Right' and `Not Right'Representations of justice in young people (original) (raw)
Related papers
Social Constructions of Childhood
Not until we start to ask the necessary questions, of the world and ourselves, can we begin to uncover, de-construct and understand the very constructs that have shaped our lives and experiences. Every single child and adult is affected by society’s historical and social constructions. With the alarming increase in the intensity and complexity of physical, emotional and mental ill health, violence, corruption and self-abuse, it is clear that as a society we have lost our natural way of being. The construct of the agentic child represents what may be possible when adults remember the power and responsibility they hold and the possibility of reflecting this back to our children. An adult’s willingness to self-reflect, uncover and deconstruct their own childhood, is what ultimately guides a deep respect, understanding and equality with children.
Social Constructions of Childhood (2007)
Childhood and Youth Studies, 2012
Each of us has experienced not one, but two childhoods: the first as a biological state of growth and development and a second as a social construction, which is to say as an institution that has been socially created. If this is true then it follows that childhood is dependent on the nature of a society into which an individual is born and will vary from place to place and time to time. In the last half of the twentieth century a number of thinkers and writers in a variety of fields began to consider the ways in which this process of constructing childhood has been carried out, both in the past and today, and what the implications are for our experience of childhood and for current and future generations of children. If we accept this thesis then it follows that we can only understand childhood if we comprehend how it has been formed and how it varies and changes.
Sociology of Childhood, 2021
In this book, the term "childhood and children studies" is used as a collective concept that includes both micro- and macro sociological ideas about children and childhood. At the same time, childhood is interpreted in many ways as an age stage of individual development from 0 to 18 years old, as a socio-demographic community a set of children and as a social phenomenon inscribed in a certain macro- level context.
Sociological Review, 1998
Sociological theory displays a tendency to depict the social world in terms of completed ‘beings’. The social, thus depicted, is a world of powers to ‘finish’(such as the power granted to convention to provide for social order), and finished products (such as agents and ethical points-of-view). As sociologists of childhood have attempted to bring children into sociological focus in their own right, the disciplinary concern with the ‘complete’ has required that children be attributed the properties assumed more normally to belong to adults. The sociology of childhood has thus preserved the privilege of the complete and the mature over the incomplete and the immature. In this paper the key sociological issues of convention, agency and ethics are given a theoretical interpretation that makes them fit for understanding childhood. The ability of convention to complete social order is questioned. Agency is portrayed as the emergent property of networks of dependency rather than the possession of individuals. An alternative to the ethics of ‘positions’ is offered in the form of an ethics of ‘motion’. Where extant sociologies of childhood have brought children into the ‘finished’ world of sociological theory, this paper uses childhood's ontological ambiguity to open the door onto an unfinished social world.
Are Children Born Social Actors?
Forum for Anthropology and Culture, 2021
‘Maybe there are only two kinds of question in the world,’ wrote Peter Høeg in his novel Borderliners. ‘Th e kind they ask in school, where the answer is known in advance; asked not so that anyone will be any the wiser, but for other reasons. And then the others, those in the laboratory. Where one does not know the answers, and oft en not even the question, before one has asked it. <…> Th at was what we meant by science’ [Høeg 2013]. Unfortunately in contemporary Western research on childhood — a fi eld which is also called ‘critical sociology of childhood’ or ‘the new sociology of childhood’ — the question of whether children should be regarded as subjects or actors long ago became a school question. Th ere is a ‘right answer’ to it: yes, of course they should. ... As one of the masters of the anthropology of childhood, David Lancy, has subtly remarked, the rhetoric calling for ‘children to be regarded as social actors’ has taken up such a solid position within childhood studies that it is reproduced even by those scholars whose results obviously contradict this call [Lancy 2012]. The aim of this brief essay is to turn a school question, the answer to which is known in advance, into a scholarly question, to which we are all trying to find an answer.
THE MEETING BETWEEN PSYCHOLOGY AND SOCIOLOGY OF CHILDHOOD
2018
ABSTRACT. The text aims to build an interdisciplinary dialogue on conceptions of childhood, child development and education based on the propositions of Developmental Psychology and Sociology of Childhood for the study of children. The study presents axes of approximations and distances between these fields of knowledge based on an epistemological view that reveals interfaces and articulations between these perspectives regarding conceptions, approaches and methodologies. The studies of children and childhood in the contemporary world point to the need to deepen the understanding of phenomena from an interdisciplinary reflection on the historical and cultural constitution of the subject, the transformations along the development and the implications for education. It is an epistemological debate with implications in the discussion about ethics in research on/with children. The advances in this debate involve the same critical reflection of the human sciences on the relations of power and knowledge that have as central and constituent aspect the language for the understanding of human dimensions. At the end, there is a reflection on the formulation of a new conceptual, theoretical and methodological framework for the debate and research of childhood in the contemporary world.