The place of children among the Guji of southern Ethiopia: school,work and play

This article explores everyday life among Guji children in southern Ethiopia and the place of children in an intergenerational social order. Based on data generated through ethnographic fieldwork among the Guji, we show that work, school and play are significant and intertwined social practices. Local knowledge and skills of importance for sustainable livelihood are acquired through children's participation in these different social practices. Oral tradition represents a key element of local knowledge and social practices in everyday life. However, political and social changes, such as settlement policies and the introduction of schools, affect the dynamic interconnectedness of these practices, as well as relations between different generations. These changes also have implications for local knowledge and local livelihoods.     

Values and assumptions underpinning policy for children and young people in England

This paper provides an account of current ideas about English childhood that seem to underpin policies ‘for’ children. New Labour values the future adulthood of children more than their childhoods, and stresses children's responsibilities over their rights. Generally, child protection and provision for children has higher status than children's participation. Children are excluded from participation in social life. Traditional psychological formulations remain powerful in their stress on childhood as a preparatory stage of life, where children are socialised into conformity with the norms of social life. However, the last 15 years have seen greater respect for children's own views and experiences, for their rights and for the idea that childhood is socially constructed. But the idea that children are contributors to society is still rarely recognised and they continue to suffer from low social status accordingly.     

Participation,consultation, confusion: professionals' understandings of children's participation in physical planning

This article discusses how professionals understand the theory and practice of children's participation in physical planning processes. Drawing on group discussions between Swedish professionals we analyse how children's participation is understood and negotiated, and why it is problematic to implement. The participants had difficulties in understanding the difference between participation and consultation, as well as recognising children as social actors with competences. We argue that while Swedish children have a strong position in society, they are excluded from planning processes due to the rigidity of the planning process, neoliberal influences and planners' lack of competence.     

‘They'd only call you a scally if you are poor’: the impact of socio-economic status on children's identities

This article highlights the importance of socio-economic status to children's understandings of their own identity and belonging. It draws on a participatory research project with two groups of children, aged 8–13 years, from different socio-economic backgrounds, in two different geographic locations. It explores how children perceive and understand their own social and economic situations in relation to others. Whilst the children, from both backgrounds, did not regard themselves as rich or poor, they acknowledged social difference through their discussions of ‘chavs’ and ‘posh’ children. The article highlights the importance of place to those children with fewer socio-economic resources. The article confirms the nature and extent of the stigma associated with being relatively poorer, and increases our understanding of a socially divided society through children's eyes. It demonstrates how even young children perceive and experience social divisions, and contributes to a fuller picture of inequality from a child's perspective.     

Autistic culture online: virtual communication and cultural expression on the spectrum

In this article, I examine cultural narratives about the lives and places of women with mental illness in the commercial Hollywood film: Girl Interrupted (1999). In contrast to most of the disability studies literature concerned with cultural representation, this article explicitly examines how the spatiality of ‘mad women's’ lives is constructed through film. Drawing on post-structuralist, and feminist perspectives on disability, and on conceptual ideas from the limited social geographic literature concerned with the lives of persons with mental illness, I explore the contradictory cultural narratives about the lives and places of women with mental illness constructed through this film. This approach recognizes that representations of ‘mad women’ and their places in society and space involve contradictory, tension-laden relationships between spectator and cultural product, complex discursive negotiations of meaning, and gendered processes of meaning-making, in some ways affirming mad women's lives and in others perpetuating negative stereotypes about women with mental illness and where they belong.     

Children’s participation: moving from the performative to the social

The body of work on children’s participation has been valuable in asserting its importance. Nonetheless, participation is a contested concept and key challenges arise relating to its emphasis on age and voice, its focus on socialising the participative responsible citizen, and its failure to sufficiently recognise the range of participatory activities of children in their everyday lives. This article presents findings of a study on children’s experiences of participation in their homes, schools, and communities including the importance of the relational context, how everyday interactions rather than ‘performative’ formal structures for participation are valued by children and how their participation is limited by adult processes based on notions of competence and voice. It concludes with an argument for recognising and facilitating children’s informal and social participation as well as new forms of democratic processes being developed by children to address the possibility of governance and over-responsibilisation of children.     

