but who do not passively succumb to these structures; they are agents or actors and they make society as much as society makes them. From this perspective the expert is no longer the psychologist, the teacher or the sociologist, but children themselves. This shift in the epistemology of childhood (in how we can claim to know what childhood is or who children are) privileges first person accounts and participatory research over experiments, surveys and observation.

Conceptualizing the child as agential marshalled a particular view of children's capacities and competencies. Largely it deployed an argument that children are as rational, self-knowing and independent as adults. The fact that in most cultures children are understood to be irrational, ignorant and dependent was, Childhood Studies suggested, an effect of discrimination against children. This discrimination paralleled other social exclusions, for example those structured by racism and sexism.

The insistence on children being rational, self-knowing and independent left little room for a distinctive child subject – in effect it suggests that children are like small adults. This view has been criticized in recent work for embracing a modern, stable, self-knowing subject just when many of the rest of the social sciences and humanities were rejecting this way of conceptualizing subjectivity. Furthermore, there was some criticism that the baby (the child's body) had literally been thrown out with the bathwater (socialization theories) and that it was time to bring the body back in and to acknowledge the effect on their place in the social world of the distinctiveness of children's bodies and (relatedly) their imaginations.

Childhood Studies established some important theoretical and methodological frames for thinking about children as subjects. It is now an established discipline and some of the gaps in its framing of children and childhood have become apparent. Childhood Studies needs new theoretical tools and empirical focus if it is to continue to have explanatory power in relation to understanding what it means to be a child in the contemporary world.

In response to these concerns scholars in Childhood Studies have begun to look for new social theories for theorizing childhood in more complex ways. Whilst poststructuralism certainly has not taken over Childhood Studies, Foucault's governmentality theory, Butler's gender performativity, Agamben's state of exception, Latour's actor network theory and other critical social theories, are starting to appear in Childhood Studies. This critical work has been particularly useful for understanding how childhood intersects with other social positions.

My central argument in this book is that childhood is a profoundly unequal space. Childhood Studies frames this inequality primarily as generational inequality between adults and children. I want to suggest that this does not capture the complex ways in which age, as one category of subordinate social status, intersects with others such as race, gender, class and disability. Although the concept of multiple childhoods has been in the discipline since its inception, it has tended to understand multiplicity in spatial and temporal ways: there is childhood there and childhood here; childhood then and childhood now. What has been less explored under this rubric of multiple childhoods is the multiplicity of childhood within a time-space; how racism, sexism and class shape childhood experiences, impact on children's life chances and on how they form a sense of self. Children's experience of their childhoods is different within the same geographical spaces and historical times because of the profound structural inequalities that shape the contemporary world, in the advanced (or overdeveloped) capitalist countries of the Global North as well as the incipient and partial capitalist countries of the Global South (Balagopalan 2014). Uneven development is not only global, it is also regional and national. It is the central task of this book to contribute to the conceptualization and description of this multiplicity of childhood, what I call the making of young subjects.

Chapter summaries

In the next chapter I survey the field of Childhood Studies to give the reader a sense of the genealogy of the four key sub-disciplines (anthropology, geography, history and sociology) that have contributed to the discipline. I then develop the core argument of the book over the following seven chapters, in which I show how the classic exclusions of or limitations on liberal rule have played out in the lives of children and in the formation of their subjectivities. In chapter 3, which is loosely structured around the history of childhood, I begin the story by showing how from the beginning of the twentieth century there was a purposeful exclusion of black children from the child labour reform campaign in the USA. This campaign to get children out of work and into school focused its reform energy on white children and indeed claimed the importance of rescuing white children from economic labour because, or so they argued, white children were living in slavery while black children were free. The offence, in other words, was not the labour of children but the unfreedom of whites. Capitalism in the USA, I argue, was a racial capitalism from the outset. My claim is that governing through childhood and governing through racism were strategies for securing the power of the liberal state that emerged at the same time and cannot be unpicked from one another. In chapter 4, drawing mainly on the sociology of childhood, I show how Childhood Studies has understood gender and sexism in relation to children. My empirical material here is drawn from the scholarship on juvenile justice in the USA, and shows how gender is literally policed by the state and how racism and homophobia both enter into the production of children as gendered subjects. Chapter 5 explores geographies of childhood in relation to the formation of class. Here I show how economic exclusion in childhood in the USA is racialized and how it impacts children's sense of respect and recognition.

