(SCY4) Constructions of childhood: Where are we now and where are we going?

Cette session invite des contributions qui évaluent les théorisations de l'enfance. Parmi les récits disponibles aujourd'hui, quels sont ceux qui semblent particulièrement sophistiqués, prometteurs, perspicaces et/ou bien fondés ? Quelles sont les questions importantes en suspens dans ce domaine et quelles sont les lignes d'approche les plus prometteuses pour y répondre ? Alors que la diversité et les multiples facettes de la manière dont les humains conçoivent l'enfance avaient déjà suscité l'intérêt des chercheurs dans les années 1890 et avaient reçu un nouvel élan avec la publication de L'enfant et la vie familiale sous l'Ancien Régime d'Ariès en 1960, c'est avec la naissance des études sur l'enfance et de l'EPE reconceptualiste à la fin des années 1980 et au début des années 1990 que les « constructions de l'enfance » et « l'image de l'enfant » sont devenues un programme de recherche soutenu. Pourtant, malgré une génération d'efforts depuis lors, le chemin parcouru n’est pas clair. L'une des images dominantes de l'enfance est que « les enfants sont notre avenir ». Un avenir durable et partagé est essentiellement un avenir dans lequel nos enfants (et leurs enfants, et leurs enfants, ...) peuvent envisager de vivre réellement. En même temps, pour les adultes, l'enfance est aussi une affaire de passé, un passé qui peut être perçu avec ambivalence ou nostalgie, et qui peut servir de ressource ou d'obstacle à un avenir vivable. Les constructions de l'enfance ne sont pas seulement des « idées », mais des institutions et des pratiques, avec leurs explications et leurs justifications, leurs projets et leurs critiques. Les questions sur la manière dont nous théorisons et construisons l'enfance sont donc précisément des questions sur la manière dont nous construisons l'avenir – et quels avenirs nous construisons, pour qui. Tags: Enfants Et Jeunes, Théorie

Organizers: Chris Borst, McGill University, Richy Srirachanikorn, Concordia University; Chair: Richy Srirachanikorn, Concordia University

Presentations

Chris Borst, McGill University

Identifying Constructions of Childhood: Beyond Adjectives to the Promise of Verbs

Reconceptualist ECE enjoins us to use “the image of the child” as our evaluative lens in children’s services. Doing so depends on having a rich schema of the constructions of childhood we will encounter, but those available to us remain limited. To propose and pilot methods for the identification of a rich (i.e., multidimensional) schema of constructions of childhood. Recent work on constructions of childhood, associated with the so-called “new wave” and “ontological turn”, has focused on processes of construction, rather than on the enumeration of constructions . But solutions to the latter problem remain unsatisfactory. The standard solution appears to be that provided in Smith’s 2014 The Government of Childhood and Lancy’s 2008 The Anthropology of Childhood . Yet, these offer a schema (good, bad, potentially useful) that would have been familiar at the outset of the 19th century. Malaguzzi claimed there were “hundreds” of images, but gave us only a Manichean clash of “the image we need” and “the image we don’t”, subsequent work deeming the latter to be the version of human capital theory associated with Heckman and colleagues, decorated with references to epigenetics and neuroscience, and the former to be a critical-democratic discourse that (despite invocations of Foucault, Bourdieu, Deleuze, Haraway, and Braidotti) would have been familiar to Dewey. Pacini-Ketchabaw et al.’s 2015 Journeys offers only ad hoc lists whose items don’t all even clearly differ. A potentially more fruitful route is sketched in works such as Heywood’s 2001 A History of Childhood and Hendrick’s 2003 Child Welfare , which suggest small sets of binary oppositions – multidimensional models – as ways of organizing historical variation. This chimes with work in cross-cultural psychology and psychological anthropology, parenting studies, the study of political ideologies, and multiple currents in linguistics, as well as Bourdieu’s work on the “space of lifestyles”. The electronic texts in the Project Gutenberg repository, most pre-dating 1927 for copyright reasons, were downloaded and passages pertaining to children were computationally extracted from the over 54,000 texts in English. Various methods were applied on a pilot basis to samples from this corpus, including both the hand-coding of passages and computational methods. The familiar images from Smith, Lancy, Malaguzzi, et al., emerged clearly from the adjectives used about children and young people, which were predominantly about positive-negative ethical and aesthetic contrasts, saving only a heavy emphasis on their smallness and some mention of their weaknesses and strengths. A much richer picture, however, was suggested by the verbs – the things children and young people do and have done to them. Nouns (other than nominalized verbs) and adverbs seemed to convey unexpectedly little information. That good/bad/potentially useful conveys something about how children are conceived is clear, if not necessarily anything unique to them. Such evaluations are encoded in adjectives. The promise, however, lies in looking beyond adjectives and scaling up an analysis of the semantic space suggested by the verbs used about children. A rich empirical schema of constructions of children can potentially be generated computationally from the verbs and, to a lesser degree, the adjectives used in discourse about children in a larger and more contemporary corpus. The most effective way to generate this semantic space is still being piloted.

