RN04 | Session 01a Children’s Identities I
Childhood and Fashion: Investigating the Embodied Performance of Gender through Fashion
Galatia Kallitsi
University of Cyprus, Cyprus kallitsi.galatia(at)ucy.ac.cy
This paper aims to provide a sociological insight on the ways tween children (8-13 years old) negotiate fashion to construct their social, gendered and sexual subjectivities. More specifically, the paper explores how children’s fashion choices reveal embodied gendered subjectivities and the complex ways in which they negotiate a sexualized cultural domain. My overall goal is to combine feminist perspectives on beauty and sexualization with empirical data from children’s lives.
This paper is based on an ethnographic approach.
Twenty boys and girls between 8-13 years old in Cyprus were interviewed in their home space. Tasks such as wardrobe audits and items such as fashion magazines, school pictures, and dolls dressed by the
“Dollz Mania” online dress-up game were used as a starting point for discussing the desirable “beauty”
ideal in semi-structured interviews. Data were also gathered through observations in the school setting and children’s social activities.
Results indicate that children are well aware of the symbolic value of clothing and its importance in expressing both individual uniqueness and participation in collective trends. The paper argues that children face social and cultural pressures to express a socially acceptable gendered and sexual body through fashion that is closely connected with the performance of certain types of masculinities and femininities (“sporty”, “trendy”, “sexy”, “cool”). Often preteen children, both boys and girls, show a strong desire in possessing fashion items that help them build an adult appearance and an idealized gendered self.
Challenging normative assumptions about
vulnerable children and youth through a myriad of small stories
Manon Alice Lavaud
Roskilde University, Denmark manon(at)ruc.dk
This paper shows how an analytical focus on “small stories” can challenge normative assumptions about children and youth in vulnerable life situations.
The paper is based on a study about social work with children and youth living in foster families and residential institutions in Denmark. Based on repeated interviews and observations with thirteen children and youth and several professionals around each, the study explored how notions of normality, difference and deviance came into play in the stories they told about themselves, their strengths and challenges, and the stories told by the professionals. The concept of small stories was used to draw attention to the many different stories told by the children, youth and the professionals. After a brief presentation of the study and the concept of “small stories”, I present some examples from the analysis of the empirical material, which had an explicit focus on the myriad of small stories gathered across the range of actors through interviews and observations.
I argue that even though the stories told by the children may seem weak or incoherent compared to the stories of the professionals, giving longer accounts underpinned by psychological theories and professional knowledge, we should not dismiss these stories. Moreover, the study highlights the fragmented and situational character of the stories told, and hereby attempts to challenge normative assumptions about childhood, normality and deviance that infuse the perspectives of the professionals as well as the stories the children and youth tell about themselves.
Civilising Projects and Children’s Perceptions of Social Categories
Laura Gilliam, Eva Gulløv
Aarhus University, Denmark; Aarhus University, Denmark
lagi(at)edu.au.dk, evag(at)edu.au.dk
Based on ethnographic fieldwork in Danish child institutions and schools, this paper employs Norbert Elias’ concept of civilising to analyse the aims and practices of institutional upbringing. As we argue in our new book, Children of the Welfare State, looking at “civilising projects” and the way children navigate and react towards them, afford a window to investigate cultural ideals and citizen formation as well as their social consequences. In this paper, we will focus on how institutional upbringing influences children’s identities, their identification with others and their understanding of different social categories. In the process of acquiring a consciousness of the proper relation between self and others, children seem to learn the association between specific conduct on the one hand and social status and degradation on the other hand. Thus, through their everyday interactions and navigation of the institutional demands, children do not merely learn how to behave, but gain a consciousness of class, ethnicity, gender and distinction and a sense of their own social worth, identity and group membership. Focusing on our material about migrant children in kindergartens and schools, we show how children experience that ethnic
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minority children and especially boys, tend to belong to an ‘uncivilised’ category. Reacting to marginalisation with opposition, troublemaking and an inversion of civilised norms, these children demonstrate a “paradox of civilising”, i.e. that the civilising projects despite intentions of inclusion and moral upbringing, sometimes come to exclude already marginalised groups by way of monopolizing civilised standards.
