Michael G. Wyness

Childhood, Politics and Ambiguity Towards an Agenda for Children’s Political Inclusion

This article examines the relationship between children, young people and the world of politics. Whilst the past decade or so has seen the development of initiatives that draw children within the political sphere, there are powerful political and social forces that position children as dependent subalterns and thus exclude them from political participation.We address this ambiguous situation by referring to competing discourses on childhood: the discourse on children’s needs that foregrounds their transitional social status and an imperative to protect, and a set of ideas that revolves around children having collective ‘interests’ that require political articulation. In drawing out these competing discourses, the article addresses a range of ‘inclusive’ policies at global, national and local levels.

Children's participation and intergenerational dialogue: Bringing adults back into the analysis

Within the field of children’s participation there has been a shift from adults mediating children’s worlds to children themselves becoming the sole interpreters of their own standpoints. In the process this has sometimes led to the marginalisation of adults’ perspectives on and contributions to children’s participation. In this article the author argues that analyses of children’s participatory roles need to take account of the form and nature of children’s relationships with adults. Drawing on the notion of intergenerational dialogue the article explores a range of political and global themes that highlight the participatory roles of children and their interdependence on adults.

Children Representing Children Participation and the problem of diversity in UK youth councils

This article is concerned with the relationship between children’s participation and the diversity of childhoods. While there are a number of different arrangements for encouraging children and young people to participate, the article focuses on a dominant mode of participation through which children are elected to represent the interests of other children within formal institutional structures. Drawing on empirical data from work with school and civic councillors in the UK, the article critically addresses two questions: what level of involvement do these child representatives have within their schools and communities that allow them to articulate the interests of their peers? To what extent do these representative forms of children’s participation reflect the interests of diverse groups of children? The article concludes that the implementation of electoral forms of participation reinforce existing inequalities between groups of young people and are less likely to incorporate the voices of disadvantaged and socially excluded groups of young people. Formal structures of democratic representation may need to be revised in exploring more fruitful ways of articulating the voices of diverse groups of children and young people.

Children, young people and civic participation: regulation and local diversity

International and national political agendas have prioritized childrens issues in the past decade or so. However the nature of the commitment to children themselves participating in arrangements that affect them and their communities are highly ambiguous. Whilst childrens voices have become progressively louder, the extent to which these voices are articulated within spaces for participation over which children can genuinely claim ownership are often compromised by political structures determined by adults. This article examines these participatory spaces for children within the civic or political realm. Drawing on two distinct cases of civic participation, the paper explores the ways that young participants understand their relationship to adult structures and negotiate their roles as representatives of childrens interests.

Keeping Tabs on an Uncivil Society: Positive Parental Control

Interview data from a sample of parents with adolescent children are used to assess arguments that centre on the fears parents have about their child rearing practices. The focus in some recent accounts of parenting has been on how these fears indicate the moral and psychological state of parenthood rather than the problems parents think their children have negotiating an increasingly insecure outside world. By focusing on the latter, this paper relocates these fears externally as parents try to control their childrens whereabouts. Control, rather than being defined negatively as a way of compensating for a lack of moral influence, is taken as an important means by which parents supervise their childrens moral and physical wellbeing.

Children, Family and the State: Revisiting Public and Private Realms

The state is often viewed as part of the impersonal public sphere in opposition to the private family as a locus of warmth and intimacy. In recent years this modernist dichotomy has been challenged by theoretical and institutional trends which have altered the relationship between state and family. This article explores changes to both elements of the dichotomy that challenge this relationship: a more fragmented family structure and more individualised and networked support for children. It will also examine two new elements that further disrupt any clear mapping between state/family and public/private dichotomies: the third-party role of the child in family/state affairs, and children’s application of virtual technology that locates the private within new cultural and social spaces. The article concludes by examining the rise of the ‘individual child’ hitherto hidden within the family/state dichotomy and the implications this has for intergenerational relations at personal and institutional levels.

Global standards and deficit childhoods: the contested meaning of children's participation

In recent years a discursive voice-based form of childrens participation has become a global standard. This has rendered more material childrens practices particularly in less-affluent regions as deviant forms of participation. Drawing on the case of child labour, I critically examine the dominance of a discursive model of participation in terms of international policy statements. I argue for a more inclusive notion of childrens participation incorporating childrens economic as well as discursive contributions within their families, communities and schools. At the same time a more nuanced view potentially shifts the policy focus towards the legitimation of child labour rather than its condemnation.

Sociology of Childhood

Course Description: This course will examine how children shape and are shaped by the social worlds in which they live. We will consider the experiences of children in the different contexts and institutions that make up the landscape of contemporary childhood, and to a lesser extent, experiences of the adults charged with their care. We will consider how childhood and adolescence have been defined and have changed over time and why. We will explore social life from the perspectives of children and teens, paying particular attention throughout the course to how class, gender and race shape experiences and to the ways that children’s agency shapes institutions. In the first part of the course, we will consider childhood as a historically constructed category as well as from a developmental perspective, and the social and material environment in which contemporary childhood takes place. In the second part of the course, we will study two important institutional cornerstones of childhood: family and school experiences, and the different ways these are connected. Finally, we will consider topics that may be considered as problems of childhood, including commercialization and technology, the medicalization of different aspects of children’s life experiences and crime and delinquency.