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Children Participating and Developing Agency in and Across Various Social Practices
... I denne foraelders erfaringer med de professionelle 'taler man ofte forbi hinanden', og i vores senere arbejde er vi blevet mere og mere optaget af, hvordan samarbejde blandt andet handler om at lade forskellige former for viden kunne forbindes til hinanden, at se sammenhaenge gennem forskelle. I arbejdet med børn og familier i vanskeligheder fremstår netop muligheden for at lykkes med dette (henholdsvis at opgive dette) som en vaesentlig dynamik i de eksklusionsprocesser, der kan karakteriseres ved 'de gensidige opgivelses dynamik' (Højholt & Kousholt, 2016). ...
... At begrebsaette laering og udvikling som knyttet til deltagelse er en bred og sammensat bestraebelse inden for megen forskning (fx Dreier 2008, Fleer & Hedegaard 2010, Lave in prep) men der synes fortsat at vaere brug for at videreudvikle og differentiere deltagelsesbegrebet for at kunne begrebsaette forskelle og forandringer i deltagelse -knyttet til deltagelsesmuligheder, aktiviteter og bevaegelser i praksis. Her vil jeg saerlig fremhaeve børns muligheder for at bidrage og have ind ydelse på deres egne laereprocesser og de sociale betingelser forbundet hertil , Højholt & Kousholt 2016, Stetsenko 2008. Det peger på et teoriarbejde omkring, hvordan man kan arbejde med udvikling af børns rådighed -både i de kontinuerlige reorganiseringer og omfordelinger i familieliv og i forbindelse med betydninger af at udvikle rådighed i andre livskontekster. ...
... Ved gennemlaesning af observationerne blev jeg slået af, hvor ofte verber som at lede, nde og vente gik igen -det kunne ofte handle om at lede efter venner, men også om at lede efter eller vente på voksne, der skal give tilladelse eller har nøgler eller informationer, børnene er afhaengige af. Vi blev optaget af, hvordan børnene i disse betingelser -på en gang praeget af hurtige skift, afbrydelser, foranderlighed og eksibilitet og praeget af ventetid, gentagelser og 'stilstand' -ser ud til at arbejde på at få, hvad de laver, og hvem de laver det sammen med til at gå op i en højere enhed (Højholt & Kousholt 2016, Stanek 2011. ...
Mit forskningsarbejde begyndte i en interesse for, hvordan psykologien kan bruges i menneskers hverdagsliv og med en undersøgelse af, hvordan brugere (forældre) oplevede psykologhjælp (Pædagogisk Psykologisk Rådgivning). Det første, forældrene fortalte, var, at problemerne handlede om noget andet, end andre parter havde fortalt. Vores forskning blev derved sendt ud i de mange sammenhænge, hvor børn lever deres hverdagsliv, og forskellige voksne samarbejder og konflikter om dem – samt sendt ind mod betydninger for børnene, deres fællesskaber, livsførelse og subjektivitet. Analyser af de mange forskellige perspektiver herfra illustrerede, hvordan pro- blemerne blev forskudt rundt mellem stederne. Frem for problemforskydninger, der placerer nogle parter i ‘brugerpositioner’, skal vi måske analysere folkeskolens mangesidede ‘sager’ og konflikter og de situerede uligheder i forhold til at gøre sig gældende i disse konflikter? I dag er jeg optaget af indholdet i konflikterne, og af, hvordan børnenes personlige dilemmaer og ‘agency’ kan ses knyttet til deres deltagelse i konfliktuelle samspil og forløb. På den måde søger artiklen at belyse, hvordan personlige konflikter er indvævet i samfundsmæssige og politiske konflikter – konflikterne om børnene synes at indebære konflikter for børnene.
... kunnskap tilbyr premisser for politikkutforming, og forståelsesrammer for profesjonell praksis (Burman, 2008), og videre vil politiske beslutninger og profesjonell praksis inngå som betingelser for hvordan de psykologiske fenomenene får spille seg ut og utvikle seg, dermed vaere med på å (re)produsere fenomenene vi observerer i forskning (Højholt & Kousholt, 2018). Psykologien er slik med på å produsere de psykologiske fenomenene vi forsker på (Schraube, 2015). ...
... Utvikling kan ikke forstås uten deltakelse i fellesskaper: Sosiokulturell utviklingspsykologi legger til grunn at barnet er en aktør: en I. Hogstad: Den kvalitative psykologis kraft til å forstyrre fenomenene. som gjennom et spekter av både språklige og ikke-språklige, kroppslige innspill deltar i sosiale og kulturelle praksiser(Gulbrandsen, 2017a;Højholt & Kousholt, 2018). Det psykologiske fenomenet «barns sorg», altså hvordan barns sorg kommer til syne, vil henge sammen med for eksempel hvordan barn involveres i kulturelle praksiser knyttet til dødsfall(Menendez et al., 2020). ...
... Hvordan innspillene blir tatt imot legger føringer for hva de ender om med å bety, og for dialogen videre. Hvordan våre innspill og initiativ sammen med andre blir forstått og tatt imot betyr noe for hvordan vi forstår oss selv og videre for hva vi opplever er våre muligheter til å bidra inn i det sosiale neste gang: både hvorvidt vi kommer med innspill i det hele tatt og hvordan vi opplever mulighetene til deltakelse(Højholt & Kousholt, 2018).Hvis vi utarbeider en sosiokulturelt inspirert analytikk som vi leser tekst med, vil en mulig konsekvens vaere at vi ser på den felles meningsskapingen, både i det aktuelle samspillet, og i sosiokulturelle praksiser. Vi får øye på den profesjonelle, og hennes bidrag inn i samspillet. ...
Psykologisk forskning på mennesket tilbyr selvforståelser som kan fungere selvoppfyllende og dermed være med å (re)produsere de psykologiske fenomenene vi forsker på. Kunnskapsproduksjonen har helt reelle konsekvenser for individ og samfunn, og forskere har et etisk ansvar i å være kritiske i sin forskning og jobbe for å unngå at forskningen skader mennesker, samfunn, natur og miljø. Forfatter av denne artikkelen har tidligere vært opptatt av hvordan psykologisk forskning kan bidra til å reprodusere kunnskap om barns sorg som støtter praksiser som kan fungere ekskluderende for de yngste barna. Denne artikkelen argumenterer for at den kvalitative psykologien bærer i seg en kraft til å «forstyrre» de psykologiske fenomenene vi forsker på heller enn å reprodusere dem, og at denne kraften særlig ligger i analysen og med den i anvendelse av teori. I artikkelen søker forfatteren å demonstrere den forstyrrende kraften i kvalitativ psykologi ved å anvende to ulike teoretisk informerte lesninger av et empirisk eksempel om barns sorguttrykk fra intervjuer med barnehagelærere. De to forskjellige «analytikkene» utvikles fra to ulike teoretiske perspektiver fra utviklingspsykologi, Piagets konstruktivistiske teori om kognitiv utvikling og sosiokulturell utviklingsteori. Lesningene demonstrerer hvordan det teoretiske perspektivet har konsekvenser for hvordan vi avgrenser og lokaliserer psykologiske fenomen, hva vi antar intervjutranskript kan representere av fenomenet og for hva slags kunnskap vi ender opp med å produsere.
... Developmental psychology has traditionally considered the universal development of children's concepts about death by age (Hogstad and Wold 2016). However, when a mother or father dies, the child's understanding of parental death involves more than just understanding death cognitively: children's subjective, everyday life experiences of parental death relate to how they together with others actively relate to and continuously make meaning of parental death (Hundeide 2003;Højholt and Kousholt 2018). The present study takes a sociocultural psychological approach and relocates death concepts from the individual child to the transindividual: the meaning of death is socially constructed and already embedded in cultural practices, language, and other socioculturally shared symbol systems (Graven, Lund, and Jacobsen 2013). ...
... From a developmental perspective, children gradually, and together with others, develop their ways of drawing on socioculturally shared meanings in their conduct of life (Hundeide 2003;Højholt and Kousholt 2018). Caregivers or professionals contribute as partners in interpretation by taking departure from shared knowledge that is already known to the child and expanding this by building bridges to something novel (Hundeide 2003). ...
