Abstract
Most international research on childhood and youth is carried out by Northern Hemisphere-based scholars and deals with international questions in that ‘half’ of the world. Whilst there may be an understanding that scholars from the Global South have a better insight into the realities of childhood and youth in their regions, approaches to international childhood and youth research and particularly research on children out of place are also conducted by European, American and Australian scholars and are generally informed by Eurocentric ideals and values. Thus, children out of place are quickly categorised as children who have no childhood because of not living the ‘normal’, protected space of childhood that is characterised only by attending school and not by other activities such as work, be it domestic or outside the household.
The chapter concentrates on research conducted and published in German, which seems to have been stagnating since the late 1990s with only few exceptions. Therefore, we argue for a revival and new orientation of international studies in childhood and youth, taking a non-judgmental approach to understanding children’s and young people’s lives in viewing their own understanding of life as starting point and constantly reflecting the Eurocentric limitations engrained by socialisation in the Global North.
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Notes
- 1.
In fact, in several African and other countries of the Global South, children and young people make up the majority of the population.
- 2.
When we take a clear subject-oriented approach as in former publications (Liebel et al. 2001; Liebel 2004, 2012; Hungerland et al. 2007), we are aware that the question of the ‘subject’ has pitfalls in itself and can never be dealt with without taking into account its historical, societal and cultural context.
- 3.
Although this can be seen in most English childhood studies also (see, e.g. Qvortrup 2005; Qvortrup et al. 2009), there are at least more contributions in English that deal with childhoods in the Global South in the context of postcolonial globalisation (see, e.g. Burman 1994; Punch 2003; Cannella and Viruru 2004; Penn 2005; Wells 2009).
- 4.
Albeit the ground-breaking work of Margaret Mead (1928), childhood and youth have remained a marginal subject in ethnology and cultural anthropology. However, in the 1990s some articles were published in German that deal with research on childhood and youth in extra European societies and cultures and give some interesting ideas (e.g. Loo and Reinhart 1993; Dracklé 1996; Renner and Seidenfaden 1997). Contributions on Russia, Azerbaidjan and Palestine are found in two sociologically oriented more recent edited volumes on youth issues from an international perspective (Hunner-Kreisel, Schäfer and Witte 2008; Schäfer, Witte and Sander 2011). In her elementary text Lebensphase Kindheit (life phase of childhood) Doris Bühler-Niederberger (2011: 53–68) calls for the acknowledgement of the „diversity of childhoods“ and not to pre- measure their quality according to western patterns (see also Bühler-Niederberger 2010; Bühler-Niederberger and van Krieken 2008).
- 5.
Lenhart (2006: 201) explicitly criticises that the ‘theory of childhood’ is ‘in large parts one of the northern hemisphere. Within this space, the theory is additionally highly limited, being informed only by western democratic-capitalist industrial societies. Childhood in other world regions has on the other hand neither gained importance in historical nor current orientations of theory construction.’
- 6.
Other publications and research on global childhood and youth are published in English, although the researchers may be native German speakers – this is due to the international topic (see, e.g. contributions in the Handbook of Child Well-Being: Ben-Arieh et al. 2014). Nonetheless, we believe more publications in German would reach a larger number of scholars as well as German-speaking populations who are more firm in their native tongue than in English.
- 7.
There are endeavours to come by this, e.g. by the European Education Ministers by promoting ‘lifelong learning’ – this concept is however being implemented mainly in European-based projects.
- 8.
A discussion of the dominant discourses we are referring to here can be found in a later section of this contribution.
- 9.
In our Eurocentric vision, children who are excluded from institutions and spaces dedicated or reserved for them, such as schools, youth clubs, etc. are also viewed as marginalised and out of place.
- 10.
Karl Hanson (2012) develops this ambiguity further as ‘difference dilemma’ in his reflections on different schools of thought in children’s rights; according to this, it is always a difficult challenge to decide whether the view on the social status of children or that of adults is more important.
- 11.
The British sociologist Alan Prout (2005) points out the traditional dichotomies of structure and action, nature and culture, being and becoming that childhood research has taken on from ‘modern sociology’ and claims that they do not suffice to characterise today’s childhoods.
- 12.
The Wandervogel was a movement founded by middle and upper class school pupils and students in Steglitz near Berlin in the late nineteenth century with the aim of freeing themselves from educational constraints in rapidly industrialising society. The movement was informed by romanticism and was the beginning of youth movements. Amongst other activities, the Wandervogel movement gave important impulses for reformative pedagogics.
- 13.
New perspectives for childhood and youth research could derive from approaches in migration studies in which research is experiencing a ‘transnational turn’ (Vertovec 2009: 6) to new spatial and virtual neighbourhoods. By this, it becomes clear that ‘national, cultural and political borders are crossed, and collective and individual identities as well as concepts of childhood and youth, of growing up in hybrid forms are merged anew’ (Hunner-Kreisel and Bühler-Niederberger 2015: 5–6).
- 14.
German citizenship has always been ‘given’ or ‘granted’ according to ius sanguinis (bloodline). These strict principles have become a bit porous with the first and second changes to German citizenship law. Children of non-German citizens had been granted German citizenship if born here, however, by the age of 18 – then the age was raised to 23 – these young people had to choose between German citizenship or that of their parents; the demand to choose was abolished with the second law which came into force in the late 2014.
- 15.
A critical note is necessary here: the so-called youth transition studies’ only conclusion drawn is the demand to provide youth with tools by training them for the functional character traits needed to meet the growing risks of competition or sociopolitical compensation strategies (see Walther 2006). No less questionable is the attempt to protect young people from risk and guarantee a better start in life by reviving the youth moratorium (see Clark 2015). Notwithstanding all the differences of these two approaches, they are both based on an equally paternalistic and individualistic perspective.
- 16.
By ‘east’ we are referring to the countries of the former Soviet Bloc. When talking of the Global South, the ‘east’ is included.
- 17.
When speaking of ‘children’, it has to be understood that we orient ourselves towards the formal definition of a child according to the UN Convention on the Rights of the Child, according to which all young are considered to be children until the age of 18. This does not imply that they see themselves as children.
- 18.
On ‘street children’ and the societal connotations implied in this term, not only in societies of the North but also in societies of the South is taken up by Michael Bourdillon in this volume.
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Liebel, M., Budde, R. (2017). Other Children, Other Youth: Against Eurocentrism in Childhood and Youth Research. In: Invernizzi, A., Liebel, M., Milne, B., Budde, R. (eds) ‘Children Out of Place’ and Human Rights . Children’s Well-Being: Indicators and Research, vol 15. Springer, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-33251-2_8
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