1st Edition
Routledge Handbook of Childhood Studies and Global Development
The Routledge Handbook of Childhood Studies and Global Development explores how global development agendas and processes of economic development influence children’s lives. It demonstrates that children are not only the frequent targets or objects of development but that they also shape and influence processes of economic, political and sociocultural development.
The handbook makes the case for the importance of placing children at the heart of development debates and demonstrates how researchers, policymakers and practitioners can engage children in development. Through reports on field research as well as a critical engagement with theories in development studies and childhood studies, contributors contest normative assumptions about childhood and global development. They tease out and tease apart the complex social, historical, cultural, economic, epidemiological, ecological, geopolitical, and institutional processes transforming what it means to be young in the world today.
Showcasing research from both established scholars and early career researchers, and with particular prominence given to the work of authors from the global south, this book will be an essential reference for policymakers, practitioners, and for researchers and students across childhood studies, education, geography, sociology, and global development.
Childhood Studies and Global Development - Introduction
Tatek Abebe, Anandini Dar and Karen Wells
Section 1: Researching Childhood and Development
1. Section Introduction by Anandini Dar
2. The Dispersed Child: Indian Children and their Archival Presence in Missionary Collections
Hia Sen
3. Development Research with Children from A Decolonial Perspective: Experimentation with Knowledge and Learning to Think Otherwise
Lucia Rabello de Castro
4. Participatory Knowledge Co-Generation with Children: Ethics and Politics of Engagement
Tatek Abebe and Hilde Refstie
5. Ethics and Consent in Research with Children and Young People in Global Development
Julia Truscott, Antonia Canosa and Anne Graham
6. Visual Research
Karen Wells
7. Using a Mixed Methods Approach to Identify Pathways to Adolescent Girl Empowerment
Mallika Tharakan, R.Maithreyi, Manideep Govindu
Section 2: Political activism and development
8. Section Introduction by Karen Wells
9. Political Socialization in Militarized State: Youth in Armed Conflict of Indian Administered Kashmir
Khalid Wasim Hassan
10. New Readings for Palestinian Children and Youth’s Experiences During the British Mandate: the Birth of Children’s Political Agency
Janette Habashi
11. “Capitalism Doesn’t Empower Me”: Latin American Children’s Activism and Critiques of Neoliberal Development
Jessica K. Taft
12. Children as Environmental Actors: a Generational Perspective on Climate Activism in an Overheated World
Tanu Biswas and Thomas Hylland Eriksen
13. Colombian Child-Soldiers and Their Status as Political Actors
Diana Carolina García Gómez
Section 3: Migration, Children, and Development
14. Section Introduction by Anandini Dar
15. Exclusionary Locales of Migration and Education in India: Situating Heterogeneous Manifestations of NGO Schooling
Vijitha Rajan
16. Children’s health and well-being in the context of parental migration: the case of Southeast Asia
Yao Fu, Lucy Jordan, Thida Kim and Elspeth Graham
17. The Politics of Unaccompanied Child Migration at the U.S./Mexico Border
Kate Swanson
18. Transnational Migration and Childhood, Social Reproduction and Economic Crisis
Michael Boampong
Section 4: Health, Gender Norms, and Development
19. Section Introduction by Karen Wells
20. Sexual Violence Against Children
Janelle Rabe
21. Navigating Social and Gender Norms in Early Childhood - a Case Study in a Flood-Prone Area in Amazonian Peru
Karina Padilla, Deborah Fry and María Cecilia Dedios
22. Influence of Policies on Early Adolescent's Sexual and Reproductive Health
Liseth Lourdes Arias López
23. Sexuality, Bodies and Desire through the Schooling of Girls
24. Children and Adolescents Living with and Affected by HIV in African Countries: Converging Crises, Vulnerability, and Resilience
Courtney Myers, Edith Apondi, and Leslie A. Enane
Section 5: Governing Childhoods: Law and Rights
25. Section Introduction by Tatek Abebe
26. Child Rights Governance in International Development
Anna Holzscheiter, Felix Stadelmann & Benjamin Stachursky
