Abstract
As scholars researching children and childhood, most of us have an additional important role of teaching on these themes. Pedagogic strategies can, therefore, play a key role in encouraging students to move beyond binary categorization of children’s lives into “them” versus “us”. Often, what is left out of this reductive framing are questions of history and political economy as well as a critical reading of power, philanthropy, and the politics of media representations. This chapter offers a specific focus on the intellectual and pedagogical complexities, efforts, and challenges in teaching a course on “Global Childhoods” to undergraduates in Camden, NJ. This course compelled me to open up the “global” beyond a discussion of childhoods as multiple to instead rework the term to function as a productive node to discuss the flow of ideas, persons, commodities, media, and policies that affect children’s lives around the world, including those in Camden.
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Notes
- 1.
Borrowing from the work of Michel Foucault, I use this term to refer to the ways in which childhood in advanced liberal societies is governed through the setting in place of certain norms. This norm is not necessarily limited to legal norms but instead circulates more broadly, often framing interpersonal relations as well as the working of social institutions like schools, and thus works to measure, guide, realign, penalize, criminalize, and so on, those who do not conform.
- 2.
I borrow the term “denial of coevalness” from Johannes Fabian’s (1983) critique of the discipline of anthropology in which this term broadly is used to reference the hierarchical, a-temporal, relationship within which the final production of the ethnographic “object” or the “other” is indexed.
- 3.
These two terms are those that emerged out of my ethnographic research with a group of street children in Calcutta.
- 4.
Indigenous and Aboriginal children in the continent of North America and Australia bore the brunt of settler modernity and colonial efforts to civilize populations through the use of brutal force. This includes the “stolen generation” or the 10–30 per cent of Aboriginal children who were forcibly removed from their parents from the late nineteenth to the mid-twentieth century as part of the state’s mission of cultural assimilation (Jacobs 2006).
- 5.
This refers to the various efforts undertaken by President Lyndon Johnson, between 1964 and1966, to address poverty and racial inequality in the US. Several key pieces of legislation were passed during this period and include the Civil Rights Act (1964) as well as the Economic Opportunity Act (1964). The former banned discrimination based on race and gender in employment and ended the segregation of all public facilities. The latter aimed to address poverty by setting up a job corps to provide vocational training and setting up an Office of Economic Opportunity. In addition, he started the Head Start programme and increased funding for public schools as well as instituted Medicare to control the costs of healthcare amongst several more initiatives that funded the arts and environmental programmes.
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Balagopalan, S. (2019). Teaching “Global Childhoods”: From a Cultural Mapping of “Them” to a Diagnostic Reading of “Us/US”. In: Twum-Danso Imoh, A., Bourdillon, M., Meichsner, S. (eds) Global Childhoods beyond the North-South Divide. Palgrave Studies on Children and Development. Palgrave Macmillan, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-95543-8_2
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