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Governing Childhood into the 21st Century
... 6 Véase un estudio sobre la evolución de esta fórmula en Pizzolo, Derecho e integración regional, capítulo V, y Globalización e integración. Ensayo de una teoría general, capítulo IV. 7 Este principio tiene una larga tradición en el derecho internacional general. La denominada paz de Westfalia (1648) -en sus tratados-adoptó de hecho el principio de igualdad jurídica de los Estados. ...
... Estos límites actúan como recaudos sustanciales mínimos cuya eventual inobservancia puede conducir a la absoluta inconstitucionalidad del tratado de integración en cuestión. 7 Con ello, en opinión de Ekmekdjian, queda delimitado un "mínimo de protección" que condiciona el accionar futuro del poder constituido en la materia 13 . Normas similares encontramos en la mayoría de las constituciones del resto de los países latinoamericanos que participan en algún proceso de integración regional. ...
... 32. 7 Por tanto, también respecto a normas constitucionales, véase STJ, 17 /12/1970, "Internationale Handelsgesellschaft", 11/70 [EU:C:1970; íd., 26/2/2013, "Stefano Melloni", 399/11 [EU:C:2013:107]. 8 No estando el juez nacional obligado a esperar la modificación, derogación o anulación de la disposición nacional, ya sea por procedimientos legislativos o judiciales. ...
Usando como hilo conductor la sentencia del TJUE al caso Comisión Europea/Hungría c-78/18, el capítulo analiza la utilización, cada vez más profusa, del recurso por incumplimiento en caso de violación por parte de un Estado miembro de las reglas en las que se basa el Estado de derecho. En concreto, en este asunto estaba en juego las restricciones a la libertad de acción de las organizaciones de la sociedad civil.
... The new child discourse brought changes to parenting attitudes that involved more active participation and took distance from the prevailing Aristotelian and Christian logic, which emphasised the deterministic accounts of childhood (Pollock, 1983). Once it started, this changed attitude towards children affected childhood practices, by shifting the ambitions and anxieties of the middle and higher social classes (Aries, 1992;Nadesan, 2010). ...
... The therapists embed this version of sociality in a defensive dynamic that a) builds on the modernist division between the public and the private sphere (Clarke et al., 2009) and also b) a view of modern subjectivities under the overarching theme of their problematic nature (Sloan, 1995). In this manner, the defence/safety repertoire could be seen as originating from the wider discourses that frame children's subjective worlds within the 20 th century (Nadesan, 2010). ...
... Note here how the concept of immobility is given a kind of negative assessment. It seems that in a mobile culture, the flow of any kind becomes a primary signifier of health, welfare and progress (Nadesan, 2010). Ranging from 20 st century economic cultures to human ones, society has been assumed to develop under a boundless flow of movement. ...
... A theoretical framework for analysing the different ways in which the category of 'family' and its associated connotations have been critical childhood studies (e.g. Nadesan 2010;Alderson 2015;Szymborska 2016;Spyrou 2018). The reflexive approach to the changing, ambiguous role of the child in the family it imposes, suggests an openness to a diversity of definitions of family roles or to trajectories of responsibility other than the traditional "parent responsible for the child" dynamic. ...
Families, including those with children, constitute a significant group of people crossing the Polish-Belarusian border. The aim of this article is to analyse the discourse on the Polish-Belarusian border in the context of the place that the category of “family” finds in it, and what role and responsibility is assigned to children and parents. The theoretical framework for these reflections is primarily critical childhood studies. For this purpose, the author analyzed Polish-language online statements about the humanitarian crisis on the Polish-Belarusian border published between mid-August 2021 and the 1st of January 2023. The research included statements by institutional actors (e.g. Border Guard), media publications as well as public comments by social media users (Twitter). In the case of the humanitarian crisis on the Polish-Belarusian border, the term “family” is used in a variety of ways – from building a sense of symbolic solidarity (the “Families Without Borders” group), through referring this term to the presence of particularly vulnerable people among migrants, to attributing responsibility for the risks regarding the situation of children at the border to either parents or state institutions, depending on the discourse. Reflections on the Polish-Belarusian border seem to be part of the tensions related to the concepts of “family”, “parenthood” and “children”.