The Formation of Health and Gender - an
Ethnographic Study of Health Identity Formation among Children
Mathilde Cecchini
University of Aarhus, Denmark mcecchini(at)ps.au.dk
Recent studies suggest that health plays a role in identity formation among children; children identify as
“healthy” or “unhealthy”. However, we still need a more elaborate and nuanced understanding of children’s health identities. By adopting an intersectionality approach this paper aims to examine the meaning of health in identification processes among children by investigating how health intersects with other principles of differentiation such as gender, ethnicity, social class and peer group in these processes. The paper is based on an ethnographic study of identity and hierarchy formation among 12-14 year old school children in two Danish Public Schools.
The study shows that how a child’s health is interpreted and evaluated by the child itself and its peers is to a wide extent depended on the child’s gender. The health of girls is mainly understood and assessed in terms of physical appearance and eating habits, while the health of boys is interpreted and judged in relation to physical activity. The health identities of children thus seem to be gendered. The paper concludes by arguing that this has implications for how we should conceptualize and study the health of children, but also for practitioners working in the field of health promotion aimed at children and young people.
RN04 | Session 01b Children as Refugees and Migrants I
Constructing the child as refugee: visual and textual representations of refugee children in digital media
Eleni Theodorou
European University Cyprus, Cyprus E.Theodorou(at)euc.ac.cy
Over the past few years, Europe has seen a significant rise in immigration as a result of protracted and violent conflicts in various places around the world. One of conflicts that has featured prominently in European media is the Syrian conflict. Images of men, women, and children refugees from Syria reaching European shores in small, overcrowded and fragile boats drifting in tumultuous Mediterranean waters have been traveling around the world through, inter
alia, digital media. The power of the media to produce, reproduce and represent ideas and ideologies about refugees and asylum seekers, often construing dehumanizing and stigmatizing representations of (mostly adult) refugees, has been documented in the literature (for example see Banks, 2012; Eses, Medianu, & Lawson, 2013, Bleiker, Campbell, Hutchison & Nicholson, 2013). This paper seeks to turn the gaze unto the refugee child in particular with the aim of unraveling meanings and conceptualizations of the child as refugee by critically examining representations of refugee children in image and text appearing in Greek-Cypriot digital news media over the period May 2015-May 2016, a period which, according to UNHCR records, marked a tremendous spike in refugee flows through the Mediterranean sea. Through engaging in qualitative visual, content, and thematic analysis of approximately 350 news articles appearing in ten different Greek-Cypriot digital news media (digital newspapers and news sites), visual and textual representations of refugee children were critically interrogated as to the ideas and conceptualizations of childhood vis-à-vis dominant ideological constructions of childhood innocence (Duschinsky, 2013) and of the raced, gendered and classed child-subject.
Contested Childhoods: Independent Juvenile Migrants’ Social Navigation Strategies through Worlds in Crisis.
Sofia Vlachou Panteion, Greece SVlachou(at)gmx.de
My presentation discusses chronological Age as an additional field of Biopolitics exercise in the European migratory context. Based on research with independently migrating teenagers and young adults in Greece, it highlights some of those juveniles’
generational strategies to localize and create passages through the real, symbolic and material constraints imposed on them by spatial seclusion, economic and civic deprivation and exposure to racism during their efforts to reach an imagined
‘genuine Europe’. While examining the subjects’
sociopolitical situatedness with relation to further intersecting aspects such as ethnicity, nationality, sex and gender the presentation moreover traces eventual racialization, gendering and generationing rationalities that underlie public discourses around migrant Bogusness. It is finally argued that due to the existence of an additional, generational ‘bio- filter’ in matters of migration governance, in the case of young migrants, the natural process of reaching chronological adultness constitutes after all an instance to be feared of instead of being celebrated, once that it forms another threshold of exclusion from settlement options.
