Children And Youth As Subjects Objects Agents

This textbook showcases innovative approaches to the interdisciplinary field of childhood and youth studies, examining how young people in a wide range of contemporary and historical contexts around the globe live their young lives as subjects, objects, and agents. The diverse contributions examine how children and youth are simultaneously constructed: as individual subjects through social processes and culturally-specific discourses; as objects of policy intervention and other adult power plays; and also as active agents who act on their world and make meaning even amidst conditions of social, political, and economic marginalization. In addition, the book is centrally engaged with questions about how researchers take into consideration children’s and young people’s own conceptions of themselves and how we conceptualize child and youth potentials for agency at different ages and stages of growing up. Each chapter discusses substantive research but also engages in self-reflection about methodology, positionality, and/or disciplinarity, thus making the volume especially useful for teaching. This book will be of interest to students and scholars across a range of disciplines, including childhood studies, youth studies, girls’ studies, development studies, research methods, sociology, anthropology, education, history, geography, public policy, cultural studies, gender and women’s studies and global studies.

This textbook showcases innovative approaches to the interdisciplinary field of childhood and youth studies, examining how young people in a wide range of contemporary and historical contexts around the globe live their young lives as subjects, objects, and agents. The diverse contributions examine how children and youth are simultaneously constructed: as individual subjects through social processes and culturally-specific discourses; as objects of policy intervention and other adult power plays; and also as active agents who act on their world and make meaning even amidst conditions of social, political, and economic marginalization. In addition, the book is centrally engaged with questions about how researchers take into consideration children’s and young people’s own conceptions of themselves and how we conceptualize child and youth potentials for agency at different ages and stages of growing up. Each chapter discusses substantive research but also engages in self-reflection about methodology, positionality, and/or disciplinarity, thus making the volume especially useful for teaching. This book will be of interest to students and scholars across a range of disciplines, including childhood studies, youth studies, girls’ studies, development studies, research methods, sociology, anthropology, education, history, geography, public policy, cultural studies, gender and women’s studies and global studies.

A critical exploration of how young people come to have agency in the world. In this critical study, readers are asked to consider how children and youth are constrained by social, cultural, political, and economic forces and how they overcome these to exercise their agency. This volume discusses issues such as the place of institutional and residential care, children as the subjects of academic research, and the voice of children and youth in the justice system, particularly that of Indigenous youth. Each chapter explores and challenges the notion that only adults can understand and determine the needs of young people by providing examples of children and youth who already participate in complex environments and by arguing for an acknowledgment of their rights and agency in each circumstance. By dismantling the Western world's romantic notion of childhood innocence, the authors critically explore the understandings of young people as agents in their own worlds.

This book bridges the gap between historical research on Japan and the field of childhood history by writing children and childhood into the general historical record of the Meiji period. To explore the widely varying circumstances of childhood during the Japanese transition to modernity, the volume presents survey studies and “snapshots” of historical moments by authors from Europe, Japan, and North America. These histories of children and childhood address various thematic aspects, from birth and child-rearing to the representation of childhood in literary works, and these are approached from differing angles, in terms of theoretical perspectives and methodology. The contributions display a particular awareness for the problem of sources in writing the history of childhood and youth. In doing so, they provide precious insights into children’s living circumstances and notions of childhood, also beyond the urban centres of evolving modern Japan. Exploring a wealth of sources including autobiographies, educational essays, government documents, children’s literature, youth journals and medical manuals, this will be a valuable resource to students and scholars of Japanese history, children's studies, the history of education, and social policy more broadly.

This new edition of A Handbook of Children and Young People’s Participation brings together work from research and practice to reflect on some of the key developments in the field since the first edition published in 2010. Subtitled ‘Conversations for Transformational Change’, the collection focuses on both ongoing and new discourses that enable us to advance thinking and practice to better understand what it means for participation to be transformational. Featuring all new content, it explores the developments that have been achieved in theory and practice in the last decade as well as the challenges and, indeed, the limitations of dominant participation approaches with children and young people in achieving genuine societal transformation. A key feature of the Handbook is the inclusion of young people as co-authors in many of the chapters. Foregrounding aspects of participation as experienced by diverse groups of children and young people, the book especially illuminates the experiences and perspectives of participation relating to groups of children who face particular challenges, such as displaced children and children living with disabilities and young people from indigenous groups in a range of contexts. The broad spectrum of debates that the text covers will be invaluable in challenging and transforming thinking and practice for a wide range of scholars, practitioners, activists and young people themselves. It will additionally be suitable for use on a wide range of courses including childhood and youth studies, sociology, law, political studies, community development, development studies, children’s rights, citizenship studies, education and social work.

For centuries seafaring people thought that the presence of women on board would mean bad luck: rough weather, shipwreck, and other disasters were sure to follow. Because of these beliefs and prejudices women were supposedly excluded from the maritime domain. In the field of maritime history too, the ship and the sea have predominantly been perceived as a space for men. This volume of the Yearbook of Women’s History challenges these notions. It asks: to what extent were the sea and the ship ever male-dominated and masculine spaces? How have women been part of seafaring communities, maritime undertakings, and maritime culture? How did gender notions impact life on board and vice versa? From a multidisciplinary perspective, this volume moves from Indonesia to the Faroe Islands, from the Mediterranean to Newfoundland; bringing to light the presence of women and the workings of gender on sailing, whaling, steam, cruise, passenger, pirate, and navy ships. As a whole it demonstrates the diversity and the agency of women at sea from ancient times to the present day.

Drawing on ethnographic fieldwork in a London high school, Individually Ourselves demonstrates how young people elaborate notions of personhood through their friendships, and pervasive peer ethics, shaped in and through relations of power and inequality. By examining the interplay between individuality and group dynamics during such a formative time of life, the book addresses how our everyday interactions help create the person we become.

Despite the increasing volume of scholarship that shows children as political actors, prior to this book, a cohesive framework was lacking that would more fully examine and express children’s relationship with political power. Rather than simply hitching children’s resistance to standard theories of resistance, Heidi Morrison seeks to meet children on their own terms. Through the case study of Palestinian children, contributors theorize children’s resistance as an embodied experience called lived resistance. A critical aspect of the study of lived resistance is not just documenting what children do but specifically how scholars approach the topic of children’s resistance. With Lived Resistance against the War on Palestinian Children, the authors account for the vessel (i.e., the body in flesh and mind) through which such resistance generates and operates. The diverse group of chapter authors examine Palestinian children’s art and media, imprisonment, parenting experiences, bereavement, neoliberalism, refugee camps, and protest movements as aspects of their collective and individual political power. Through these outlets, the book shows consistencies and contends that these children’s relationship to political power operates from an inclusive model of citizenship and is social justice oriented, symbolically oriented, and contingently based.