Sue Ruddick

The Politics of Aging: Globalization and the Restructuring of Youth and Childhood

This paper explores the ways that constitutive elements of globalization—including a celebration of risk, reduction in state funding for social reproduction in developed nations and pressures to modernize in underdeveloped ones—are being “smuggled in” in the guise of new discourses around youth and childhood. Far from being a byproduct of capitalism in its various phases, youth and childhood can be located at its literal and figurative core. In a crude characterization of the global map as it has emerged in over the past twenty years, one would find a world drawn roughly into three parts—and in each of these parts, youth and childhood is being restructured in a distinct way. These divisions look suspiciously like the earlier global models of developed, developing and underdeveloped nations, but the nature of the exclusions that sustain them spell particularly bad news for the worlds young people. Modern ideals of youth and childhood that became hegemonic in the West over the past century are being exported to non-Western contexts in which resources to adequately reproduce these forms are sadly lacking. At the same time, in Western settings over the past two decades, such resources have been eroded for children and young people, and celebrated aspects of “youthfulness” have been displaced to adults to justify lifelong learning and the increasing assumption of risk by older workers. The paper urges a move away from the study of behaviors of “children and adults” as static categories and towards an exploration of shifting norms and forms of “childhood and aging” as dynamic processes that both help to constitute and are constituted by a new political economy.

At the Horizons of the Subject: Neo-liberalism, neo-conservatism and the rights of the child Part One: From ‘knowing’ fetus to ‘confused’ child

The inability of the child to represent his or her own interests as a legal subject (by definition), and the continued interest of the state in the child as a futurity or resource locks the child in an eternal pas de deux: the child continually approaches the possibility of ‘personhood’ but never achieves it. In the past 40 years, in western nations the childs legal personhood has been simultaneously invoked and constrained: through a growing array of persons and organizations that, as an exteriority, purport to ‘best represent the child’; and through an ever more finely gradated mapping of the childs interiority—which filters the childs voice through a range of interpretive theories, and mechanisms. In this myopic and hyperopic reading of the child, the childs voice disappears. This paper is the first of two examining the relationship of the child to the liberal notion of the subject. In the case law explored around fetal rights and custody issues in the United States and elsewhere we find a paradoxical situation where the ‘fetus’ is granted a more authoritative voice in terms of what it ‘wants’ than is the child, whose wishes are perpetually called into question. Together these papers raise questions about the nature of the subject qua individual. They highlight the potential for a ventriloquist discourse around the child whereby neo-liberal and neo-conservative groups that purport to speak for the child mobilize their own political interests.

At the Horizons of the Subject: Neo-liberalism, neo-conservatism and the rights of the child Part Two: Parent, caregiver, state

This paper is the second of two that examine the paradoxical relationship of the child to the liberal notion of the subject. Together they explore the range of contexts in which childrens relationship to parents and other caregivers raise questions about the nature of the subject qua individual, and highlight the potential for a ventriloquist discourse around the child in which political projects are mobilized by neo-liberal and neo-conservative groups that purport to speak for the child. The first paper examined the emergence of two contradictory images: the ‘knowing’ fetal subject and the confused child; the second paper explores particular forms of presencing and absencing of the child in relation to parental rights and questions of social entitlements. Both papers speak to the contorted somatography and topography of the child-as-subject that is emerging at an historical juncture when childrens rights are being mobilized to undermine the gains made by a range of heterodox subjects. They point to the limits of liberal constructions of the subject in struggles for emancipation.

Speaking of Geography: Language, Power, and the Spaces of Anglo-Saxon ‘hegemony’

First, I would like to thank Roger Keil for his service to the Society and Space Editorial Board. Roger has asked to step down from the board, given his new responsibilities as Editor of the International Journal of Urban and Regional Research. I would like to thank Roger for his service to the journal over many years, and especially for his efforts to bring German-language urban studies to an English-speaking audience. Carolyn Cartier has taken over from Bruce Braun and Donald Moore as Book Reviews Editor. I would like to thank Bruce and Donald for their service to the journal, and welcome Carolyn as the new Book Reviews Editor. Finally, I am pleased to welcome Wing-Shing Tang to the Editorial Board. Dr Tang studies governmentality and rights to the city in the context of urban (re)development and planning in China and East Asia.

Abnormal, the “New Normal,” and Destabilizing Discourses of Rights

A boy was taken from his elementary school in handcuffs after his classmates turned him in for drawing pictures of weapons. The 11-year-old fifth grader was not charged with a crime in the Wednesday incident. His name is not being released to protect him, school officials said. “There were some drawings that were confiscated by the teacher,” Oldsmar Elementary School Principal David Schmitt said. “The children were in no danger at all. It involved no real weapons.” Still, Schmitt refused to discuss details of the boy’s case. “All I can tell you is it was a threat . . . against students,” he said. “Nobody in particular, but students in general. . . . We just need to get it through kids’ heads that there are certain things you don’t say and there are certain things you don’t draw,” he said. The boy was handcuffed by school police for his safety, according to Pinellas County School District spokesman Ron Stone. “That’s normal procedure in a situation like this,” Stone said. “The primary concern was to make sure we get appropriate services for the child.” —Sun-Sentinel, May 11, 2001

