Presenting the Case
A growing body of research on childhood and youth in the context of development has brought lots, yet still too little. The ânew sociology of childhoodâ that gained shape in the 1990s transformed the field (Tisdall and Punch 2012). Its key premises, appreciating childhood as a social construct and children as social actors, countered the socialisation approaches and development psychology perspectives that long dominated knowledge production about children (Ansell 2009: 190). In this new wave of research, qualitative, participatory, ethnographic, and especially so-called child-centred methods were typically favoured over standardised questionnaires (Christensen and James 2000). This generated a wealth of knowledge about children in their current condition as children, privileging their own perspectives and experiences, and challenging any singular understanding of childhood leading some to speak about âmultipleâ childhoods (Balagopalan 2014: 11â14).
The story about youth is different. 1 Their agency was never in question, albeit seldom studied in relation to young women, and mostly seen as a problem or a particularity. Unlike childhood studies, qualitative research is a respected tradition within youth studies (Willis 1981; Mead 2001 [1928]). Research conducted in rich countries still dominates the field, with numerous articles and books on the various âcrisesâ attributed to (male) youth and particular sub-cultural formations. This epistemological frame has also influenced emerging youth research in the Global South (Amit-Talai and Wulff 1995; Honwana and De Boeck 2005). It is only in recent years that youth studies have started paying serious attention to more-or-less ordinary youth and the potential of studying their everyday lives for rethinking development (Jeffrey et al. 2008; Jeffrey 2010; Woronov 2016).
Nonetheless, a key motivation driving this book is that both childhood and youth studies have informed debates in development studies only marginally. Or more precisely, it is particularly these more recent perspectives and approaches in the respective fields that have failed to impact development thinking despite their potential. For it must be recognised that research coming out of economics, medical science, and development psychology, on children especially, has made more than just a dent in development thinking and practice. This is evident from the global uptake of conditional cash transfer programmes (see Palacio this volume) as well as renewed interest in early childhood programmes (Young, 2007). Driven by the interaction between neuroscience, development psychology, and neoclassical economics, such interventions are considered highly efficient approaches to simultaneously alleviating poverty and building human capital for facilitating economic growth. Such child research, thus, speaks directly to dominant global development agendas while also offering the robust âlarge-nâ causal analyses demanded by inter-governmental donors and national governments alike. However, this research treats childhood as a site of intervention ignoring childrenâs active engagement with and appropriation of programmes, important contextual variations in how interventions play out, the constantly evolving relational and generational fabric within which children and young people live their lives and in which programmes intervene, as well as the temporal dimension that would show that at least some children may âdo wellâ later in life despite initial hardships and deprivations (Boyden et al. 2015).
At its core, development studies and practice have remained adult-centric. This influences the questions that drive most research about young people within the field. This adult-centrism is seldom, however, sufficiently marked, and it can be easily missed because of the vast volume of (evaluation) research on the incorporation of children into development interventions, frequent rhetorical references to âyoung people as the futureâ, and sub-debates on the fringes of the discipline about specific âchildâ, âadolescentâ or âyouthâ-related themes such as âchild povertyâ, âadolescent sexualityâ, and âyouth employmentâ. Children may thus have âbecome prominent âclientsâ of international development discourse and interventionâ (Boyden and Zharkevich forthcoming), and the idea of the âyouth bulgeâ continues to ignite debates on youth as either a danger or potential for development (e.g. World Bank 2006). Yet, the conceptual and theoretical innovations that have come out of the qualitative research on childhood and youth have hardly impacted the terms of thinking about development.
Perhaps, this state of affairs is partly the prize of success. Much of the qualitative research in childhood and youth studies, including work on young people in the context of development, is published in the specialised childhood and youth studies journals and book series launched in recent decades (Tisdall and Punch 2012: 252). In contrast to the early days (e.g. Goddard and White 1982; Nieuwenhuys 1994), only a fraction of this work appears in, or seems to inform in any substantial way, debates in development studies circles (Huijsmans et al. 2014: fn1). Others have pointed at the failure of much childhood and youth research to employ a political economy perspective (see Mills this volume), and thereby speak more directly to larger global processes (Hart 2008; CÎté 2014; Woronov 2016).
