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- Convenors:
-
Anna Witeska-Młynarczyk
(University of Marii Curie-Skłodowska)
Zofia Boni (Adam Mickiewicz University in Poznan)
Ewa Maciejewska-Mroczek (University of Warsaw)
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- Formats:
- Panel
- Stream:
- Intersectionality
- Sessions:
- Monday 21 June, -
Time zone: Europe/Helsinki
Short Abstract:
We call for the ethnographic accounts that focus on how children and youth engage with and experience crisis, in its varied forms and contexts (e.g. personal, institutional, epidemiological, humanitarian). We look for imaginative ways of understanding and representing young people's lives.
Long Abstract:
The interdisciplinary literature concerned with children and youth has increasingly challenged the human-centred approaches in which researchers focus on the project of "giving voice" to young people, imagining them as agentive subjects. In this panel, we plan to change the spotlight. We decentre the young rational subjects by inviting to the discussion papers favouring the relational, interconnected, circumstantial, material, affective and imaginative perspectives.
We propose to take as a common contextual thread the social and political arrangements which affect the everyday lives of young people in different geographic and cultural contexts of crisis. The entanglements with biomedicine, various forms of kinship, the effects of climate change, state policies and bureaucratic measures in the field of education, migration or pandemic - are the exemplar contexts we mean to engage with. We invite the speakers to provide ethnographic accounts of rules organizing young people's lives in the aforementioned fields.
By focusing on the situations of transgression/obedience/resistance we attend to the social and cultural orders in disarray which affect young lives and delimit the (im)possible. We favour the descriptions that draw attention to environments, materialities, technologies, structures of relations, legal solutions and everyday affects that constitute the realities for children and youth in the situations of crises seen from various angles (intrapersonal, relational, systemic, national, global etc.).
Accepted papers:
Session 1 Monday 21 June, 2021, -Paper short abstract:
Leveraging ethnographic data from a hydropower resettlement site in north-western Laos, this study primarily aims to analyze how various relocated youngsters from different socioeconomic backgrounds have confronted the new (im)mobilities of hydro/electric infrastructures.
Paper long abstract:
Over the last three decades, there has been a growing number of commissioned hydroelectric dams in Laos. Such proliferation has also caught the interest of numerous development practictioners and social scientists. While many Lao scholars have already investigated the adverse effects of development-induced displacement on relocated households, they have been recticent about how new hydro/electric infrastructures (i.e., electricity, roads, internet, livelihood reconstruction programs, etc.) have impinged upon the lives of young ressettled villagers. These infrastructures—both material and nonmaterial—unevenly distribute new resources, thereby facilitating new opportunities, new physical and social mobilities, and new marginalizations. Drawing on ethnographic fieldwork from a hydropower resettlement site in north-western Laos, this study primarily aims to analyze how various resettled youngsters have confronted the new (im)mobilities of hydro/electric infrastructures. It will focus on the narratives of three relocated youngsters who represent different socioeconomic backgrounds within the resettlement. In particular, this study will scrutinize not only the former lives of these young people in old villages, but also their present livelihoods, survival strategies, and possessed capital in the new settlement, as well as their future plans and aspirations. This analysis will unfold the relocation stories of young people who are both winners and losers of the resettlement, or those youngsters who become more abject after the relocation, and those who exploit and enjoy the new hydro/electric infrastructures, respectively.
Paper short abstract:
Youngsters belonging to families connected to the ’ndrangheta: on the one hand the story of adults who remember their own childhood, on the other hand minors subject to judicial measures who are remove from their birthplace. Living the crisis inside and outside home: comparison of experiences.
Paper long abstract:
Belonging to ’ndrangheta is primarily based on the continuity of blood ties. The mafia cultural code and the feeling of belonging to its context are transmitted in family environment. Growing up in a ’ndrangheta family means having privileges and power, but also witnessing detentions, violent events and feuds.
In an attempt to offer youngsters the opportunity to choose a different life, since 2012, the Juvenile Court of Reggio Calabria has issued measures dictating the removal of minors belonging to ’ndrangheta families whose psycho-physical development appears to be compromised.
Thanks to the investigation that has been carried out to date, an attempt will be made to observe and analyze the crisis experiences that the ’ndrangheta boys live both within the family environment and when they are removed from it. If on the one hand anguish and a climate of terror pervade the lives of minors in the domestic space, on the other hand the youngsters are included in a community center outside Calabria, and deal with disorientation and despair due to the distance from their own socio-cultural references. Crisis of living in a family where one is confronted with the fear of death, and crisis of going through a path of re-education and re-elaboration of one’s experience.
The dialogue between the memories of whom lived in a ’ndrangheta family and the stories of the operators who welcome minors removed from Calabria, will bring out the different forms that crisis can take inside and outside home in the experience of these boys.
Paper short abstract:
This paper explores opposing and entangled discourses on temporality in a covid-19 diary written by pupils in a lower secondary school in Finland during coronavirus outbreak and when schools were closed, contact teaching was suspended and distance learning was organized.
Paper long abstract:
During spring 2020, the Finnish government together with the President of the Republic declared a state of emergency over the coronavirus outbreak. As the Emergency Powers Act was implemented, for example, schools closed, and contact teaching was suspended and distance learning through digital learning environments was organized instead.
Drawing on theoretical perspectives on temporality in combination with institutional time, past, present, and future intertwined practices and normality, and acceleration and deceleration, this paper explores discourses on temporality in a time that could be called ‘strange times’ or ‘corona times’. Using the concept temporality is a way to emphasize the social character and dimensions of time, as time is in different ways experienced in different contexts and by different people.
The material for this article consists of a corona diary, where 34 pupils in a lower secondary school, aim to give their version of how a day passes during a pandemic and social distancing. The method of the analysis of this paper is a qualitative textual analysis inspired by critical discourse analysis. Through qualitative textual analysis, I aim to identify different narratives, thematic structures of the diary entries, as well as, value-laden words and expression.
In the paper, I identify opposing and entangled discourses on temporality in youth’s everyday lives during a pandemic.
Paper short abstract:
This paper focuses on the experiences of children living in joined physical custody. Commuting between homes involves moving things: favourite clothes, the book one currently reads. This paper focuses on the role and meaning of material culture in the experience of living in joined physical custody.
Paper long abstract:
Since 2015 Polish law allows family courts to rule “joint physical custody” of children after parental divorce, meaning the child spends substantial time living with each of the parents, and the both parents have equal responsibility to care for the child.
In a situation of parental divorce - which undoubtedly is a situation of a crisis - the children have to reformulate or at least reflect upon some aspects of family life that before might have been taken for granted, like for example where home is, or is the mother’s new partner also “family”). Commuting between two homes involves moving things: favourite clothes, the book one currently reads etc. This paper focuses on the material aspects of living in joined shared custody - the objects that move and the objects that don't, the objects that are necessary to make one feel at home, and the objects that exist in two homes (beds, toothbrushes etc) - and sheds light on the role of the material culture in the experience of living in joined shared custody.