Sydney Chapados, Carleton University

Childhood Harm, Child Protection, and the Agentic Child

Child poverty, neglect, and harm have long been the interest of various actors and organizations. However, how they appear in these interests, the primary concerns, and the interventions mobilized have shifted drastically through time and space. From the moral reform movement of the early 1900s, which advanced concern about juvenile delinquency in urban environments (Valverde, 2008), to the 1960s discovery of battered baby syndrome and the memory wars of the 1980s (Hacking, 2000), followed by recent applications of risk assessment algorithms (Cradock, 2014), we can observe the fundamentally different ways that harm towards children has been conceptualized, resting on radically different understandings of what makes up a good childhood. Although these periods are not clear-cut ways of understanding harm, these different conceptions of childhood are closely related to shifts in relations of power/knowledge more broadly. Paying close attention to how this ever-changing knowledge about harmful and good childhoods rests on historically and culturally specific ways of conceptualizing and relating to children is essential. This project considers a new shift in understanding harm toward children related to trauma and neurobiological development. In 1997, the U.S. Centre for Disease Control and Prevention released its largest scientific investigation into child abuse and neglect. This study determined that household dysfunction in childhood generates toxic stress (“trauma”) that increases the likelihood of leading causes of death in adulthood through behavioural and physiological deficits (Felitti et al., 1998). Related shifts in social service provision and child protective practice can be traced. Mobilizing a neurobiological framework to understand harm towards children leverages several ontological and epistemological assumptions about childhood as future-oriented, distinct from adulthood, and requiring protection and care by biological relatives. Drawing on interview, archival, and media data, I explore how these developmental assumptions have been adapted to absorb newer ideas about childhood from the New Sociology of Childhood, described by James and Prout (1997), namely, the agentic child. Drawing on a critical child, post-structuralist lens, I unpack these assumptions to examine how child protection discourses frame childhood as a bodily, emotional, and temporal state requiring constant self-regulation. This regulation is now presented as being in children’s best interest, generating greater autonomy, self-control, and self-compassion. However, significant tensions and contradictions arise when children’s autonomy appears in practice. Ultimately, this paper concludes that child-centred and empowering practices that prevent harm by generating autonomous children are not evidence that the world is becoming more progressive for children. Instead, these shifts represent a recalibration of asymmetrical relations under the guise of care and carefully crafted autonomy, pairing the childs capacity to choose with the responsibility to choose correctly . 

Luiza Mattos Jobim da Costa, Brock University

Childism and the discourses about childhood present in a Brazilian Childfree Facebook page

According to Pierce and Allen (1975) and Young-Bruehl (2012), childism is defined as prejudice against children, following the logic of other structural, central forms of oppression such as sexism, racism, and antisemitism. Research in the field of sociology often approaches different forms of oppression, and, in the sociology of childhood, to which this work wishes to contribute, the oppression against children has been an object of research for a number of years. However, while other forms of oppression have well-established concepts to describe them, such as racism or sexism, the oppression against children does not. Childism has been an object of discussion, but still not enough attention is given to it and the need to have it as a tool for research in sociology. I hope to contribute to the field of the sociology of childhood by adding to the discussion on childism and hopefully helping in the process of continuing and deepen this conversation. This study intends to challenge that insufficiency, as well as investigate the occurrence of childist discourses in the Facebook page “Childfree Brasil”, which gathers Brazilian people who have chosen not to have children. Although being childfree does not mean being oppressive towards children, previous visits to the page showed that there are childist discourses present in the posts and comments in the page. As one step forward into understanding childism and its underpinnings, this study seeks to investigate some of the discussions present in the Facebook page “Childfree Brasil” in order to identify common childist discourses and their sociological foundations. I seek to find out what the discourses about children used by people who engage on the Facebook page “Childfree Brasil” are and how they may produce and simultaneously reflect childism. To analyse the data, I intend to use the concept of discourse(s) in a Foucauldian sense, meaning that words and language do not only describe the world, but constitute it. Discourses, according to Foucault (1972), are “practices that systematically form the objects of which they speak” (p. 54). However, discourses are also formed by these objects, meaning that discourses reflect and simultaneously build the dominant ideology (Foucault, 1986). This is a qualitative research project. I look into posts from 2022 that appear when searching the word “hate” (in Portuguese) in the page “Childfree Brasil” on Facebook, as well as the comments under them. The Facebook page “Childfree Brasil” is not restricted, therefore the posts and comments made on it are open for any person to see. This choice was made in order to facilitate access to data, as private Facebook groups would require further ethical questioning and discussion. Data collected in the Facebook page is organized according to themes, which are identified with the help of the software Quirkos. The most common topics or themes identified and the discourses attached to them are then analysed using Critical Discourse Analysis. According to Van Dijk (2001), “Critical Discourse Analysis (CDA) is a type of discourse analytical research that primarily studies the way social power abuse, dominance, and inequality are enacted, reproduced, and resisted by text and talk in the social and political context” (p. 352). Using this approach allows me to analyse the discourses present in the page through a critical lens, which denies neutrality. Results so far have shown that discourses found in the page Childfree Brasil in posts from 2022 found searching the word “hate” majorly reflect, reproduce, and produce childist discourses that are heavily connected to the idea of children as the possession and sole responsibility of parents. Children are, in this way, not seen as agentic participants in society, but passive beings who should be under their parents’ control. Some of the main ideas found are related to criticism of the concept of caring for children collectively and an individualization of the responsibility for reproducing.