Participation and Passive Revolution: The Reproduction of Neoliberal Water Governance Mechanisms in Durban,South Africa

Abstract: This article demonstrates that Gramsci's concept of passive revolution can be utilised to help unearth some of the contradictions of participatory development within neoliberal governance systems in the global South. I argue that some approaches to “participation” within neoliberal governance systems can, in part, be understood as moments within a protracted process of passive revolution. The argument is traced through eThekwini municipality's Community Participation Programme and the related extension of Free Basic Water (FBW). This article contributes to existing scholarship by demonstrating how a Gramscian analysis is indispensable to understanding the way in which state–civil society relations are conceived in participatory development strategies and the implications this might have for radical social change. I argue that a Gramscian approach compels us to reconsider current understandings of state–civil society relations so that we might overcome the impasse of passive revolution and move towards a more progressive form of politics.     

Children of Dutch Nazi collaborators

This article looks into what happened to the children of Dutch Nazi collaborators after the liberation of the Netherlands in May 1945. The author first outlines the historical context in which these children lived and the manner in which they recounted and recorded their memories much later. In combination with new archival research on social-welfare policy and ‘re-education’ of former National Socialist youth, this puts the discourse that dominated the Dutch debate, that is, the discourse of the ‘innocent child’ harshly punished by society, in a different light. The framework of the innocent child being punished by a cruel society obscured our view of experiences that did not fit this mould. Furthermore, it made the values and norms that were current during the reconstruction period disappear from the picture: the bad memories of children of collaborators partly originate in policy that was considered normal in those days. This, however, should not obscure the impact of the vulnerable social position which these children experienced after the war.     

Fifty Hausa Folk-Tales

For police officers, much of the working day consists of telling stories about everyday policing and events. Although the study of narrative and storytelling in organizational contexts is an expanding area of research, the same cannot be said of the study of narrative and storytelling in a police context, which remains an under-researched, although not unexplored, subject of study. Using the work of management-narrative theorists such as David Boje and Yiannis Gabriel as a starting point, this article considers policing organizations and agencies as storytelling organizations. This is achieved through a literature review of the ‘storied’ nature of policing and the police use of storytelling in an organizational context. Thus, this reflective article contributes to the developing literature in the field by reviewing and mapping the literature, highlighting potential areas for future research.     

Gender,Legend, and the Icelandic Countryside in the Long Nineteenth Century: Re-Engaging the Archives as a Means of Giving Voice to the Women of the Past

This article addresses the way in which, in spite of their accepted drawbacks (which often include an over-emphasis on male informants), folklore archives can be used to reconstruct the oral traditions of women from earlier times, especially when used in combination with other archival sources that are increasingly becoming available online. In Iceland, the recorded interviews by the folklore collector Hallfreður Örn Eiríksson in the 1960s and 1970s have proven to be a particularly useful source for engaging with the reconstruction of women’s narrative traditions in Iceland. These interviews not only provide us with women’s narratives told in their own voices, but also yield a wide range of additional information about the context of women’s storytelling within the rural society of previous centuries.     

Geographies of migration and relatedness: transmigrancy in open transnational adoptive parenting

Current transnational adoptive parenting is characterized by ambiguous practices of (1) discursively distancing adoptive children from immigrants, while (2) symbolically or actually reconnecting newly constituted families to children's birth countries through charity and culture work. This ambiguity reveals the ubiquity of contradictory and essentialist understandings of categories of familial and national belonging. However, adoptive parents’ strategies for accommodating their children's sense of belonging may also open up space for rethinking care and family building in transnational contexts. Using the case of a Belgian family who adopted a 12-year-old girl from Ethiopia, decided to maintain strong connections with the child's biological family, engage in charity work in Ethiopia and forge strong ties with immigrant communities in Belgium, the article explores how the concept of ‘transmigration’ may further our understanding of identity configurations within adoptive families. Furthermore, this particular case of ‘open’ transnational adoptive parenting testifies to adoptive parents’ efforts to escape from essentialist and exclusionary frameworks and create counter-spaces of multiplicity and transmigrancy in a context of severe social and economic inequality.     

