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- Convenor:
-
Anna Streissler
(University of Vienna)
Send message to Convenor
- Formats:
- Workshops
- Location:
- R08 (in V)
- Sessions:
- Friday 13 July, -
Time zone: Europe/Paris
Short Abstract:
Children/youth especially seem confronted by uncertain realities personally and collectively. How are they creatively dealing with their realities? We discuss ethnographies ON children/youth as well as BY children/youth.
Long Abstract:
Children and youth especially seem to face uncertain realities. Personally and collectively they are in structurally weak positions in society. They often need to make far-reaching decisions about their future lifecourse (concerning e.g. education, employment, partners, peers, sex, health, lifestyle) and their views on life may quickly change. At the same time, many decisions are made for them by their families, their educators, politics etc.. For many, peer pressure and consumption trends also play vital roles. We therefore argue that their realities are especially uncertain and especially varied (or is that an adult point of view?). This may be even more so in cases of conflict, violence and poverty.
Despite these manifold constraints, children and youth are known to be pro-actively dealing with these uncertain situations, exploring creative forms of meaning-making and reinterpretation and thereby developing multifaceted competencies and knowledge in different socio-cultural contexts.
We are inviting contributions on two subtopics:
1) Ethnographies ON children/youth as exploring uncertain realities.
2) Ethnographies BY children/youth, that is, knowledge produced systematically by children/youth in certain contexts (usually framed by adults) exploring their own lifeworlds and those of their peers.
How do children/youth play with realities and (un)certainties, e.g. in "second life" and other media environments?
How do children/youth react to and make sense of uncertain realities influenced by violence?
How does research carried out by children/youth change their perception of realities and (un)certainties?
We explicitly invite young researchers to share their works-in-progress and results in our workshop.
Accepted papers:
Session 1 Friday 13 July, 2012, -Paper short abstract:
The paper discusses how Western lifestyle migrant children in Goa experience their mobile life. The children are very talented in re-organising their everyday lives and social relations according to the changing locations; characterising their lives as uncertain may be an adult point of view.
Paper long abstract:
An increasing number of Western lifestyle migrant families live several months a year in Goa, India, and the rest of the year some Western country(ies). This paper is based on an on-going ethnographic research among such children. To outsiders, the lifestyle seems to be characterized by uncertainty, instability and constant change. To the children themselves, however, the transnationally mobile life is the only lifestyle they have experiences of: for them, it is not something extraordinary or vague. In this paper, I discuss how the children themselves experience their life circumstances. I show that the children live very much 'here and now'; they are very flexible and used to re-organise their everyday lives and social relations again and again according to the changing situations and locations. The family routines and certain material objects gain particular importance among them: the outside circumstances are fluid (and the children are for example very aware of various visa problems) but the children are very talented in creating small anchors of stability into their lives. Certain toys, for example, travel with the children back and forth between Goa and the West. I also show that the children hold multifaceted competencies to navigate in various social and cultural environments. Eventually, I ask whether uncertainty is only an adult point of view to their lives or whether the children also consider themselves to be living in uncertain circumstances. Are they exploring uncertain realities or simply living in fluid circumstances which to them represent normality and certainty?
Paper short abstract:
The proposed paper explores the changing life worlds of young people growing-up with cerebral palsy. Addressing centrals theme of embodiment identity, and transformation, it asks how young people with impaired bodies negotiate the challenges and uncertainties associated with the move into adulthood.
Paper long abstract:
Exploring the meanings which young people with cerebral palsy attach to their bodies, identities, and transitions through the stories which they tell of themselves, the Economic and Social Research Council funded research sheds light on themes of uncertainty and disquiet by asking how disabled young people make sense of and negotiate the challenges they face as they grow up, the relationship of those challenges to embodiment, and how those challenges shape the biographical stories young people tell. Drawing on data derived from a range of innovative qualitative methodologies developed by the research team with approximately twenty young people - including qualitative interviews, participant-led photography, and online interactions - this paper explores the creative ways in which young people with physical impairments articulate who they are as they negotiate their transitions into adulthood. The paper will contribute to the literature on young people by shedding light on how bodies and disability inform the ways in which young people imagine their pasts, presents, and futures. Our focus on story-telling as a practical activity giving insight into the creative ways in which young people engage with, resist, or reconstruct the cultural narratives that shape their identities enables us to explore how the cultural scripts constituting expectations around young people's lives are troubled by disabled young bodies. The uncertainty which emerges from that troubling will be a key theme of the paper.
Paper short abstract:
Children with cancer seem especially challenged by uncertain realities. Crossing the border zones of illness and cure, hospital and home, present and future, this study explores how children are facing social uncertainty and disquiet, engendering certainty and hope and the scope of social relations.
Paper long abstract:
Children with cancer are facing a long period of uncertainty. This uncertainty is accompanied by social isolation due to illness, treatment and risk of infections - and social consequences can be traced in cancer survivors. Moreover, the cure is hardly negotiable and many decisions are made for children by health professionals and families. Such an atypical childhood seems to leave little space for the child as a social agent. However, little is known about children's agency, how they experience social isolation during cure, how they cope with disquiet about their return to friends and social network, and how views and types of agency are generated in the border zones of cancer.
The aim of this study is to examine how children create options for social participation, despite living in uncertainty, being ill and away from their familiar environment. The study highlights children's agency and the scope of social relations for children's future participation in communities.
The study spans the border zones of illness and cure, present and future, hospital and home. Data from a Danish context are generated during a one-year fieldwork at the paediatric oncolgy isolation unit of Aarhus University Hospital and in the homes of children with cancer. The study explores how children navigate through uncertainty and disquiet and how they use social relations to do so. The significance of social relations, if and how children engender certainty and hope for their present and future social life, will be discussed.
