Children Of Globalization

Children of Globalization is the first book-length exploration of contemporary Diasporic Coming-of-age Novels in the context of globalized and de facto multicultural societies. Diasporic Coming-of-age Novels subvert the horizon of expectations of the originating and archetypal form of the genre, the traditional Bildungsroman, which encompasses the works of Johann Wolfgang von Goethe, Charles Dickens, and Jane Austen, and illustrates middle-class, European, "enlightened," and overwhelmingly male protagonists who become accommodated citizens, workers, and spouses whom the readers should imitate. Conversely, Diasporic Coming-of-age Novels have manifold ways of defining youth and adulthood. The culturally-hybrid protagonists, often experiencing intersectional oppression due to their identities of race, gender, class, or sexuality, must negotiate what it means to become adults in their own families and social contexts, at times being undocumented or otherwise unable to access full citizenship, thus enabling complex and variegated formative processes that beg the questions of nationhood and belonging in increasingly globalized societies worldwide.

Globalization has carried vast consequences for the lives of children. It has spurred unprecedented waves of immigration, contributed to far-reaching transformations in the organization, structure, and dynamics of family life, and profoundly altered trajectories of growing up. Equally important, globalization has contributed to the world-wide dissemination of a set of international norms about children’s welfare and heightened public awareness of disparities in the lives of children around the world. This book's contributors – leading historians, literary scholars, psychologists, social geographers, and others – provide fresh perspectives on the transformations that globalization has produced in children's lives.

The primary aim of Globalization and Children is to present an interdisciplinary analysis of a diverse set of global changes and their effects on the everyday lives of children. Contributors offer guidelines which will enable researchers, policy makers, and other child advocates to increase their understanding of how global change is affecting children and which interventions would be useful in understanding and developing policies that would advance the well-being of children. The book explores and explains how children have been excluded from our conceptualization of the world and our research about globalization. The contributors represent a variety of perspectives from different disciplines including anthropology, sociology, psychology, politics, international relations, law, and economics. Globalization and Children will be an indispensable resource for practitioners and policy makers who are concerned with children and child-related issues, psychologists, sociologists, social workers, and upper-level students in anthropology, sociology, psychology, and education.

Due to globalization processes, foreign language skills, knowledge about other countries and intercultural competences have increasingly become important for societies and people’s social positions. Previous research on social inequality, however, has dominantly focused on the reproduction of class structures within the boundaries of a particular nation-state without considering the importance of these specific skills and competences. Within Social Class and Transnational Human Capital authors Gerhards, Hans and Carlson refer to these skills as ‘transnational human capital’ and ask to what extent access to this increasingly sought-after resource depends on social class. Based on Pierre Bourdieu’s theory of class, they investigate this question via both quantitative and qualitative empirical analyses. In doing so the authors focus, among other examples, on the so-called school year abroad, i.e. students spending up to a year abroad while attending school – a practice which is rather popular in Germany, but also quite common in many other countries. Thus, this insightful volume explores how inequalities in the acquisition of transnational human capital and new forms of social distinction are produced within families, depending on their class position and the educational strategies parents pursue when trying to prepare their children for a globalizing world. An enlightening title, this book will appeal to undergraduate and postgraduate students, as well as postdoctoral researchers interested in fields such as sociology, social inequality research, globalization studies and educational studies.

This astute book initiates a broad discussion from a variety of different disciplines about how we place children nationally, globally and within development discourses. Unlike other books of its kind, it does not seek to dwell solely on the abiding complexities of local comparisons. Rather, it elaborates larger concerns about the changing nature of childhood, young people’s experiences, their citizenship and the embodiment of their political identities as they are embedded in the processes of national development and globalization. In particular, this book concentrates on three main issues: nation building and developing children, child participation and activism in the context of development, and globalization and children’s live in the context of what has been called "the end of development." These are relatively broad research perspectives that find focus in what the authors term "reproducing and developing children" as a key issue of national and global concern. They further argue that understanding children and reproduction is key to understanding globalization.

Publisher Description

"To address how and why youth and children have come to seem so important to globalization, the contributors to this volume look at both the spatial relations of globalization and the temporal dimensions, examining the reality behind truisms such as "youth are the future" or "children are our hope for the future." Discourses of, and practices by, youth and children bring the new temporal conjunctions of globalization into relationship with people's negotiations of the life course. Reaching from the design of children's toys to youth political mobilization, such discourses and practices are critical sites through which people everywhere conceive of, produce, contest, and naturalize the new futures."--BOOK JACKET.

Focusing on the impact of globalization on children's lives, in the United States and on the world stage, this work examines children as both creators of culture and objects of cultural concern in America, evident in the strange contemporary fear of and fascination with child abduction, child murder, and parental kidnapping.