Читать книгу Childhood in a Global Perspective - Karen Wells - Страница 12

History and geography, with their attention to the organization of space and time, suggest that there cannot be a global form of childhood, in the sense that children’s lives are the same everywhere. However, the contention of this book is that a global perspective on childhood is possible and useful because globalization shapes political economy everywhere, from small-scale hunter-gatherer groups to the central business districts of global cities. This global political economy overdetermines (shapes and limits) the social fields and cultural forces that necessarily make childhood different in different times and places. The task of a global perspective on Childhood Studies is to understand precisely how global political economy, and the structures it supports and the forces it mobilizes, reshape childhood in multiple spaces and times, societies and cultures.

This book addresses that task through showing how a particular model of childhood, one that originates in contemporary Western ideas about what it means to be human and what differentiates children from adults, is being globalized through international instruments and global capitalism. This model of childhood constructs healthy childhood as one that orientates children towards independence rather than interdependence and towards school-based rather than work-based learning, and separates them from the wider forces of politics, economy and society. I call this model of childhood ‘neo-liberal’ because of the compatibility between liberal ideas that value independence, rational choice and autonomy, and the concept of childhood inscribed in this model.

In the following chapters I explore the tensions between this globalizing model of childhood, the circumstances of children’s lives, and local conceptions of childhood and of children’s competencies, capacities and vulnerabilities. I do this through exploring how global flows and international structures press down on childhood in key domains of children’s lives (family, work, school and play), how children interact directly with the state in politics, war and juvenile justice, and the strategies (especially migration) that children and their families deploy to make life possible in a globalizing world. In the next chapter I expand on the role of the state, philanthropists and non-governmental organizations (NGOs) in the reshaping of childhood in the discursive shift from child-saving to child rights.