Abstract
It was the consolidation of the first wave of nation-states towards the end of the 19th century that established the modern conception of ‘the child’ and ‘childhood’ … various legislative measures gave an abstract, general meaning to the word ‘child’.
The first part of the Special Issue on the Cultural politics of ‘childhood’ and ‘nation’ explored ways in which historical and contemporary discourses in education and welfare, circulating at different geographical scales and also contributing to nation-building processes, instrumentalize children and ‘childhood’ for various political agendas. It focused on examining governing mandates and socializing processes aimed at children and childhood, including policies and practices of education and welfare (Correll and Lepperhoff, Lee, and Somerville) first grade readers (Silova, Mead Yaqub, Mun and Palandjian), children’s books (Taylor), preschool curriculum (Duhn) and media panics (Owen). The authors illuminated some avenues and practices through which (1) childhoods are being shaped in line with ideals of the nation, (2) particular kinds of national and cosmopolitan citizens are being shaped from child subjects and (3) children’s belonging to and feelings about the nation are being formed. Kallio theorized children’s agentic political socialization to prepare the second part of the Special Issue, which focuses on children’s engagements with and participation in these processes.
This second part of the Special Issue on the Cultural politics of ‘childhood’ and ‘nation’ explores how children encounter and learn and, as active agents, engage in nation-building and with nationalist/patriotic discourses, identifications and practices. It does so in a context which is characterized by ‘world-wide, restructuring of … space – times relations’ (Massey, 1999: 23, cited in Amin, 2002), transnational flows and networks of activity and power and the stretching of social, political and economic activities. International politics, legislation and organizations (such as human and children’s rights legislation and non-governmental organizations (NGOs)) and increased mobility of children themselves, as tourists, migrants or refugees, clearly interfere with ‘classical’ state-centred politics of national ‘self-determination’ (Therborn, 1996). In this context, children’s everyday experiences are also rapidly changing and ‘inter-nationalise’.
Studies in this issue understand the ‘nation’ in multiple ways: (1) as a fluid and multidimensional discursive construct to which children’s allegiances are forged, (2) as a constructed scale that interplays with other scales (e.g. global and local) to form place based identifications, 1 (3) as an imagined community that provides hope for the future and (4) as a (changing) geographical territory and homeland. Articles in this issue further demonstrate that ‘nation’, in its multiple understandings, continues to shape children’s lives, identifications, belongings and sensibilities, and their various political engagements with contestations and reconfigurations of the very idea of the ‘nation’. It is also important to posit then that for understanding childhood and children’s experiences, the ‘nation’ continues to be an important analytical dimension.
Constructs of ‘childhood’ and ‘nation’ shape how we understand our own childhood (memories of belonging to a nation or the place of the nation – homeland), children’s worlds (possibly as political agents or citizens of a nation and/or globe) and children’s lives (as future or present citizens). Discourses of the ‘nation’ provide the premises upon which a sense of belonging to a nation is constructed and within which our identifications are framed. They shape the present and future of nation-states, the possibility of a transnational/global world and our belongings to those. In assuming their national identity(ies) and in nation-building processes, children act as political agents by upholding, resisting and re/inscribing the nation, and their place within or outside the nation. As Beneï (2008: 96) further explains, the nation entails its ‘incorporation’ ‘into who we are as bodied social persons, subjects and citizens’, and children – frequently labelled as citizens – are assumed to ‘incorporate’ ‘the ideals of love of nation and good citizenship’ that feeds into their identification as national citizens (p. 72). Notions of ‘nation’ require constant (re)inscription, which leaves some measure of openness for alternative negotiations.
Perhaps due to the popular conception of childhood as apolitical, we know less about how children come to assume or use the ‘nation’ in their identifications and power relations, how they draw on national discourses and form understandings and sensibilities of their world and themselves within it both as children and as adults (Skey, 2009). Mapping nationalist discourses in children’s experiences more broadly, research demonstrates that children (even young as a couple of years old) mobilize particular discourses of nation and place for their identifications and the inclusion and exclusion of others (Beneï, 2008; Cheney, 2007; Coles, 1986; Habashi, 2008; MacNaughton, 2001; Scourfield et al., 2006; Srinivasan, 2014; Stephens, 1995; Woronov, 2007; Zembylas, 2010). Moreover, researchers explore how in children’s discourses and identifications, ‘nation’ and ‘nationality’ intersect with race, class, gender, religion, language, place and other cultural markers. While not all authors identify these dynamics as politics, in these studies, children and youth debate, promote and resist prescribed and non-prescribed notions and mandates and create non-prescribed ones, and this way, they are engaging in what Therborn (1996) defines as politics. Working in tandem with these explorations, studies in this second part of the Special Issue further articulate the ways in which children and youth actively subscribe to, resist to or recreate everyday representations of the ‘nation’ at multiple scales, learn the nation and practice the nation through ‘banal’ (Billig, 1995) and more politically agentic ways (Kallio, 2014; Kallio and Häkli, 2011 in first part of Special Issue).
