Session Information
25 SES 02, Children's Rights: Methodological and Theoretical Issues
Paper Session
Contribution
This paper explores the intersection of children’s rights with anthropology and ethics. More specifically, the paper is concerned with inquiring into the potential resourcefulness for research in children’s rights of a new orientation within anthropology that has been characterised as an ‘anthropology of the good’ (Faubion, 2001, 2011; Robbins, 2013).
Having outlined some of the contours of this new approach, ways in which styles of thinking associated with an anthropology of the good might address a number of problematics identified in recent work in children’s rights are identified. For example, Tisdall and Punch (2012), drawing upon previous work such as Valentin and Meinert (2009) identify a key problematic as the failure to distinguish Majority and Minority childhoods and the different conceptions of childhood that may be entrained. Failure to make this distinction leads potentially to the colonisation of Majority world childhoods by western assumptions about what is desirable for children (their presumed ‘good’) and rendering invisible alternative imaginaries of the good and how these might be realised in practice. The paper therefore aims to address this fundamental ethical problematic and draw attention to the significance of ethical work that is performed in diverse contexts (Nieuwenhuys, 2008).
The paper will also contribute to on-going discussion within Network 25 apropos different traditions of inquiry and their potential contribution to on-going research in children’s rights. To date, research in children’s rights in education has tended to draw upon framings associated with the New Sociology of Childhood (e.g. Jenks, 1982; James and Prout, 1997; James et al.,1998; Qvortrup et al.,1994), and such a theoretical alliance has tended to dominate the field - especially in Scandinavian, UK and Australian contexts. To this extent, it is argued that the anthropology of the good offers framings that can acknowledge difference, and the imaginative, affective as well as critical work that is involved in the production of different imaginaries of the good.
The paper argues that engaging with styles of thinking and practice associated with the anthropology of the good marks a new departure in so far as this foregrounds different conceptions of children’s good. Some of the implications of such engagement for research in children’s rights will be considered, especially with regard to the translations and framings that an anthropology of the good affords. These affordances, it will be argued, have both empirical and theoretical ramifications for on-going research in this field.
Method
Expected Outcomes
References
Faubion, J. D. (2001) ‘Toward an Anthropology of Ethics: Foucault and the Pedagogies of Autopoiesis’, Representations, 74: 1. pp. 83-104. Faubion, J. D. (2011) An Anthropology of Ethics, Cambridge & New York: Cambridge University Press. James, A., Jenks, C. and Prout, A. (1998) Theorising Childhood. Cambridge: Polity Press. James, A. & Prout, A. (1997) Constructing and Reconstructing Childhood: Contemporary Issues in the Sociological Study of Childhood, London and New York: Routledge. Jenks, C. (Ed). (1982) Sociology of childhood, Essential readings. London: Batsford Academic and Educational Ltd. Nieuwenhuys, O. 2008 ‘The Ethics of Children’s Rights’, Childhood, 15: 1, pp. 4-11. Robbins, J. (2013) ‘Beyond the suffering subject: toward an anthropology of the good’, Journal of the Royal Anthropological Institute (N.S.), 19, pp. 447-462. Tisdall, E. K. M. & Punch, S. (2012) ‘Not so ‘new’? Looking critically at childhood studies’, Children’s Geographies, 10: 3, pp. 249–264. Valentin, K. & Meinert, L. (2009) ‘The adult North and the young South: Reflections on the civilizing mission of children’s rights’, Anthropology Today, 25: 3, pp. 23–28.
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