Chapters 3, 4 and 5, then, explore how governing forces press onto the child from the outside, structuring their experience of the world. In the subsequent chapters, I turn my attention to the child's own activities, practices and responses. Chapter 6 begins with the governing technologies that produce disability, specifically autism, and then explores how autistic communication can be understood culturally and symbolically. Chapter 7 turns to children's bodies to think through how the specific affordances of children's bodies (of which their brains are a part) shape their subject formation. Chapter 8 draws on social and development psychology to interrogate how children think about gender and racial identification, and chapter 9 turns to practices of consumption as sets of cultural resources through which children come to understand the performativity of social identity. Finally, in the concluding chapter, I return to the three core arguments developed in this book, which are that childhood is the ideal target of liberal governmentality; that governing through the child is segmented in highly unequal ways and is structured by racism, sexism and classification; and thirdly that subject formation is not only pressed onto the child from outside but is also taken up by children and shaped by their corporeal and cognitive resources and through their cultural practices. Through the reasons and techniques of government on the one hand, and the affordances of children's bodies and minds on the other, young subjects are made.

2
The Disciplines

Introduction

The purpose of this chapter is to sketch the dominant trends in each of the sub-disciplines that constitute Childhood Studies in order to show the explanatory power of Childhood Studies as an interdisciplinary and multidisciplinary field. Childhood Studies locates children and childhood at the intersection of time, space, society and culture. Each of the field's sub-disciplines (history, geography, sociology, and anthropology) approaches the figure of the child and the site of childhood through the central problematic of their discipline. So for sociology the central problem is structure/agency, for anthropology it is culture or specifically how children are enculturated, and for history and geography it is the difference that time and space make to childhood and to the lives of children and youth. In the following sections I trace the genealogy of these sub-disciplines, their points of origin, the central problems that they engage with and their key concepts.

History

Historians, perhaps more so than geographers and sociologists, tie their claims about childhood to specific places and historical periods. With the exception of Peter Stearn's world history of childhood (2011), most histories of childhood are region or country specific. Indeed, the field of the history of childhood is mostly the history of North American childhood, and, in fact, largely the history of the colonial period and up to the recent past in the USA.

It is a cardinal principle of historical inquiry that explanations for phenomena should be faithful to the period, in other words that contemporary ways of understanding social phenomena should not be projected back into the past. The definition of children in current use by most Childhood Studies scholars is people below the age of 18 years. Somewhat paradoxically, given a prevailing critique of the United Nations Convention on the Rights of the Child (UNCRC), this definition is derived from that Convention. For historians to describe a person as a child who would not be recognized as such by their contemporaries would be anachronistic. Historians are much more likely to take childhood to be the period from birth to a culturally resonant age or a moment in biological development (for example, puberty). The period from puberty up until a historical culturally resonant shift to adulthood occurs is much more likely to be defined by historians as ‘youth’ than childhood.

The history of childhood, like the history of all marginalized populations, presents specific problems about the trace children did or, for the most part, did not leave in the historical record. The history of institutions and how they refract ideas about childhood has been the focus of many of the histories of childhood, perhaps because institutional records offer a rich archival source for children's histories. These institutional records and other official sources, including records of birth and death, not only give us a record (albeit at times a rather thin one) of children's experiences but also offer evidence of how childhood was structured and governed in the past. Artefacts are another fertile source for reconstructing the history of childhood; for example, gravestones supplement registries of birth and death and also provide evidence of parents’ feelings towards their children, or at least how they wanted their feelings to be viewed in public. Other material objects, including artefacts recovered in archaeological digs, can provide a tra...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Table of Contents
• Series page
• Title page
• Copyright page
• Dedication
• 1: Making Young Subjects
• 2: The Disciplines
• 3: Governing Through Race, Governing Through Childhood
• 4: Policing Gender
• 5: Class Discrimination in Childhood
• 6: Disability in Childhood Studies
• 7: Children's Bodies Matter
• 8: Development Psychology and Social Identity Theory
• 9: Consuming Childhoods
• 10: Conclusion
• Bibliography
• Index
• End User License Agreement