... Occurring at the same time and contributing to the increasing intensification of parenting in this regard was a global shift toward neo-liberal politics and a growing cultural preoccupation with uncertainly and risk. This shift was linked to the dismantling of the welfare state that saw notions of collective responsibility for social ills give way to a cultural ideal of the self-sufficient, adaptable and self-managing citizen (Nadesan 2010, Rose 1996. In this uncertain, individualistic climate parenting was more easily understood as a planning project that involved drawing on expert knowledge to educate oneself so as to anticipate and manage risks (Beck-Gersheim, 1996). ...
A focus on early brain development has come to dominate expert child rearing advice over the past two decades. Recent scholars have noted a reinvigoration of the concept of attachment in this advice and changes in the ways that attachment is framed and understood. The extent to which the concept of attachment is drawn on, the way it is framed, and the consequences for mothers, families and parent-child relationships is examined through a discursive analysis of a current Canadian parental education campaign. Findings support the argument that attachment is receiving a great deal of attention in brain-based parenting education programmes as children's emotional development becomes increasingly prioritized. Attachment is presented as needing to be actively and continually built through expert-guided empathetic and responsive parental behaviour, and is framed as crucial for the development of brain pathways that promote emotional strength and self-regulation in children. Attachment-building is also presented as requiring highly intensive parenting that falls overwhelmingly to mothers. The parent-child relationship that is envisioned is one that is instrumental, lacking in affect and conducive to the creation of ideal self-regulating neo-liberal citizens.
... This approach is inevitably shaped by inequalities in our social and political system -such as those based on class, race and gender -rendering an uneven application of methods of control for different children (Lyon, 2003, p. 7;Monahan & Torres, 2010, p. 7). CCTV cameras that capture information in school playgrounds or government databases that collate extensive information on children's learning and behavior do not therefore operate in a politically neutral vacuum, but rather become part of the technologies of power that seek to control and manage children's lives (Monahan & Torres, 2010;Nadesan, 2010). ...
Children are at the forefront of the rapidly changing technological landscape, living in a world where both physical and virtual spaces are an intertwined part of daily experience. As an example of a child's changing relationship with new technologies, this article explores the increasing presence of surveillance technologies in the day-to-day spaces children inhabit. It suggests that childhood experience needs to be understood in the context of fluid and interdependent relations with others and the worlds around them, including their relationships with new technologies in the surrounding environment. At the same time, it is important to retain a view of the child that is more complex than what is simply gleaned through their relationship with new technologies, even as this becomes a prominent mode of interaction with others and the world around them.
This special issue is a comprehensive exploration of the pivotal role of state borders in shaping child welfare in various European borderlands from the First World War to the present. The richly detailed articles present a diverse range of historical and social-scientific perspectives, offering a comprehensive understanding of the complex dynamics at play. Each case study sheds light on a unique aspect of the mixed economies of welfare in borderland areas, collectively proposing a framework for analysing the intricate influence of welfare providers on children's well-being in the intermediary spaces.
The biology of adversity and resilience' (TBOAR) coheres around the claim that early childhood experiences of stress and adversity get 'under the skin' and become 'biologically embedded', increasing the risk of negative health and behavioural outcomes later in life. Taking a genealogical approach to biosocial plasticity, this article situates TBOAR within the arc of an apparatus of power/knowledge that emerged in tandem with liberal governmentality, and which assumes childhood as a means of programming the future. The argument is that TBOAR is a normative fiction: a socially-scripted story that figures the 'resilient' child in a way that potentially sustains extant inequalities by prefiguring a future that is in step with the neoliberal present.
