ABSTRACT

This chapter discusses the difference and transgression through a series of empirical, conceptual and literature-based exemplars. It addresses the ways in which normative ideas about childhood impact on understandings of particular kinds of children and set up assumptions about the norms against which 'others' are judged. The chapters draws on a range of dimensions of difference, including how difference is manifested through geographical location; economic differentiation and identification through social class; embodied differences such as gender and disability; and through a developmental lens, which demarcates activities as congruent within a particular developmental age or as transgressive. It discusses these instances in ways that attend to the local, contingent and partial knowledges about contexts of development and movements through time. The introduction chapter then presents an overview of the key concepts discussed in the subsequent chapters of this book.