Abstract
Based on long-term ethnographic fieldwork this chapter analyses how children in Russian-speaking middle-class families in Finland construct and negotiate economic inequality. Childhood recollections show that children experience a new locality as a new materiality. Children’s material worlds consist of infrastructures with guidelines and webs organising their everyday beings. Teenagers’ consumption of junk food, and the cultural practices of handling pocket money, were two of the most significant topics related to children’s economic worlds and the inequality within them. The distribution of presents at Christmas can also convince children of their unequal position in society. These are practices grounded in the discourse on richness and poverty. At the same time, within this discourse children negotiate their positions using their translocal experience and knowledge.
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Hakkarainen, M. (2018). Experiencing Inequality: Children Shaping Their Economic Worlds in a Translocal Context. In: Assmuth, L., Hakkarainen, M., Lulle, A., Siim, P. (eds) Translocal Childhoods and Family Mobility in East and North Europe. Studies in Childhood and Youth. Palgrave Macmillan, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-89734-9_6
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