Play is a central discourse in policy and practice pertaining to young children's learning, development and well-being in many countries around the world. Dominant ways of understanding and advocating for play often construct universalising notions of children and childhood, overlooking that play is always-already culturally situated and ideologically inflected. In play discourse, happiness is constituted as an unproblematised condition, goal and outcome of children's play, and as an antidote to contemporary childhoods burdened by geopolitical, social and environmental issues. In this article, the authors analyse images of children at play in curriculum frameworks, documents and reports, exploring the ways that happiness consistently features as a largely unspoken/unwritten expectation and rationale for policies and policy advocacy concerning play in early childhood. Informed by post-structural theories of biopolitical power, everyday practices and the cultural politics of emotion, and utilising analytical techniques from social semiotics and discourse analysis, the authors argue that visual representations in the documents analysed depict play and happiness as co-implicated. They contend that these representations function in the production of play discourses that both assume and obligate children and childhood to happiness. They interrogate play in these terms, critiquing discursive tropes that are contingent on the co-implication of play and happiness with biopolitical subjectification in order to consider the relevance and utility of play as a policy and pedagogical export to diverse parts of the world.
This chapter introduces the gerontological hygiene movement. Any hygienic regime seeks to abolish or eradicate that which is unwanted, or in some way undesirable. Gerontological hygiene, as a movement geared toward the abolition of the condition of being ‘old’, does this in several ways. To interrogate the manifold ways in which older subjects are (re)-produced through a medicalized lens, I trace a genealogy of the biopolitical and governmental regimes that underpin this production. Foucauldian biopolitics allows me to examine the inter-relations between old-age-as-disease and the deployment of evolving anti-aging somatechnologies. Finally, I draw upon eugenics as a framework for enforcing regimes of hygiene, proposing that similar eugenics discourses are in operation in an attempt aimed at the abolition of age.
I map the conditions generative of gerontology’s emergence as a discipline aiming to re-code the ‘old’ body as existing in a disease-state. Of significance is how political, economic and social biopolitical discourses and institutions identify elderly individuals. Imposing the notion of ‘marginal life’ upon the body politic can itself be seen as a foundational movement toward gerontological hygiene. Critical to this chapter is the emergence and perpetuation of a neo-eugenic paradigm, whereby practices of hygiene continue to govern bodies and disenfranchise specific forms of the human. In this chapter, I propose that elderly bodies have become a primary figure for neo-eugenic hygiene practices. These practices can be considered through the governing and regulating practices of the medicalized elderly body that produce and perpetuate discourses of frailty and disease. Further, the ways in which homogenizing discourses of the elderly body as a disease-state requiring intervention, medical or otherwise, are examined.
The article aims to examine the meanings that Polish children (age 8–11) attribute to computers, television, or smartphones, in the context of health. Basing on childhood studies literature and the concept of healthscape I show how children include electronic media, as material and symbolic objects, in health discourses. In children’s worldviews these objects meet with healthy food and fit culture, as elements of healthscapes. The healthscape infrastructure allows children to simultaneously adopt different viewpoints and moral orders in the field of health. It could seem that the ‘perfect’ child would be a self-controlling child who never watches television or plays computer games, and who eats only healthy food. But this expectation contradicts another one, according to which children should be wild, free, and disobedient. Children need to navigate between contradictory viewpoints, and they need to find balance and a way to create their own identity therein.
School meal programs in France and Japan have become sites of bio- and gastro-politics in what amounts to a project of creating gastro-citizens. In the past fifteen years public health and education administrators have revamped school meal programs to promote nutritional health, food safety, quality, and national culinary traditions. Even though in both countries school meals are financially accessible to students of all income levels, lack of choice in terms of food options means that those who do not conform to national culinary homogeneity are denied gastro-citizenship. Such a denial, as communicated through the “gastro-politics” of school meal programs, is one more way that certain individuals are socially excluded in these societies.