The Experiences of Unaccompanied Minors before and during their migration to Greece
Ourania - Eleni Zachariadou University College London, Greece zachariadou.rania(at)gmail.com
This research attempts to explore the experiences of unaccompanied minors, before and during their migration to Europe. It aims to assist the better understanding of these children, hoping that this could help not only the improvement of services offered to them, but also influence people who are negative regarding children’s migration. This is a case study which took place in a shelter (directed by an NGO) in Greece. Before the beginning of the research an ethical application has been examined by the ethical committee of University College of London and a pilot research has been completed. The methods which are used are qualitative methods, such as group activities (the creation of drawings and posters) and group interviews. The participants were boys between 12 and 18 years old. Regarding the findings, minors seem to migrate in order to be safe from the terrorists and the war and to get a better life. Moreover, all participants have had painful experiences from the migration trip which was scary and dangerous for them. Greece is just a station for them, before their final destination. The decision for these minors’
migration, in most cases, had been made by their family or/and by their family and them personally.
However, there were cases when children made this decision alone and/or against the will of their family.
Participants present positive and negative aspects of their life before their migration with the main conclusions being that these children have survived several hazards, in order to start a better life.
Present- absent? Migrant and refugee children in Polish schools in the narratives of teachers Urszula Markowska-Manista, Dominika Zakrzewska-Olędzka
Maria Grzegorzewska University, Poland; Maria Grzegorzewska University, Poland
umarkowska(at)aps.edu.pl, dzakrzewska(at)aps.edu.pl
Polish school is a place where migrant or refugee students are still relatively rare. Despite the fact that the problem of cultural diversity connected with the concept of intercultural opening of the school has been addressed for several years, school praxis still seems to be oriented towards the needs of a homogeneous environment, with an average, undistinguished student, and most import_antly, one who does not stand out against the majority of school class. Research (observations and interviews) conducted in school environment allow to discern children’s diversity with a clear division into those who are better and worse. The observations and research also reveal that children’s cultural context is ignored.
The aim of the presentation is to outline how migrant and refugee students in Polish schools are perceived through the prism of teachers’ narratives.
In the presentation we will refer to research results from 2015-2017 when interviews were conducted among 80 teachers from primary and lower secondary schools.
The presentation is an attempt at a critical look at the place of migrant and refugee students in Polish schools as well as how they are perceived by teachers.
RN04 | Session 02a Children’s Identities II
Constructing children's national identities through waved and unwaved flags
Nehir Gündoğdu
Independant researcher, Turkey nehir0495(at)hotmail.com
Children encounter with waved and unwaved flags in schools that remind them of national identities every day.While Billig’s (1995) banal nationalism concept helps to understand institutions' usage of national discourses to build their imagined communities (Anderson. 2006), Thompson’s (2001) local nationalism perspective points out individual’s engagement with these discourses in the construction of national identities. By engaging both ideas, this paper aims to discuss what national identity reminders are around children specifically in preschool context and how children understand and perform these reminders. I will try to argue these questions based on my field study in Ankara capital of Turkey. The study has conducted in two state preschool classrooms between September 2013 and March 2014 by participant of 49 children aged between 5 and 6, two preschool teachers, two assistants of teacher and four managers. Observation suggests that the children construct their national identities through the discourses offered bypreschool curriculum and teachers.On the other hand, the findings show that the children did not absorb and take on board all the messages they receive about national identity. This reminds us that children also create their own meanings. In addition to this, although some children interpreted national symbols and rituals in a way that differed based on preschool curriculum and staff expectations, they did not also question or search for other ways of beings. This may mean that children did not know what exists beyond the boundaries that are given to them.
Migrant children’s identity construction: education as socialisation venue in complex migratory contexts
Chiara Massaroni
Universität Innsbruck, Austria
Chiara.Massaroni(at)student.uibk.ac.at
While it is without doubt that education has a paramount role in ensuring socio-cultural integration and influencing migrant children’s identity, research has been largely influenced by two limiting assumptions. First, it often focuses on curricular approaches, overlooking the role of educational
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settings as socialisation venues. Secondly, it is embedded in a dichotomous interpretation of migrations (push-pull, illegal-legal, North- South) and is influenced by the “permanent settlement migration paradigm” (Agunias, 2006). Migration, however, is a complex phenomenon and migrants continuously forge multiple forms of belonging across nations or communities, constructing diverse personal plans and life narratives. Morocco is an example of such complexity, being a crossroad of continental migrations, a temporary and long-term transit hub and a destination county, where migrants constantly renegotiate various interpretations of belonging.
