The 'Poor Child'

The cultural politics of education, development and childhood

Lucy Hopkins, Arathi Sriprakash, Lucy Hopkins, Arathi Sriprakash

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2015
• Print ISBN: 9780415741293
• eBook ISBN: 9781317807254
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Education
• Subtopic: Education General

• Why are development discourses of the 'poor child' in need of radical revision?

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• What are the theoretical and methodological challenges and possibilities for ethical understandings of childhoods and poverty?

The 'poor child' at the centre of development activity is often measured against and reformed towards an idealised and globalised child subject. This book examines why such normative discourses of childhood are in need of radical revision and explores how development research and practice can work to 'unsettle' the global child. It engages the cultural politics of childhood – a politics of equality, identity and representation – as a methodological and theoretical orientation to rethink the relationships between education, development, and poverty in children's lives.

This book brings multiple disciplinary perspectives, including cultural studies, sociology, and film studies, into conversation with development studies and development education in order to provide new ways of approaching and conceptualising the 'poor child'. The researchers draw on a range of methodological frames – such as poststructuralist discourse analysis, arts based research, ethnographic studies and textual analysis – to unpack the hidden assumptions about children within development discourses. Chapters in this book reveal the diverse ways in which the notion of childhood is understood and enacted in a range of national settings, including Kenya, India, Mexico and the United Kingdom. They explore the complex constitution of children's lives through cultural, policy, and educational practices. The volume's focus on children's experiences and voices shows how children themselves are challenging the representation and material conditions of their lives.

The 'Poor Child' will be of particular interest to postgraduate students and scholars working in the fields of childhood studies, international and comparative education, and development studies.

Part I

Cultural representations of childhood and poverty

2 ‘It shouldn’t happen here’

Cultural and relational dynamics structured around the ‘poor child’

Erica Burman

In September 2012, Save The Children UK launched a UK campaign on child poverty with the by-line ‘It shouldn’t happen here’ to publicise increasing child poverty and neglect in Britain as a result of economic recession. This was the first time the organisation had launched a campaign in the UK linked to fundraising to support its UK programme work, and so made an impact as a major departure for an organisation that was largely known for its focus on child welfare and rights internationally – primarily via bilateral and local partnerships.¹ The slogan made topical the exceptional character of this focus, thereby also asserting the avoidable and ameliorable status of child poverty and neglect.² In this chapter I discuss this slogan, the campaign and selected media reception of this campaign, alongside other recent publicity material mobilised to publicise child welfare concerns, to explore some key tensions and dilemmas navigated by child-focused agencies. I do so not to criticise their campaigns but rather to identify the wider discourses of childhood the organisation necessarily engages with and their relations with broader cultural and economic debates. In particular I will suggest how such specific textual consideration illustrates not only how poverty and childhood are discursively framed (and framed in particular ways in relation to each other), but also how this incites further critical reflections including on ‘our’ own positionings as readers and writers of such texts ,with clear relevance for policy as well as academic analysis.

A key starting point for this chapter is the widespread acknowledgement of how the incipient abstraction that surrounds the notion of ‘the child’/‘childhood’/‘children’ within dominant cultural representational practices – as individual, separate, alone, distinct, and devoid of class, cultural community, ‘race’ and gender markers – belies a crucial dynamic of mutual configuration: ‘child’ implies ‘adult’ with a corresponding allocation and distribution of culturally loaded qualities. Failure to acknowledge and challenge this relationality and contingency is widely heralded as working to reproduce prevailing binaries of stigmatisation, as well as differential visibility and seriousness accorded to key issues such as poverty and material and social deprivation via a focus on children. Equally, ‘the poor child’ evokes specific imaginaries that – notwithstanding the widely noted abstraction from context as well as community that surrounds ‘child’ (Holland 1992; Castañeda 2002) – imply particular locations (Valentine 1996; Moss and Petrie 2002). Since this is a point that is largely assumed by current childhood researchers I will not labour it further. However, precisely because of this, what is of particular interest is the way child-focused organisations (such as Save the Children UK) narrate the relations between specific child-welfare or rights concerns and those of their families or communities and, beyond these, national economic policies.