27. The Politics of Child Rights: Protecting the “World-Child”, Governing the Future
Jana Tabak
28. The Global Politics of Child Labour: A Critical Analysis
Laurence LeBlanc & Edward van Daalen
29. Disability and Education Under Conflict and Crisis in the Global South
Dina Kiwan
30. Explaining Variation in Compliance with Anti-FGM and Child Marriage Law in Burkina Faso
Josephine Wouango & Susan L. Ostermann
31. A Critical Reflection on Ghana’s Childhood, Child Rights and Child Labour Governance Modalities: A Case Study of Abolitionist Discourses and Practices on Children’s Work in the Fishing Sector
Sam Okyere, Nana K Agyeman & Bernard Koomson
Section 6: Childhood and Social Reproduction
32. Section Introduction by Tatek Abebe
33. Gendered Navigations of Space, Work and Education in Young Adivasi Lives in India
Gunjan Wadhwa
34. ‘Skilling’ Educated Youth for Insecure Employment in the Informal Economy
Sarada Balagopalan and Ketaki Prabha
35. Mothers’ Reflections on Generational Changes in Childhood in a Mayan Town: Globalisation Challenges to Convivencia/Togetherness
Itzel Aceves-Azuara, Barbara Rogoff, & Marta Navichoc Cotuc
36. Children as Agents of Change to Reach the Water Security Sustainable Development Goal in the Climate Crisis
Martina Angela Caretta and Bronwyn Hayward
37. Early Childhood Education in Turkana Pastoralist Communities of Kenya
John Ng’asike
38. From Post-Development to Post-Schooling: Rethinking Educational Pathways with Agro-pastoralists in Southwest Ethiopia
Sabrina Maurus
Section 7: Culture, Childhood and Development
39. Section Introduction by Karen Wells
40. Language Policy, Development and Translanguaging in Africa
Karen Wells and Girma Muluneh
41. Children’s Play Cultures in West Africa
Peace Mamle Tetteh
42. The Role of Videogames in The Socio-Cultural Life of Children in Peru
Jerjes Loayza
43. Sport for Development
Itamar Dubinsky
44. Resisting State-Sponsored Oppression through Applied Theatre: A Brazilian case study
Marina Henriques Coutinho with Tim Prentki
Biography
Tatek Abebe is a Professor of Childhood Studies at the Norwegian University of Science and Technology, where he teaches postgraduate courses on cultural epistemologies of childhood, development, global south childhoods and youth, participatory methodologies and ethics. His ethnographic research examines how young people are affected by and shape the political-economic environment they inhabit, with an emphasis on their activism, inter-generational relationships, care, livelihoods, labouring and learning.
Anandini Dar is Associate Professor at the School of Liberal Studies, BML Munjal University (BMU). She is the co-founder and co-convener of the Critical Childhoods and Youth Studies Collective (CCYSC), and serves as the advisory board member of The Childism Institute, at the Rutgers University, USA. She also serves on the international editorial board of the journal Children’s Geographies, Taylor & Francis, and is the Series Editor of Studies in Childhood and Youth for Palgrave Macmillan. Dr. Dar’s areas of research intersect childhood studies, development studies, sociology, education, and feminist studies. She has published on the topics of children’s rights, politics, migration, de-colonialism, and youth.
Karen Wells is a Professor of International Development and Childhood Studies at Birkbeck, University of London. She has over twenty years of experience in research on the intersection between international political economy and socio-cultural fields in the formation of childhood. She has published widely on this research.
In this powerfully argued handbook, Abebe, Dar and Wells show how we can make major changes in development by shining the spotlight on childhood studies and recognising the agency of children and their role in creating and shaping the future we want. The handbook confronts contemporary complexity, systems, power, and mechanisms, including established institutions, that perpetuate children as victims of exploitation or recipients of top-down development interventions. Based on the critical theoretical insights grounded with rich empirical evidence that provides a compelling call for reflection and action, this handbook is a wonderful gift to all development professionals, practitioners, activists, government and concerned citizens who want to make our world a better place. We are all in this together!