... The fourth step of analysis involved looking for patterns of forms of interactions and resources for meaning making within and across the professional groups, and it resulted in three main forms of interactions, with the two latter tied to context-specific resources within the institutional contexts. Finally, using the findings in the fourth step as a point of departure, we used Højholt and Kousholt's (2018) concept of participation to analyse how the professionals' various ways of conducting meaning-making work conditioned children's possibilities to participate across the contexts. ...
The present study focused on professionals’ meaning-making support to young children (1–6 years old) anticipating and grieving the loss of a parent because of a severe, somatic disease. A two-phased interview study with palliative health-care professionals (11) and kindergarten teachers (18) provided data for a comparative analysis of professionals’ contribution in making meaning about parental death across the contexts of palliative health care and kindergarten. The analysis focused on forms of interactions and resources for meaning making. Dialogues in the health systems centred on death and dying as natural, biomedical processes and relied on the dead or dying body as a context-specific resource for meaning making. The dialogues in the kindergarten centred on trying to understand the affected child’s behaviour and emotional expressions together with the peer group.
Kort, norsk omtale av artikkelen:
Noen ganger opplever barn allerede i barnehagealder at mamma eller pappa dør. Det er ikke så lett å forstå, og det kan være fint å få hjelp til å skape mening om det som har skjedd. Dette studerte Ingrid Hogstad og Anne Jansen i en intervjustudie med 11 leger og sykepleiere og 18 barnehagelærere. Vi fant ut at helsepersonell og barnehagelærere støttet barna i å forstå foreldredød som ulike fenomen og med støtte i ulike ressurser. Helsepersonell støttet barn i å forstå foreldredød som biologisk fenomen og biomedisinsk prosess, med den døde eller døende kroppen som meningsskapingsressurs. I barnehagen fikk barna støtte til å forstå foreldredød som emosjonelt og relasjonelt fenomen, og her var de andre barna i barnehagen sentrale ressurser i felles meningsskaping. Vi argumenterer for at helsepersonell og barnehagelærere må snakke med hverandre og trekke på hverandres erfaringer og kunnskap - for at barna skal oppleve mer sammenheng mellom helsekonteksten og barnehagekonteksten. Artikkelen hvor forskningen er presentert er åpent tilgjengelig fra og med i dag.
... The school is a controversial historical institution, illustrating what Jean Lave conceptualizes as historical struggles over class and other life-saturating divisions in and through the production of everyday lives (Lave, 2019; see also Holland & Lave, 2001). In addition, the school is an everyday context in which many children and educational professionals cooperate and conduct their personal lives (Dreier, 2008;Højholt & Kousholt, 2018a;Schraube & Højholt, 2016). Published in Theory & Psychology, 2019, this is authors final version-minor correctional changes was made before publishing 3 The involved parties (children, teachers, school leaders, psychologists, and parents) have different perspectives on school problems and on what is important in everyday school life, but in psychological investigations of the problems, such disagreements are seldom explicitly addressedinvestigations often focus on students' individual behavior, and on categorizations of individual difficulties. ...
... In our previous research, we have discussed how such categorizations of individual children imply different ways of understanding them and different social conditions for their participation (Højholt, 1999(Højholt, , 2006Højholt & Kousholt, 2018a;D. Kousholt, 2011D. ...
... In this way, subjectivity and personal perspectives are understood as anchored in common historical practice (Axel, 2011(Axel, , 2002Bernstein, 1971;Holland & Lave, 2001;Jensen, 1987Jensen, , 1999Lave, 2008Lave, , 2011Lave, , 2019Chaiklin & Lave, 1993). This is a situated approach to structural and political issues with a point of reference in the shared societal life, where people deal with common matters from different locations and positions (Dreier, 2008;Holzkamp, 2013;Højholt & Kousholt, 2018a;Schraube & Højholt, 2016). Nevertheless, these common matters are multifaceted and contradictory (Ollman, 2015(Ollman, , 2003. ...
How can theoretical psychology develop concepts for analyzing connections between subjective dilemmas in everyday life and contradictions in historical social practice? We discuss this question by analyzing conflicts related to problems in children’s school lives. One frequent conflict is whether school problems should be explored in relation to individual deficits and deviations, family background, how the school is organized, the societal task of education etc. However, such conflicts often become concealed by psychological concepts, which contributes to individualization, categorization and the displacement of problems. We argue that theoretical development of the concept of conflict may support the widespread endeavors to transcend such reductionism by developing contextual and dialectical understandings of personal dilemmas. Through examples from empirical studies, the article illustrates how political conflicts concerning societal institutions (such as schools) form part of both inter-subjective conflicts about common matters and personal conflicts in the conduct of everyday life.
... By focusing on the subjective dimensions of interconnected structural practices (Dreier, 2003(Dreier, , 2008Højholt & Kousholt, 2018a;Holzkamp, 2013;Schraube, 2013), the historical concerns around which the involved parties gather come into view. Education is thus understood as a common matter, and different perspectives on children, on the school, and on what school life should be about, can be analyzed in terms of how they are connected. ...
... In such practices, opportunities to assert oneself, and to have one's knowledge and perspective on a given problem acknowledged, are unequally distributed. Often, parents are regarded as the very problem to be solved, and in this way school dilemmas may be displaced onto the children's family background (Højholt & Kousholt, 2018a; see also Christenson, 2004). In research, conceptualizations and interventions, this displacement produces a focus on family life and parenting at the expense of inquiry into situated interplay in schools, and into how children and parents experience school life as well as broader social conflicts over schooling. ...
... Children's conflicts are complex and interwoven with their different conditions for taking part in, and influencing, social interplay, thereby connecting personal participation with social possibilities (cf. Højholt & Kousholt, 2018a, 2018bStanek, 2011). Accordingly, conflicts can be experienced very differently by children, and it is often the case that the stories parents are told vary a lot. ...
Parental collaboration is both promoted for enhancing children’s performance and criticized for reproducing educational inequality. The issue of parental collaboration thus presents an opportunity to discuss theoretical differences in current debates about education, notably the educational consequences of social background and governmentality. The article emphasizes the conflictual nature of children’s school lives and analyzes the social interplay between the involved subjects, who are connected through their engagement in common matters and concerns. Our analysis challenges approaches inspired by Bourdieu that analyze the social reproduction of inequality in terms of discrepancies between parental style and the culture of the school. It also raises questions about the Foucauldian perspective which regards policies and practices of parental collaboration as means to govern parents. Through a discussion of these analyses, the article shows how different ways of conceptualizing parental collaboration offer different opportunities for organizing collaboration and dealing with the historical problems of the school.
... Over the past decades, childhood studies have underpinned children as social actors that participate in and negotiate the construction of their everyday lives (James & Prout 1997;Fleer & Hedegaard 2010;Kousholt 2011a;Højholt & Kousholt 2015). In this perspective, children are seen as human beings having their own perspectives, which are worth fully including in research (Alderson 1995;Greene & Hogan 2005;Højholt & Kousholt 2014). ...
... A great number of professionals contribute to children's daily lives, especially when they live out-of-home. The main point addressed here is how these professionals make it possible for children to experience 'being influential' in practical ways in their everyday lives (Højholt & Kousholt 2015). I will argue that we need to develop a more profound theoretical understanding of children as agents who take part in arranging their social life and how they do so according to their specific life contexts. ...
... Children take part in a structured social world, which they simultaneously contribute to change (Stetsenko 2008). Even more significantly, by doing so, they develop their future societal participation (Højholt & Kousholt 2015). ...
A large part of most children's childhood is about taking part in educational and leisure-time activities together with other children across various contexts. However, children in out-of-home care do not always have easy access to these possibilities for participation. In general, parents coordinate their children's everyday lives, but in the case of children in out-of-home care, the responsibility of care is distributed between several professionals and institutions. Research often recommends that inter-professional cooperation should put the child at the centre and be more child focused. But what does that mean? The paper investigates theoretical understandings of ‘child centredness’ in inter-professional cooperation. It also includes an empirical example taken from a research project that followed four children in their everyday lives in two residential homes in Denmark. The research explored how professionals work together across contexts in order to support children to take part in school and leisure-time activities. The overall reasoning leads to the point that for children in out-of-home care, the possibility of exercising personal agency in their everyday life constitutes a difficult but vital issue. How children in out-of-home care learn how to conduct their everyday lives, is closely related to the ways professionals cooperate across contexts. It points to the need for close inter-professional cooperation in order to encourage and support children's initiatives and engagements in activities in communities with other children.
