Hanne Warming

Getting under their skins? Accessing young children’s perspectives through ethnographic fieldwork

This article explores ways of representing young children’s perspectives in an empathetic and empowering manner. Based on a poststructuralist reinterpretation of ethnographic field notes taken at a Danish day care institution, the article argues, first of all, that in order to represent young children’s perspectives in an ethically sound manner, it is necessary to combine the ‘voice approach’ with ethnomethodological insights and critical sociological analysis, which together enable ‘critical sociological empathy’. Second, that a methodological strategy that combines differentiated researcher participant roles with a ‘least adult role’ approach, enhances the possibilities of successfully achieving empathetic and empowering representation of young children’s perspectives.

The life of children in care in Denmark: A struggle over recognition

This article examines the social work practices towards children in care in Denmark. For this purpose, it reworks Honneth’s theory of recognition, so it fits with the axiomatic propositions of the new social studies of childhood. The analysis shows how the life of these children unfolds as a continuous struggle over recognition with negative consequences for their well-being. It is argued that while these struggles take place in face-to-face interactions, the violence of recognition is based on wider social structures, such as the generational order, familization of children’s emotional needs and a problematizing, individualistic diagnostic approach to deviation.

Theorising Trust — Citizenship Dynamics Conceptualisation of the Relationship Between Trust and Children’s Participation and Citizenship in Globalised Societies

This chapter explores how sociological theories of trust can contribute to a dynamic and critical understanding of children’s participation and citizenship within the new sociology of childhood paradigm. Critical is understood here as a dialectical approach which is attentive to power relations and that illuminates dynamics of discrimination, disciplining and exclusion. Using the concept of trust for this purpose might seem a bit peculiar, as many sociological approaches to trust are functionalist rather than critical, including Luhmann’s perspective which informs this chapter. However, in line with Harre (1999), I will argue that a functionalist concept of trust can underpin a critical agenda and that this can be further reinforced using Bourdieu’s relational sociology and Delanty’s theory of cultural citizenship.

Inclusive discourses in early childhood education

This article explores the discursive formation of inclusion in early childhood education and after‐school (recreation) centres in a Danish municipality. While inclusion has been a central educational issue in research and practice for well over quarter of a century, with continuing emphasis worldwide on ‘initiatives by governments’, this interest has centred on the school environment and institutions of higher education. Thus, despite increasing recognition of the significance of preschool and after‐school‐care, inclusion in these environments remains peripheral to the main debate.

Social Work and Lived Citizenship

Warming and Fahnoe offers, through the introduction of the sensitizing concept of lived citizenship and a socio-spatial perspective, a much needed renewal of the rights and strength-based approach to social work practice and research towards an almost anthropological understanding of the social situation of vulnerable groups. Indeed, they show how the concept of lived citizenship, and four supporting concepts (disciplinary versus inclusive identity shaping; intimate citizenship; space; and community governance) enables the contextualized analyses of the complexities of social work as a social space of meaning and power as (re-)producing practices through which clients experience and negotiate rights, responsibilities, participation, identity and belonging, and thereby of dynamics of inclusion and exclusion related to social work.

The Role of Social Work Practice and Policy in the Lived and Intimate Citizenship of Young People with Psychological Disorders

Drawing on the concepts of lived and intimate citizenship and applying a weak theory approach, Warming shows how social work practices at a residence for young people with psychological disorders constitute a social intervention with contested and multidimensional (action-related, emotional, affective, positioning-related) outcomes for clients’ rights, participation and belonging. Although the clients describe their stay as empowering and characterised by recognition, they also experience discrimination and exclusion. Indeed, the chapter’s socio-spatial analysis show how their time there unfolds as a risky dance on the edges of non-citizenship, where they are positioned as—or feel—out of place due to politically contingent everyday practices through which emotions, affections and more-than-human agents intertwine with rational human agency.

Children's Citizenship in Globalised Societies

Drawing on a sociospatial lived citizenship approach, this chapter theorises recognition and trust as being essential to children’s citizenship. Acknowledging citizenship rights, participation and identity as outcomes of conditioned, everyday interactions and practices, Warming explores the actual social conditions. She proposes a diagnosis of changing intimacies, including increasing rights-claiming, standardised individualisation, governmentalisation, responsibilisation, spatial flows and acceleration with a view to theorising how globalisation changes the ways in which children’s practices and negotiations of citizenship rights and responsibilities as well as their identity and sense of belonging is shaped. She calls this a ‘practice theoretical prism’ and argues that we need to drop the ambition to come up with a single, coherent and exhaustive approach in favour of exploring these dynamics from multiple angles.

Beasts, victims or competent agents: The positioning of children in research literature on manipulation

Drawing on positioning theory, Warming, Galløe, Carlsen and Rasmussen explore how discourses of manipulation in everyday life debates and research literature contribute to what Cook has termed ‘the moral project of childhood’. The analysis shows that children are positioned in these discourses either as incompetent, powerless victims or as powerful, egoistic or psychopathological agents, and moreover that these discourses unreflexively build upon and reinstall pre-sociological Dionysian and Apollonian views on Childhood, and a taken-for-granted generational order in which adults hold (and should hold) power over children.

Conclusion: The Potentials of a Lived Citizenship Perspective for Critical Social Work Research

Fahnoe and Warming provide a cogent overview of how a lived citizenship approach enables critical analyses of social work and social policies by addressing challenges related to rights, recognition, participation, belonging and identity. The sub-concept of intimate citizenship and a spatial analysis approach reveal how clients’ struggles in intimate and societal life, and in public and private spaces, are intertwined with geo-politics and global flows of governance strategies, e.g. neoliberalism and managerialism, which also condition social work practices. Indeed, social work constitutes a kind of sociological magnifying glass through which broader social changes can be studied, including dynamics of inclusion and exclusion, new conflicts and modes of resistance, and new social pathologies.

Trust Building and Violation During Childhood Consequences for Children's Wellbeing and Dispositions for Trust in Later Life

This chapter examines trust dynamics in children’s lives from a combined being and becoming perspective. In the early days of the new social studies of childhood, researchers advocated replacing the traditional developmental ‘becoming perspective’ on children’s lives and life conditions with a ‘being perspective’ (see for example Qvortrup, 1994). However, more recent contributions suggest that children must be conceptualised both as becomings and beings (Lee, 2001; Hallden, 2005; Uprichard, 2008). In keeping with that idea, this chapter examines childhood experiences in terms of insecurity/security, trust building/violation, and the consequences of these experiences for children’s wellbeing and self-esteem as well as for dispositions for trust in later life. Given all the societal (Welch et al., 2005; Putnam, 1993, 2000; Rothstein, 2009; Fukuyama, 1995; Uslaner, 2002) and individual (Ward & Meyer, 2009; Helliwell & Wang, 2011) benefits that trust is known to generate, we urgently need to expand our knowledge about how trust is formed within the ecological system that frames children’s lives and development (Bronfenbrenner, 1979; see also introduction to this book). Thinking along these lines means acknowledging that ‘society shapes the individual’ (James et al., 1998: 23), recognising the impact of adults (parents, teachers and others), peers and the local environment (see for example Stolle & Nishikawa, 2011; Jantzer et al., 2006), and regarding children as actors who shape their own futures, which is consistent with a life course perspective (Elder, 1994; Elder et al., 2003; Giele & Elder, 1998).