Children and Young People's Relationships

Learning across Majority and Minority Worlds

Samantha Punch, Kay Tisdall

• Publisher: Taylor & Francis
• Year: 2016
• Print ISBN: 9780415828611
• eBook ISBN: 9781134923885
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Social Sciences
• Subtopic: Sociology
• Index: Social Sciences

This book challenges the current state of childhood studies by exploring children and young people's agency and relationships. It considers how recent theorisations of relationships and relational processes can move childhood studies forward, particularly in relation to re-thinking claims of children and young people's agency and uncritical assertions around children and young people's participation and voice. It does this by bringing together case studies of children's inter-generational and intra-generational relationships from both the Majority and Minority Worlds. The main themes include negotiated power, agency across contexts and negotiations of identity. The chapters show both the heritage of childhood studies, particularly within the UK, and where it may be going. One of the key aims of the book is to add to the limited but growing cross-world dialogue that encourages cross-cultural learning from research and practice in both Majority and Minority World contexts leading towards a more integrated global approach to childhood studies.

This book was published as a special issue of Children's Geographies.

Introduction

Exploring children and young people’s relationships across Majority and Minority Worlds

How can we learn from research and practice in both Majority and Minority World contexts? How can we challenge the current academic area of childhood studies, with new and revised theorisations around children and young people’s agency and relationships? This special issue addresses these questions, capitalising on the intensive seminar series funded by the UK’s Economic and Social Research Council. The series, titled ‘Exploring Children’s Relationships Across Majority and Minority Worlds’, was held between April 2010 and October 2011. It was organised by the Co-Directors and Associate Directors of the Centre for Research on Families and Relationships, a consortium research centre of Scottish universities. Most of the ideas presented in this special issue emerged out of lively discussions at these seminars and we gratefully acknowledge the contributions of all seminar participants.

We use the terms ‘Majority World’ and ‘Minority World’ (see also Panelli et al. 2007) to refer to what has traditionally been known as ‘the third world’ and ‘the first world’ or more recently as ‘the Global South’ and ‘the Global North’. This acknowledges that the ‘majority’ of population, poverty, land mass and lifestyles is located in the former, in Africa, Asia and Latin America, and thus seeks to shift the balance of our world views that frequently privilege ‘western’ and ‘northern’ populations and issues (Punch 2003). The dichotomy does risk over-simplicity: for example, the ‘rising powers’ of countries such as Brazil, China and India do not sit easily within either category, and each category contains considerable and salient differences. At the same time, the dichotomy has proved a useful device to challenge thinking throughout the seminar series, particularly given the lack of learning across research conducted in these contexts. Across the papers, we generally use ‘children and young people’ to refer to the age group under the age of 18, as defined by the UN Convention on the Rights of the Child (UNCRC). This phrase aims to respect that many older children prefer the category ‘young people’ to ‘children’. Papers may use ‘children’, when referring particularly to childhood studies, children’s rights, and when using quotations.

A central concern of the ESRC seminar series was to explore the current state of childhood studies. The ‘new’ sociology of childhood of the 1990s carved out attention to children and childhoods (James and Prout 1990/1997, Qvortrup et al. 1994, Corsaro 1997/2004, James et al. 1998). Key assertions were developed: childhood is socially constructed; children are social actors and have agency and are not passive subjects of social structures and processes; childhood is differentiated by structural processes and social variables such as gender, ethnicity and class. These ideas have run alongside policy developments, such as UNCRC, which have globalised attention to the provision for, protection and participation of, children and young people (Hill and Tisdall 1997, Van Beers et al. 2006, Hartas 2008, Lansdown 2010). However, the sociology of childhood is no longer so new. It has become increasingly multi-disciplinary, with other disciplines picking up and extending ideas, such as anthropology, education, law, health studies, history and political science (represented by the trend towards calling the academic area ‘childhood studies’). In particular, within geography a sub-disciplinary group of ‘children’s geographies’ has been formed.

Childhood studies have different complexions in the different countries where it has taken root (see Mayall 2012). For example, Bühler-Niederberger’s (2010) review of 10 countries identifies at least three differences. First, children, concerns about childhood and children’s policy have been more marginalised in some countries than others – and this has shaped childhood studies. For example, she writes of early childhood sociological interest in Finland and child-oriented egalitarian legislation at the beginning of the twentieth century, in comparison with the Netherlands, where the ‘bourgeois family model’ (p. 375) dominated until recently. Second, certain child research traditions and scientific cultures impacted on the emerging childhood sociological research. She comments on the influence, for example, of actor-oriented educational science in Germany and the concern about ‘risks’ (while Mayall 2012 notes the interest in structural concerns from Germany); France, in contrast, has a strong tradition of educational sociology; Scandinavian countries, the UK and the US have been more influenced by feminist scholars and cultural studies. However, Bühler-Niederberger (2010) also finds common elements in childhood sociology. Children are recognised as a marginalised group, in terms of public life and public recognition. There is a discourse of ‘crisis’, with children depicted as social problems either as victims or as a current or future danger. Her review confirms that attention to the generational order, the difference between childhood and adulthood, is an important starting point across the ‘new’ sociology of childhood (see also Shamgar-Handelman 1994, Alanen and Mayall 2001).