Ebenezer Forkuo Amankwaa, Senior Lecturer of Human Geography, Department of Geography and Resource Development, University of Ghana, Ghana
This impressive handbook comprises a collection of chapters that vividly illustrates the breadth and depth of research in the intersecting fields of childhood studies and global development. The seven well thought thorough sections introduce some genuinely novel approaches that, as the editors point out, move beyond the established focus on ‘the agentic child’ and ‘the authentic child voice’. Writing from diverse geographical locations, the authors explore childhoods through a decolonial lens, present archival and historical studies, encounter arts and sport and take young people’s politics and activism seriously.
Nicola Ansell, Professor of Human Geography, Director of the MA program on Children, Youth and International Development, Brunel University, UK
The Handbook of Childhood Studies and Global Development is an invaluable resource for researchers, teachers and students, policymakers and practitioners seeking fresh insights and approaches to understanding relationships between global development processes and the lived experiences of children. Comprising 45 chapters, organized across seven well-conceptualized thematic sections, this volume comprehensively engages with current debates, concepts, theories and research findings on childhood and children around the world, and excellently integrates perspectives from diverse regions and scholarly disciplines. Addressing pressing global challenges, including migration, public health, ecological threats, economic inequality, human rights protections, and uncertain futures, this volume ushers in new ways for researchers, students, and practitioners to appreciate how global development processes influence children’s lives as well as how children shape development. I hope its chapters will be added to many scholars’ and practitioners’ reading lists.
Elizabeth Cooper, Associate Professor, School for International Studies, Simon Fraser University; Canada, Author of Burning Ambition: Education, Arson, and Learning Justice in Kenya
This all-important book intersects development, regardless of the ideological or normative connotation, with childhood and children as a biosocial category. By reframing pertinent issues on child research, health, migration, child rights, and culture, this insightful book by social scientists and development practitioners has succeeded in stimulating further integration of children and childhood into discourses of development.
Yaw Ofosu-Kusi, Professor, School of Arts and Social Sciences, University of Energy and Natural Resources, Sunyani, Ghana
Providing a comprehensive, innovative, and groundbreaking view, this book responds to the problem of how to place children in developmental studies, overcoming, as its editors indicate, the parallel trends that construct children as victims of exploitation or privileged recipients of development improvements. The chapters analyze the contexts, social relationships, temporalities and complex spatialities of development, rather than solely addressing “child agency” or “the child's voice.” This shift, which is also accompanied by a change in preferred methodological strategies, allows for an innovative and necessary advancement in the generationalization of development studies. The handbook addresses urgent contemporary topics and at the same time allows for progress both in the contributions that childhood studies can make to development studies, and in the deployment of new questions and approaches, in order to understand childhood in the framework of contemporary social transformations. Tackling the urgent problems that affect the lives of millions of children, this book is a key tool for navigating the future of childhood studies and development studies and policies.
Valeria Llobet, Professor, Director of the Center for the Studies of Inequalities, Subjects and Institutions (CEDESI), Universidad de San Martín, Researcher, Laboratory of Human Sciences (LICH), CONICET, Argentina
This new handbook is very welcome because it is centred around not only critiquing dominant development discourses, but also illuminating the value that childhood studies scholarship can bring to bear on key issues that are often centred in development discourses such as education (both in relation to early childhood and young adults), health (including sexual and reproductive health), children’s rights, and migration. The handbook brings together a diverse range of childhood studies scholars, including those at different stages in their career and based in institutions in both the North and the South, who all, in their respective ways, offer compelling and persuasive arguments that are long overdue in dominant development discourses. Beyond touching on key development issues, the handbook further covers a vast number of pertinent topics, including methodologies in researching children’s lives in developing contexts, children’s political activism and childhood and social reproduction – to name but a few - across a breath-taking range of Southern contexts – primarily located in Africa, the Middle East, Latin America, South Asia and South East Asia. As a childhood studies scholar who moved into the field from a development studies background that had left me feeling out of place, uncomfortable and dissatisfied, I am very excited about this book and its potential to contribute to existing development studies thinking and teaching. Putting together this volume was clearly no mean feat. I commend the editors for their efforts in bringing forth these refreshing perspectives relating to children and development and I look forward to drawing on this volume in my own teaching.
Afua Twum-Danso Imoh, Associate Professor in Global Childhoods and Welfare, The University of Bristol, UK