... We need to conceptualize how persons pursue a variation of different personal concerns across a plurality of contexts and together with others (Dreier, 2008). Nielsen (2013) and Schraube (in press) accentuate how this effort entails including the inter-subjective reciprocity with other people's conduct of everyday life and, in general, it seems that the further development of this theoretical approach points to the conduct of everyday life as a collective project (Chimirri, 2013, Højholt & Kousholt, 2015. This collectivity constitutes concrete conditions as well as developmental tasks in relation to directing and prioritizing the pursuit of various personal activities, matters and concerns across time and places: ...
... People are making a living quite literally in the sense that they actively pursue a specific conduct of everyday life; at the same time, they are making sense of their activities in specific contexts. (Nielsen, 2013, p. 349) Such an attention appears of serious importance for psychology and represents new perspectives on well-known themes and problematics of psychology, such as: rehabilitation (Borg 2002), "drop out" from educational systems (Nielsen, 2013), technology (Schraube & Marvakis, 2015;Chimirri, 2013), everyday life with disease (Huniche, 2011), psychotherapy (Dreier, 2008), children's learning and development in general, as well as children in difficulties (Højholt, 2015;Højholt & Kousholt, 2015;Juhl, 2014;Schwartz, 2014;Morin, Røn Larsen & Stanek, this volume). ...
... Many empirical projects have highlighted this "activity" for children's common life across contexts (e.g. Andenaes, 2012;Fleer & Hedegaard, 2010;Gulbrandsen, 2012;Hedegaard et al., 2012;Hviid, 2012;Højholt & Kousholt, 2015;Johansson & White, 2011;Juhl, 2015;Schwartz, 2014;Stanek, 2014). This is not to say that there are no differences to adult life, but instead of relating the differences to intrinsic or universal characteristics, these differences are to be understood as being related to the specific historical conditions of being a child and the dialectical process of developing as a person, while participating in the development of the social world. ...
This texts is introducing the special Issue "Psychological perspectives on children's conduct of everyday life" touching on the concept of conduct of everyday life and some of the theoretical debates in relation to this. The common aim of the issue is to unfold and explore the concepts potential meaning to a psychology for children and their development. By addressing development as person's activities and involvement in a collective, shared everyday life, the authors emphasize the relations between the context and the person as a dialectical relation of developing through the process of gaining access, influencing and contributing to the collective, social life conditions. In this way, the discussions of the text are dealing with some of the fundamental theoretical debates about persons and their social lives. The discussions in this special issue is anchored in the Nordic, pedagogical traditions, and draw on a number of different empirical research projects involved in children's everyday life across different contexts, such as family, child care and school. Additionally the issue investigates different problematics related to children's lives across the so called normal, and the special pedagogical area. Conclusively this text resumes the different articles in the special issues, their theme, intentions, main points and contributions to the development of the concepts of children's conduct of everyday life.
... There has been a paradigm shift in the field of research on children in the last decades. The perspectives of children has come into greater focus (James et al., 1998;Christensen and James, 2008;Gulbrandsen et al., 2014;Warming, 2020) and this change situates children as social agents with agency in the research process (Kousholt, 2011;Gulbrandsen et al., 2014;Højholt and Kousholt, 2018;Warming, 2019bWarming, , 2020. Recent studies on the perspectives of children have contributed to the field with new knowledge about their experiences of social life issues (Warming, 2011(Warming, , 2020Højholt and Kousholt, 2018;Alminde, 2021;Rose, 2021b). ...
... The perspectives of children has come into greater focus (James et al., 1998;Christensen and James, 2008;Gulbrandsen et al., 2014;Warming, 2020) and this change situates children as social agents with agency in the research process (Kousholt, 2011;Gulbrandsen et al., 2014;Højholt and Kousholt, 2018;Warming, 2019bWarming, , 2020. Recent studies on the perspectives of children have contributed to the field with new knowledge about their experiences of social life issues (Warming, 2011(Warming, , 2020Højholt and Kousholt, 2018;Alminde, 2021;Rose, 2021b). Kousholt (2011)states that the research brings a focus on children's everyday life conditions and involves children as actors in the societal contexts within which they take part (p. ...
New interventions are offered to children of divorced parents in Danish schools. Establishing conversation-groups can be seen as part of this overall effort to increase pupils’ wellbeing. This new practice leads to new professional challenges when teachers facilitate group processes and call for in-depth studies of children’s own perspectives on their participation in these interventions. This article is based on ethnographic fieldwork and asks the following research question: “How do children make sense of the professionals’ double role as both group leader and teacher when facilitating the conversation-groups in schools?” The study draws on 23 interviews with children and observations in four conversation-groups in Denmark. Theory of social representations is used as an analytical tool to explore the dilemmas of school interventions for children of divorced parents. The analysis presents three dominant themes: The group leader’s problematic double role, balancing the duty of confidentiality and trusting the group members. The analysis shows that children struggle to express feelings about their home situation in the school context. The importance of balancing the duty of confidentiality as a group leader is clearly reflected as a key factor, seen from the perspective of the child.
... It also emerges from their daily interaction with the family (e.g. Højholt & Kousholt, 2018;Nolas et al., 2017). ...
... While having in mind the national and socioeconomic backgrounds undoubtedly have an impact on civic processes and engagements in the family context (Brites et al., 2017;Nolas et al., 2017), the family conduct of everyday life, in which child-parent bidirectional socialization occurs and agency is reshaped, is under constant negotiation, not only among parents, but also between parents and children and other family members, across the many social practices they participate in and contribute to (e.g. Højholt & Kousholt, 2018;Kousholt, 2016). Adding to these theoretical discussions of reciprocal agency, the discussed literature suggests that these dynamics are mutually and thus (micro-) collectively constituted, and should be understood as the basis for situating civic engagement in family context. ...
https://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/share/author/BBJFITAUYY2UVJDIEMID?target=10.1111/chso.12582
This article proposes that more attention should be paid to how mediated civic engagements are shaped in a family context. Through an interpretive literature review of research that studies the family's role in mediating civic engagement, we identify several problematic conceptual understandings that create rigid distinctions between the family sphere and its members' civic engagement, as well as between their analogue and digital engagements. The article introduces a conceptual framework that has implications for further research on mediated civic engagement by taking into consideration parents', children and youth's emotions and affective relations as relevant for engaging in the civic realm.
... First, with respect to doing family, children are the only group of actors who are members of both the family and day care and structure their everyday lives in and between these two social worlds (cf. Dencik, 1995;Hedegaard, 2011;Højholt, & Kousholt, 2018). This involves constantly placing the two environments in relation to one another and navigating daily transitions (cf. ...
... We build upon existing research on children as actors within collaboration (Betz & Eunicke, 2017;Betz et al., 2019aBetz et al., , 2020b and day care, which has also begun to pay increasing attention to children's everyday lives at the crossroads of day care and the family (e.g. Bollig, Honig, & Nienhaus, 2016;Højholt, & Kousholt, 2018); how children navigate divergent cultural models within the family and day care (Dencik, 1995;Brooker, 2006) and their practical, everyday enactment of their fractal and multiple cultural identities (James, & Prout, 1996;Heedegard, 2011); their multiple belongings between day care and the family (Stratigos, Bradley, & Sumsion, 2014); and their connections to the family in extended care relations between day care and the home (Bundgaard, & Olwig, 2018). ...
The WORKING PAPER series by the General Educational Science / Childhood Studies Research Group at the Department of Educational Science at Johannes Gutenberg University Mainz serves as a forum for the publication of a loose sequence of working
papers based on the research group’s ongoing projects. In addition to publications in scientific journals and books as well as practiceoriented publication formats, these working papers provide a further level of open access information to interested members of the field, students and researchers concerning project developments and (preliminary) research results. The aim is to contribute to scientific and research-oriented discussions on theoretical foundations, empirical findings as well as interpretations and conclusions.
The research group’s projects cover a wide range of topics, including empirical analyses in the field of social scientific childhood research and educational inequality research in early, middle and late childhood. The working papers in this series address the relationship between the family and public institutions responsible for early childhood education and care as well as schools from different perspectives and with a variety of theoretical and methodological approaches. They analyze the complex mechanisms
behind the strong linkages between background-related factors such as social milieus and school success, as well as how childhood is and can be structured under conditions of social inequality. Particular focus is placed on actors who play a role in childhood, such
as preschool educators, teachers and other educational staff, mothers and fathers, as well as children, policymakers and institutions of early and middle childhood, which include education and care institutions and families, but also policy, research, economics and law. Emphasis is placed on political and societal models of 'good' childhood and 'good' parenthood, widespread national and international educational and political programs addressing parents’ and pedagogical professionals’ practices, and widespread social ideologies. Another area of focus concerns processes that produce difference and reproduce social and generational inequality during childhood.