Tangible Patriotism during the First World War: Individuals and the Nation in British Propaganda

This article explores several propaganda campaigns aimed at British civilians during 1917. Through examples from campaigns for War Savings, Food Economy and National Service, it argues that propaganda in this crisis year was as much about identifying small, tangible, contributions that individuals could make to the war effort as about more sensational accounts of enemy wrongdoing. Propagandists targeted all sections of society, offering children and some women new status through war work, promoting attractive working conditions for others, and reminding the wealthy of the social responsibilities that their greater economic freedom carried in wartime. The article suggests that the consensual, voluntarist approaches promoted during 1917 remained an important precursor to possible forms of compulsion.     

Civil society,political society and politics of disorder in Cambodia

This paper questions under what conditions the social foundation necessary for the construction and sustenance of civil society are present in post-colonial social formations, and the extent to which there has been a need to develop concessionary politics to maintain a project of rule. It utilizes Partha Chatterjee's usage of Gramsci's political society to understand how Cambodia's ILO-led garment factory monitoring regime secures legitimacy not by the participation of worker citizens in the matters of the state, but by claiming to provide for their well being. I argue that the hegemonic project is fraught by virtue of the fact that consent-seeking forms of regulation, which aim to prevent strikes through trade union membership and tripartitism, have reached their limit and spilled over and into a disaggregated, messier terrain of struggles akin to political society. To develop the argument that workers' politics cannot be expressed in state-civil society relations, I present case studies of two forms of protest. The first form is distinguished by mass faintings, which I characterize as ‘visceral protest’ against the terms of workers' insertion into industrial capitalism. The second is large-scale, worker-led strikes that signal a ‘politics of social disorder’ is emerging, characterized by extra-legal, disruptive, and sometimes violent protest. The paper calls for a re-politicization of labor, and research attuned to workers' ambitions that cannot be reduced to a stable location or sphere within state-civil society relations.     

Transnational families,religious participation and gender dynamics: Filipino,Sao Tomean and Indo-Mozambican immigrant women in Lisbon,Portugal

In addition to being the object of policy and legal initiatives, families of migrant origin have become a focus of debate concerning differences and its limits. Migrants themselves, however, are also reflecting on how to manage family relationships in a changing world in which migration is mostly transnational. This article aims to discuss the influence of religious participation on the reconfiguration of processes of family dynamics promoted by three groups of migrant women who, while settled in Lisbon, maintain transnational ties with their countries of origin and with various diasporic spaces. Guiding research questions are: to what extent does religious participation provide migrant women with connections, networks and other intangible resources? How are these resources mobilised as ‘bonding' and ‘bridging' social capitals? Can such capitals become a conduit for the redefinition of family relations and female self-narratives? Comparative analysis confirms that the three groups discussed not only mobilise religious belonging and ties to generate resources, but also convert these connections into social (and other forms of) capital, thus triggering desired changes that affect the lives of their children and families in both the short and long term. While migration does not alter long-standing patterns provided by their own respective sociocultural frames of belonging, our findings reveal that the three groups of interlocutors use religious participation to explore tactics, social capitals and mobility spaces and, further, to negotiate, without subverting, specific family inequality dynamics.     

Producing African-descent: afro-peruvian music,intangible heritage,authenticity and bureaucracy in a Latin American music compilation

ABSTRACT

Policy and actions for the safeguarding of Intangible Cultural Heritage (ICH) are laced with politics of representation and meaning-making of expressive culture within and outside communities. This article explores how ICH experts, practitioners, activists, and other actors negotiate and re-construct ideas of racial identity and authenticity in one such initiative. Sponsored by CRESPIAL in 2012, the album Cantos y Música Afrodescendientes de América Latina is a compilation of music of Afro-descendant communities in Latin America. Conceived as a project for safeguarding the musical ICH of these communities, it involved participation from thirteen Latin American governments. This paper, centered on the Peruvian participation in this project, studies the bureaucratic intricacies of this project, exploring how ideas on racial identity and authenticity overlap with political agendas and administrative requirements in order to produce a unified representation of ‘Afro-Latin American’ music. My analysis highlights 1) the local knowledge systems that inform the ideas of racial identity and authenticity advanced by the project’s actors; 2) their adopted strategies within Peru’s bureaucratic network of heritage management; and 3) the positionality, capacity and agency of each actor for achieving their particular goals in this collaborative project.     

