Although children’s well-being is an increasingly important area of interest for policy and research, it is still an under-theorized concept. This article proposes a theoretical framework regarding children’s well-being that combines a capabilities approach with a social provisioning approach. The methodology used involved children in the conceptualization of their well-being and in validating a list of relevant capabilities necessary to have a good life. The data show how children express a multidimensional understanding of well-being and propose an agenda of priorities and concerns of their own different from that of adults.
Mónica Domínguez Serrano, Lucía del Moral-Espín, Lina Gálvez‐Muñoz
This article takes a post-qualitative stance upon the construction and taking up of certain positions in research by children and adults, and explores how emergent assemblages of (non-)human agents shape how children’s voices are expressed and genuinely listened to within intra-active research encounters. Plugging in post-qualitative concepts as ‘listening’, ‘response-ability’ and ‘becoming-with’, this article analyses key incidents (that emerged during a research process in Flanders) in order to reconfigure voices, discourses, methodologies and ethics in research with children.
Silke Daelman, Elisabeth De Schauwer, Geert Van Hove
In our current context, researching how young children encounter and inhabit the nation among diverse people is ever-more important. In societies free of conflict, the nation operates beneath the surface, therefore, it is difficult to study. By bringing together the perspectives of ‘everyday nationalism’ and ‘cultural pedagogy’, I develop the concept of ‘pedagogy of nation’ to focus on and account for various didactic means through which young children learn to inhabit the nation and to further explore everyday nationalism.
This article examines children’s agency in their interactions with social workers during statutory encounters in a child protection context. It draws from a UK-wide ethnographic study. It finds that much of social workers’ responses to children’s agency in this context are best understood as a form of ‘containment’. In doing so, it offers an original and significant contribution to the theoretical understanding of children’s agency, as well as its application in social work practice.
Fiona Morrison, Viviene E. Cree, Gillian Ruch et al.
This article argues that children’s social status and positioning as children needs to be foregrounded in discussions of social citizenship and the re/development of the welfare state against a backdrop of neo-liberal economic and social reform. Set within a theoretical model that highlights the circular and de-centered exercise of power across fields of action, the subject of children’s citizenship, understood as a “citizenship habitus” is explored, taking the exemplar of education and migrant children’s positioning within schools.
This article analyses four different contexts in Sweden where children’s rights have been mobilised to govern vulnerabilised migrant childhoods. The concept of ‘vulnerabilisation’ is suggested to capture the political processes creating the conditions for defining and attributing vulnerability. To enable children’s rights to be a productive tool for challenging the repressive governing of migrant families and children, the article argues for the need of a problematisation and contextualisation of both the children’s rights paradigm and the vulnerabilisation of migrant childhoods.
This article examines the relations between human children and other than human animals in a multispecies ethnographic study conducted in an unofficial educational zoo established in a greenhouse in a lower secondary school. The specific focus is on the practices in which the students become responsible carers of animals. The analysis employs the theory of care (de la Bellacasa) and a storytelling approach (Haraway) to develop the concept of multispecies childhood and to offer ways to account for the complexities of lives shared across species.
Recent articles by Kim and Hammersley have critiqued, respectively: the methodological and normative assumptions that underlie research ‘by’ children; claims made about the implications of children’s rights for the ethics of research with children; and more broadly, some of the central commitments of Childhood Studies. This paper offers a response to these critiques, seeking to distinguish between those that clearly should be accepted, those that appear to be based on a misreading of the claims being made by scholars and researchers, and those that represent serious challenges to defend, redefine or rethink our aims, claims or practices.
This article draws on data from a comparative ethnography of two UK primary schools to explore the complexities inherent in Mandell’s ‘least adult role’. In the interest of gaining insight into children’s informal productions of sexuality and gender, this role was used to gain access to peer group cultures and diffuse the imbalance of power between researcher and researched. However, while found to be productive in a number of ways, ‘least adulthood’ was revealed as a positionality suffused with practical, ethical and emotional complexities, and characterised by a fundamental misconstruction of the workings of ‘power’. In line with recent critiques that have recognised both ‘power’ and ‘agency’ as largely under-theorised in childhood research, I conclude this article by offering a tentative alternative to least adulthood, which attempts to respond to some of the key methodological and ethical challenges in contemporary childhood ethnography.
‘A society that does not tackle the bitterest chapters of its past risks repeating the same mistakes – sooner or later'. These are the words pronounced by the Swiss Minister of Justice to apologise for the harm suffered by victims of coercive social measures. Apology is one of the measures established by Switzerland for dealing with the legacy of forced removals of Yenish children. Through an analysis of the reparation schemes undertaken in Switzerland, the article shows that relying on the theoretical framework provided by transitional justice facilitates making a critical assessment of reparation schemes for past child abuse cases.