This chapter is an introduction to the book, describing the aim, empirical data and theoretical framework. Since the book seeks to problematize the incontestability of Environmental and Sustainability Education (ESE) and how to be an environmentally friendly student (the eco-certified child), it departs from Foucault’s thoughts on how discourses organize how it is possible to live in a certain context and how “kinds of” desirable and undesirable people are made inside these discourses. Ultimately the book aims to shed light on what is “into the bargain” with good intentions to create a sustainable society; how the idea of a common future in fact makes distinctions between social classes, races, and nationalities. The chapter outlines how these analyses are done from theories deconstructing normality and the Other.
The chapter unpacks how the figuration of the eco-certified child is (re)produced inside a cultural politics of emotions and how the “right” knowledge and actions are thought of as optimizing students’ emotions. Through education and activation, students are supposed to engage in the world with a good mood—which makes Environmental and Sustainability Education (ESE) into a “nice” practice avoiding complex problems as well as anger, despair or apathy. These emotions are instead attached to the Other; the one who needs to change to become a desirable citizen. The chapter discusses what this categorization of emotions means in terms of cultural constructions of We and the Other and how the cultural politics of ESE is (re)producing a colonial understanding of the world and its inhabitants.
Purpose: The purpose of this paper is to examine the discursive rationalities shaping Irish child policy, with a particular focus on the rationality of “better with less” and its association with an intensified focus on the early years. In the aftermath of the global financial crisis there was a shift towards universal provision of early years services as part of the better with less agenda – the paper critically examines the assumptions which shaped this policy reform. Design/methodology/approach: The paper is based on analysis of the texts of the two national child policy plans produced to date in Ireland – The Children, Their Lives 2000–2010 and Better Outcomes, Brighter Futures 2014–2020. Findings: Ireland adopted its first national children’s strategy The Children, Their Lives in 2000, associated with an initial shift to a more technocratic, investment-oriented approach to policy making. The emphasis on economic returns is more strongly evident in the successor adopted in 2014. Informed by the “better with less” agenda Better Outcomes, Brighter Futures has a strong focus on early years provision as offering the most significant potential for returns, particularly in relation to “disadvantaged” children. This position not only objectifies children but is associated with a set of assumptions about the nature of “disadvantage” and those affected by it which ignores the wider context of unequal social, political and economic relations. Originality/value: National children’s strategies have not been explicitly looked at previously as a form of governmentalization of government and there has been limited analysis to date in Ireland or elsewhere of the better with less agenda in the context of child policy, gaps which this paper seeks to address.
Vaccination operates as yet another classic biopolitical dimension of contemporary immunitary life. In recent years, and in particular communities, thresholds of effective vaccination have fallen perilously below recent historic levels, leading to new infectious disease events and posing challenging questions for clinical bodies and government. However, the vaccination debate is only part of a wider picture in tensions between the community and the individual, between public policy and the population, between medical institutions and patients. The politics of vaccination has its roots in the Victorian period and articulates tensions between the laboring classes and ruling elites, together with competing notions of progressive modernity itself. ‘Anti-vaccination’, both as a diffuse phenomenon and as an organised movement, offers a unique opportunity to understand the shifting dimensions of immunitary politics over the course of a century and a half.
Parents, especially mothers, have been increasingly positioned as a central determinant of children’s educational outcomes. Analysing articles from a Canadian parenting magazine, this study explores and compares understandings of what it means to be an involved parent in a child’s education during two time periods: 1993–1995 and 2013–2015. Findings suggest that involved parenting with respect to children’s education is complex and intensive, occurring in both the home and the school. Over time the necessity of parental involvement became more taken-for-granted and the ideal parental role moved from one of providing direct assistance to children to one of creating the right environment for children to take self-responsibility; a shift that involved more emotion management on the part of mothers. These changes are analysed in the context of neoliberal understandings and intensive mothering with attention paid to class and gender implications.
