Jane Helleiner

`Over the River' Border childhoods and border crossings at Niagara

Drawing on interviews with Canadian borderlanders, this article examines childhood experiences with the Canada—US border in the mid-1980s to early 1990s. The retrospective accounts of childhood border experiences demonstrate how childhood was produced and experienced in border crossings and how the production of childhood intersected with a stratified border to reinforce forms of privilege and exclusion associated with class, citizenship, gender and racial/ethnic positionings.

“Women of the itinerant class”: Gender and anti-traveller racism in Ireland

Abstract This paper examines the articulation of racism and gender in Ireland through an analysis of elite Traveller-related discourses and practices in the period preceding the implementation of a settlement program in the mid-1960s. During this period, elites expressed concern about the vulnerability of non-Traveller women to a masculinised Traveller population. By the 1940s and 1950s protection of non-Traveller women was being invoked as grounds for exclusionary anti-Traveller actions. The articulation of anti-Traveller discourses with an ideology of female domesticity obscured the existence of Traveller women. Traveller women however emerged as targets of efforts at domestication in early settlement policy and practice.

Canadian border resident experience of the “smartening” border at Niagara

Abstract Much of the writing on the post‐9/11 Canada/U.S. border analyses (supportively or critically) the border‐related projects of economic and political elites. This paper focuses instead on local residents’ experiences of a changing border. Drawing on interviews and press reports from the Niagara region, the paper provides a grounded account of Canadian border life both at and after 9/11. Local experiences of altered cross‐border mobilities, intensified border inspections and reworked political subjectivities complicate dominant claims of straightforward congruence between a “smartening” Canada/U.S. border and border resident interests and concerns.

Recruiting the “culturally compatible” migrant: Irish Working Holiday migration and white settler Canadianness:

Working Holiday programs have been identified as an increasingly significant source of temporary migrant labor for several wealthy states. This case study adds to limited work on this phenomenon in the Canadian context by offering a partial chronology of Irish Working Holiday migration to Canada and a critical analysis of Canadian government discourse that positioned Irish migrants as not only “culturally compatible” but also part of white settler Canadianness thus making them desirable workers and potential future immigrants. The Canadian case study raises questions about how Working Holiday and related youth mobility programs may be linked to classed and racialized migration and dominant ideologies of nationalized belonging

Reflections on Using Participant-Generated, Digital Photo-Elicitation in Research With Young Canadians About Their First Part-Time Jobs

Participant-generated photo-elicitation usually involves inviting participants to take photographs, which are then discussed during a subsequent interview or in a focus group. This approach can provide participants with the opportunity to bring their own content and interests into research. Following other child and youth researchers, we were drawn to the potential of participant-generated photo-elicitation to offer a methodological counterweight to existing inequalities between adult researchers and younger participants. In this article, we reflect on our use of one-on-one, participant-generated photo-elicitation interviews in a Canadian-based research project looking at young people’s earliest paid work. We discuss some of the challenges faced when it came to gaining institutional ethics approval and also report on how the method was unexpectedly but productively altered by participants’ use of publicly accessible Internet images to convey aspects of their work. Overall, we conclude that participant-generated photo-elicitation democratized the research process and deepened our insights into young people’s early work and offer some recommendations for future photo-elicitation research.

“I’ll be more prepared than most people”: Very young Canadian workers talking about their first jobs

We report on interviews with very young Canadian workers regarding their first jobs, with a focus on why they started working, the rewards and risks of their work, and their familial supports. Our participants were largely positive about their early work experiences, although they also raised concerns, e.g. about safety. We reflect on three inter-related themes emerging from their accounts: competence and vulnerability, independence and dependence, and protection and under-protection.

O’Connor, Pat (2008) Irish Children and Teenagers in a Changing World. Manchester: Manchester University Press. (181 pp.) ISBN 9780719078194

idioms and forms such as the notion of mantra, for example, we are able to see the larger relationships that exist between the school and the temple and how these relationships help to produce meaningful senses of belonging. Over time, children come to embody nationalism in the daily rituals of singing, chanting or calisthenics (among others) that they engage with in school, and it is because these senses of belonging are embodied that they are both meaningful and powerful. In this way, the nation is incorporated into the children’s very physical, bodily experience rather than simply being an abstract set of ideas that they are loyal to. But, however powerful these processes are, Benei is very careful to point out that children are not passive agents, but are involved in negotiating these processes in ways that range from unconditional identification to total resistance (p. 65). Two of the chapters in the book, one devoted to Muslim children’s education and another devoted to children attending military schools, provide very interesting comparative insights on the processes of embodiment and incorporation. In between the different chapters, the author uses what she calls ‘interludes’, which include her own reflections as well as children’s drawings and narratives in an effort to make children and their voices more visible in the book. Though she clearly considers these interludes to be an experimental attempt at representation and that they are, after all, fictional (rather than ‘real’ or ‘authentic’ in an objective sense), they are in many ways reflective of the book’s underlying agenda − to push the boundaries of scholarship a bit more. One could certainly sense from reading the book that Benei has opened the doors to a new landscape which needs to be further explored through cross-cultural, comparative studies, and has provided the necessary food for thought to stimulate this exploration. The book also shows clearly how the study of children and childhood can benefit immensely through its engagement with mainstream theoretical topics such as nationalism from which children have been mostly absent and it is, in a sense, a proper response to Sharon Stephen’s call back in 1997 in a special issue of Childhood devoted to “Children and Nationalism” to put children and childhood at the center of our thinking about nationalism.