So far published in the series Working Paper:
Nr. 1 – 2020
Bisher erschienen in der Reihe Working Paper:
Nr. 1 – 2020
... Til trods for at børns perspektiver er kommet i større fokus i forskningen generelt (Alminde, 2021;Christensen & James, 2008;Gulbrandsen et al., 2014;James et al., 1998;Warming, 2020), var det også vigtigt at bringe deres stemmer frem i naervaerende projekt for at undgå at reproducere tidligere forskning på feltet. Dette standpunkt betyder, at man ser børn som sociale aktører, der er i stand til at bidrage med viden og erfaringer om deres eget sociale hverdagsliv (Alminde, 2021;Kousholt, 2011;Gulbrandsen et al., 2014;Højholt & Kousholt, 2018;Rose, 2021a;Warming, 2019bWarming, , 2020. ...
Artiklen retter et fokus på de forskningsetiske implikationer, der knytter sig til at forske i et genstandsfelt, der er præget af gode intentioner, møder positive holdninger i samfundet og har stor politisk opbakning. Vi undersøger, hvilke etiske dilemmaer der kommer til syne i udforskningen af de gode intentioner, der knytter sig til omsorgsarbejdet i indsatser for børn. Det empiriske grundlag er baseret på vores respektive ph.d.-afhandlinger, hvor vi på forskellig vis har arbejdet kvalitativt med at undersøge grundlæggende antagelser bag etablering af sorg- og skilsmissegrupper for børn på danske skoler. Vores forskning viser de dilemmaer, der kommer til syne, når man undersøger pædagogiske samtalegruppeindsatser for børn, der bygger på godhedsargumenter. Der opstår nogle etiske udfordringer, når vi som forskere befinder vi os i spændingsfeltet mellem professionelles gode intentioner om, hvad der er bedst for børn og børnenes egne perspektiver på deres liv med sorg eller skilsmisse. Vi drøfter derfor, hvilke forskningsetiske implikationer der opstår, når man som forsker træder ind i et felt, hvor ”godhed” bruges som argument for uanfægtelige sandheder, som ingen kan være imod eller uenige i. Her har vi fundet inspiration i Pettersvold og Østrems (2012) begreb om godhedsmagt.
... What is important, in relation to children's psychological development, is whether the child basically and broadly is understood in relation to this distinctly human activity, directed at the transformation of their own and others' living conditions. It is important for children's well-being that the pedagogical practice is concerned with figuring out how best to support children's agency, in a way where the children's disposal over their life conditions is expanded (in the long term) (Højholt and Kousholt 2018). In this perspective, it is crucial that the pedagogical practice is understood as a place where children learn to understand themselves as someone who can or cannot/must or must not change their living conditions. ...
This article analyzes the possibilities and obstacles in pedagogical practices in ECEC (Early Childhood Education and Care) in relation to developing relevant opportunities for participation for all children, by supporting their own engagements in order to expand their action possibilities. Over the last decades, the political agendas in the Nordic as well as other OECD countries have been led by an increasing focus on learning goals and standardized professional procedures, at the expense of a more situated and flexible pedagogy following children’s own engagements. When concerns arise about children’s well-being, development, and/or learning, this tendency seems to intensify, as descriptions of concerns are often based on assessments of children’s individual (dis-)abilities, while investigations of children’s own engagements and reasons for actions are seldom conducted. From a theoretical standpoint in critical psychology and social practice theory, we discuss collaborative processes among children and adults in relation to institutional conditions as inherently political, in the sense that the distribution of different access to social resources and opportunities for participation for different children is negotiated through such daily exchanges and therefore also involves questions about democracy. We explore the everyday life practices of children and professionals, analyzing how, through everyday practice, they constantly work on maintaining, reproducing, and transgressing the standardized demands. To understand such processes, we suggest a conceptual focus on the politics of everyday life and situated pedagogy.
... To exemplify how dilemmas such as the above can spur researchers to further explore the conditions for individualizing understandings of school problems, we draw on another example: Individualizing and scholastic understandings are part of school problems; as researchers, we became preoccupied with exploring when and how such understandings become dominant. The categorical understandings and displacements of problems are not associated with certain persons or groups of persons -rather, they seem to be part of processes with restrictive conditions and limited action possibilities at stake -processes characterized by unresolved conflicts and "mutual resignation" (Højholt & Kousholt, 2018). In this way, the analyses accentuate how different understandings of problems are related to conditions for collaborating on various tasks. ...
This article contributes to discussions of transmethodology by drawing on experiences from conducting practice research aimed at the development of theory and practice through research collaboration. We analyze efforts to build research communities where researchers and professionals work together to perform analyses and develop knowledge. A collective research project exploring children’s possibilities for participation in school is used as a case for exploring how a research problem develops through such collabora-tion. This research project was designed to explore school life from the perspectives of children, parents, teachers, school leaders, and psychologists, and to analyze conflicts situated in everyday practices while considering political struggles concerning the school as a historical institution. The article emphasizes the often intangible and overlooked processes involved in research collaboration and details how we worked to build a re-search community comprising researchers and professionals that enabled collective mul-ti-perspective analyses. Building on a dialectical approach, we conceptualize conflicts as part of historical processes and as an immanent potentiality that arises from people’s engagement in common but contradictory matters. Hence, the different perspectives of those involved in children’s school life can be seen as linked through common matters, while also being differentiated by their allotted tasks in relation to children’s school life. This approach continuously challenged the researchers to analyze everyday conflicts grounded in the different perspectives of those involved, the different forms of reasoning, understandings, and standpoints, as well as how the different perspectives are connected through the participants’ engagement in a common matter – providing good schools for children. The article concludes by arguing that the discussed approach to theory devel-opment can be linked to a situated concept of generalization.
... To exemplify how dilemmas such as the above can spur researchers to further explore the conditions for individualizing understandings of school problems, we draw on another example: Individualizing and scholastic understandings are part of school problems; as researchers, we became preoccupied with exploring when and how such understandings become dominant. The categorical understandings and displacements of problems are not associated with certain persons or groups of persons -rather, they seem to be part of processes with restrictive conditions and limited action possibilities at stake -processes characterized by unresolved conflicts and "mutual resignation" (Højholt & Kousholt, 2018). In this way, the analyses accentuate how different understandings of problems are related to conditions for collaborating on various tasks. ...
This article contributes to discussions of transmethodology by drawing on experiences from conducting practice research aimed at the development of theory and practice through research collaboration. We analyze efforts to build research communities where researchers and professionals work together to perform analyses and develop knowledge. A collective research project exploring children’s possibilities for participation in school is used as a case for exploring how a research problem develops through such collaboration. This research project was designed to explore school life from the perspectives of children, parents, teachers, school leaders, and psychologists, and to analyze conflicts situated in everyday practices while considering political struggles concerning the school as a historical institution. The article emphasizes the often intangible and overlooked processes involved in research collaboration and details how we worked to build a research community comprising researchers and professionals that enabled collective multi-perspective analyses. Building on a dialectical approach, we conceptualize conflicts as part of historical processes and as an immanent potentiality that arises from people’s engagement in common but contradictory matters. Hence, the different perspectives of the participants in the field can be seen as linked through common matters, while also being differentiated by their allotted tasks in relation to children’s school life. This approach continuously challenged the researchers to analyze everyday conflicts grounded in the different perspectives of those involved, the different forms of reasoning, understandings, and standpoints, as well as how the different perspectives are connected through the participants’ engagement in a common matter – providing good schools for children. The article concludes by arguing that the discussed approach to theory development can be linked to a situated concept of generalization
... I sosiokulturell utviklingspsykologi er det et premiss at alle mennesker er deltakende, gjennom å vaere forbundet i et samspill med andre mennesker, innleiret i en sosial, kulturell og materiell kontekst. Dermed blir ikke spørsmålet om barnet deltar, men snarere hvordan barn kan delta og hvilke muligheter de har for deltakelse i ulike situasjoner (Gulbrandsen, Seim, & Østensjø, 2014;Højholt & Kousholt, 2018). I et sosiokulturelt perspektiv spør en ikke «hvor mye» et barn deltar, men hvilke muligheter for deltakelse som finnes. ...
