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- Convenors:
-
Ben Kasstan
(London School of Hygiene Tropical Medicine)
Tracey Chantler (London School of Hygiene Tropical Medicine)
Rishita Nandagiri (Kings’s College London)
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Short Abstract:
This panel will explore how children are conceived and raised in un/well worlds, examine social relations, and how they shape politics of protection. Moving beyond Dickensian dystopias or material utopias, ethnographic contributions will interrogate states of action for an alternative future.
Long Abstract:
From Dickensian tales to the Global Polio Eradication Initiative, children's un/wellness has long compelled pursuits of anticipatory futures. Ethnographies can interrogate how children forge relational links across generations and temporalities, and states of expectation that traverse the past, present, and future. Through the figure of the child, contemporary unwellness evokes insufferable pasts and uncertain fates — laying claim to regression, abandonment of progress, or managed neglect.
Reproductive Justice, conceptualised by SisterSong and Black feminists in the US, locates reproduction and parenting within broader conditions of social and structural inequities that shape them. Reproductive justice advocates for 'the right not to have a child, the right to have a child and the right to parent children in safe and healthy environments' (Ross and Solinger 2017), offering an imaginative frame to (re)conceive social reproduction amidst the un/wellness of the world.
This panel will feature ethnographic research that addresses how states of action can help to anticipate life beyond a return to Dickensian dystopias or pursuits of bountiful (but increasingly unsustainable) utopias. How are child and family wellness being re/constructed within social relationships and within the limits of the planet's precarious existence? What are the implications of relying on (health) technologies to realise anticipative futures? And what definitions and practices of safe/guarding have emerged to manage life in states of uncertainty and despair? These questions invite an interrogation of how children are conceived, parented, and raised in un/well worlds, and how and which politics of protection become engendered
Accepted papers:
Session 1 Thursday 13 April, 2023, -Paper short abstract:
This paper explores nappy-free infant rearing practices in Britain and Pakistan and highlights how the gendered burdens of sustainable management of homes and environments are also classed and raced, highlighting intersectionality’s critical insights in the un/wellness of the world.
Paper long abstract:
This paper excavates the haunting image of the estimated 300,000 disposable nappies that are thrown to landfill every minute globally, an image that haunts not only because of the environmental costs to come but also by a disavowal of the costs that are already here. In global health and environmental discourse, mothers are targeted with sustainable solutions for managing infant waste and are encouraged to adapt how children are raised in unwell worlds. In this paper I explore nappy-free infant rearing practices in Britain and Pakistan, contexts that are starkly different yet deeply connected. In southern Britain, white middle class women sought to develop nappy-free parenting as a capacity to help them pursue deeper parent-child intimacies and to lessen the environmental cost of reproductive decisions. The parenting guidance to which they turn positions ‘Third World’ women as experts in this practice, whose skills have been denigrated by Euro-American parenting cultures. By contrast, poor women in Punjab, Pakistan, maintain nappy-free parenting as a strategy for facing economic constraints and environmental challenges such as heat strain. They deride middle class women’s use of disposable nappies but simultaneously envy them for the greater comfort they can provide for their children. The paper builds on literature on the gendered burdens of sustainable management of homes and environments, but also argue that these burdens are also classed and raced, highlighting intersectionality’s critical insight to incongruent privileges and disadvantages in the un/wellness of the world.
Paper short abstract:
In the context of an unstable or unwell world, more and more children are not thriving. This paper explores dilemmas that arise when primary health care providers suspect that a child is subjected to maltreatment, and react to signs that move parenting and social practices into the biomedical realm.
Paper long abstract:
In an increasingly uncertain world with unstable and unsettling conditions, more and more families are pushed into precautious and sometimes desperate situations. In recent periods of social lock down during the Covid 19 pandemic, contacts to child protection services show that child maltreatment has risen substantially. In Denmark, a Nordic welfare state, the extensive social system plays a significant role in ensuring child protection, in close cooperation with pediatric and forensic departments at health care system, which is critical in determining whether child maltreatment has taken place. However, primary care also plays an important role in terms of early detection, and in recent years ore and more children who are seen here, are failing to thrive – for a wide range of (often socially conditioned) reasons. Some of these children are being maltreated. But when is a child at risk? What is the proper way of protecting the child from that risk? And what is best for the child? Drawing on fieldwork in Danish primary care this paper explores some of the dilemmas that health care professionals in the front line of the health care system face, when encountering vulnerable and unstable families, who often live in difficult social circumstances. It engages with the challenges of discovering and determining that child maltreatment is going on through definitions and practices of safeguarding, and of transferring parenting and norms of behavior that belong in the realm of the social into the realm of the biomedicine.
Paper short abstract:
The paper focuses on a group of parents living in the Bergamo aerea, close to the center of Italian COVID breackdown, who have decided not to vaccinate their children. The aim Is to understand if and how this choice affected or reshaped parental strategy during the pandemic.
Paper long abstract:
This paper focuses on a group of parents who chose for themselves and proposed to their children not to use the COVID vaccine.
I met these parents during a research project on "vaccine hesitancy" that I am carrying out in the Bergamo area, the center of the Italian pandemic breakdown.
Attwell, among others, shown that vaccination hesitancy arises together with other parenting choices (2017) that are related to health but also involve trust in institutions and how parents place themselves and their children in the present and future societies (Poltorack et alii, 2005).
Reframing Hesitancy in the context of the pandemic seems as necessary as it is interesting because this parents' choices now have to face phenomena and dangers that put into question the way we can live together (Kelly, Keck, Lynteris, 2019) and that make the present unsafe and the future uncertain.
Through in-depth interviews and close observation of certain moments in family life, I intend to describe how this vaccination choice Is inscribed and redefined parenting.
I want to document and analyse what these parents perceived as a risk and a threat to their children's present and future, what meaning they gave to the idea of protection and wellbeing within the pandemic framework, and how they thought they could secure it, relying on what resources, relationships and knowledge.
If possible, I intend to investigate the conflicts that may have arisen between parents and children over vaccination choice, also gathering the voices of their children and acknowledging their positioning