Framing the analysis

The approach taken in this analysis draws on critical theories from deconstruction (Burman 2008a; Burman and Maclure 2011), postcolonial educational theory (Cannella and Viruru 2004), Foucauldian analyses (Rose 1990; Parker 1992, 2002; MacNaughton 2005) and feminist theory (Burman and Stacey 2010) to inform a discursive analysis of the Save the Children campaign. Consistent with methodological debates in discourse analysis (Burman and Parker 1993), it includes analysis of the cultural conditions of and for, and reception of, the campaign. Discourses are here understood as systems of statements that form subjects and objects (Parker 1992, 2002), that is, they are socially shared frameworks which have material effects, and whose contests over competing representations in fact occupy much of our daily policies and debates. As such, they are material practices whose explanatory powers are performed in each (re)capitulation of them, and whose conditions of intelligibility are correspondingly reinforced or reformulated.

Indeed, the material taken for analysis here is itself treated as a pre-text or indicative corpus that opens up wider discourses of local and global childhoods for critical scrutiny, alongside debates about the nature (origins, causes and contexts) of poverty (c.f. Penn 2005, 2011; Burman 1994, 1996a, 1996b). The text is written and visual from print media, ranging from newspaper coverage, publicly available reports, to media comment. The campaign was also launched via television advertisements, and I will comment later on its imagery, as well as the pictures that accompany the reports. While focusing in some detail on the campaign slogan, I also draw upon the report on child poverty and the working poor it aimed to publicise (Whitham 2012) and analyse, by way of indicative contrast, aspects of its media reception. My discussion here has benefitted from consultation with people from Save the Children who were involved in devising the campaign.³ The analysis below is therefore less an exhaustive cataloguing of all its available repertoires, but rather motivates a particular set of readings which sees its text as a significant diagnostic intervention within its surrounding context. Thus I am less concerned with specific or systematic application of linguistic or discursive techniques than exploring how these inform ethical-political analysis of what is at stake in representations of childhood – in this case child poverty.

Why this text?

While there is no shortage of relevant material, this text (the campaign, its publicity and reception) was taken for analysis as it clearly signalled a specific departure from mainstream aid and child-saving campaign materials.⁴ The conventional child charity genre of the global North usually focuses on some specific humanitarian disaster or acute emergency, soliciting funds for ‘other’ children and communities (e.g. Black 1992; Wells 2007). In this sense the Save the Children campaign was clearly successful in drawing attention to the limits of the normative genre, whose assumptions it disrupts.

My first reading of this text, which reflects others’ reactions to it and, as we shall see, some of the wider media reception partakes of this, suggested a rather more negative reading: ‘It shouldn’t happen here’ as implying the acceptability of ‘it happen[ing]’ elsewhere. Reflecting a methodological approach that attends to temporality and shifts of narrative positions (Doucet and Mauthner 2008), the text drew me into successive readings that worked to throw the unity of the subjective reading position into question. So this chapter traces a shift in interpretation and orientation from highly critical to more appreciative evaluation. Once I started to read the surrounding context, I arrived at a different interpretation of its claims and possible arenas of intervention. The implications of taking this reflexive account seriously at the very least highlights both the significance of attending to processes of temporal engagement and the importance of being open to the ambiguity of the text. Finally, this is obviously not the only – or possibly not the most relevant – reading of this text; rather, the reading here is motivated by and through a particular sensitivity to the framing of childhoods as a privileged and canonical mode of discoursing North–South relations, as power relations between rich and poor countries.

In this sense my critical comments about discourses of childhood mobilised by this and other texts should not be read as criticising individuals or organisations, and especially not the organisation that produced it (Save the Children) – who have led the way in formulating ethical-political debates on how children should be represented (see Save the Children 1992). Rather such text, through its skilled engagement with and subversion of prevailing discourses reveals not only the conditions of its own possibility within broader cultural and institutional discourses, policies and institutional practices, but perhaps hints at what would be necessary for its demise; that is, what wider cultural-political and economic changes would be necessary to make such representational practices redundant.

