Johanna Kiili

A lattice of participation: reflecting on examples of children's and young people's collective engagement in influencing social welfare policies and practices

The article introduces four case studies from Wales, France and Finland and explores the situated, intergenerational and dynamic nature of collective participation in child welfare settings. Collective participation is conceived of as a process of engagement in which children and young people have some influence over the initiation or direction of a project; and as seeking a product, or outcome. The case studies represent a range of forms of collective engagement and highlight some key resources which supported childrens participation (communicative spaces, time, money, knowledge, social position, attitudes, social networks, institutional commitment, equipment, food and transport). Challenges encountered in achieving effective participation in different nations within Europe are also identified, related to generation barriers and the distribution of resources. These elements are used to construct a lattice of participation: a model for conceptualising children and young peoples collective engagement in participatory projects. The model provides a tool for visualising how, at different stages of a project, actors (children, young facilitators, adults and institutions) exercise influence by directing the use of different resources, such as finance and time. It invites reflection on why influence is limited in some stages of a participatory project, and how it is supported in other stages.

Invited to labour or participate : intra- and inter-generational distinctions and the role of capital in children’s invited participation

ABSTRACT This paper applies aspects of Bourdieu’s conceptual toolkit related to capital, and analyses inter- and intra-generational relations of influence. Applying Bourdieu’s concepts to examples of case studies from a children’s parliament in Finland, and with reference to an adult resident forum, moments of continuity and disruption in the relatively stable patterns of distinction between children and adults emerge. Children in school councils (at times) are labourers for agendas set by teachers, but the children at the top of the structure’s hierarchy can benefit from cultural capital and a functional capital that enables them to set agendas and direct the work of others. The political capital of the person presenting views from the participation sphere and the dominant symbolic capital of market logics appear to have a greater impact than generation on the influence participants achieve. Unquestioned acceptance of this differentiation suggests that new approaches to invited participation structures are needed.

Struggling to Support: Genesis of the Practice of Using Support Persons in the Finnish Child Welfare Field

Bourdieu has often — and we believe mistakenly — been regarded as a theorist of social reproduction rather than a theorist of transformation. Along with many others, we consider the Bourdieusian approach a particularly valuable means for studying social change. For Bourdieu history appeared as ‘a privileged instrument for breaking with received views that strike the uncritical observer as self-evident, commonsenical, and only natural’ (Bourdieu and Wacquant 1992: 238; Swartz 2013: 22). His own studies on social transformation often focused on such large-scale fields as the French academic world (1988 [1984]), the grandes ecoles (1996a [1988]), art (1996b [1992]) and economy (2005 [2000]). Gorski delineates Bourdieu as an eminent theorist of historical change in that his master concepts ‘can be elaborated into a more general framework for describing various forms and levels of socio-historical change and tracing out causal interconnections’ (Gorski 2013b: 327; also 2013a).