Når profesjonelle møter barn i vanskelige situasjoner, bidrar de til å regulere barnets muligheter til deltakelse. Hensikten med kapittelet er å tilby begrepene mulighetsrom, involveringspraksiser og meningsarbeid. Begrepene kan brukes i veiledning med profesjonelle for å bevege tenkningen omkring profesjonelle praksiser i møte med barn i utsatte situasjoner. Kapitlet formidler en interaksjonell forståelse av deltakelse som et alternativ til resultatorienterte forståelser, med mål om å bidra til profesjonelles refleksjon over egen maktposisjon i møte med barn. Begrepene vil vaere relevante for profesjonelles møter med barn i alle typer velferdspraksiser, og kanskje saerlig for møter med barn i utsatte situasjoner der foreldrekapasiteten er nedsatt på grunn av fysisk eller psykisk sykdom, rusmisbruk eller skade. Barns rett til deltakelse-en plikt for profesjonelle Se for deg at du kommer inn i et hjem for å møte en alvorlig syk og døende kreftpasient, en mann i slutten av trettiåra med svulst i hjernen. Du er her i kraft av å vaere lege eller sykepleier som gir han lindrende behandling. På gulvet i stua sitter en liten gutt på rundt to og et halvt år og bygger Lego. Det er mannens sønn. Ifølge hHelsepersonelloven § 10a har du ansvar for å bidra til å ivareta sønnens behov for informasjon om farens sykdom og prognose. Hvordan finner du ut hvilke behov han har, som du skal ivareta? Eller du møter denne gutten som barnehagelaerer. Nå er han fire år og pappaen er død. En dag går du forbi han i garderoben mens han ligger på gulvet og ser på noen bilder som henger på veggen: de er fra da barnehagen var på utflukt og pappaen hans var med på turen. Hvordan møter du han? Eller du er barnevernspedagog og skal fortelle en fireåring at han ikke lenger skal bo lenger i beredskapshjemmet der han er nå, men flytte til et fosterhjem. Uansett hvilken profesjon du representerer, vil den måten du møter barn på i vanskelige situasjoner vaere avgjørende for barnets muligheter til deltakelse.
... When considering the process of agency development Højholt and Kousholt (2018) discuss that in focusing the child as someone who needs to learn to adapt, there is a neglect of the importance of giving children the experience of being influential. Thus, personal development and the development of social communities are interdependent dimensions. ...
After 21 years under a violent military dictatorship, institutions’ democratization processes took place in Brazil in the past three decades, starting from the Constitution of 1988. As one of the actors in the struggles for democracy, psychologists whose practices are committed to its consolidation in different contexts are constantly facing challenges due to the contradiction between government´s democratic discourses and its authoritarian practices - which tends to be increasingly constant with the rise of a far-right government to the power. This scenario demands, more than ever, that Brazilian Psychology liberates itself from uncritical conceptions to build decolonizing foundations and practices for strengthening and expanding people´s agency. Considering school as an everyday life context for people in the early stages of development, we understand this place as a privileged space for the intervention of psychologists. We intend to share in this presentation some reflections built from participatory action research on how psychologists can promote the participation of students in school. We argue that, in a context of constant attacks to people’s rights, creating conditions for children to recognize and expand possibilities of action to conduct their everyday lives, as well as producing science that supports it, is a great form of resistance and contribution Psychology can make in such dark days.
... Cultural psychology (Cole, 1996;Shweder, 1999;Valsiner, 2000) anchors children's developmental processes in their everyday lives, embedded within a sociocultural and historical context, and thus offers relevant developmental perspectives when approaching the challenges of arranging and conducting care for unaccompanied minors. Children are conceptualized as meaning-making actors who develop by participating in the practices of everyday life (Højholt & Kousholt, 2018), within contexts that are socially and culturally arranged (Weisner, 2002). In the Western world, parents usually take responsibility for organizing the child's everyday life in ways that secure the child's welfare here and now and that facilitate the child's development by providing direction to their future activity (Weisner, 2002). ...
How is care arranged for unaccompanied refugee minors at residential care institutions , and what kind of conditions do these arrangements constitute for young per-sons' well-being and development? Informed by developmental perspectives that consider young people's development through participation across contexts in everyday life and by research into how parents in 'ordinary' families organize care, we developed a study based on interviews with 15 unaccompanied refugee minors and their professional caregivers at residential care institutions. The interviews were analysed systematically by exploring how care is arranged between professionals and its implications in the young persons' lives. The results elucidate how responsibility for following up and making sense of central issues in the lives of the minors was allocated to professionals outside the daily care rather than being part of the primary caregivers' contact with the minors. This practice contrasts with what young persons in 'ordinary families' in Norway enjoy, where coordination across contexts and keeping an overview of the total care are considered the responsibility of parents. The article focuses on the outsourcing of what we call refugee-related legal issues in the minors' everyday lives, to the legal guardians, which appeared to be a barrier to being understood and supported. K E Y W O R D S development, inter-professional cooperation, residential care, shared care, unaccompanied refugee minors, well-being
... To exemplify how dilemmas such as the above can spur researchers to further explore the conditions for individualizing understandings of school problems, we draw on another example: Individualizing and scholastic understandings are part of school problems; as researchers, we became preoccupied with exploring when and how such understandings become dominant. The categorical understandings and displacements of problems are not associated with certain persons or groups of persons -rather, they seem to be part of processes with restrictive conditions and limited action possibilities at stake -processes characterized by unresolved conflicts and "mutual resignation" (Højholt & Kousholt, 2018). In this way, the analyses accentuate how different understandings of problems are related to conditions for collaborating on various tasks. ...
In this paper, the concept of transmethodology will be reflected in relation to developing research communities and collective multi-perspective analyses that assist in transgressing divisions between theory and practice and isolated knowledge. I will discuss these issues in relation to a collective research project where the aim was to explore children’s possibilities for participation in school through a shared focus on conflicts. Through an exploration of interconnected processes seen from children’s, parents’, teachers’, school leaders’, and psychologists’ perspectives, we addressed how situated conflicts in everyday practices could be analyzed in light of historical and political struggles concerning the school as an institution. We discussed empirical material and everyday dilemmas with the professionals with the aim of analyzing all participants’ different perspectives in connection with their different responsibilities, their conditions, and the different knowledge they had about the children’s school life. This collaboration continuously challenged us to take into account different perspectives, reasons, and worldviews and how they are connected in the same engagement – to make a good school for children. In a dialectical approach, conflicts can be conceptualized as part of historical processes as an immanent potentiality that arises out of people engaging in collective, contradictory practices. The perspectives of the parties involved are linked to common matters, as well as differentiated by the tasks they have in relation to the children’s school life and how they are part of the conflicts. The paper raises discussion about the potentials and dilemmas of engaging with conflicts in research practice and analyses.
... Methodological strategies for tracing connections between the particular and the general can be found in various traditions of thought (e.g., Foucault 1997;Holzkamp 2013c;Højholt and Kousholt 2018;Latour 2005;Marcus 1995). In multi-perspectival practice research, tracing connections refer to the fact that psychological phenomena are processual and transient. ...
The chapter emphasizes the key role of generalization in scientific work and takes a critical look at major forms of scientific generalization in psychological research. Based on a presentation of fundamental characteristics of psychological processes including its subjective, contextual, and transient dimensions, it argues for a notion of psychological generalization which does not abstract away human subjectivity and difference but understands it as different manifestations of the same relationship. Based on such an embodied, subjectivity-in-everyday-life approach to the production of knowledge the chapter asks how generalization in psychological research practice can be done and presents a variety of basic analytical strategies of situated generalization including 'Zooming In to Zoom Out and Zooming Out to Zoom In'.
This article discusses the methodological concept of chains of reasons , as a conceptual possibility for analysing connections between personal participation and structural conditions in a concrete historical practice. The concept of context is central within psychology, but methodologically it is often an open question how to select and focus on the relevant contextual nexuses to a problem. Following subjective reasons as an analytical foundation for tracking relevant conditions provides a possibility for concretising the work with contexts and anchoring personal aspects in social practice. This is illustrated through an analysis of unequal possibilities for children’s participation in educational institutions, conceptualised as situated inequality . Although the analysis exemplifies an analytical round trip into social practices involved in the individual representation of problems at school, the concept is meant as a general contribution to theoretical psychology, highlighting structural conditions through analysis of subjective perspectives in participants’ conduct of everyday life.