Learning and forming attachment to the nation is promulgated in children through many processes and arenas, including education systems, the family, social policy, marketing and consumerism. National education policies and curricula (re)produce ideas of the nation. Intersecting gender and place with these instruments of persuasion, Esther Miedema and Zsuzsa Millei investigate how the delivery of HIV- and AIDS-related education in Mozambique serves as a process of civic enculturation of young girls that ‘roots’ nation-building in the moralized and gendered places of the domestic (‘in-here’), and in which girls are constructed as the moral backbone of the nation threatened by larger scale (‘out-there’) corrupting influences. Interview participants (policy makers and educators) assemble and call into being a ‘healthy nation’ through notions of desirable ‘girlhood’ that undergird this specific curricula and nation-building efforts.
Standing also at the crossroads of local traditions and globally circulating discourses and aspirations for child citizens, family is another important site of patriotic socialization. Focusing on parenting resources preferred by Australian parents and service providers, Sue Nichols argues that her participants looked for vernacular resources that matched a not well-articulated, but Australian, style of parenting shaped by undertones of cultural nationalism. Other participants strategically looked for resources and practices that aimed to prepare their children for a cosmopolitan lifestyle with globe spanning opportunities. By positioning herself in the middle of family discussions, Bree Akesson interprets the dynamics through which multiple generations in extended families engage in the teaching and learning of the nation of Palestine. She pays particular attention to the feelings of frustration and hope that participants of an occupied nation express, and from which their sense of identity and belonging to an imagined homeland, and the current geographical place of Palestine and notions of Palestinianness, emerge.
Marisa O Ensor picks the exceptional case of the new South Sudanese nation, a young nation with young population. Ensor develops complex insights into how children gain legal citizenship across ethnic and political divides in a post-conflict society, how they fare in the conundrum of administrative processes that has far reaching consequences for their and their families’ survival (for whom which many of them are responsible) and how they participate in nation-building and citizenship projects. She argues that the ways in which these children (or perhaps very young adults) ‘contest and re-interpret critical cultural meanings … serve as important catalysts for social change, contributing in the process to the construction of emerging notions of South Sudanese nationhood’ (Ensor, 2014: 55).
Elizabeth A Peacock and Helena Oikarinen-Jabai each bring to the reader youths’ articulations of their multifaceted national identifications at the intersections of language, class and ‘race’, through their investigations located in the contexts of post-socialist nation-building in Ukraine and the waves of African migration to Finland. The authors explore the frictions created between inscriptions of an ideal national subjecthood, and those that take shape in the context of cosmopolitanization of cities and transnational belonging. They describe the creative, brave and novel ways and tactics through which young people maintain, contest and transform notions of a coherent and territorially based nation, and singular notions of national citizenship and belonging. Nisha Thapliyal adds further dimensions to children’s politics by exploring their role in reshaping the cultural politics of childhood in India. Through her analysis of children’s participation in television shows, debating the passage of the Right to Education Act, Thapliyal illustrates the ways in which children contest the subject positions and subjectivities presented to them by their families, the nation state and media. Her work offers a potent example of the possibility and potential of children’s politics (Kallio and Häkli, 2011).
By extending the potential of youth’ citizenship to the globe, Margaret Zeddies and Zsuzsa Millei bring fresh questions for the role of notions of childhood and citizenship discourses that extend beyond nationhood and call for children and youth participation in global transformations for a more just society. Based on their analysis of a voluntourism website, they argue that the positioning and opportunities of Global North youth as mobile, transnational and geopolitical agents depend on the co-construction of children in the Global South as inferior, immobile and in need of these voluntourists’ help beyond to what nations in the South can offer. Thus, as they argue, the website reifies the very global division it aims to circumvent. Zeddies and Millei’s conclusion not only warns about the uncritical take-up of global or transnational discourses and citizenship in relation to children but also highlights the complexities and enduring power relations in conceptualizing youth as geopolitical agents in attempts to address long entrenched global inequalities.
As Massey (1999: 23, cited in Amin, 2002) argues, The globalisation we are facing now, is a thoroughgoing, world-wide, restructuring of … space – times, along particular lines. It is a remaking of those, inherited but always temporary and provisional, spaces, places, cultures which are themselves the hybrid products of previous restructurings.
Within this altered imagination of ‘space-time’, new perspectives on the local, the national and the universal emerge as well as conceptions of childhood and child politics. This two-part Special Issue sets forth and considers many ways in which children are implicated and taking active parts in these re/imaginations and restructurings. In turn, these examinations provide vivid illustration of, and develop questions about, how larger socio-political processes are taking shape and operate in children’s everyday lives (Stephens, 1995) and offer unique insights into how children are affected by and effect changes at multiple scales.