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2019 | Book

Introduction: Exploring Children’s Lives Beyond the Binary of the Global North and Global South Read chapter Read first chapter

Global Childhoods beyond the North-South Divide

Editors: Afua Twum-Danso Imoh, Michael Bourdillon, Sylvia Meichsner

Publisher: Springer International Publishing

Book Series : Palgrave Studies on Children and Development

Part of: Springer Professional "Wirtschaft+Technik" , Springer Professional "Technik" , Springer Professional "Wirtschaft"

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About this book

This book explores children’s lives across the Global North and Global South in the context of academic discussions of childhoods. The edited volume offers a unique selection of materials suitable for teaching in the areas of children, childhoods, young people, families, and education in a global context, as well as specific aspects of international development and social policy. While the focus of the project is conceptual rather than practical, the holistic understanding of childhoods that it encourages should also enable practitioners to better ensure that they are improving the lives of the children.

Table of Contents

Frontmatter
Chapter 1. Introduction: Exploring Children’s Lives Beyond the Binary of the Global North and Global South
Abstract
While there are significant differences in the experiences of the majority of children in the Global South compared to those in the Global North, too sharp a focus on differences encourages binary dichotomies between childhoods in these world areas, and more generally, it encourages binary thinking in terms of “them” as opposed to “us”. This volume, therefore, challenges common restricted ways of thinking about childhoods and instead directs attention to new and relevant insights arising from a mixture of theoretical and empirical papers, which consider not only the differences that exist but also the commonalities between children’s lives across the Global North and South or which take into account the various ways the global influences on the realities of children’s lives in their local contexts. This introduction situates the volume within relevant debates and introduces the collection of chapters presented in the volume.
Afua Twum-Danso Imoh, Michael Bourdillon, Sylvia Meichsner

Intersections Between the Global and the Local in Children’s Lives in the Context of Their Communities

Frontmatter
Chapter 2. Teaching “Global Childhoods”: From a Cultural Mapping of “Them” to a Diagnostic Reading of “Us/US”
Abstract
As scholars researching children and childhood, most of us have an additional important role of teaching on these themes. Pedagogic strategies can, therefore, play a key role in encouraging students to move beyond binary categorization of children’s lives into “them” versus “us”. Often, what is left out of this reductive framing are questions of history and political economy as well as a critical reading of power, philanthropy, and the politics of media representations. This chapter offers a specific focus on the intellectual and pedagogical complexities, efforts, and challenges in teaching a course on “Global Childhoods” to undergraduates in Camden, NJ. This course compelled me to open up the “global” beyond a discussion of childhoods as multiple to instead rework the term to function as a productive node to discuss the flow of ideas, persons, commodities, media, and policies that affect children’s lives around the world, including those in Camden.
Sarada Balagopalan
Chapter 3. “Child Labour” and Children’s Lives
Abstract
While child labour is often considered to be a problem of the Global South and largely overcome in the Global North, it is more useful to consider different approaches as relating to access to status and resources. Children’s work can convey both benefits and harm; those with access to resources focus on risks of harm, whereas others are more concerned about risks of losing possible benefits, creating tension between different approaches with elites often imposing their perspectives on those who value the benefits of work. This chapter outlines benefits, which are often ignored in discourse and intervention relating to child labour. It goes on to discuss the concept of child labour, which conflates harmful work with work assessed by age of employment, resulting frequently in a mismatch between the protective aims of intervention and damaging outcomes in children’s lives.
Michael Bourdillon
Chapter 4. “Ours” or “Theirs”: Locating the “Criminal Child” in Relation to Education in the Postcolonial Context of India
Abstract
An engagement with social investigation reports of apprehended legal minors within the Indian juvenile justice system draws our attention to the social profiles of these young people. It raises the contention of a direct correlation between social marginality and deviance along with its association with the conception of modern childhood. A historical contextualization puts into perspective the juxtapositions of childhood and colonialism as simultaneous projects of modernity, over large parts of the nineteenth century. The resonance of this in contemporary times relates to the universal standardization drive of childhood along with practices like the school-based model of education. This chapter poses a challenge to the normative ethic of modern childhood, the standardization of which results in increasing criminalization of boys from marginal social locations within contemporary Indian society.
Chandni Basu
Chapter 5. Young People and Brazil’s Statute on the Right-to-the-City
Abstract
Brazil’s City Statute (2001) reinforces a national constitutional order regarding urban development. It closely follows proclamations for a Right-to-the-City inspired by Henri Lefebvre’s work, as an exemplar from the Global North that has yet to be implemented there but took off as an idea in Brazil. While raising examples of Brazilian children’s experiences, we engage broader debates about young people’s rights. What kind of “right” is the right-to-the-city for young people? Besides being differently deployed across urban contexts, it addresses multiple childhoods and relations, which expose global processes that affect children’s daily lives. We note that affective and reciprocal relations are required in any discussion about materializing the concept of a right-to-the-city, and we note how the Brazilian example can contribute to rethinking the relation between children and adults when addressing policymaking and urban living globally in ways worth noting by the Global North.
Adriana T. Cordeiro, Stuart C. Aitken, Sergio C. Benicio de Mello
Chapter 6. “Family Is Everyone Who Comes Through the Doors of Our Home”: West African Concepts of Family Bridging the North-South Divide in the Diaspora
Abstract
Some cultures, such as those belonging to the Global North, may place emphasis on individual well-being within the family system, while other cultures, such as those in the Global South, tend to view the family as the sum of its parts. When these two perspectives meet, as happens when a family immigrates to another context, there can be differing perceptions with regard to the role of the family, the ability of parents to effectively parent according to cultural norms, and perceptions about the child welfare system. This chapter presents data from West African families who have immigrated to Canada within the past ten years. Participants indicated that they felt as if they were oscillating between these two cultures by modifying their parenting practices and their understandings of family within these contexts. At the same time, by belonging to both cultures, the families engaged in and thereby bridged both worldviews.
Magnus Mfoafo-M’Carthy, Bree Akesson