This volume is a modest contribution to bridging gaps in order to facilitate conceptual dialogue between these strands of research. That is, between childhood and youth studies, and between those two fields and development studies (other major works include Young Lives; Katz 2004; Ansell 2005; Jeffrey et al. 2008; Wells 2009). To this end, the volume brings together a total of 14 chapters. The three parts of the book, âtheorising age and generation in young livesâ, âeveryday relationalities: school, work and belongingâ, and ânegotiating developmentâ consist of four chapters each and are complemented with an introductory chapter setting out the conceptual and theoretical parameters and a commentary by Nicola Ansell that closes the volume.
Analytically, the volume coheres around a relational approach. Relational thinking can take many forms, but in essence it is about tying together different things, actors, dimensions, dynamics, or forces. It emphasises relationships, networks, friction, interaction, negotiation, the everyday and power. At an ontological level, relational thinking, thus, seeks to overcome static agencyâstructure binaries (Worth 2014). At a minimum, the relational exercise presented in this volume is about bringing into critical conversation some of the conceptual and theoretical contributions of childhood and youth studies with debates and perspectives in development studies. In addition, the chapters in this volume also retain the important relational exercise of investigating the interactions between constructs of childhood and youth and the lived experience of being young (see for example Alma Gottliebâs (2004) work on the interplay between the understanding of the personhood attributed to babies and practices of child rearing). However, the specific contribution of the volume lies in its attempt to capture the twofold dynamic of how development, in its various conceptualisations, restructures generational social landscapes, and also how young people themselves, as constrained agents of development, renegotiate their role and position vis-Ă -vis others and in particular places and spaces of development.
The next section sets out an analytical frame underpinning the relational approach informing this book. This framework is given specific childhood and youth studies content by mobilising age and generation, in their various interpretations, as key concepts. Next, the general approach to development is sketched followed by an outline of the organisation of the book and a brief introduction to the contributing chapters.
Relational Thinking
In recent years, there has been somewhat of a revival of relational approaches. This is evident not only in work on âspaceâ (Jones 2009), âthe stateâ (Thelen et al. 2014), âpovertyâ (Mosse 2010) but also in research with young people (e.g. Punch 2002b; Kraftl 2013; Worth 2014). Thelen et al. (2014: 2) posit that by making relations the entry point of analysis, we gain new insights into how things work. The rationale for foregrounding generational relations is, thus, to gain a deeper understanding of how development, in its diverse conceptualisations, works in a generational mannerâand especially, though not exclusively, how this pertains to young people.
Thelen et al.âs (2014) relational anthropology of studying the state is driven by a problematique that maps well onto childhood and youth studies because of its concern with the interplay between âformationsâ, ârepresentationsâ, and âpracticesâ. In the context of childhood and youth studies, formations can be operationalised as âgenerational structuresâ, representations can be taken to refer to âdiscourses about young peopleâ, and practices can direct attention to the âlived experiences of being youngâ. Thelen et al. (2014: 2) propose studying these interconnected dimensions with an analytical framework comprising of three axes: ârelational modalities, boundary work, and the embeddedness of actorsâ.
The idea of modalities captures the different ontologies in which notions of childhood and youth exist and the various understandings of age that come with it. We could, thus, speak of âgenerational modalitiesâ. In Sara Vida Coumansâ chapter, different modalities are clearly illustrated through policies seeking to regulate sex work. These policies are articulated in terms of chronological age and legitimised on the basis of neuroscience. However, there is also the modality of the embodied dimension of age that shapes sex work as practice. Similarly, in Lidewyde Berckmoes and Ben Whiteâs contribution, young people hopefully articulate the rights and obligations associated with kinship descent. According to this generational modality,...