To highlight this double move, of mobilising but also disrupting subject positions, I draw on Butler’s (1997) notion of ‘turning’ and ‘turning around’ (developed further by Macherey 2012) to move the focus from text to reader. In previous work I have discussed aid, development and marketing campaign materials involving depictions of children in terms of how the affective relations mobilised by and in relation to children and (individual and cultural-societal) models of childhood reflect and inform wider economic relations – including how both structure what development has come to mean (Burman 2008a, 2008b, 2012). Here I build on such analyses to attend more specifically to the processes of contextual engagement and political debate prompted by a specific campaign. Indeed, as a particular reflexive twist, what emerges as crucial to the reception of this campaign precisely revolves around questions of representation, of evidence, and specifically turns upon the question of who or what its topic is, and to whom it should be addressed. Far from being (only) about the condition of ‘poor children’ in Britain who unsurprisingly are found to be in a similar condition to poor children elsewhere, this text turns around to evaluate the reader and/or position it presumes and produces. Deconstructing the popular/academic and policy/expert binaries, both aid agencies and their media critics turn out to be preoccupied with similar concerns to those of academic childhood and education researchers: the ethics and politics of claims to and around childhood within national and international policy discourse.

In what follows I indicate the socioeconomic context for the campaign text and offer an account of its reception, before moving on to look more closely at its construction (drawing technical inspiration from some of the early work associated with social semiotics (Kress and Hodge 1979; Hodge and Kress 1988). Focusing in particular on criticisms made by one newspaper, I turn the campaign slogan text around to evaluate what it tells us about the canonical reader and the conditions of, and for, discourses of poor children and child poverty as they (in this rather prosaic way) engage the field of national and international relations.

The context

While I will return to these later, it is necessary to highlight some key events that form the conditions of possibility for this text. While the global market crash of 2007 onwards brought about worldwide recession, the United Kingdom under a Coalition government of Conservatives and Liberal Democrats has seen the post-1945 welfare state steadily rolled back, with severe cuts in public spending impacting significantly on all welfare provision including housing, social care and health services, and with major impacts on education (Tunstall et al. 2011; Hammett 2014). The government slogan ‘we’re all in it together’ belies how the measures disproportionately target the poorest sectors of the population, and so – like other countries hit by the raft of measures associated with ‘austerity’ – there has been a deterioration in the conditions of children’s lives. This is in a country where children have consistently emerged in annual UNICEF reports as among the least happy and healthy of all European countries. Moreover, just before the 2010 election (which brought in a Conservative and Liberal Democrat administration), the Labour government passed the Child Poverty Act. This committed the government to achieving four income-based child poverty targets by 2020.⁵ Significantly, all major political parties supported the Bill as it went through Parliament but the current Coalition government has been particularly keen to criticise the relative measure of child poverty (often seen as the ‘headline’ measure). This suggests that, whilst reiterating their support for tackling child poverty, they did not feel held to account on needing to meet the 2020 targets (so that child poverty is expected to rise by over 1 million between 2014 and 2020) (see Social Mobility and Child Poverty Commission 2014; Sparrow 2014).

It was in September 2012 that Save the Children launched their campaign ‘Child poverty: It shouldn’t happen here’ (across print and social media, and with television advertising) to publicise their research on child poverty in the UK (Whitham 2012) and to draw attention to the ways the wider climate of public sector cuts were affecting children and their families and communities – even as the further and deeper swathes had not yet been announced or enacted (but are now well underway). While the previous Labour administration had pledged to end child poverty by 2020 (Cooke et al. 2008), there was a perceived need to hold the new administration to this commitment (or else expose how they were reneging on it). Other relevant conditions include concurrent policy repositioning around international aid which promoted a climate of popular opinion about Britain as needing help rather than being a provider of it, alongside a challenge to its imperial/colonial (self-)representation. The political climate had seen the rise and political promotion of anti-immigrant feeling, promulgating the view that foreigners are taking jobs, houses and consumi...

Table of contents

• Cover Page
• Half Title Page
• Series Page
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Contents
• List of illustrations
• Notes on contributors
• Acknowledgements
• Introduction
• Part I Cultural representations of childhood and poverty
• Part II Contextualising the ‘poor child’: Children's voices as modes of resistance
• Part III Questioning the project of schooling and the politics of development
• Conclusion
• Index