Ambitionen med denne artikel er at bidrage til forståelser af lærerfaglighed og undervisningspraksis, der adresserer, hvordan lærere arbejder med hverdagslivets kompleksiteter og dynamiske samspil som led i at skabe deltagelsesmuligheder for børn og unge i konkrete undervisningssituationer. Vi vil på den måde bidrage til udviklingen af en ’situeret psykologi’ med begreber, der kan styrke forståelser for lærerfaglighed som samarbejdende og udforskende. Artiklen bygger på et begreb om ’situeret ulighed’, der inviterer til at forstå og analysere ulighed som på en og samme tid knyttet til skolen som en særlig samfundsmæssig praksis, sociale samspil og samarbejdsprocesser og børn og unges personlige erfaringer, engagementer og liv på tværs af steder. Det peger på en sammenhæng mellem børn og unges forskellige muligheder for at deltage og lykkes i skolen og professionelles faglige betingelser for at arbejde med deres deltagelsesmuligheder i skolen. Med afsæt i praksisteori, kritisk psykologiske begreber om blandt andet livsførelse samt Donald Schøns teori om faglighed i praksis bidrager artiklen med trædesten til forståelser af lærerfaglighed som situeret i skolens sociale hverdagsliv, hvor lærere og elever samarbejder om forskelle og fælles opgaver. Formålet er herigennem at styrke forståelser af og betingelser for læreres faglighed i arbejde med børns og unges betingelser for deltagelse i skolens læringsfællesskaber.
The article presents the results of a study of the activities of educational psychologists working in Danish schools. The discovery is that the most valuable part of the work of school psychologists is done “in between times” and “in the corridor” — in the interval between scheduled meetings, testing and other tasks “according to job descriptions”. The researchers describe the specific types of psy-chologists' work in difficult school situations, the conditions of their professional activities and the di-lemmas that arise when solving professional problems. The authors note that creative, research and context-oriented work aimed at organizing cooperation between various parties is in conflict with the standardized work schedule, which occupies the bulk of the psychologist's working time, while real solutions to complex problems lie in informal communication, cooperation, studying social conditions and analyzing school problems. Choosing between what should and what is needed, the psycholo-gist finds himself in a situation of professionally significant choice and in a conflict situation with him-self, which leads to the need to constantly clarify his own situation and the conditions of his work.
Forced migration has a major impact on family life. Yet, how the trajectory of flight and process of rebuilding everyday family life can challenge parental care is understudied and undertheorized. This article provides insight into the multiple transitions and ruptures that dramatically change the everyday conditions for parental care in the migratory process. By empirically exploring the migratory process in a family perspective, including the perspective of children and parents, and by analytically unfolding an understanding of parental care as part of shifting local structures of social practice, the article sheds light on the content of parental care so rarely studied. The analysis draws on an ethnographically inspired practice research study conducted in 2014–2017 in cooperation with five Syrian families, while they were awaiting asylum and during their first year with a temporary residence permit in Denmark. The empirical foundation consists of participant observation in the everyday life of the families and recurrent interviews with eight parents and 15 children. The article concludes with a discussion of the contribution to the conceptualization of parental care and implications for qualifying social work with refugee families.
This article discusses theoretical challenges in conceptualising the dialectical relationship between historical conditions and the situated interplay between people in concrete everyday practice. The concept of conflict may help us move beyond tendencies within psychology to separate history and situated practice, structure and activity, and micro- and macroprocesses – and to regard social life as unambiguous or as governed through hegemony. Research on the everyday social life of schools describes societal conflicts about education and how school children deal with unequal conditions when handling the conflictuality of their everyday lives. Analyses of coordination and conflicts between various parties (e.g. children, parents, teachers and psychologists) elucidate connections between intersubjective efforts to make things work in everyday practice and historical struggles related to the school as a social institution. Concepts are required that enable understanding of these processes as historical and political, driven by intersubjectivity related to concrete dilemmas, connected to personal and collaborative conduct of everyday life – processes we term the politics of everyday life. From a social practice perspective, we discuss how to grasp the ways in which people constitute the conditions for each other in a situated interplay in which they deal with common problems and – through these activities – also produce history.
Studies of children’s participation in school illustrate both societal conflicts about the school and how children in school deal with quite unequal conditions when it comes to handling the conflictuality of school life. Analyses of situated interplay, coordination and conflicts between the parties involved in children’s school lives (children, parents, teachers, psychologists, etc.) can elucidate the connections between intersubjective means of making things work in everyday practice, and historical struggles relating to the school as a societal institution. These dynamics reveal general conflicts over education policy, the distribution of responsibility and in which directions to change society. From a social practice perspective, and based on empirical studies of children’s everyday lives, this article discusses conceptual challenges concerning how to grasp the ways persons constitute the conditions for the acting of each other in a situated interplay in which, together, they must deal with shared societal and historical issues and problems.
The article presents findings from a practice research project dealing with the everyday life of 0-2 year olds across family and different day-care settings. From a critical psychological perspective, it explores three related issues: Young children's conduct of everyday life in and across different institutional settings; professional pedagogical work related to supporting children's conduct of everyday life, and finally, the restricted political and bureaucratic conditions for exactly these forms of pedagogical practice. The article addresses the theoretical challenge of understanding children through their conduct of everyday life in the field of tension between being someone who is dependent on others, being taken care of and arranged for - and, at the same time, someone who is actively participating, arranging and contributing to the reproduction and change of the collective life conditions in the social practice of day-care. These compound processes include the professional's complex efforts to support the many children's personal conduct of everyday life in and across their different life arenas, involving ongoing situated and sensitive exploration of children's perspectives through observations, conversations and collaborative processes with the different children, colleagues, families in the day-care environment. However, at the same time, exactly these situated explorative processes tend to be unheeded as professional in the more explicit professional explanations of problems in day-care. Through a discussion of this apparent contradiction and the conditions for developing a more situated approach, the article aims to contribute to the current professional and political discussions about day-care practice for the youngest children.
In conjuring up acts of violence, many Westerners readily picture guns or other unyielding weapons that allow one person to use force against another — including projectile force (via bullets) or, even more, ‘weapons of mass destruction’, which have an enormous capacity to produce a great deal of violence with a minimum of effort. When we consider such acts of violence, many of us likewise readily picture strangers as their perpetrators. The government-funded initiative, Drug Abuse Resistance Education (D.A.R.E.) — which is now administered by local police departments in 49 countries — takes as its earliest goal the socialization of young children into fearing strangers as potential perpetrators of drug-motivated violence.1 Through the program, police officers entering elementary school rooms instruct five-year-old children to shun strangers who might abduct them for unspeakable purposes. Other programs target even younger children for this lesson (Holcombe et al. 1995).
Døgninstitutioner for børn og unge er gennem tiden blevet kaldt meget forskelligt som f.eks. “opdragelsesanstalter”, “børnehjem” eller “be- handlingshjem.” (se f.eks. Bryderup 2005). Tilsvarende er døgninstitutionsbørn blevet kategoriseret som “adfærdsvanskelige”, “om- sorgssvigtede” eller “behandlingskrævende”. Kategoriseringer, der lægger op til at forstå børnene som specielle børn med særlige behov i problematiske familier. De mange betegnel- ser viser hen til forskelle i forståelser af, hvad problemerne handler om i de professionelle praksisser, der søger at håndtere dem. Disse forskellige problemforståelser udgør et af de mest centrale stridspunkter i professionelles diskussioner om, hvilken hjælp der bør ydes.
Providing early education and care (ECEC) which is both equitable and high quality is a challenge all governments are confronting. This comparative volume seeks both to broaden and to deepen our understanding of policies in operation in different countries. It asks how successfully policies in eight different countries ensure that all children, including those from disadvantaged backgrounds, can access high quality ECEC. The countries included are Australia, France, Germany, the Netherlands, New Zealand, Norway, the UK and the US. Each chapter is written by academic experts from the country in question, and contains empirical evidence on access to services by children from different backgrounds, alongside careful analysis and discussion of how services are organised, including the operation of funding and regulation mechanisms. A concluding chapter pulls together potential policy lessons from across the eight countries, highlighting common policy challenges, and, where possible, identifying policies that have proved effective in particular countries. The book recognises the very different cultural and institutional inheritance which has shaped services in each country, and the idea is not one of “fast policy transfer” but rather one of “contextualised policy learning” (Mahon, 2007), in which attention is given to how policies work on the ground and to the contexts in which they are embedded.
