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Habermas has criticized the position that educational and genetic enhancements are parallel events (2001, 91). I, on the other hand, will provide reasons for the position that there is a structural analogy between educational and genetic enhancement such that the moral evaluation of these two procedures should be seen as analogous, too. I will show that an affirmation of educational enhancement suggests an affirmation of genetic enhancement. In addition, I offer reasons why both types of enhancement ought to be affirmed. I will progress as follows. First, I will explain the relevance of the question by considering transhumanism and posthumanism. Both are contemporary philosophical and cultural movements in which the question concerning enhancement is central. Second, I will compare educational and genetic enhancement, showing that Habermas’ arguments concerning their relationship are implausible. In the conclusion, I will refer to the relevance of this insight to the future of education, when the humanities will need to be transformed into metahumanities.
Current discussions on the concept of agency in the inter- and multidisciplinary field of Childhood Studies are a reaction to the deficits revealed in the way the New Sociology of Childhood has viewed agency: as an attempt to gain a more nuanced, differentiated understanding of agency on both an empirical and a theoretical level. My intention here is to contribute to the current reconceptualisation of agency, but not in the ense of providing a better or more nuanced understanding of individual or human agency. Quite the contrary, I argue for a different understanding of agency as social and collective, which allows for different sensitivities and methodologies in research on childhood. I will bring into play selected contributions on agency in the social theory and social anthropology of the last two decades that share a relational/ relativistic approach towards the social. The core argument that I want to push forward is that a relational conception of agency can be one productive reaction towards the claim by Prout and others that we need to reflect on existing understandings of agency in the field, all the time striving for a qualitatively different approach toward agency. This perspective turns away from predominantly intentional and cognitive understandings of agency. Hence, agents are not substantialised agents, but often consist of overlapping entities or fabrics, which are complex and in motion. Consequently, agency can be seen as a realised, situated and permuted capacity, which can be accomplished through the combination of various interconnected “persons” and “things”.
Recent theorising of children’s agency has focused on relational approaches. Critical realism can provide additional theoretical reinforcement as it demands a focus on relatively enduring patterns of disadvantage and potential powers. Participatory research with children and young people confirms the relevance of Archer’s conception of influence achieved by Selves, Social Actors, and Primary and Corporate Agents. In moments, children within organised collectivities set agendas and shape some circumstances that affect others. When modified by generation-sensitive insights, Archer’s framework may provide understandings of children’s individual and collective agency. These insights might also strengthen critical realist understandings of children and childhood.
What happens when children use their own understandings of their human rights to question international standards in the very places where these are adopted and monitored? In this article, we study the encounters of Latin American working children’s movements with members of the European Parliament in Brussels and with ILO staff in Geneva, in an attempt to influence the assessment of Bolivia’s Law 548. The law was drafted with the help of a working children’s movement and diverges from international norms by providing protection to working children of 10 years and older. We invoke the concept of ‘translation’ to analyse how and why the notions of ‘protagonismo infantil’, ‘work as a part of education’, and ‘the right to work in dignity’ were used to challenge the dominant anti-child labour discourse of the EU and the ILO. While these efforts were not successful in a conventional way, we argue that they were important for the political consciousness of Latin American working children’s movements and strengthened their belief that the real defenders of working children’s rights are not the international organisations claiming to act on their behalf, but working children themselves.
Vogue predictions that citizenship is diminishing in relevance or perhaps even vanishing outright, popular among jetsetters who already possess full membership status in affluent democracies, have failed to reach many applicants still knocking on the doors of well-off polities. One can excuse the world’s destitute, those who are willing to risk their lives in search of the promised lands of migration in Europe or America, for not yet having heard the prophecies about citizenship’s decline. But the same is not true for the well-heeled who are increasingly active in the market for citizenship: the ultra-rich from the rest of the world. They are willing to dish out hundreds of thousands of dollars to gain a freshly-minted passport in their new ‘home country.’ That this demand exists is not fully surprising given that this is a world of regulated mobility and unequal opportunity, and a world where not all passports are treated equally at border crossings. Rapid processes of market expansionism have now reached what for many is the most sacrosanct non-market good: membership in a political community. More puzzling is the willingness of governments – our public trustees and legal guardians of citizenship – to engage in processes that come very close to, and in some cases cannot be described as anything but, the sale and barter of membership goods in exchange for a hefty bank wire transfer or large stack of cash.
The basic relationship between people should be care, and the caring life is the highest which humans can live. Unfortunately, care that is not thoughtful slides into illegitimate intrusion on autonomy. Autonomy is a basic good, and we should not abridge it without good reason. On the other hand, it is not the only good. We must sometimes intervene in the lives of others to protect them from grave harms or provide them with important benefits. The reflective person, therefore, needs guidelines for caring. Some contemporary moralists condemn paternalism categorically. This work examines weaknesses in their arguments and proposes new guidelines for paternalism, which it calls “parentalism” to avoid the patriarchal connotations of the old term. Its antiparentalism is more moderate than standard antipaternalism based on an exaggerated respect for autonomy. The work explores implications for both the personal sphere of interactions between individuals, such as friends and family members, and the public sphere of institutions, legislation, and the professional practices.
