ABSTRACT
This book is about a possibility for institutions for children and young people. It is a possibility that we have been moving towards in previous
writings, both together and with other colleagues (cf. Dahlberg and Åsén, 1994; Moss and Pence, 1994; Dahlberg et al., 1999; Moss and Petrie, 2002). The possibility is that these institutions can be understood, first and foremost, as forums, spaces or sites for ethical and political practice – as ‘loci of ethical practices’ and ‘minor politics’. That these institutions can be places where the Other is not made into the Same, but which open up instead for diversity, difference and otherness, for new possibilities and potentialities. That they can be places where children and adults are governed less, not in the neo-conservative sense of ‘smaller government’, but through being able to confront dominant discourses that claim to transmit a true body of knowledge, and that seek to manipulate our bodies, mould our subjectivities and govern our souls. That they can be places, too, for confronting injustice, in particular, structural domination and oppression.
