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2016 | Buch

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Generationing Development

A Relational Approach to Children, Youth and Development

herausgegeben von: Roy Huijsmans

Verlag: Palgrave Macmillan UK

Buchreihe : Palgrave Studies on Children and Development

Enthalten in: Springer Professional "Wirtschaft+Technik" , Springer Professional "Wirtschaft" , Springer Professional "Technik"

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Über dieses Buch

This ground-breaking book weaves together insights from the children and youth studies literature and critical development studies. Debunking the idea of childhood and youth as self-evident social categories, the author unravels how these generational constructs are (re)constituted and experienced in relational terms in development contexts spanning both the Global South and the Global North.

Running through these chapters is a fundamental concern with age, gender and generation as key principles of social differentiation. This is developed in Part 1 at a theoretical level, and applied to everyday contexts, including school, work, migration and the street in Part 2. Part 3 zooms in on the generational dynamics of development by exploring how prominent development interventions (conditional cash transfers, schooling) problems (gender discrimination) and questions (the generational question of farming) shape the (gendered) experience of being young and growing up.

Inhaltsverzeichnis

Frontmatter

Chapter 1. Generationing Development: An Introduction

Abstract

This introduction chapter sets out the overall framework informing the volume and surveys the relevant literature. It lays out a relational approach to studying children, youth and development with age and generation as key concepts. This chapter introduces and develops these central ideas, and their various interpretations, and links them to the contributing chapters.

Roy Huijsmans

Theorising Age and Generation in Young Lives

Frontmatter

Chapter 2. Locating Young Refugees Historically: Attending to Age Position in Humanitarianism

Abstract

This chapter explains the importance of attending to the ‘age position’ of young refugees from two inter-related perspectives. First, as a means to comprehend the forces that inform the expression of particular needs and aspirations by young people and, second, in order to grasp the historicity of their lives and of the larger displaced population. The paper then moves to offer a conceptual framework for investigating age position. The notion of ‘generation’ is central to this framework. Four distinct meanings of generation are identified, and their application explored through reference to findings from research conducted in a Palestinian refugee camp in Jordan.

Jason Hart

Chapter 3. Bodies, Brains, and Age: Unpacking the Age Question in the Dutch Sex Work Debate

Abstract

Taking as point of departure the Dutch debate on a proposed increase in the minimum age of prostitution from 18 to 21, this chapter explores how ideas of age inform the regulation and practice of sex work. On the basis of qualitative research in the Netherlands with policy makers, activists, sex worker representatives, and (former) sex workers, the chapter shows the influence of recent neuroscientific research in justifying the policy proposal. Such a rationale not only emphasises age over living conditions, but also fails to acknowledge the corporeality of age that informs sex work as practice albeit in distinctly gendered manners.

Sara Vida Coumans

Chapter 4. The Impact of ‘Age-Class’ on Becoming a Young Farmer in an Industrialised Agricultural Sector: Insights from Nova Scotia, Canada

Abstract

An exodus of young people from rural areas and agrarian futures can be observed globally. Yet, despite significant obstacles, some young people still aspire to become farmers. This chapter proposes the concept of ‘age-class’—the intersection of age and socioeconomic position—to analyse the limitations and differential impacts of policies and support structures aimed at helping young people start farming futures. The analytical discussion is illustrated and expanded via a case study of the eastern Canadian province of Nova Scotia. This case highlights the importance of collective agency demonstrated by the province’s young farmer community via the formation of organisations, in reaction to the absence of government policies that support all groups of (aspiring) young farmers regardless of their background.

Elyse N. Mills

Chapter 5. Mainstreaming Social Age in the Sustainable Development Goals: Progress, Pitfalls, and Prospects

Abstract

Based on a comprehensive quantitative and qualitative textual analysis of the Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs) and corresponding United Nations Resolution A/RES/70 (2015), this chapter analyses the degree to which social age has been mainstreamed into the SDGs. The analysis reveals that the SDGs make some progress towards social age mainstreaming, especially compared to the preceding Millennium Development Goals. However, the very young and the very old are underrepresented in the document, and a problematic conflation of age with children, as well as little attention to intergenerational power relations is observed. The chapter concludes with some ways in which practitioners, policy-makers and scholars can build on the SDGs to make development discourse more age-sensitive.

Christina Clark-Kazak

Everyday Relationalities: School, Work and Belonging

Frontmatter

Chapter 6. Generationing School Bullying: Age-Based Power Relations, the Hidden Curriculum, and Bullying in Northern Vietnamese Schools

Abstract

Drawing on ethnographic research conducted in two schools in northern Vietnam, this chapter suggests understanding and addressing school bullying as a generational problem rather than one of individual children. It demonstrates that school bullying is intricately connected to manifestations of power in the deeply generational organisation of schools, and to the ways in which both children and adults exercise their agency in this social environment by drawing on age-related hierarchies, bodily size, and physical strength. Employing the concept of the hidden curriculum, the chapter suggests that some students learn to utilise bullying as a means through which they can influence the behaviour of others and thus more easily navigate their way through school, both socially and scholastically.

Paul Horton

Chapter 7. ‘Being Small Is Good’: A Relational Understanding of Dignity and Vulnerability Among Young Male Shoe-Shiners and Lottery Vendors on the Streets of Addis Ababa, Ethiopia

Abstract

In many cities of the Global South children are a large and visible segment of the street-based population. This chapter focuses on two common street-based occupations: shoe-shining and lottery vending. Employing a relational approach this chapter views young street-working lives in connection with the wider social and cultural context of which they are part. It illuminates how young, male, street-based workers position themselves in the relational hierarchy of Addis Ababa’s street life. Yet, various vulnerabilities, some of them structural in nature, render fragile the realisation and maintenance of a degree of dignity and untenable in the long run given the friction between street-based work with valued forms of male social adulthood.

