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- Convenors:
-
Maria Reimann
(University of Warsaw)
Magdalena Radkowska-Walkowicz (University of Warsaw)
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- Format:
- Panel
- Stream:
- BASE (Bodies, Affects, Senses, Emotions)
- Location:
- Room H-209
- Sessions:
- Tuesday 14 June, -
Time zone: Europe/London
Short Abstract:
This panel focuses on the ways in which children experience and think about crisis. We invite papers that look at children's perspectives on different crisis (divorce, migration, illness) in order to understand the meanings children attach to them and allow their voices become part of the debate.
Long Abstract:
This panel focuses on the ways in which children and teenagers experience, think about, and cope with crisis. We invite papers that look at children's perspectives on different forms of crisis such as for example parental divorce, migration, disability/illness, poverty, climate change, or pandemic. We would also like to redefine crisis by looking at it not only from ethic but also from emic perspective and therefore we invite papers which aim to understand what children themselves consider difficult and what is not necessarily seen as such by the adults.
Children are often conceptualized as helpless and at risk. Situation of crisis makes their position even more vulnerable. At the same time, the situation of crisis allows us to see different dimensions of children's agency. Crisis may reveal children's competences that are invisible on a daily basis, as well as new power relations.
In this panel we would like to look at children as competent actors with their own needs, views, and ethics, that should be heard and taken into account by adults and policymakers. We would like to re-think crisis by allowing children's voices and perspectives become part of the debate on crisis and finding solutions to it. We invite both empirical and methodological papers that try to shed light on the complex position of children in contemporary world.
Accepted papers:
Session 1 Tuesday 14 June, 2022, -Yinka Olusoga (The University of Sheffield) Julia Bishop (University of Sheffield) Catherine Bannister (University of Sheffield)
Paper short abstract:
This paper employs Barad’s concept of timespacemattering to propose re/source/fulness as a lens with which to examine how children co-created rich forms of play and agency via intra-action with material-discursive human and non-human bodies during the COVID-19 pandemic.
Paper long abstract:
This paper adopts a posthumanist lens to (re)consider how children have experienced play during the COVID-19 pandemic. Conceptualising crisis as a moment of pivot, we examine how COVID restrictions disentangled children from many of the usual locations outside of the home where they engage in wider networks of affective relationships. Instead they became (re)situated within the material, discursive, temporal and relational entanglements of home and family, leading some adults to fear that children’s play and agency would inevitably be constrained and even ‘lost’.
The Play Observatory Project (https://play-observatory.com/) has been collecting examples of everyday play over the course of the pandemic from children in an online survey and via ethnographic interviews. Employing Barad’s concept of timespacemattering (2007), we examine some of their contributions and argue that these data challenge this assumption of deficit. We explore how children, as emerging subjects, co-created rich forms of play and agency within this new set of circumstances, via intra-action with material-discursive human and non-human bodies.
Rather than drawing on contested tropes of child ‘resilience’ (Gill & Orgad, 2018) in a time of ‘crisis’, our analysis highlights children’s re/source/fulness. Children identified and created possibilities for play and cultural intra-action via active enquiry, exploration and expression. Engaging with the social, material, discursive, temporal and relational affordances of this intense period of saturation within the context of home and family, children’s play developed deep, creative, and sometimes new, entanglements.
References
Barad, K. (2007). Meeting the universe halfway: Quantum physics and the entanglement of matter and meaning. Durham: Duke University Press.
Gill, R., & Orgad, S. (2018). The Amazing Bounce-Backable Woman: Resilience and the Psychological Turn in Neoliberalism. Sociological Research Online, 23(2), 477–495. https://doi.org/10.1177/1360780418769673
Maria Reimann (University of Warsaw)
Paper short abstract:
A growing number of couples in Poland decide to shared childcare equally after divorce (separation). Children who live in joint physical custody spend a comparable amount of time at mother's and father's place. What is their experience of home and belonging? Is it possible to have to homes?
Paper long abstract:
The number of children who live in joint physical custody is growing in Europe and in Poland. While divorce is known to be a difficult experience for children, joint physical custody is - in the light of recent studies - considered to be a better solution when comes to children's health and wellbeing.
In my research I look at the experience of Polish children who live in joint physical custody and try to understand their experience of family, home, and belonging. In a society where "home" is by definition one, a family that underwent a divorce is called "broken", and children of divorced parents are considered to be at risk, what my interviewees say could seem revolutionary. "Mum's place" and "dad's place" are both "home" to them. From their perspective the family is not "broken", but rather alright, and they don't think about themselves as in trouble or need. The children I spoke to put much more emphasis on the relationships between the individual family members than on the logistics and structures of family life. If taken seriously, could those voices change the way we think about family?
