1st Edition
Studies of Childhoods in the Global South Towards an Epistemic Turn in Transnational Childhood Research?
What would a body of literature, focusing on Southern childhoods, look like when epistemologically driven by the demands (social, cultural, economic, political) of the localities in which they are shaped and produced? To answer this question, this book explores locally driven perspectives of childhoods in diverse contexts in the Global South to produce knowledge of Southern childhoods determined, not by Northern priorities and frameworks, but by local needs and contexts.
Given the intensification of global processes and the extent to which the local and the global intersect in the everyday lives of children and their families, this edited volume demonstrates that a focus on the epistemological demands of localities necessarily grapples with global as well as local processes and concepts. Chapters in this collection include empirical research on child participation and activism, schooling/educational experiences, child work and street children. They use methodologies ranging from arts-based methods to participant observation, and engage with theories relating to child participation, agency and vulnerability to produce a key resource on Southern childhoods.
The chapters in this book were originally published as a special issue of Third World Thematics.
Introduction - Studies of childhoods in the Global South: towards an epistemic turn in transnational childhood research?
Afua Twum-Danso Imoh, Lucia Rabello de Castro and Orna Naftali
1. Unsettling orthodoxy via epistemological jailbreak: Rethinking childhood, psychology, and wellbeing from the Caribbean
Shelda-Jane Smith, Adaeze Greenidge and Levi Gahman
2. Kapwa child participation, kapwa childhood, and a path towards the indigenisation and expansion of international agreements
Roberto S. Salva
3. International perspectives on the participation of children and young people in the Global South
Lucy Jamieson, Irene Rizzini, Tara M. Collins and Laura H.V. Wright
4. Considering an agency–vulnerability nexus in the lives of street children and youth
Ernestina Dankyi, Lorraine van Blerk, Janine Hunter and Alison McFadden
5. ‘Shed’, ‘shed makkalu’, and differentiated schooling: narratives from an Indian city
Vijitha Rajan
6. Untangling the Latin American child: heterogeneous temporalities of Latin American “modern” childhoods
Valeria LLobet and Ana Vergara Del Solar
7. Children’s agency and cultural appropriation through the lens of South American anthropology: Mapuche and Toba/Qom children facing Catholic education
Mariana García Palacios and Andrea Szulc
8. Child care and participation in the Global South: an anthropological study from squatter houses in Buenos Aires
Pía Leavy and Paula Nurit Shabel
9. Vaulting the turnstiles: dialoguing and translating childhood and agencies from Chile, Latin America
Susana Cortés-Morales and Camilo Morales-Retamal
10. Disputed meanings about child labour, its consequences, and interventions: discussions based on ethnographic research in Argentina
María Eugenia Rausky and Laura Frasco Zuker
Biography
Afua Twum-Danso Imoh is Associate Professor in Global Childhoods and Welfare at the University of Bristol. Much of Afua’s work focuses on constructions of childhoods; children’s rights and social and cultural norms; and problematising the binary between the Global North and the Global South as it relates to childhood studies.
Lucia Rabello de Castro is Professor of Childhood and Youth at the Instituto de Psicologia at the Federal University of Rio de Janeiro. She is also Chief Editor of DESIDADES, a Latin American journal on childhood and youth. Her research interests focus on childhood theories and methodologies, childhood and decoloniality, children’s and youth’s social and political participation.
Orna Naftali is the Abraham Miller Chair in Chinese Studies and Associate Professor in the Department of Asian Studies at the Hebrew University of Jerusalem. Her research interests include the anthropology of childhood and youth, gender and the family, nationalism, militarisation, and the nation-state, and children's rights and legal consciousness in the People's Republic of China.