Degwale G. Belay

Chapter 8. ‘We Don’t Even Use Our Older Children’: Young Children Accompanying Blind Adult Beggars in Tamale, Ghana

Abstract

This chapter analyses the phenomenon of child–adult partnerships for begging in Tamale, Ghana. It explores how and why children are preferred as companions to blind adult beggars. What the presence of a young child does to the moral evaluation of begging, and how in contexts of poverty the interaction between age, gender, migration, and (fictive) kinship shape children’s entry and exit into the activity. The chapter brings together voices of blind adult beggars, their young child companions as well as voices from the almsgiving public and officials. Yet, the central analytical focus is on the experiences and perceptions of the children involved in this activity.

Wedadu Sayibu

Chapter 9. Travelling Identities: Gendered Experiences While Doing Research with Young Allochtoon Dutch Muslims

Abstract

This chapter results from my reflections on an autoethnographic study I did with six young allochtoon Dutch Muslims, most of whom were men. Through my reflections, I look back at my research as a gendered experience. These experiences are told through a collection of my personal encounters with one of my participants who I refer to in this chapter as J. By unpacking these encounters, I attempt to deconstruct the singular narrative often associated with Muslim men and embed myself as a young female researcher whose interactions while doing fieldwork give insight into how gender identities are expressed and negotiated by myself, my participants, and our environment.

Mahardhika Sjamsoeoed Sadjad

Negotiating Development

Frontmatter

Chapter 10. Subjects of Development: Teachers, Parents, and Youth Negotiating Education in Rural North India

Abstract

This chapter examines negotiations of school education in a mountainous rural region of north India, and locates these as part of broader cultural politics of development differentiated by class, generation, and gender. Theoretically, it addresses the utility as well as limitations of governmentality for understanding how education and development shape young people’s relationships to changing terms of social reproduction. Disciplinary and governmental forms of power re-entrench existing inequalities and boundaries. Yet the ethnographic and relational perspective highlights contradictory experiences by teachers, parents, and youth. Such negotiations on the part of ‘subjects’ of development signal limits of governmental power, and counter notions of inevitable outcomes and choices for the futures of rural youth and their communities.

Karuna Morarji

Chapter 11. Little People, Big Words: ‘Generationating’ Conditional Cash Transfers in Urban Ecuador

Abstract

Employing a generational approach, this chapter decentres adults’ voices in research on conditional cash transfer programmes creating the conceptual space for bringing in children’s experiences and perspectives. The Ecuadorian programme Bono de Desarrollo Humano (BDH) targets households with children, providing income support and incentivising human capital investments aiming at breaking the intergenerational transmission of poverty. Chronological age constitutes a key measure in the architecture of the BDH which renders childhood a site of investment and adulthood a time for productive employment. Being a BDH recipient affects children’s relational position in the household, vis-à-vis other children, and the state. Teenage motherhood is analysed as friction between the age-normativity shaping the BDH design and the lived realities of poor families.

María Gabriela Palacio

Chapter 12. Growing Up Unwanted: Girls’ Experiences of Gender Discrimination and Violence in Tamil Nadu, India

Abstract

This chapter examines the cultural reproduction of daughter aversion from a generational perspective. It is based on longitudinal research with ten girls from childhood into adulthood in the district Madurai, Tamil Nadu. Children as much as adults are embedded in the micro-contexts of everyday lives in which gendered practices are reproduced, and they are acutely aware of the differential treatment meted out to them. Cultural reproduction of daughter aversion is intergenerational. It manifests differently as girls move through the life course, largely because of the dynamic intersection of relations of gender and age. The chapter concludes by emphasizing a child-centred approach that would allow girls’ voices to actively inform development analysis and policy to tackle daughter aversion and discrimination.

Sharada Srinivasan

Chapter 13. Youth, Farming, and Precarity in Rural Burundi

Abstract

In the aftermath of civil war, young people in eastern Burundi experience their livelihoods and preparations for independent householding as ‘lacking’. Aware of the unsustainability of current practices of land inheritance and farming, they orient to other livelihood possibilities whilst maintaining an aspiration to a farming future. Combining ideas from agrarian studies and youth studies, we argue that a generational approach helps exposing structural problems of reproduction in rural communities. Young people’s responses to difficulties in social reproduction vary. Formal (secondary) education and gender in particular affect strategies of circular migration and marriage, and expose young people to hardship and violence in different ways.

Lidewyde H. Berckmoes, Ben White

Commentary

Frontmatter

Chapter 14. Age and Generation in the Service of Development?

Abstract

This commentary draws on the previous chapters to highlight how both age and generation are produced and deployed in the exercise of power in societies. They are shown both to regulate (for stability and continuity) and to produce change. As such, age and generation are fundamental to the contexts in which development interventions happen. They also play a role in development. Intentional processes of development restructure relations of age and generation, and development proceeds in part through this restructuring. Often, however, as the chapters reveal, development policies and interventions incorporate notions and practices of age and generation that conflict with or disrupt locally prevalent age and generation norms. This has significant, and not always positive, consequences for young people’s lives.

Nicola Ansell

Backmatter

Titel: Generationing Development
herausgegeben von: Roy Huijsmans
Verlag: Palgrave Macmillan UK
Electronic ISBN: 978-1-137-55623-3
Print ISBN: 978-1-137-55622-6
DOI: https://doi.org/10.1057/978-1-137-55623-3