ABSTRACT
As an ethnographic sociologist seeking to understand contemporary urban childhoods, I take a historical, interactionist, and social practice approach to “contexts,” “diversity,” and “pathways of development.” This approach, which examines large-scale structural changes within the situated and embodied practices of everyday life, breaks with the “separate containers” mode of thought that characterizes much of the developmental research on contexts and differences. The image of separate containers can be found, for example, in Uri Bronfenbrenner’s (1979) conceptualization of “mesosystems” of “family,” “school,” and “neighborhood.” Bronfenbrenner asserted that these separate contexts are “linked,” and in turn, “nested” within broader “macrosystems” of ideology and institutional structure. But his relatively static framework tends to constrain rather than facilitate understanding of the complex and processual dynamics of social life. It also runs the risk of drawing on commonsense American typifications of sites like “family,” “school,” and “neighborhood” rather than opening toward the enormous range of contingent circumstances in which different children grow up.1