Postcolonialism: A Very Short Introduction explores the political, social, and cultural effects of decolonization, continuing the anti-colonial challenge to western dominance. It explores the history and key debates of postcolonialism, discussing its importance as an historical condition and as a means of changing the way we think about the world. Key concepts and issues are considered, such as the status of aboriginal people, cultural nomadism, Western feminism, the innovative fiction of Garcia Marquez and Salman Rushdie, and the postcolonial cities of London, Bombay and Cairo. The work of theorists such as Homi Bhabha, Edward Said, Frantz Fanon, and Gayatri Spivak is also examined.
Anti-social behaviour (ASB) was a major preoccupation of New Labour's project of social and political renewal, with Anti-Social Behaviour Orders (ASBOs) a controversial addition to crime and disorder management powers. Thought by some to be a dangerous extension of the power to criminalise, by others as a vital dimension of local governance, there remains a concerning lack of evidence as to whether or not they compound social exclusion. This collection brings together opinion, commentary, research evidence, professional guidance, debate and critique in order to understand the phenomenon of anti-social behaviour. It considers the earliest available evidence in order to evaluate the British government's ASB strategy, debates contrasting definitions of ASB and examines policy and practice issues affected by it. Chapters ask what the recent history of ASB governance tells us about how the issue will develop to shape public and social policies in the years to come.
Chapter I: St. Jago—Cape de Verd Islands
After having been twice driven back by heavy south-western gales, Her Majesty’s ship Beagle, a ten-gun brig, under the command of Captain Fitz Roy, R.N., sailed from Devonport on the 27th of December, 1831. The object of...
In what ways are reproductive rights the concerns of men as well as women?
With the ongoing rise in single pregnancy and motherhood, and continuing patterns of disproportionate maternal responsibility for child rearing, men are typically less connected to and less likely to take...
Do people everywhere have the same, or even compatible, ideas about multiculturalism, indigenous rights or women's rights? The authors of this book move beyond the traditional terms of the universalism versus cultural relativism debate. Through detailed case-studies from around the world (Hawaii, France, Thailand, Botswana, Greece, Nepal and Canada) they explore the concrete effects of rights talk and rights institutions on people's lives.
Do people everywhere have the same, or even compatible, ideas about multiculturalism, indigenous rights or women's rights? The authors of this book move beyond the traditional terms of the universalism versus cultural relativism debate. Through detailed case-studies from around the world (Hawaii, France, Thailand, Botswana, Greece, Nepal and Canada) they explore the concrete effects of rights talk and rights institutions on people's lives.
The concept of ‘agency’ is regularly put forward as an analytic tool to help understand, evaluate and act upon places around the world, through social development policies and programmes ostensibly designed to support or increase children’s agency. This article reflects on empirical research into children’s agency spanning a range of international contexts over two decades and offers new insights through critical engagement with a growing body of work on the ‘localisation’ of social development and humanitarian responses in international settings. It suggests that the largely normative ways in which the concept of agency is invoked as an analytic tool for understanding human experience universally effectively renders children’s agency invisible to us. This is because it is more a description of a particular discourse than something which actually helps us to understand and make visible children’s socio-culturally grounded ‘agentic practice’ from place to place. This article argues for new directions in research and practice to localise agency that are critical to the central commitments of interpretive social science. These new directions include (a) a new research agenda which can go beyond children’s ‘own perspectives’ to the discovery, description and analysis of agency in socio-cultural terms, to ensure it can function as an analytic tool for learning about socio-cultural phenomena which help animate local concepts of agency; and (b) the development of agency-related policies and programmes that are grounded in such locally situated concepts of agency developed through understanding local socio-cultural systems rather than externally derived socio-cultural assumptions about childhood and children’s agency.
The normative aim of childhood studies is to show that children are and should be recognized as active shapers of their lifeworlds. In this article, we discuss which concept can best be used to accomplish this. Our thesis is that the agency concept ubiquitous in childhood studies only inadequately advances the field’s normative agenda. Mostly containing some hidden normativity, its meaning remains primarily descriptive. Indeed, children always have some kind of agency, regardless of the conditions they live in. They may exercise agency while still being manipulated or otherwise rendered incapable of acting as autonomous human beings. Against this backdrop, we first delineate the deficiencies of the notion of child agency and try to show why it should be replaced by that of autonomy in order to preserve and make explicit its hidden normative impetus. Second, we seek to clarify which understanding of autonomy is able to fulfill our aspirations. We oppose individualistic notions of autonomy and, by the same token, draw on criticism of the insufficient attention often paid to structural social factors. Eventually, we aim to develop a social concept of child autonomy that takes into account the relationality of human existence and replaces the asymmetrical relationship between children and adults with an equal appreciation of differences.
In the debate on children’s rights, reference is often made to children’s interests but very little attention is paid to what the interests of children actually are, how they come about, and how they contribute to the foundation and understanding of children’s rights and to a practice oriented towards these rights. The author explains the complex relationship between children’s rights and interests, while illuminating some of its reasons and consequences. Since children’s rights are to be understood as human rights, the author takes a more general approach to the political and moral philosophical debate on human rights, in which reference to interests plays an important role. He relates the most important arguments in this debate specifically to children’s rights and offers an interest-based theoretical justification of children’s rights as agency rights.
Relations between the International Labour Organization (ILO) and grassroots movements of working children are characterised by tensions. Working children's claim to participate in conceptualising child labour policy is increasingly rejected. Most recently, in November 2017, the Latin American Movement of Working Children and Adolescents (MOLACNATs) lodged a complaint with the UN Committee on the Rights of the Child over violations of rights enshrined in the 1989 UN Convention on the Rights of the Child. This article reconstructs the history of working children's movements and their communication with ILO since the 1990s.