EW-MA 4: Child Politics during Multiple Crises

The overall purpose of the course Child Politics during Multiple Crises is to explore with a multidisciplinary approach and attention to methodologies how in contemporary societies politics produce childhoods and form children’s experiences with considerations of the Global South and North and the former East (post-socialist spaces) contexts. The research field of Child politics brings under an umbrella concern for how children and childhood are entangled in power relations shaped by current global politics and war, the political economy, climate change, post-colonial and post-industrial contexts, urbanisation as well as small scale everyday institutional politics. Child politics can have unintended effects on children’s lives, can target or instrumentalise children and childhood, and children can participate in politics as political subjects and agents (Qvortrup, 2007). The course uses research from the broad field of social sciences to focus on children's lives, experiences and agencies, and living conditions that crosscut educational agendas.

 

The fragile political and environmental situation is coupled in contemporary societies with fear of war, climate change, economic collapse, mass migration, widespread inequalities, and backlash in human rights. In the escalating political tensions new political atmospheres are created by right-wing nationalists, populists, anti-globalization and anti-climate movements, and as a result, children are intensively targeted by, suffer the consequences of and are enrolled more intensively in politics. The course pays special attention to the diversity of theoretical orientations and epistemologies applied for these explorations informed by relational, comparative, ethnographic, decolonial, multispecies, memory and arts-based approaches.

 

Teaching methods: Students must prepare with reading the assigned texts for each seminar. This is necessary because we will learn by discussing the readings in a facilitated manner in seminars and lectures will be kept to the minimum. There will be some arts-based engagements as well during the course, but they do not require any training or skills in artmaking