Vittorio Iervese

Introduction — Theoretical Foundations and the Book’s Roadmap

Childhood and adolescence are periods in life that are distinct for a variety of reasons. It is during the early years of life that individuals experience the most important cognitive and emotional developments that subsequently shape their identity and world-views. The capabilities of children and adolescents are formed through social interaction and receptiveness within the household and broader environments, and constitute to a large extent the foundation of a human being’s development. This means that understanding and assessing children’s and adolescents’ well-being cannot successfully be pursued by viewing them as miniature adults. Moreover, understanding adults’ well-being might not be possible without reference to these early stages in life. As a result, what might appear to be a simple technical question — namely, what is the most appropriate way of assessing children’s well-being? — may turn out to be a real challenge. To help address this challenge, this book develops the capability approach (CA) as a conceptual framework for understanding children’s well-being.

Observing Children’s Capabilities as Agency

This chapter explores some conditions in which children’s resources can be transformed in capabilities (choosing) and therefore functionings (acting), and children’s rights to participation in society can be promoted. The Capability Approach asserts that children’s ability to convert resources and commodities into capabilities and functionings depends on conversion processes and factors. We will highlight how the concepts of conversion processes and factors can be analysed in the perspective of Conversation Analysis and Social Systems Theory. We will provide theoretical and empirical evidence that important conversion processes and factors can be produced in adult-children interactions, as communication systems promoting children’s rights to participate in decision making, i.e. children’s rights to agency. In particular, we will analyse the facilitation of children’s agency in the interaction as a potential social conversion process. We will examine data on interactions in educational settings, showing in which ways different forms of facilitation promote opportunities for children’s agency. Finally, we will discuss the features of different forms of facilitation as possible social conversion factors promoting children’s rights to participate in decision making.

The Right to Be Transnational: Narratives and Positionings of Children with a Migration Background in Italy

This chapter presents a social system and interactional approach to explore how theorising children in sociology has moved beyond mere interest in children’s ‘voice’ to one where children practise agency and contribute to the structuring of social systems. It examines how children with a migrant background play with narratives of transnational mobility, claiming transnational citizenship. Reflecting on how children’s citizenship and rights relate, and how they are affected by transnational mobility, allows a focus on children’s active participation in social processes. Through positioning theory and interaction analysis, applied to video-recorded extracts of workshops, we aim to explore the resources that children activate in the interaction to deal with their travelling experiences and to construct and negotiate their identities inside the group in an institutional setting.

Form is when the substance rises to the surface

Significant international political discourse in the field of education and culture (UNESCO, EU, IFACCA) calls for advances to be made towards more coordinated and complementary public policies. Innovative international projects have pointed the way forward. (Creative Partnership: ) Unfortunately, while they may have succeeded in producing examples of good practice, they have not gone on to become standard practice in Catalonia. The aim of our investigation is to identify the factors responsible for divergence – and the difficulties involved in promoting convergence – between education and culture by studying the preambles of laws between 1980 and 2010 and the opinions of qualified professionals and experts. Our investigation confirms that there is a lack of fluidity in the dialog between cultural and educational policies in Catalonia. However, our research has provided evidence that cultural education can be systematized in order to improve synergy in future policies. The principle strategies involve (i) the reinforcement of educational local issues and the challenge of cultural citizenship; (ii) coordinated action aimed at developing cultural competencies while taking into consideration the appreciation of diversity, media education and intercultural dialog and, (iii) the promotion of creativity and the exploration of training in expressive potential in all kinds of artistic languages.