| 1. |
- Andersson Bruck, Kjerstin, 1975-
(författare)
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Child poverty in rich contexts : The example of Sweden
- 2020
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Ingår i: Global Studies of Childhood. - : Symposium Journals. - 2043-6106. ; 10:2, s. 95-105
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Tidskriftsartikel (refereegranskat)abstract
- In international comparisons, Sweden is one of the countries with the lowest number of children growing up in poverty; its material standard is high, and welfare services are extensive and heavily subsidised. How child poverty can be understood in that context is interrogated in the article. The point of departure for the discussion is Swedish Save the Children’s 2013 anti-poverty campaign Fattigskolan [Poverty School]. The campaign presents child poverty from the vantage point of a welfare state and is informative for understanding normative discourses on childhood. Childhood is investigated as a social imagination that both structures children’s and parents’ everyday lives and organises society. It is argued that the dominant social imagination is based on a middle-class fantasy permeating the organisation of the welfare state. The elements of this fantasy are critical to understanding child poverty.
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| 2. |
- Baldini, Myung Hwa, 1991-, et al.
(författare)
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Listening to children and young people in Sweden: Practices, possibilities, and tensions
- 2024
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Ingår i: Global Studies of Childhood. - : Sage Publications. - 2043-6106. ; 14:2, s. 214-226
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Tidskriftsartikel (refereegranskat)abstract
- This piece is a collective exploration by seven doctoral researchers in Child Studies, who discuss notions of listening to children and young people in a Swedish context. We approach different aspects of listening in research and in practices such as education, psychiatry, and social work. The discussions in this collective writing are an invitation for continuous reflections about the contexts where listening to children is done, its challenges and possibilities.
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| 3. |
- Cowan, Kate, et al.
(författare)
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Pandemic playthings : A multimodal perspective on toys and toy play in the time of COVID-19
- 2024
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Ingår i: Global Studies of Childhood. - 2043-6106. ; 14:1, s. 62-80
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Tidskriftsartikel (refereegranskat)abstract
- This article considers ways in which toys have featured in children’s play throughout the COVID-19 pandemic. Whilst often dismissed as trivial novelties, toys can be seen as a significant aspect of material culture, both reflecting and constructing ideas of childhood. A multimodal social semiotic perspective is used to examine a selection of toys produced between 2020 and 2022 that respond to the pandemic in various ways. The toys feature representations of the virus, of accessories for enacting pandemic practices such as mask-wearing and vaccination, and of pandemic ‘heroes’. In addition to these commercially produced toys, examples of toy play collected by the Play Observatory project from 2020 to 2022 are also analysed. These real-world instances demonstrate toys and everyday objects being used to playfully make sense of, and communicate understandings of, the COVID-19 pandemic. In combination, the examples reveal discourses embedded in the multimodal design of ‘pandemic playthings’ and ways in which toy play demonstrated children’s agentive meaning-making, including awareness and understandings of the pandemic they may not have articulated verbally. In this way, toys and toy play are seen as deeply meaningful, revealing stories about children and childhood in the time of COVID-19.
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| 4. |
- Göransson, Kristina
(författare)
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‘The big crossroad’: Parenting, risk and educational transitions in Singapore
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Ingår i: Global Studies of Childhood. - 2043-6106.
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Tidskriftsartikel (refereegranskat)abstract
- Singapore’s education system is globally recognized for its high academic standards. In this paper, I explore how Singaporean parents navigate sentiments of uncertainty and risk in relation to their children’s education. While academic achievements are still considered crucial to foster a competitive population, there has been a shift of attention in education policy towards social-emotional skills and holistic education. This reconceptualization of learning is partly grounded in a concern about children’s psychological well-being, but it is also construed as essential to thrive in the 21st century. The findings show that parents’ sentiments of uncertainty and risk management are complicated, and indeed heightened, by the paradoxical expectations with regard to children’s education. Sentiments of fear of regret and guilt were particularly conspicuous in the parents’ narratives and heightened during specific educational transitions, such as the Primary School Leaving Examination.
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| 5. |
- Harju, Anne, et al.
(författare)
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Children's education in 'good' nature : Perceptions of activities in nature spaces in mobile preschools
- 2021
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Ingår i: Global Studies of Childhood. - : SAGE Publications. - 2043-6106. ; 11:3, s. 242-251
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Tidskriftsartikel (refereegranskat)abstract
- In the Nordic countries, there is a culturally rooted understanding of nature as a ‘good’ place for children. The aim of the article is to deconstruct this understanding by exploring how different mobile preschools – buses that bring children to different places on a daily basis – relate to nature spaces and children’s learning and well-being in them. Based on critical theorization of place and the nature/culture divide, we argue that, while there exists an idealization of nature within the mobile preschool tradition, the ways that nature is viewed as ‘good’ for children differ depending on the children’s ethnic background and residential area. The results show that compensatory ideas are especially vivid when it comes to migrant children who live in multi-ethnic neighbourhoods. Education in nature, aiming at freedom and agency, brought forward in the preschool curriculum in the Nordic countries, seems more reserved for children who already have the right kind of cultural background and language. The ‘other’ children, however, are more likely to receive an education aiming to compensate for something perceived as missing – that is, the ‘right’ kind of capital regarding ‘nature’.