This book explores the experience of dehumanization as the privation of speech. Taking up the figure of silence as the space between human and animal, it traces the potential for an alternate political and ethical way of life beyond law. Employing the resources offered by deconstruction as well as an ontological critique of biopower, this book suggests that humAnimal, as the site of impropriety opened by racism and manifested by silence, can be political and hazardous to power. Through the lens of such works as Coetzee’s Foe, Chesnutt’s “The Dumb Witness,” Dr. Itard’s “wild child,” and aerialist Philippe Petit’s Man on Wire, this book brings Derrida’s concept of the trace and his theory of sovereignty into conversation with Agamben’s investigation of the analytics of power. The task is twofold: on the one hand, to question the logocentric presumption that determines the separation between human and animal, and on the other to examine the conflation of this separation as an instrument of power in the practice of racism. The book details the differences and intersections between Derrida and Agamben in their respective approaches to power, claiming that to think simultaneously within the registers of deconstruction (which conceives of power as a symptom of the metaphysics of presence) and biopolitics (which conceives of power as the operation of difference) entails a specification of the political and ethical consequences that attends the two perspectives. When considered as the potential of language to refuse the law of signification and semantics, silence can neutralize the exercise of power through language, and this book’s inquiry discloses a counterpower that does not so much oppose or destroy the politics of the subject but rather neutralizes it and renders it ineffective.
Haraway’s discussions of how scientists have perceived the sexual nature of female primates opens a new chapter in feminist theory, raising unsettling questions about models of the family and of heterosexuality in primate research.
Çiğdem Kağitçibaşi's influential volume was a work of masterful scholarship and field-defining thought that challenged the existing assumptions in mainstream western psychology about the nature of individuals. During the past two decades since its publication, cultural and cross-cultural research and theory on the self, family, and human development have expanded greatly, developing fruitfully from the basic issues and paradigms Kağitçibaşi explored. This Classic Edition provides a critical assessment, consideration, and reflection of recent scholarship in this field. It brings this essential work up to date and appraises it in the light of current prevailing perspectives.
Something instructive occurred in the process of entitling the present collection. Both editor and publisher sought a simple and succinct rubric for the various pieces of work. But they rapidly and reluctantly reached the consensus that, by either intellectual or marketing criteria, the inser tion of the adjective "psychological" to qualify the noun "development" was a communicative necessity. Much to the chagrin of the develop mental psychologist, the term development still connotes-to the world at large as well as the general community of publishers, librarians, and computer archivists-the modernization of nation states. Inside and outside the university, I find that, when asked, "What are you in terested in?" I am not at liberty to reply, "The concept of development," without being absorbed immediately into a discussion of Third World studies. The approach of the present volume should be taken as an exhortation to psychologists to take the genealogy of "development'' seriously. The history of the discipline is not so different from the histo ry of the word and, as we shall discover, the concern with developmen tal progress cannot easily be separated from the urge for dominion. This volume presents a selection from the recent critical scholarship on psychological development. The emphasis is on rethinking the field of developmental psychology at the level of theory.
How to respond to the needs of working parents has become a pressing social policy issue in contemporary Western Europe. This book highlights the politicising of parenthood in the Scandinavian welfare states - focusing on the relationship between parents and the state, and the ongoing renegotiations between the public and the private. Drawing on new empirical research, leading Scandinavian academics provide an up-to-date record and critical synthesis of Nordic work-family reforms since the 1990s. A broad range of policies targeting working parents is examined including: the expansion of childcare services as a social right; parental leave; cash benefits for childcare; and working hours regulations. The book also explores policy discourses, scrutinises outcomes, and highlights the similarities and differences between Nordic countries through analyses of comparative statistical data and national case studies. Set in the context of economic restructuring and the growing influence of neo-liberal ideology, each chapter addresses concerns about the impact of policies on the gender relations of parenthood. “Politicising parenthood in Scandinavia” is a timely contribution to ongoing policy debates on welfare state models, parenthood and gender equality. It will be of particular interest to students and teachers of welfare studies, family policy and gender studies.
In this completely revised and updated edition, Deconstructing Developmental Psychology interrogates the assumptions and practices surrounding the psychology of child development, providing a critical evaluation of the role and contribution of developmental psychology within social practice. Since the second edition was published, there have been many major changes. This book addresses how shifts in advanced capitalism have produced new understandings of children, and a new (and more punitive) range of institutional responses to children. It engages with the paradoxes of childhood in an era when young adults are increasingly economically dependent on their families, and in a political context of heightened insecurity. The new edition includes an updated review of developments in psychological theory (in attachment, evolutionary psychology, theory of mind, cultural-historical approaches), as well as updating and reflecting upon the changed focus on fathers and fathering. It offers new perspectives on the connections between Piaget and Vygotsky and now connects much more closely with discussions from the sociology of childhood and critical educational research. Coverage has been expanded to include more material on child rights debates, and a new chapter addresses practice dilemmas around child protection, which engages even more with the “raced” and gendered effects of current policies involving children. This engaging and accessible text provides key resources to inform better professional practice in social work, education and health contexts. It offers critical insights into the politics and procedures that have shaped developmental psychological knowledge. It will be essential reading for anyone working with children, or concerned with policies around children and families. It was also be of interest to students at undergraduate and postgraduate levels across a range of professional and practitioner groups, as well as parents and policy makers.
Jan De Vos's second book on psychologization argues that psychology IS psychologization, a phenomenon traced back from Late-Modernity to the Enlightenment. Engaging with seminal thinkers such La Mettrie, Husserl, Lasch and Agamben, the book teases out the limits of psychoanalysis as a critical tool.
The title “Psychology: Social Self-Understanding on the Reasons for Action in the Conduct of Everyday Life” does not intend to put forward some new type of psychology in addition to those already existing. Instead, it argues that psychology in its entirety, as it has developed historically, needs to put itself under such a motto if it wants to fulfil its function within the scientific community of offering a particular access to our experiences and actions. This simultaneously maintains, ex negativo, that the prevailing psychology is unable to master this task; its research misses human problems of life and is incapable of contributing anything substantial to our knowledge in human and social sciences.
Over ten years ago, the first volume of Children in Culture: Approaches to Childhood appeared.1 It was one of the first,2 and remains to date the most multi-and interdisciplinary volume on childhood to be pub-lished, engaging with constructivist approaches to childhood3 across a range of disciplines, from psychology to film studies, from literature to history. All the chapters in the book took as their starting point the idea that childhood (but also any identity) is a historically and culturally contingent construction, not an essential, transhistorical or transcultural continuity, predetermined by inherent biological or physiological factors. As discussed in the introduction to Children in Culture,4 the approach that definitions and perceptions of childhood change through time and from place to place, and within times and places, has been widely attributed to the French historian Philippe Aries’s famous, and still controversial, book Centuries of Childhood: A Social History of Family Life, where Ariès famously argued that:
But have we any right to talk of a history of the family? Is the family a phenomenon any more subject to history than instinct is? It is possible to argue that it is not, and to maintain that the family partakes of the immobility of the species. It is no doubt true that since the beginning of the human race men have built homes and begot children, and it can be argued that within the great family types, monogamous and polygamous, historical differences are of little importance in comparison with the huge mass of what remains unchanged. On the other hand, the great demographic revolution in the West, from the eighteenth to the twentieth century, has revealed to us considerable possibilities of change in structures hitherto believed to be invariable because they were biological. … I accordingly looked back into our past, to find out whether the idea of the family had not been born comparatively recently, at a time when the family had freed itself from both biology and law to become a value, a theme of expression, an occasion of emotion.5
Feminist theories have focused on contemporary, Western, middle-class experiences of maternity. This 1998 volume brings other mothers, from Asia and the Pacific, into scholarly view, aiming to show that birthing and mothering can be a very different experience for women in other parts of the world. The contributors document a wide variety of conceptions of motherhood, and drawing on ethnographic and historical research, they explore the relationships between motherhood as embodied experience and the local discourses on maternity. They show how the experience of motherhood has been influenced by missionaries, by colonial policies and by the introduction of Western medicine and biomedical birthing methods, and raise important questions about the costs and benefits of becoming a modern mother in these societies.