This paper looks at educational settings (formal and non-formal) as socialisation sites for young migrant children between 6 and 12 in Morocco. I will interpret the Moroccan migratory scenario and educational offers through the combined lenses of psychosocial identity theory and multi-dimensional perspective on migrations. I will argue that, for educational spaces to foster a positive sense of self for migrant children, it is necessary to understand the complex dynamics correlated to modern migrations and the influence that elements such as hopes, expectations, local and transnational networks can have in shaping the child’s identity.
Migration, identity and childhood: Exproring young migrants' ethnonational identifications and belonging
Eugenia Katartzi
University of Leeds, United Kingdom e.katartzi(at)leeds.ac.uk
In the era of unprecedented migration waves an ever-increasing number of children and young people experience, mobility and dislocation as crucial part of their lives (United Nations, 2016). More than ever children and young people move between and across states leading transnational and translocal lives, thereby disrupting the idealized notion of childhood as unfolding in fixed and bounded spaces (Ní Laoire et al., 2010). The presentation seeks to shed light on the intricate relationship between migration, 'identity' and belonging by focusing on young migrants, a group placed on the periphery of scholarship and public debate. Based upon a qualitative study of youth identities in the context of Greek society, the key objective is to examine ethno-national identifications, formed through the dialectic of self-definition and categorization. The narrative analysis of young migrants’ in-depth interviews unpacks how their sense of belonging and emotional attachments to their countries of origin and settlement are mediated by processes of racialization and othering. Young migrants’ narratives point to an understanding of identifications and belonging -what comes to be seen as ‘identity’- as deeply socio-politically bounded processes in the frame of which boundaries are being drawn and bonds are forged and inter-subjectively negotiated on the basis of alleged similarities and differences between the ‘self’ and ‘others’, ‘us’ and
‘them’.
Language as a Means for Ethnic Identity Fencing or Bridging? Multilingual children’s perspectives on the relation between ethnic identification and language
Graziela Dekeyser, Paul Puschmann, Gray Swicegood
Ku Leuven, Belgium; Ku Leuven, Belgium; Radboud University Nijmegen; Ku Leuven, Belgium
graziela.dekeyser(at)soc.kuleuven.be, paul.puschmann(at)soc.kuleuven.be, gray.swicegood(at)soc.kuleuven.be
Antwerp (in the Dutch-speaking part of Belgium) is turning into a minority-majority city, characterized by superdiversity in terms of ethnicity, culture and language. Against this new reality, we investigate how 10-12 year old multilingual children perceive the relationship between language use and proficiency on the one hand and ethnic identification on the other.
These children are part of many social groups (e.g.
social class, sex, age, leisure activity groups) besides the own ethnocultural minority group and thus have multiple identities. Questions arise then to which degree 1) children view their language use as implicated in their ethnic identity and 2) whether language functions as a way to draw ethnic boundaries or, conversely, as a means to bridge the distance between ethnic groups.
We use data from the multi-method Multilingualism in Antwerp study (Dekeyser, 2016). Focus groups were organized with children to discuss several language dimensions (e.g. language use, management and ideologies) in their everyday lives. By means of vignettes and yes/no statements, children were asked to voice how they link language practices and proficiency to feelings of belonging, ethnic identity and processes of social exclusion and inclusion. The focus groups were stratified according to sex, ethnicity, migration generation, and children’s perception of their schools’ policy toward the use of the home language, for 5th and 6th year pupils across 19 primary schools in Antwerp. This makes it possible to investigate intra- (e.g. across schools and/or sex) and interethnic differences. Cross-case analyses will be performed with NVIVO.
RN04 | Session 02b Children as Refugees and Migrants II
Children, transnational migration and school. The relevance of transnational mobility in the debate between children’s agency and structural constraints.
Sara Amadasi
Università di Modena e Reggio Emilia, Italy samadasi(at)yahoo.it
In the last decade a significant number of children with a migrant background has been included in the Italian schools. The inclusion of these students brought major changes inside the school.
This work aims to focus on one of these changes,
represented by the management of periods of absence of those children who live experiences of temporal return to their – or their parents’ – countries of origin during the school year.
