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This book explores the alternative experiences of children and young people whose everyday lives contradict ideas and ideals of normalcy from the local to the global context.
Presenting empirical research and conceptual interventions from a variety of international contexts, this book seeks to contribute to understandings of alterity, agency and everyday precarity. The young lives foregrounded in this volume include the experiences of transnational families, children in ethnic minority communities, street-living young people, disabled children, child soldiers, victims of abuse, politically active young people, working children and those engaging with alternative education. By exploring 'other' ways of being, doing, and thinking about childhood, this book addresses questions around what it is to be a child and what it is to be marginalised in society. The narratives explore the everydayness and the mundanity of difference as they are experienced through social structures and relationships, simultaneously recognizing and critiquing notions of agency and power.
This book, including a discussion resource for teaching or peer reading groups, will appeal to academics, students and researchers across subject disciplines including Human Geography, Children's Geography, Social Care and Childhood Studies.
List of contents
Foreword 1. Introduction Part One: Stigma 2. Childhood Disability and Clothing: (Un)dressing debates 3. ‘They should have stayed’: Blaming street children and disruption of the intergenerational contract 4. Subverting neighbourhood normalcy and the impacts on child wellbeing in Malta 5. ‘Bad Children’: International stigmatisation of children trained to kill during war and armed conflict Part Two: Work, Education and Activism 6. Other(ed) Childhoods: Supplementary Schools and the Politics of Learning 7. Not an ‘other’ childhood: child labour laws, working children and childhood in Bolivia 8. Unschooling and the simultaneous development and mitigation of ‘otherness’ amongst home schooling families 9. Being seen, being heard: Engaging and valuing young people as political actors and activists Part Three: Out of Place 10. Young Survivors of Sexual Abuse as ‘Children out of Place’ 11. Realising Childhood in an Urdu-Speaking Bihari Community in Bangladesh 12. Discovering Difference in Outer Suburbia: Mapping, intra-activity and alternative directedness in Shaun Tan’s Eric 13. Transnational Practices and Children’s Local Lives in Times of Economic Crisis 14. Conclusion. Appendix
About the author
Nadia von Benzon is a Lecturer in Human Geography at the University of Lancaster, UK.
Catherine Wilkinson is a Senior Lecturer in Educaton at Liverpool John Moores University, UK.
Summary
Contributions present international narratives from a broad range of contexts and locales, demonstrating the ways in which children's lives are shaped by intersecting identities and notions of difference.