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| 6. |
- Hernvall, Patrik, et al.
(författare)
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Writing identity : Gendered values and user content creation in SNS interaction among Estonian and Swedish tweens
- 2011
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Ingår i: Global Studies of Childhood. - : SAGE Publications. - 2043-6106. ; 1:4, s. 365-376
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Tidskriftsartikel (refereegranskat)abstract
- Tweens (10–14 year olds) in Estonia and Sweden were interviewed about their experience and understanding of gender construction on social networking sites (SNS). Our interviews indicate that peer culture is the most important dimension and a source of inspiration for the young when writing their identity online. Gendered norms and values are prominent in these activities, especially in the manipulated images being produced by the tweens. The latter practice is most explicit among the girls, especially when it comes to photoshopping. Our findings suggest that both girls and boys are well aware of what images are acceptable to publish as well as how to act and pose in front of the camera.
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| 7. |
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| 8. |
- Jannok Nutti, Y., et al.
(författare)
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Being, exploring, and playing outdoors : Young children philosophize through Sámi pedagogical imagination and storytelling
- 2024
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Ingår i: Global Studies of Childhood. - : Sage Publications. - 2043-6106.
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Tidskriftsartikel (refereegranskat)abstract
- This article discusses the pedagogical role of the imagination and forms of life in Sámi early childhood education. Following Nergård’s development of Wittgenstein’s notion “form of life” as an imaginative, pedagogical, and anthropological concept, the article will explore how Sámi children both use and transform forms of life in Sámi early childhood centers. The article explores scenes from a day spent outdoors with early childhood educators and children. The aim is to show how young Sámi children philosophize and articulate their world, and how listening to the children can be a decolonizing practice that challenges colonial assumptions in pedagogy, philosophy and society. The empirical data was collected through a pilot project and the subsequent project Sámi Children as Thought Herders. The data material contains photos, short films, sound records, and notes collected through ethnographic fieldwork conceived as Critical Utopian Action Research, which takes into account the social learning of all participants, here specifically the children, the educators and the researchers. Thus, these are spaces for a joint critique that resists colonially structured practices. The main findings are that, during outdoor activities, educators and children imaginatively perform, play and encounter outdoor spaces and aspects of Sámi forms of life. This is explored on the basis of scenes where young children imaginatively engaged with the forest environment. The educators’ storytelling and the storytelling tradition continued into the children’s own storytelling. The children created stories about a Stállo who lives in a rusty oil barrel they found in the forest, making traditional stories and forms of life come alive and transforming them. In reflecting upon these scenes, we argue for the pedagogical, performative, and philosophical importance of engaging with the ways that children’s imaginative play interacts with place.
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| 9. |
- Knezevic, Zlatana, 1984-
(författare)
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Speaking Bodies – Silenced Voices : Child Protection and the Knowledge Culture of ‘Evidencing’
- 2021
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Ingår i: Global Studies of Childhood. - : Sage Publications. - 2043-6106. ; 11:3, s. 252-264
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Tidskriftsartikel (refereegranskat)abstract
- Using the metaphors body and voice and drawing on critical contributions on biopolitics, this article interrogates children’s participation rights in a knowledge culture of ‘evidencing’. With child welfare and protection practice as an empirical example, I analyse written assessment reports from a Swedish child welfare agency, all exemplifying how social workers evidence needs for protection and reasons for removing children from the home. I discuss how ‘evidencing’ equals a knowledge culture of seeing-believing and predicting-believing and the search for visibly damaged bodies and underdeveloped minds. I furthermore problematise how such conceptualisation of evidencing foregrounds children’s ‘speaking’ bodies while silencing their voices. By showing these manifestations of evidencing, this critical contribution discusses some wider epistemic concerns for fields influenced by the knowledge cultures of ‘the evidence-based’.
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| 10. |
- Kvist Lindholm, Sofia, 1979-, et al.
(författare)
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‘Looping effects’ related to young people’s mental health: How young people transform the meaning of psychiatric concepts
- 2020
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Ingår i: Global Studies of Childhood. - : Sage Publications. - 2043-6106. ; 10:1, s. 26-38
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Tidskriftsartikel (refereegranskat)abstract
- Over the past decades, reports from official authorities and the media have suggested that there is a ‘crisis’ in young people’s mental health. However, there is considerable uncertainty regarding how to interpret the data referred to in these alarming reports. The present article draws on ‘the minority voices’ of young people and theories developed by Ian Hacking to undertake a critical analysis of the conceptualisation of young people’s mental health. According to Hacking, systems of classifications formulate general truths about people and frame the suffering of individuals in specific ways. Classification changes people. However, young people are social actors who interact with classifications of their mental health and by doing so they could cause classifications to be redrawn. Hacking refers to these feedback effects as ‘looping effects’. Based on 51 interviews with 15-year-olds, this article explores how young people interact with psychiatric labels associated with their wellbeing such as anxiety and depression. We demonstrate how the participants gave new meaning to these psychiatric labels, devalued and gave nuance to them, and by doing so transformed them into cultural categories rather than diagnostic categories. We discuss the potential looping effects related to young people’s mental health and how the present findings can inform policy practice.
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