This study investigates the transformation of the regime of governing child developmental conditions in Taiwan. With the shift from a medicalised regime of disabilities to a riskised regime of developmental delays, early childhood development has become the primary focus of governance. Drawing upon a multi-sited ethnography to follow the process by which the ideas and practices of early intervention are imported and adapted to local conditions, I elucidate how and why the new subject, that is, children with developmental risks and their families, emerged with the concomitant re-configuration of governance. By using three riskisation strategies, namely, the truth claim of prevalence rate of developmental delays, mass screening with standardised instruments, and identification of risky families, child development is problematised collectively and surveilled individually. Within this new regime, every young child is no longer considered either normal or disabled but is rather located within a developmental risk continuum and subject to relentless medical and social interventions. While ‘returning to normal’ becomes the predominant goal of early intervention for developmentally delayed children, disabilities are increasingly enacted negatively and considered embodying an undesirable state of being. These changing delimitations and subsequent interventions have profoundly reshaped our understanding of the child, normality and disability.
There are several complications in the geographies of children and young people and in all social science, including the following three questions: How can we resolve disagreements and even contradictions between empirical, evidence-based, factual, statistical research versus interpretive and social constructionist research into contingent beliefs, behaviors, and values? How can we understand and respect each local culture and yet not fall into mere description and cultural relativism? Limited micro-observational studies of children can be superficial and misleading if they ignore powerful macro-causes that shape children’s lives. How can short studies, without the time and resources of international longitudinal research such as Young Lives, take due well-grounded account of such macro-causal powers as global politics and economics? The chapter will outline concepts in critical realism and relate them to research reports about children from around the world, in order to show how the concepts help to resolve these problems. The concepts are especially relevant at the stages of designing research projects and later of analyzing and interpreting data. The concepts include being and knowing; intransitive and transitive; theory/practice contradictions; social science and philosophy; the epistemic fallacy; the possibility of naturalism; closed and open systems; polyvalence; depth realism; structure and agency; natural necessity; power; predicting the future; absence, change, and emergence; macro- and micro-levels in research; four planar social being; and a four-stage process of analysis that will be discussed later.
From HGTV and the Food Network to Keeping Up With the Kardashians, television is preoccupied with the pursuit and exhibition of lifestyle. Lifestyle TV analyzes a burgeoning array of lifestyle formats on network and cable channels, from how-to and advice programs to hybrid reality entertainment built around the cultivation of the self as project, the ethics of everyday life, the mediation of style and taste, the regulation of health and the body, and the performance of identity and "difference." Ouellette situates these formats historically, arguing that the lifestyling of television ultimately signals more than the television industry's turn to cost-cutting formats, niche markets, and specialized demographics. Rather, Ouellette argues that the surge of reality programming devoted to the achievement and display of lifestyle practices and choices must also be situated within broader socio-historical changes in capitalist democracies.
Resilience is the popular term for a capacity to ‘bounce back’ from adversity. It is also a scientific concept informing an influential bio-psychological approach to contemporary inequality. This article recalls the origins of the term in developmental psychopathology and suggests that the project of cultivating resilient selves is an aspect of the broader depoliticization characterizing “post-democracies” today. The scientific object of resilience is produced through the study of the interplay of risky and protective variables in the individual life course. Resilience is present when developmental resources in and around the self help to combat threats to ‘adaptation’. The project of resilience is to know how to cultivate individual robustness in the face of immutable threats – including poverty, grasped as a developmental risk factor. In this way of knowing the world, structured inequality is seen to be relatively unchangeable compared to the powers of resilience. Resilience has been taken up by neoliberal governments as the model of evidence-based ‘actionable knowledge’ for population interventions. But its influence extends further, to institutions of global governance, where resilience’s central object of enquiry and intervention – the child – has been projected onto humanity as a whole. The appeal of resilience as a practical and optimistic science is undeniable but we suggest that it is time to take account of its implications for political contestation. Resilience provides positive psychology’s contribution to the narrowing of justice- and equity-seeking projects in the current moment, reducing their horizons to the care for ‘human capital’ under conditions of socioeconomic precarity.