Exploring Dissonance and Synergy in Children’s Lives Across World Areas

Frontmatter
Chapter 7. “Disabled” Versus “Nondisabled”: Another Redundant Binary?
Abstract
Echoing other discussions on binaries, this chapter addresses the dichotomy “disabled versus nondisabled” and considers the dilemmas in using this categorisation in a world where “inclusion” is an avowed aspiration. Child mortality has dramatically reduced recently. However, some who survive will have impairments, leading to the label disabled and usually affecting their status as citizens. Meanwhile, attention globally is turning to maximising all children’s development. However, disabled children are frequently seen in categorical ways which do not lead to their real inclusion. They are often once labelled as different, excluded from mainstream society. Being categorised does not always lead to accessible services and activities, support, and acceptance. This chapter discusses the implications of being labelled “disabled” and proposes actions leading to a broader acceptance of diversity. Ideally, disabled children would like a “strategic essentialism” which only categorises them for positive resource-related reasons and not for negative and exclusionary ones.
Mary Wickenden
Chapter 8. Children’s Use of Music in Understanding Time: Perspectives from Singapore, Australia, and the US
Abstract
As young children begin formal schooling, they encounter tight schedules and adult-imposed time pressures that often clash with the play-based freedom experienced at home and in preschools. This clash between clock time and event time can be a difficult adjustment. Common to all cultures is how music stretches our experience of time in vitally personal ways. This is especially so for children. Parents and teachers across cultures intuitively use music to help children transition between tasks and events. Children also create music to self-regulate. They hum, sing, tap rhythms, dance, and chant throughout their day. Based on data collected in kindergarten classrooms in Singapore, New York, and Darwin, Australia, this chapter explores how children across cultures create music to negotiate transitions and find balance against clock-time pressures.
Sara Stevens Zur
Chapter 9. Children’s Resilience and Constructions of Childhood: Cross-Cultural Considerations
Abstract
Drawing on ethnographic data from multi-sited research in schools in a Majority World (Tibetan in India) and a Minority World context (Germany), this chapter explores children’s resilience cross-culturally. Both the Tibetan and the German schools were guided by Modernist values related to children’s education and childhood. The manner in which these notions played out varied cross-culturally, giving rise to unique constructions of childhood at each site. These cross-cultural differences in how children were viewed and treated by adults are likely to have accounted for a higher level of resilience found in the Tibetan children. There is evidence, however, that certain groups in the Minority World grow up with constructions of childhood similar to that of the Tibetan children, possibly developing higher levels of resilience as a consequence. Generalizing binaries, such as Majority versus Minority World, in other words, might not do justice to the social reality of children’s lives.
Carla Cribari-Assali
Chapter 10. Child Protection Across Worlds: Young People’s Challenges Within and Outside of Child Protection Programmes in UK and Zanzibar Schools
Abstract