A study entitled 'Transforming Education in the Primary Years' by Lisa Guernsey and Sara Mead argue in building up a high-quality education system that starts at age three and extends through the third grade. They envision this as integral to a new social contract that sets forth the kind of institutional arrangements that prompt society to share risks and responsibilities of our common civic and economic life and provide opportunity and security for our citizens. Many efforts to improve the early childhood education sector have been incremental and transactional versus transformational. Guernsey and Mead argue that when educators are well-prepared, supported, and rewarded, they can form strong relationships that positively affect children's success. Prescriptive curricula are developed to support teachers who were new or struggling in a bid to guide the primary students, not to replace the professional in the classroom.
This book opens the door to the effects of intellectual, educational, and economic colonization of young children throughout the world. Using a postcolonial lens on current educational practices, the authors hope to lift those practices out of reproducing traditional power structures and push our thinking beyond the adult/child dichotomy into new possibilities for the lives that are created with children.
Considering a wide range of texts by authors such as Locke, Rousseau, Caroline Norton, Henry Mayhew, Frances Trollope, and Charles Dickens, Monica Flegel provides an interpretive framework for understanding the formation of child cruelty popularized by the National Society for the Prevention of Cruelty to Children. The emergence of the NSPCC, Flegel argues, had material effects on the lives of children, and profound implications for the role of class in representations of suffering and abused children.
Schooling Passions explores an important, yet often overlooked dimension of nationalism—its embodied and emotional components. It does so by focusing on another oft-neglected area, that of elementary education in the modern state. Through an ethnographic study of schools in western India, Véronique Benei examines the idioms through which teachers, students, and parents make meaning of their political world. She articulates how urban middle- and lower-class citizens negotiate the processes of self-making through the minutiae of daily life at school and extracurricular activities, ranging from school trips to competitions and parent gatherings. To document how processes of identity formation are embodied, Benei draws upon cultural repertoires of emotionality.
This book shifts the typical focus of attention away from communal violence onto everyday "banal nationalism." Paying due attention to the formulation of "senses of belonging," this book explores the sensory production and daily manufacture of nationhood and citizenship and how nationalism is nurtured in a nation's youth.
Through a series of exquisite encounters with children, and through a lucid opening up of new aspects of poststructuralist theorizing, Bronwyn Davies opens up new ways of thinking about, and intra-acting with, children. This book carefully guides the reader through a wave of thought that turns the known into the unknown, and then slowly, carefully, makes new forms of thought comprehensible, opening, through all the senses, a deep understanding of our embeddedness in encounters with each other and with the material world. This book takes us into Reggio-Emilia-inspired Swedish preschools in Sweden, into the author’s own community in Australia, into poignant memories of childhood, and offers the reader insights into: new ways of thinking about children and their communities; the act of listening as emergent and alive; ourselves as mobile and multiple subjects; the importance of remaining open to the not-yet-known. Defining research as diffractive, and as experimental, Davies’ relationship to the teachers and pedagogues she worked with is one of co-experimentation. Her relationship with the children is one in which she explores the ways in which her own new thinking and being might emerge, even as old ways of thinking and being assert themselves and interfere with the unfolding of the new. She draws us into her ongoing experimentation, asking that we think hard, all the while delighting our senses with the poetry of her writing, and the stories of her encounters with children.
Regions: Sociological and Administrative DefinitionsSocial Boundaries: Plurality, Fluidity, and AmbiguityChanges in Family and Population StructuresNuptiality and Marriage PatternsReproduction and Fertility TransitionGender ImbalancesSocioeconomic InequalityConclusion
Appendix: Going FurtherReferences
Psychotherapy in Everyday Life shows how clients employ therapy in their daily lives. The varied and extensive efforts involved in this are systematically overlooked in therapy research. The book shines important new light on processes of personal change and learning in practice. More generally speaking, it launches a theory of personhood based on how persons conduct their everyday lives in social practice. This approach and many of the book's findings are of immediate relevance for understanding other fields of expert practice.
Today more than ever, our understanding of ourselves, others and the world around us is described in psychological terms. Psychologists deeply influence our society, and psychological-discourse has invaded companies, advertising, culture, politics, and even our social and family life. Moreover, psychologisation has become a global process, applied to situations such as torture, reality TV and famine. This book analyses this ‘overflow of psychology’ in the three main areas of science, culture and politics.
What is the difference between a lie and a fantasy, when the subject is a child? Moving between literary and scientific texts, this book explores the range of fascinating issues that emerge when the inner world of the child becomes, for the first time, the explicit focus of literary and medical attention. Starting in the 1840s, which saw the publication of explorations of child development by Brontë and Dickens, as well as some of the first psychiatric studies of childhood, this book progresses through post-Darwinian considerations of the child's relations to the animal kingdom, to chart the rise of the Child Study Movement of the 1890s. The book offers detailed readings of novels by Dickens, Meredith, James, Hardy, and others, as well as the first overview of the early histories of child psychology and psychiatry. Chapters cover issues such as fears and night terrors, imaginary lands, the precocious child, child sexuality and adolescence, and the relationship between child and monkey. Experiments on babies, the first baby shows, and domestic monkey keeping also feature. Many of our current concerns with reference to childhood are shown to have their parallels in the Victorian age: from the pressures of school examinations, or the problems of adolescence, through to the disturbing issue of child suicide. Childhood, from this period, took on new importance as holding the key to the adult mind.
Today, political claims are increasingly made on the basis of experienced trauma and inherent vulnerability, as evidenced in the growing number of people who identify as a "survivor" of one thing or another, and also in the way in which much political discourse and social policy assumes the vulnerability of the population. This book discusses these developments in relation to the changing focus of social movements, from concerns with economic redistribution, towards campaigns for cultural recognition. As a result of this, the experience of trauma and psychological vulnerability has become a dominant paradigm within which both personal and political grievances are expressed.
Where do young children spend their time? What activities are they involved in and who do they interact with? How do these activities and interactions vary across different societies and cultural groups? This book provides answers to these questions, by describing the lives of three-year-olds in the United States, Russia, Estonia, Finland, South Korea, Kenya and Brazil. Each child was followed for the equivalent of one complete waking day, whether at home, in childcare, on the streets or at the shops. Graphic displays and verbal descriptions of the children's everyday activities and interactions reveal both the ways in which culture influences children's lives and the ways in which children play a role in changing the cultural groups of which they are a part. This book also has a clear theoretical rationale and illustrates why and how to do cultural-ecological research.
• in the spirit of C. Mills's [1959] "dynamic" perspective on the link between individual personalities and social structure [the author discusses] several issues that come up in the consideration of the study of human lives, which are also relevant to the study of the relation between society and the individual, or what sociologists refer to as social structure and personality / [discusses] the problems with the way in which the relationship between personality and social structure is often conceptualized / [considers] some advantages of conceptualizing this relationship in dynamic rather than static terms, and in doing so, [the author argues] that changes in both biographical and historical time must be specified in our conceptualization of factors that influence human development, if the link between the person and society is to be understood
propose an approach to studying 1 aspect of the link between person and society through the specification of trajectories of molar stability across the life span / although the application of this framework to preadult development is of crucial importance, [the author's] eventual focus in this chapter is on issues of continuity and stability of individual differences in adult development (PsycINFO Database Record (c) 2012 APA, all rights reserved)
• in the spirit of C. Mills's [1959] "dynamic" perspective on the link between individual personalities and social structure [the author discusses] several issues that come up in the consideration of the study of human lives, which are also relevant to the study of the relation between society and the individual, or what sociologists refer to as social structure and personality / [discusses] the problems with the way in which the relationship between personality and social structure is often conceptualized / [considers] some advantages of conceptualizing this relationship in dynamic rather than static terms, and in doing so, [the author argues] that changes in both biographical and historical time must be specified in our conceptualization of factors that influence human development, if the link between the person and society is to be understood
propose an approach to studying 1 aspect of the link between person and society through the specification of trajectories of molar stability across the life span / although the application of this framework to preadult development is of crucial importance, [the author's] eventual focus in this chapter is on issues of continuity and stability of individual differences in adult development (PsycINFO Database Record (c) 2012 APA, all rights reserved)