Most research in childhood studies tends to be based on one dominant discipline, such as sociology or geography, rather than being inherently inter-disciplinary (see also Prout 2011). Similarly, in relation to new academic departments and degrees in childhood studies, Thorne (2007) comments that often, rather than being inter-disciplinary, these tend to bring disciplines together in a pluri-disciplinary manner. Thus, childhood studies is the umbrella term for multiple disciplines working in the area of childhood, but in practice most work is not inter-disciplinary (for some exceptions, see Hill and Tisdall 1997, Thomas 2000, Kehily 2013, Montgomery 2013, the work of Young Lives: http://www.younglives.org.uk).

Multi-disciplinary collections of childhood studies have emerged in recent years (Pufall and Unsworth 2004, Qvortrup 2005, James and James 2008, Kassem et al. 2009, Qvortrup et al. 2009) and it is no longer easy to keep up with the proliferation of empirical studies which explore children and young people’s social worlds. Childhood studies has reached a stage where its own orthodoxies, patterns of inquiry and unarticulated assumptions need to be examined (see also James 2007, 2010, Prout 2011). This special issue aims to contribute substantially to such developments and build on discussions within children’s geographies (such as Horton and Kraftl 2005, 2006, Horton et al. 2008, Holloway and Pimlott-Wilson 2011). It considers how recent theorisations of relationships and relational processes can move childhood studies forward, particularly in relation to re-thinking claims of children and young people’s agency and uncritical assertions around children and young people’s participation and voice.

Alanen and Mayall (2001) use the concept of ‘generationing’ as a relational way of thinking about the ways in which child–adult relations are socially constructed (see also Mayall and Zeiher 2003). Carsten (2004) has used the term ‘relatedness’ and Smart (2007) ‘relationality’ to re-emphasise that personhood and individuality in all societies are constituted by close personal relationships and that such significant personal relationships are rarely restricted to kin relationships. While this special issue tends to use the term ‘relationships’, in fact the emphasis is on relational processes, that are changing and enacted, rather than fixed and given. An inclusive approach to the study of relationships can advance our understanding of social change (Jamieson et al. 2006, Jamieson and Milne 2012). A focus on children’s relationships can contribute to these theoretical developments, as well as moving forward childhood studies.

Childhood studies emerged in part as a reaction against tendencies towards a false universalisation and normalisation of childhood, arguing that childhood should be seen in context and as socially and culturally constructed. However, it risks concentrating unduly on the Minority World and not fully integrating learning from development studies, and the growing work exploring Majority World childhoods (see e.g. Punch 2003, Ansell 2005, Hinton et al. 2008, Wells 2009). A negative consequence of the dominant Minority World conceptualisations of childhood is that international standards set for work or education tend to reflect Minority World views, which sometimes lead to more harm than good (Boyden 1990/1997, Kaufman and Rizzini 2002) or to further marginalise or ‘other’ Majority World childhoods that do not conform to notions of appropriate childhoods (Kesby et al. 2006, Payne 2012). This special issue contributes to the recent but limited work that pulls together literatures and empirical data from both Majority and Minority World contexts (Chawla 2002, Katz 2004, Panelli et al. 2007, Jeffrey and Dyson 2008, Montgomery 2013).

It is timely to consider a more global approach to childhood studies. Globalisation is not new but a consideration of how global processes shape the lives of children and young people is relatively new (Aitken et al. 2008). It is increasingly said that we are living in a global world, evidenced by high levels of mobility and migration, emerging transnational families and technological changes leading to new forms of communication. Whilst the impacts of globalisation may be both positive and negative, they are particularly uneven often resulting in greater inequalities between Majority World and Minority World countries as well as within them (Kaufman and Rizzini 2002). Lund argues that many children ‘have become more (not less) vulnerable with globalisation’ (2008, p. 146). The papers in Aitken et al.’s volume on Global Childhoods demonstrate that ‘the future of economic transformation and the wholesale betterment of the world through universal consumerism and material gain is questionable’ (Aitken et al. 2008, p. 9). However, such edited collections tend not to provide dialogue between Majority and Minority Worlds, rather they bring together papers from different countries to address a particular theme. In this way the global focus offers different perspectives rather than attempting to engage in dialogue between Majority World and Minority World childhoods.

