ABSTRACT

This book explores the alternative experiences of children and young people whose everyday lives contradict ideas and ideals of normalcy from the local to the global context.

Presenting empirical research and conceptual interventions from a variety of international contexts, this book seeks to contribute to understandings of alterity, agency and everyday precarity. The young lives foregrounded in this volume include the experiences of transnational families, children in ethnic minority communities, street-living young people, disabled children, child soldiers, victims of abuse, politically active young people, working children and those engaging with alternative education. By exploring ‘other’ ways of being, doing, and thinking about childhood, this book addresses questions around what it is to be a child and what it is to be marginalised in society. The narratives explore the everydayness and the mundanity of difference as they are experienced through social structures and relationships, simultaneously recognizing and critiquing notions of agency and power.

This book, including a discussion resource for teaching or peer reading groups, will appeal to academics, students and researchers across subject disciplines including Human Geography, Children’s Geography, Social Care and Childhood Studies.

chapter 1|12 pages

Introduction

part I|64 pages

Stigma

chapter 2|15 pages

Childhood disability and clothing

14(Un)dressing debates

chapter 3|16 pages

‘They should have stayed’

Blaming street children and disruption of the intergenerational contract

chapter 5|16 pages

‘Bad children’

International stigmatisation of children trained to kill during war and armed conflict

part II|64 pages

Work, education and activism

chapter 6|15 pages

Other(ed) childhoods

78Supplementary schools and the politics of learning

chapter 7|14 pages

Not an ‘other’ childhood

Child labour laws, working children and childhood in Bolivia

chapter 9|17 pages

Being seen, being heard

Engaging and valuing young people as political actors and activists

part III|78 pages

Out of place

chapter 12|25 pages

Discovering difference in outer suburbia

Mapping, intra-activity and alternative directedness in Shaun Tan’s Eric

chapter 14|6 pages

Conclusion