Towards a dialectics of the positive

The persistent divide within French philosophy between so-called structuralists and poststructuralists has been recently revived in the writings of Badiou and others. This narration of the history of French philosophy is trapped inevitably in the very way it poses the problem: as a dialectic of the negative. The abstracting of these traditions from all their messiness into a dialectical opposition is itself part of the problem, a misrepresentation, ignoring any points of convergence. Drawing centrally on the work of Pierre Macherey, I suggest this divide can be traced back to Hegels profound misreading of Spinoza, which became the basis for Hegels dialectic and Marxs subsequent inversion. I explore crucial points of convergence between Marx and Spinoza, and a resonance between Deleuze and Macherey (who are often stereotyped as emblems of oppositional tendencies within French philosophy). Their work converges on a rejection of negation as the defining quality of essence or multiplicity and, in the case of Deleuze and Macherey, a shared uptake of Spinozas concept of potentia. Their work gestures towards the development of a dialectics of the positive: a problematic that might enable us to think across our differences to a political ontology that embraces the posthuman, immanent, and affirmative qualities of struggle.

Situating the Anthropocene: planetary urbanization and the anthropological machine

The anthropological machine is the discursive framework, the dispositif that grounds “Western man” in a sense of civility, secured through a violent division within and between the human and nonhuman: not the after-effect of the civilizing act but its very foundation. This paper explores Agamben’s machine at multiple sites: in its expression in everyday lives of urban citizens, and its legitimation of capitalist urbanization on broader spatial and temporal scales, its “worlding” through planetary urbanization and normalization of climate change. Complicit in capitalist urbanization and climate change, the anthropological machine has acted as a “switch point” since the 1600s. It now frames an emergent response: triage as the inevitable sacrifice of some peoples and parts of the planet to preserve others. If the urban is to become the site of mondialization, confronting the apparent inevitability of triage we must think beyond the either-or of a people or a planet. Thought in relation to the urban, the anthropological machine offers a meeting ground between urban political economy and assemblage urbanism. It enables us to situate the Anthropocene and differentiate the urban. But it also exposes a deep divide between scholars reframing the human beyond “Western man”: between those for whom the more-than-human expresses the dreams of a biophilic city and those for whom the less-than-human is increasingly its living nightmare.

Disability and Deleuze An Exploration of Becoming and Embodiment in Children’s Everyday Environments

Building on Deleuze’s theories of the becoming of bodies, and notions of the geographic maturity of the disabled body we formulate an emplaced model of disability wherein bodies, social expectations and built form intersect in embodied experiences in specific environments to increase or decrease the capacity of disabled children to act in those environments. We join a growing effort to generate a more comprehensive model of disability, which moves beyond a binary between the individual and the social. Drawing on in-depth case studies conducted with 13 physically disabled children, we consider the intersections between their primary environments (homes, schools and neighbourhoods) and the multiple subjectivities they embody. Ultimately we make a case about the importance of responsive, situated models of subjectivity for the development of adaptations, and that physical and social adaptations must respond to these children’s complex and varied needs and desires.

Rethinking the subject, reimagining worlds:

The ecological crisis is also an ontological crisis. It raises questions about our ethical response-ability to this world, calling for a rethinking of the human–nature divide. Vitalist approaches and scholarship on the affective turn have shifted our understanding of our relations to nonhuman others, but they remain constrained: limited to proximate attachments; ambivalent or agnostic in the face of conflict; unable to move beyond the celebration of a lively earth. At issue I feel is a methodological individualism that haunts these offerings when confronted with questions of the ethical composition of a larger whole. Building upon Sharp’s invitation to explore ‘our continuity with nonhuman agencies’, I investigate the ethical basis for a reimagined subject in a series of becomings: the becoming nature of God, becoming animal of man, and becoming sign of earth. Drawing on the writings of Spinoza, Deleuze and Guattari, and Peirce, I rework this familiar terrain on two counts. First, I examine how the content of each becoming invokes distinct relational dynamics and complicates the ‘problem of composition’. Second, I draw on Spinoza’s differentiated concept of power (as potentia and potestas) and the concept of the composite individual to suggest an alternative way of framing our collaborations with the nonhuman world.

Inaccessible childhoods: evaluating accessibility in homes, schools and neighbourhoods with disabled children

ABSTRACT Accessible built environments are a critical component of Canada’s commitment to disabled children’s ‘right to enjoy full and decent lives’ [United Nations Convention on the Rights of the Child. 1989. Convention on the Rights of the Child. New York.] . Although valid, reliable research data about the accessibility of built environments are key to developing related policies, these data currently do not exist. To begin to redress this gap, we conducted a case study series followed by a survey to determine the accessibility of schools, homes and neighbourhoods directly from disabled children (The ScHaN Project). To present a concise summary of the findings that can inform equitable, evidence-based policies, we developed a scoring system for their homes, schools and neighbourhoods. Although our findings illustrate that eliciting and interpreting data from these children were complex undertakings, it is clear that none of these central environments met Canada’s obligation to enhance equity by enabling their access, inclusion and participation.