Action heritage: research,communities, social justice

Societies are unequal and unjust to varying degrees and heritage practitioners unavoidably work with, perpetuate and have the potential to change these inequalities. This article proposes a new framework for undertaking heritage research that can be applied widely and purposefully to achieve social justice, and which we refer to as action heritage. Our primary sources are semi-structured conversations we held with some of the participants in three heritage projects in South Yorkshire, UK: members of a hostel for homeless young people, a primary school, and a local history group. We examine ‘disruptions’ in the projects to understand the repositioning of the participants as researchers. The disruptions include introducing a scrapbook for personal stories in the homeless youth project and giving the school children opportunities to excavate alongside professional archaeologists. These disruptions reveal material and social inequalities through perceptible changes in how the projects were oriented and how the participants thought about the research. We draw on this empirical research and theorisations of social justice to develop a new framework for undertaking co-produced research. Action heritage is ‘undisciplinary’ research that privileges process over outcomes, and which achieves parity of participation between academic and community-based researchers through sustained recognition and redistribution.     

‘ALL HIS WAYS ARE THOSE OF AN IDIOT’: THE ADMISSION,TREATMENT OF AND SOCIAL REACTION TO TWO ‘IDIOT’ CHILDREN OF THE NORTHAMPTON PAUPER LUNATIC ASYLUM, 1877–1883

Abstract

This article attempts to provide a case study of the patient case notes of two boys admitted to the Northampton Lunatic Asylum in the late 1870s. This case study is intended to provide a flavour of the asylum experience for two boys; John Wenborn aged 6 and Charles Luddington, aged 7, both deemed idiots and both removed to the county asylum. Although, the focus on two individuals provides a narrow case study their experiences will provide a window through which to analyse much broader themes such as, the changing social relationships taking place in Victorian Northamptonshire and the impact of the family in securing admission to a pauper lunatic asylum. This analysis will be set against a backdrop of the discussion of the practical uses of the asylum in the late nineteenth century and perceptions of the asylum within the community. This article will examine the mechanisms used to deal with children deemed unfit for ‘normal’ society, the experience and treatment of the children while residents of the asylum and the social response towards insane children within the wider community.     

On Making Fathers in Lesu: The Historical Anthropology of a New Ireland Society

ABSTRACT This article examines the initiation of boys in Lesu, New Ireland, in 1929‐30. It is argued that these rituals not only transformed the initiands but also their fathers and thereby created counterpoint notions of social continuity in an openly ‘matrilineal’ society. Discursive and iconic symbolism identified and made manifest an alternative male cultural modality, not generally accessible to women. The neophytes' socially ascribed fathers, not necessarily their actual genitors, were in the world of female presuppositions ritually very marginal to their discursively defined children, but circumcision established a new sort of iconic fatherhood. Male social continuity involved the construction of flows in two directions, the future being dependent on the establishment of a past.     

Fearsome people and places,narratives of street and hideout children in Freetown,Sierra Leone

This article is based on a GOAL Global field study of street children in Freetown, Sierra Leone. It draws on narrative accounts given by street children who have migrated to Freetown from rural Sierra Leone. The study used the participatory ranking method to generate data about children’s street and hideout (a room, shack or part of a building where children live in groups) lives post-migration. These data contained much about children’s fears, and the article explores their experience of fearsome people and places, showing that fear is a dominant aspect of these children’s lives. Fear shapes their day-to-day choices and decisions: their agency. It also suggests that agency should be seen as complex, contingent and sometimes paradoxical. The article concludes by identifying implications for social policy and practice, suggesting that these necessarily entail risky engagement with fearsome people in the liminal spaces of children’s street and hideout lives.     

Bladud of Bath: The Archaeology of a Legend

Based on recent Central European research concerning the history of storytelling, this article explores the transformation of apparition stories in Scandinavia and Germany from the late Middle Ages through the Reformation to about 1700. A number of motifs were kept alive throughout the entire period but the stories as a whole changed considerably. This was not only due to a changing social and religious context but also to the specific transmission conditions of these stories.