In the exceptional publications where there is dialogue, the ensuing ‘conversations’ illuminate commonalities and differences, and also the testing of assumptions. For example, the edited volume by Panelli et al. (2007) juxtaposes chapters of rural children and young people from different world areas around three themed sections of identity, agency and power. Differences emerge in the material inequalities for many rural parts of the Majority World and the cultural expectations of children and young people’s intergenerational responsibilities across the life course. Commonalities include their relative lack of mobility and inadequate transport, insufficient opportunities for work or education often leading to migration, enhanced opportunities for asserting their agency in rural areas and the importance of emotional connections to place. A striking similarity across global contexts is:

…the simultaneous here-now and there-future weavings young people make of their coincident present realities and possible imaginaries of later life. From Mexico, Tanzania, Bolivia, and Indonesia to Norway, eastern Germany, and the northern United States young people undertake both present configurations and future imaginations about their lives. Identity, together with notions of agency and action provide potent concepts for exploring these multiple tactics further. (Robson et al. 2007, p. 223)

Jeffrey and Dyson (2008) reveal several cross-learning opportunities from global portraits of young lives, including the various ways in which youth is being restructured in different contexts. At times the period of youth is cut short, whilst for many youth across both the Majority and Minority Worlds it is being extended:

… structural adjustment programs in the global south and not dissimilar processes of economic restructuring in Euro-America have delayed or prevented people from acquiring financial independence from their parents and establishing separate economic and familial units. In other situations, neoliberal economic change has prevented young people from acquiring the skills, welfare goods, and social support required to manage a transition to adulthood. (Jeffrey and Dyson 2008, p. 5)

Commonalities across global contexts also include the sense of ‘crisis’ for the categories of childhood, youth and adulthood as well as the contested and entangled identities of youth, many of whom are living their lives under duress, where both the remarkable and the mundane are starkly juxtaposed (Philo and Swanson 2008).

Chawla (2002) compares children’s perspectives on urban areas across eight countries equally mixed between the Majority and Minority Worlds. Key similarities in the positive qualities that children mentioned across the case studies included social integration, peer gathering places, safety and freedom of movement and a cohesive cultural identity. Children’s descriptions of alienating urban spaces included stigma and social exclusion, boredom, fear of harassment and crime, racial tensions, lack of basic services, geographic isolation and a sense of political powerlessness. Interestingly out of the five sites where children indicated most satisfaction with their urban environments, three of these were in the economically poorer parts of the Majority World. Such studies illustrate the benefits of learning across Majority and Minority World boundaries.

Katz explores children’s changing childhoods in the USA and Sudan, in the light of global economic restructuring, revealing the ‘unexpected connections among disparate places’ (2004, p. xiv). Her cross-cultural work demonstrates that different forms of neoliberal capitalist development can lead to deskilling and community destabilisation which can result in the displacement of young people from their local environment. This special issue of Children’s Geographies calls for more work in childhood studies to establish dialogue between Majority and Minority World contexts.

Two papers begin the special issue, to provide a critical discussion of key concepts, theories and research. The first, by Tisdall and Punch, gives an overview of the ‘new’ sociology of childhood for those less familiar with the paradigm, and considers subsequent ‘insider’ critiques of it. The paper takes forward the growing contestation of children’s ‘agency’ as fixed and individualist, and the related contention of children’s rights – particularly in its application across Majority and Minority World contexts. The second, by Jamieson and Milne, mines the ever-growing interest in theorising and researching relationships, providing definitional anchors and theoretical resources. They link these ideas with social change, as demographics alter, family structures and stability change, and different forms of transnational relationships become prevalent and possible.

Six papers follow, using the particularities ...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half Title
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Table of Contents
• Citation Information
• 1. Introduction: Exploring children and young people’s relationships across Majority and Minority Worlds
• 2. Not so ‘new’? Looking critically at childhood studies
• 3. Children and young people’s relationships, relational processes and social change: reading across worlds
• 4. Conflict and coexistence: challenging interactions, expressions of agency and ways of relating in work with young people in the Minority World
• 5. Agents of support: intra-generational relationships and the role of agency in the support networks of child-headed households in Zambia
• 6. ‘Beings in their own right’? Exploring children and young people’s sibling and twin relationships in the Minority World
• 7. Berg-en-See street boys: merging street and family relations in Cape Town, South Africa
• 8. Children’s peer relationships and social identities: exploring cases of young children’s agency and complex interdependencies from the Minority World
• 9. An afterword: some reflections on a seminar series
• Index