These trips represent processes able to express a high degree of social complexity, involving a number of diverse and heterogeneous issues that may be of great interest to social sciences. On one side these international journeys introduce a break in the school system that reveals social changes that the school, as an institution, is forced to deal with; on the other hand, this mobility which sees children as protagonists, promote reflections on their active role in social processes, recognizing them as deeply involved in the global dynamics and requiring a change in the more traditional understanding that wants them projected only to a future participation in the world.
Based on video recordings of workshops with children and interviews conducted with teachers realized in a research year in two primary schools and one first grade secondary school, this work aims to analyze children’s narratives as well as teacher’s narratives.
The purpose of this paper is to reflect on the different meanings' constructions that international mobility takes on in these narratives and what is the space of agency for children inside them.
Navigating difference and belonging: Narratives of migrant Irish Childhoods
Susan McDonnell IT Sligo, Ireland
mcdonnell.susan(at)itsligo.ie
Based on recent research with children from migrant and non-migrant backgrounds, this paper brings focus to younger children’s intersubjective identity processes in contemporary Ireland, as situated in domestic and educational settings but also overlapped by broader texts of global media and consumption, spatial regulation, cultural and religious symbolism, mobilities, and normative whiteness. Unsettling assumptions of homogeneous Irish childhoods and of children’s passivity in relation to their social worlds, this work explores children’s negotiations of belonging to national communities. The paper illuminates processes of production and contestation of normative and raced Irish childhoods through texts and practices that were spatial, institutional and mediatised but were also reproduced by children themselves. These exclusionary currents were corroborated by conceptualisations of migration and asylum, embedded in narratives of nation, that categorised some children as ‘out of place’. Children’s contestations of such binary discourses occurred in two key ways. Firstly, the paper considers the productive potential of children’s, especially minoritised children’s, marginal positioning as a site for questioning or transgressing definitional boundaries. Secondly, the significance of playful speech as deconstructive identity practice is explored.
While problematizing assumptions of migrant children’s passivity in raced settings, the paper also acknowledges the necessity for broader commitments
by adults in order to operationalize children’s agency in this regard. As such, the paper suggests that interrupting exclusionary raced identities in Irish primary schools requires engagement with children’s world-making practices and the multiple resources that inform their lives.
Seeking Neverland: Refugee Children in Europe Tuba Bircan
University of Leuven, Belgium tuba.bircan(at)kuleuven.be
The impact of the Syrian civil war has started with the region and expanded to the entire globe. Since World War II, one of the largest forced migrations has been experienced as a mass influx of Syrians. According to the UNHCR, as of January 2017, an additional 8.7 million Syrians are internally displaced, with numbers increasing due to the incessant crisis. The neighbouring countries have hosted more than 4.8 million registered refugees and around a million Syrians seek asylum in Europe.
Research on refugee and asylum-seeking children has been focusing on the aspects of mental health and psychological interventions. Moreover some studies investigate the multiple drivers that push children to start new lives, and the problems that they face as a result of this new beginning. This study will contribute to the body of knowledge by examining the spatial distribution of the children refugees, in particular from Syria, Afghanistan and Iraq, among European countries. Hence, it will investigate if there exists a pattern for selection of destination countries The objective is to answer the following questions:
Which countries are more preferred destinations for unaccompanied minors and refugee children with families? What could explain the geographical preferences? What happens to other child refugees such as Afghan and Iraqi minors? Are the host countries prepared and committed for the challenge?
Consequently, with the use of the Eurostat and UNHCR asylum applications and evaluations data for 2008 and 2016 for EU28 countries and Middle Eastern countries such as Turkey, Jordan and Lebanon, the characteristics of the refugee children by nationality, age, and sex will be discussed and the trends over the years will be explored.
Unaccompanied minor refugees in the state of Brandenburg, Germany
Madeleine Sauer, Ingmar Zalewski
FH Potsdam, Germany; FH Potsdam, Germany sauer(at)fh-potsdam.de, zalewski(at)fh-potsdam.de
Today, about 1500 unaccompanied minor refugees live in the state of Brandenburg, Germany, faced with a culture of welcome on one hand and rising Xenophobia on the other. In our research we evaluate the situation of those minors. Building on the empirical dataset of an explorative pre-study (Thomas &
Ackermann 2017 forthcoming) challenges and problems of the minors’ situation are being investigated.