Anniversaries of war often present opportunities for the telling and retelling of tales about the geopolitical; tales of a nation’s sovereignty, its identity, its security, and how these are imagined and reimagined through the notion of specific conflicts, their histories, beginnings, ends, and aftermaths. By examining the case of the ongoing ‘war’ over the Falklands-Malvinas and a particular set of stories where the ‘childish’ has come to characterize relations and differences between Britain and Argentina, this article explores how the temporality of ‘the anniversary’ can enable certain claims, about the rationality of war, as a means of safeguarding sovereignty, identity, and security, to become commonsensical. The article argues that more attention should be paid to geopolitical tales of supposedly ‘adult’ and ‘childish’ characters because these constructions have the potential to normalize violence as a commonsensical act of strong, adult nations; as an integral part of their national stories that obscures the aggressive role of the state in normalizing and perpetuating violence.
Editorial to special issue.
In the context of what has been termed a childhood obesity epidemic, public health institutions have recently begun to promote active play as a means of addressing childhood obesity, thus advancing play for health. Drawing on Foucault, this article problematises the way that children's play is being taken up as a health practice and further considers some of the effects this may have for children. Six Canadian public health websites were examined, from which 150 documents addressing children's health, physical activity, obesity, leisure activities and play were selected and coded deductively (theoretical themes) and inductively (emerging themes). Bacchi's () question-posing approach to critical discourse analysis deepened our analysis of dominant narratives. Our findings suggest that several taken-for-granted assumptions and practices underlie this discourse: (i) play is viewed as a productive activity legitimises it as a health practice; (ii) tropes of 'fun' and 'pleasure' are drawn on to promote physical activity; (iii) children are encouraged to self-govern their leisure time to promote health. We underscore the need to recognise this discourse as contingent and as only one of many ways of conceptualising children's leisure activities and their health and social lives more generally.
In recent debates surrounding childhood nutrition and US school lunch reforms, the child's body serves as a contested battleground in a destructive politics of blame over obesity and diabetes. Scalar discourses of the body play a significant role in constructing food-related problems and their solutions. We illustrate our claims through a critical analysis of Jamie Oliver's Food Revolution; a celebrated national television program centered on chef Oliver's attempts to address childhood nutrition through school lunch reform. Informed by Foucault's biopolitics, our analysis highlights how moralizing scalar discourses of the body frames nutrition as an individual problem of personal choice. Food politics, when played out at the scale of young bodies, masks class divisions, marginalities, and governmental policies that structure access to nutritious food in the US school lunch system. Increased attention to biopower, scalar politics, and the political economy of childhood nutrition in the space of US public schooling challenges naturalized ideologies of food choice that regulate and delimit change to the scale of the body.
Although neuroscientifically informed mothering advice manuals published in the past 15 years speak in the languages of liberation, empowerment, and self-realization, I argue that they ultimately imbricate women in ever-more-dense networks of authority, expertise, and government, and contribute to the proliferation of entrepreneurial models of self-conduct that comprises the defining feature of American neoliberalism. This rhetoric situates motherhood as a practice of freedom, both drawing from and contributing to affective forces that suture freedom to economic models of conduct. Through these discourses, emotion-centric, self-interested mothering practices become a key site for the production and reproduction of entrepreneurial selves.
Globally, Physical Education (PE) carries the stamp of neoliberalism and as a field we are keen, it seems, to accrue more of the vestiges of this ideology. While neoliberal positions and practices are not necessarily harmful to the long-term interests of the field or the students we teach, indeed it may be strategic to take them up, the field needs to realize and reflect upon the pervasiveness of neoliberalism. Two trends in PE will be presented: (a) high stakes testing and (b) outsourcing PE to private providers, making the case that each is a response to neoliberalism and potentially the deprofessionalization of PE. Yet each trend or set of practices is not only embraced by many in the PE profession but each is often espoused by the profession as a way of buying into the dominant policy agendas (e.g., accountability, reducing health costs, supporting choice) and gaining the ensuing recognition as a legitimate school practice.
This paper provides a reflective overview of studies of Indonesian youth. The main part is organised around a number of key ideas about youth, in three main sections, on ‘youth as generation’, ‘youth as transition’, and ‘youth as makers and consumers of culture’.
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