Melanie Vivier (Université de Liège)
Paper short abstract:
Migration situations usually exemplify children’s agency, but the latter is rarely examined through the lens of food. This paper will discuss the construction of children’s taste in asylum seeking situation in Belgium.
Paper long abstract:
Food is often at the core of a lot of social exchanges, sometimes helping, or on the contrary, hindering the integration process for migrant children who often travel between different socialization food spheres. Of the 26.4 million refugees have arrived in Europe in 2020 (HCR, 2020), many of them were children. Nevertheless, migrant children’s food practices seem to be less studied in social sciences. From this observation, it is particularly important to document children’s practices and opinions, and their agency in the social environment they frequent, to understand the migration and integration process in all its complexity. More than ever, the migration situation leads many changes and children have to mobilize their adaptation capacity to apprehend the host society food model. In this context, how children deal with food constraints in the different food socialization spheres?
Based on fieldwork with children in asylum seeking situation, living in a reception center in the Walloon part of Belgium, as part of ongoing doctoral research, this paper aims at situating children’s food experience at the crossroads of creativity and institutional or parental constraints. How children develop their relation with food in a migration context? As opposed to a vertical vision of transmission, in this paper, we will focus on how children socialize with food, and how they teach food knowledges to adults and to their peer group, contributing to the enrichment of their taste criteria and to their daily social exchanges in Belgium.
Ada Tyminska (University of Warsaw)
Paper short abstract:
The aim of the paper will be to trace the legal category of 'unaccompanied minor' in the discourses related to the crisis on Polish-Belarusian border. I would like to trace how the state of suspension works between childhood and adulthood – and what are the consequences of that situation.
Paper long abstract:
Children's stories are present in discourses that are shaped around the current crisis on the Polish-Belarusian border. They become especially engaging for the public, due to the dominant image of the child in Poland as a defenseless and not fully causative entity, for whom the obligation to take care is important - both in ethical and legal aspects, as regulations provide for several forms of special treatment of children among all asylum seekers.
A category relating to non-adult-refugees are "unaccompanied minors" - the existence of which is conditioned by the international law, and which also exists at the level of domestic law in Poland. Its purpose is to provide protection to refugees who are not considered adults in the light of the regulations. "Unaccompanied minors" are usually adolescents who function in this role between "childhood" and "adulthood". The aim of the paper will be to trace the stories (anonymized) of unaccompanied minors related to the current crisis. I will look at the discourses and the reconstruction of administrative and judicial practices applied (depending on the access to the files). I would like to trace how in their cases the state of suspension works between a "child" and a "minor foreigner", or even "foreigner" – who uses what terms and what are the consequences of their use.
I deliberately omit the perspective of the minors I describe, due to the fact that the described events are likely to be traumatic for them. Moreover, it could pose a threat to pending proceedings.
Ewa Maciejewska-Mroczek (University of Warsaw)
Paper short abstract:
This paper is based on interviews with the judges from Polish family courts. The children separated from families are seen as vulnerable and passive. The position of the child vis-à-vis the court reveals the problematic position of children and professionals in the child support system.
Paper long abstract:
In Poland, in case of a severe crisis, each year thousands of children are separated from their first families by the decision of the court. Placement in foster care, withdrawal of parental rights, or adoption, are the procedures which deeply influence the children’s lives. Family courts are legal units where such decisions are being made, making judges essential actors in the complicated network of children’s support system.
This paper is based on in-depth interviews with 13 judges working in family courts in Poland, in which they expressed their views about their role and the position of children. They interpreted that their main role is defining the ‘right’ moment for intervention, and assessed adoption as the most positive, rewarding procedure performed by a family court. Although, according to them, children’s best interest is the main factor considered, their narratives revealed complicated, often contradictory interests, obligations and needs, shaping children’s situation. Moreover, children themselves are rarely consulted within the process, and only adults are in the position to influence the child’s situation. Children are presented as both vulnerable and passive. The judges stress their agentive role. However, they also see restrictions or even helplessness inscribed in their profession. The interviews reveal the lack of good communication between institutions responsible for the child’s situation, and institutional problems within the courts themselves and in broad legal system in Poland. The perspective of the family court judges on children in crisis reveals the problematic position of children and professionals in the child support system.