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This edited volume offers in-depth analyses of childhood as a social technology of governance. Contributions explore the ways in which dominant ideas about childhood bear on governance in a range of specific contexts, spanning the personal, the local and the global.
Each chapter reveals important insights into how ‘imagined childhood’ functions as an ubiquitous and powerful social technology of governance. In so doing, they highlight the importance of theorizing childhood not as a time of life, but as a cardinal category of identity/difference that is indispensable to social meaning-making.
Rooted in critical childhood studies, the book explores how ‘imagined’ childhoods not only govern children’s lives, but also constitute adult subjects, institutions, states and other political orders.
Nadine Benedix is a Research Associate and Doctoral Candidate at the Chair of Transnational Governance at the Technical University of Darmstadt, Germany.
Ulrike Bialas is a Postdoctoral Research Fellow at the Max Planck Institute for the Study of Religious and Ethnic Diversity, Germany.
Joanne Faulkner is Senior Lecturer in the School of Communication, Society and Culture at Macquarie University, Australia.
Stefanie Fishel is Senior Lecturer in the School of Law and Society at the University of the Sunshine Coast, Australia.
Jonathan Josefsson is Associate Professor in the Department of Thematic Studies at Linköping University, Sweden.
Zsuzsa Millei is Professor in the Faculty of Education and Culture at Tampere University, Finland.
Archana Rath is Assistant Professor in the School of International Affairs at O.P. Jindal Global University, India.
Lindsay Robinson is Sessional Instructor in the Department of Indigenous Studies at Wilfrid Laurier University, Canada.
Karen Smith is Lecturer in the School of Social Policy at University College Dublin, Ireland.
Zain Swaleh is Lecturer in the Department of Media, Communications, Creative Arts, Literature and Language at Macquarie University, Australia.
Jana Tabak is Assistant Professor in the Department of International Relations at State University of Rio de Janeiro, Brazil.
Jan Varpanen is Postdoctoral Researcher in the Department of Thematic Studies at Linköping University, Sweden.
Introduction: The Age of Childhood - J. Marshall Beier
Part I: Consequential Imaginaries
1. Childhood as a Technology of Subjectification: Governing through (Re)imagined Childhoods - Karen Smith
2. Governing Childhood, Governing the New World: Child Figurations at the Frontiers of 20th Century Internationalism - Jonathan Josefsson
3. Governing Childhoods through Cleanliness - Zsuzsa Millei, Jan Varpanen, and Stefanie Fishel
Part II: Everyday Indeterminacies
4. Governing the Colony Through the Child: The Part of ‘the Aboriginal Child’ in Australian Settler-Colonial Imagination - Joanne Faulkner
5. The ‘Big Circle Trap’ and the ‘Zinzani’: Evicting and Caging Indigenous Children in Australia and Occupied Palestine - Zain Swale
6. Childhood and Governance in India: Legal Regimes, Age, and Identity - Archana Rath
7. ‘You Belong Here’: Militarism, Imagined Childhood, and the Celebration of the British Junior-Soldier - Jana Tabak
Part III: Glocal Tensions
8. Saving Girls to Save Ourselves? Girl Rising, Climate Education, and Green Girlhood as Governance - Lindsay Robinson
9. Imagining Working Children: Disputes and Struggles Around Child Labour Regulation in Bolivia - Nadine Benedix
10. Intimate Migration Governance through Constructions of Childhood: The Case of Legal
Guardianships for Unaccompanied Minors in Germany - Ulrike Bialas
Conclusion: Imagining Childhood as a Technology of Governance - J. Marshall Beier