This chapter examines Global North and South similarities in children and young people’s reactions to school-led child protection programmes. It considers key shifts in social policy that led to the introduction of child protection training in formal educational contexts. It discusses background to this practice in Zanzibar and the United Kingdom and explores some strengths and limitations of this approach. Our findings suggest that school-focused child protection programmes often either have limited influence outside the educational sphere or create unexpected outcomes, which exacerbate difficulties that some children and young people already manage without adult support. Our findings show that focusing on schools as key providers of child protection support can unintentionally create circumstances in which children and young people feel even greater vulnerability in the wider community. It highlights the need for child protection approaches that robustly acknowledge the separate spheres of school and family and which are sensitive to those differences.
Rachel Burr, Franziska Fay
Chapter 11. Environment and Children’s Everyday Lives in India and England: Exploring Children’s Situated Perspectives on Global-Local Environmental Concerns
Abstract
Today’s children are growing up in an age of global environmental concern yet amidst important differences in household, regional- and country-level exposures to environmental hazards. This chapter draws on data generated through multi-method PhD research in varied socio-economic contexts within India and England to analyse the discursive and embodied ways that children come into contact with, make sense of and assess their agency to address “global” environmental concerns in situated contexts. It argues that children’s situated experiences and interpretations trouble a binary between global and local concerns, demonstrating how forms of environmental vulnerability map onto wider socio-spatial vulnerabilities while revealing overarching similarities in the ways that children’s structural positioning affects their agency to speak and act. The chapter presents children’s local-global environmental concerns as an area of enquiry with ample potential to progress what Punch (Glob Stud Child 6(3):352–364, 2016) describes as “cross-world” childhood scholarship.
Catherine Walker
Chapter 12. Comparing Children’s Care Work Across Majority and Minority Worlds
Abstract
Comparative qualitative methodologies that investigate children’s lives in sharply contrasting socio-economic, political and welfare contexts are relatively unusual. Yet within an increasingly interdependent globalised world, comparative research and dialogue across binaries seems ever more important. In this chapter, we critically reflect on global conceptualisations of young caregiving and discuss the methodological and ethical challenges that arose in our comparative study of children caring for a parent/relative living with HIV in Tanzania and the UK. We discuss the potential problems and benefits of using the term “young carer” and suggest that levels of support and recognition of children’s caring roles in particular countries do not follow a simple Majority-Minority world binary but rather reveal a more complex picture. We argue that developing global perspectives that work across geographical, linguistic and disciplinary boundaries can facilitate greater understanding of the commonalities and diversities of children’s caring lives globally.
Ruth Evans, Saul Becker
Chapter 13. Reflections on Binary Thinking
Abstract
The editors reflect on the nature of binary thinking arising in various forms in chapters presented in this volume. While related pairs of binary opposites enable the structuring of human experience, such thinking can be misleading if we fail to move beyond it. The chapter points to the need to discriminate in how to use this kind of classification. It points to both the necessity and the difficulty in overcoming the North–South divide in the current academic climate.
Michael Bourdillon, Sylvia Meichsner, Afua Twum-Danso Imoh
Backmatter
Metadata
Title
Global Childhoods beyond the North-South Divide
Editors
Afua Twum-Danso Imoh
Michael Bourdillon
Sylvia Meichsner
Copyright Year
2019
Publisher
Springer International Publishing
Electronic ISBN
978-3-319-95543-8
Print ISBN
978-3-319-95542-1
DOI
https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-95543-8

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