Paper short abstract:
The presentation explores the uncertain everyday urban geographies of 7-12-year-old children in Helsinki, Finland.
Paper long abstract:
My presentation explores the uncertain everyday urban geographies of 7-12-year-old children in Helsinki, Finland, by describing their engagements with a ubiquitous piece of infrastructure: the zebra crossing. Taking visual footage produced by mobile children as my starting point, I will discuss the tension-laden bodily experiences that many children have to negotiate as they move around in their city. My argument is two-fold. First, I will discuss crossing streets as an embodied event that has important consequences for children's sense of belonging in urban space. Crossing streets is a way for young children to express their agency, as it involves bodily skills that they have learned through ongoing practise with parents and friends. Second, I will argue that crossing streets constitutes a moment of hesitation and vulnerability for children, as it brings them into contact with different modes of urban mobility, often forcing children to step aside from the path of others. I will show that children's experiences point to an everyday politics of urban space that is primarily expressed and sustained on an affective level, often producing a sense of uncertainty in children's bodies and effectively turning them into bystanders.
Paper short abstract:
This paper explores Northern Ugandan urban youth as actors in an uncertain social and economic world in a post-conflict situation. Through case studies of ten youth, I explore the significance of social networks that involve both lineal and consanguineal kin as well as friends, neighbours and co-workers in navigating this uncertain world.
Paper long abstract:
From the late 1980's, armed conflict became endemic in Northern Uganda and by the late 1990's 90% of the population lived in IDP camps. After 2006 there was a marked increase in security and the camps have now been emptied. However significant numbers of young people, with little or no experience of rural life, have not returned to their villages, preferring to become urban dwellers. There are few qualitative studies of this new generation of urban youth in Northern Uganda. In public discourse they have been seen as a problem, a group or category in need of projects.
In this paper I focus on youth as actors in an uncertain social and economic world. Through case studies of five young men and five young women I explore the significance of social networks that involve both lineal and consanguineal kin as well as friends, neighbours and co-workers. In particular I suggest that close attention to intergenerational relations and entitlements - and the different significance of children for male and female youth - are keys to understanding urban youth in Gulu.
Fieldwork draws on life stories, key informant interviews, observation and focus group discussions. In addition video filming has been extensively used, and footage has been shared with those involved to generate discussions. Drawing on this material allows me to supplement interviews and observation and to begin to capture an ethnography by youth where young people reflects on their actions, goals and strategies and tell their own stories.
Paper short abstract:
Drawing on fours years of ethnographic research, with more than 200 teenagers, I propose a discussion about the teenagers’ search for scary, unsafe urban experiences and their metamorphosis into creative, narrative experiences – in the uncertain context of post-socialist Bucharest.
Paper long abstract:
A group of teenagers living in the centre of Bucharest sometimes went to hang-out inside the huge ruins of an unfinished communist-period mega-building. They used to go there despite their parents' interdictions, hang-out with other teens from the neighbourhood and even with some homeless teens. The ruins were scary, unsafe, dirty, dark. The adults wanted them gone. But for the teens, the ruins offered a real adventure, shared with their peers.
A group of teenagers living in a social housing neighbourhood sometimes went to explore an abandoned park and lake in the other extremity of Bucharest, searching for strange animals. Among garbage, wild flora, traces of homeless occupation, far from adult eyes, they imagined encounters with mutant animals.
These are examples of Bucharest teens being attracted to uncertain spaces, as a tactic to deal with their uncertain social situation - as in the urban geographies built by adults, the teenagers face continuous limitations, exclusion, tensions.
Thus, the ugly, unsafe urban spaces - abandoned by adults - become for them precious spaces of freedom, imagination, discovery, sociability, identity building. The collective narratives about these spaces and experiences are the means of transforming fear and uncertainty into socially significant, desirable encounters; reason why, inspired by urban sociologist Richard Sennett, we could call them "narrative spaces".
Drawing on fours years of ethnographic research, with more than 200 teenagers, I propose a discussion about the teenagers' search for scary, unsafe urban experiences and their metamorphosis into creative, narrative experiences - in the uncertain context of post-socialist Bucharest.
Paper short abstract:
The paper presents experiences from an ongoing Research Education Cooperation in Vienna, Austria in which pupils carry out ethnographic research of their own life-worlds. It focuses on the team's attempts to teach anthropological research and on the youths' changing perceptions of (un)certainties.
Paper long abstract:
This paper deals with my experiences in the ongoing project 'JuMuW [You move] Youth Research Workshop Multicultural Vienna'. This is a Research Education Cooperation focusing on intercultural learning and multicultural life-worlds of 12-15 year old pupils with fewer social and economic opportunities from two vocationally oriented secondary schools in Vienna, Austria. In "JuMuW" pupils should produce systematic socio-cultural knowledge of teenage lifeworlds in a school-based project. We anthropologists are starting out from three premises: 1) Little qualitative data exists about youth with fewer opportunities attending vocationally oriented secondary school in Vienna. 2) There is a tendency in international youth research to develop research not only ON youth but WITH youth and BY youth in order to reduce adult bias. 3) The participating pupils may be empowered by carrying out research on topics of their own choice.
Anthropologists, education specialists, and teachers provide learning opportunities regarding various anthropological research methods (photography, observation, questionnaires and interviews) and contents for the pupils in the course of the school year 2011/12. Between February and June the pupils will carry out research projects of their own design on different aspects of multicultural (Amit-Talai 1995) youth cultures and will present the results in a Junior Researchers' Conference.
The presentation will deal with two questions: 1) How did our team attempt to teach the pupils to carry out their own ethnographic research and what were the results? 2) How does research carried out by youth change their perception of realities and (un)certainties?