Prelims

Half Title Page

Childhood, Youth and Activism

Series Page

SOCIOLOGICAL STUDIES OF CHILDREN AND YOUTH

Series Editor: David A. Kinney (from 1999)

Series Editors: David A. Kinney and Katherine Brown Rosier (2004–2010)

Series Editors: David A. Kinney and Loretta E. Bass (from 2011)

Series Editor: Loretta E. Bass (from 2012)

Previous Volumes:

Editorial Board

• Lars Alberth

  Leuphana University Lüneburg, Germany

• Sampson Lee Blair

  The State University of New York, USA

• Doris Bühler-Niederberger

  Universität Wuppertal, Germany

• Ingrid E. Castro

  Massachusetts College of Liberal Arts, USA

• Patricia Neff Claster

  Edinboro University, USA

• Tobia (Toby) Fattore

  Macquarie University, Australia

• Sam Frankel

  King’s University College at Western University, Canada

• David Kinney

  Central Michigan University, USA

• Valeria Llobet

  Universidad de Buenos Aires, Argentina

• Sandi Nenga

  Southwestern University, USA

• Kate Tilleczek

  York University, Canada

• Yvonne M. Vissing

  Salem State University, USA

• Nicole Warehime

  University of Central Oklahoma, USA

• Katie Wright

  La Trobe University, Australia

Title Page

Sociological Studies of Children and Youth - Volume 33

Childhood, Youth and Activism

Demands for Rights and Justice from Young People and their Advocates

EDITED BY

KATIE WRIGHT

La Trobe University, Australia

AND

JULIE McLEOD

University of Melbourne, Australia

SERIES EDITOR

LORETTA E. BASS

The University of Oklahoma, USA

United Kingdom – North America – Japan – India – Malaysia – China

Copyright Page

Emerald Publishing Limited

Emerald Publishing, Floor 5, Northspring, 21-23 Wellington Street, Leeds LS1 4DL.

First edition 2024

Editorial matter and selection © 2024 Katie Wright and Julie McLeod.

Individual chapters © 2024 The authors.

Published under exclusive licence by Emerald Publishing Limited.

Reprints and permissions service

Contact: www.copyright.com

No part of this book may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, transmitted in any form or by any means electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording or otherwise without either the prior written permission of the publisher or a licence permitting restricted copying issued in the UK by The Copyright Licensing Agency and in the USA by The Copyright Clearance Center. Any opinions expressed in the chapters are those of the authors. Whilst Emerald makes every effort to ensure the quality and accuracy of its content, Emerald makes no representation implied or otherwise, as to the chapters’ suitability and application and disclaims any warranties, express or implied, to their use.

British Library Cataloguing in Publication Data

A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library

ISBN: 978-1-80117-469-5 (Print)

ISBN: 978-1-80117-468-8 (Online)

ISBN: 978-1-80117-470-1 (Epub)

ISSN: 1537-4661 (Series)

Contents

List of Figures and Tables

Figures

Tables

About the Editors

Katie Wright is an Associate Professor of Sociology at La Trobe University in Melbourne, Australia. She conducts sociological and historical research into childhood, therapeutic cultures, activism and commissions of inquiry into institutional child abuse. She is currently investigating new approaches to raising public awareness about child sexual abuse through digital storytelling. She leads the project, ‘The age of inquiry: A global mapping of institutional abuse inquiries’ and two Australian Research Council funded projects investigating non-recent institutional child abuse, ‘Childhood maltreatment and late modernity’ and ‘Reclaiming child rights: Activism, public inquiries and social change’.

Julie McLeod is Professor of Curriculum, Equity and Social Change in the University of Melbourne Faculty of Education. She researches in the history and sociology of education, focussing on youth, gender, curriculum and educational reform, and specialising in genealogies of educational ideas and qualitative methodologies. Her current projects include ‘Progressive education and race: A transnational Australian history, 1920s–50s’ and ‘Making futures: A longitudinal study of youth identities, generational change and education’ (both Australian Research Council funded). She is President of the Australian Association for Research in Education, co-editor of History of Education Review and a Fellow of the Academy of Social Sciences Australia.

About the Contributors

Kaisu Alamikkelä is a doctoral researcher at the University of Oulu, Finland. Her PhD focusses on the material-discursive boundaries and possibilities of children’s activity in school. She is a member of the research group Social Justice at the Focus of Education, and her interests are in social justice issues and the school as a material interior that produces practices related to these issues. She is looking at the school from new material and post structural perspectives. She conducts research using ethnographic and nomadic methods with local school children.

Malin Arvidsson is an Associate Professor in Child Studies at the Department of Thematic Studies at Linköping University in Sweden. She holds a PhD in History from the School of Humanities, Education and Social Sciences at Örebro University. Her recent publications focus on how the concept of ‘truth commission’ was introduced in Swedish politics and used to make claims for historical justice over the last decades, and how notions of retroactive responsibility were used in Swedish and Danish parliamentary debates about state redress for abuse in out-of-home care for children.

Isobelle Barrett Meyering is a historian of feminism, the family and childhood. She is currently a Research Fellow in the Department of History and Archaeology at Macquarie University. Her first book, Feminism and the Making of a Child Rights Revolution 1969-1979 (2022), explored the role of Australian feminists in advancing the radical project of children’s liberation during the 1970s and built on her award-winning doctoral research, completed at UNSW in 2017. Her work, on subjects including high school activism, feminist lifestyle politics and conservative backlash movements, has been featured in key Australian history and gender studies journals.

Judith Bessant AM is a Professor at RMIT University, Melbourne, Australia. She was awarded a Member of the Order of Australia in 2017 for ‘Significant service to education as a social scientist, advocate and academic specialising in youth studies research’. She writes in the fields of politics, youth studies, policy, sociology, social anthropology, media-technology studies and history. She also provides advice for government and non-government organisations.

Sari Braithwaite is a researcher at La Trobe University in Melbourne, Australia, and an award-winning documentary filmmaker who works across the disciplines of film, history and sociology. Her documentary film works have been played at festivals around the world. Her latest film Because We Have Each Other premiered internationally at the 2023 Rotterdam Film Festival. She is currently working with Katie Wright on the Australian Research Council funded project, ‘Reclaiming childhood rights: Activism, public inquiries and social change’.

Lindy Cameron is a PhD candidate at La Trobe University in Melbourne, Australia, with interdisciplinary interests across gender, sexuality and diversity studies, sociology, culture and media studies and feminist political science. Her doctoral project uses feminist theory to interrogate responses to opinionated teenage girls who are independent, have a clear sense of agency and prominent public voices. Using social media, she analyses public discourses surrounding girl activists, focussing on the ways in which they are vilified, how they fight back and demand to be heard and the social structures that create, enable and constrain these gendered struggles.

Philippa Collin is Professorial Research Fellow at the Institute for Culture and Society at Western Sydney University where she co-directs the Young and Resilient Research Centre. She works in political sociology, youth studies, digital cultures and health and wellbeing. A passionate advocate for participatory approaches, her research investigates: young people’s relationship to democracy; the role of the digital for youth citizenship, health and wellbeing; and, methodological innovations in youth-centred research. She has published widely including the monographs, Young People and Political Participation in Digital Society (2015) and Young People in Digital Society (2019).

Catherine Hartung is a Senior Lecturer in Education at Swinburne University, with expertise in young people’s citizenship, participation, wellbeing and diversity. Her research is interdisciplinary with a core interest in how educational, cultural and political institutions reproduce and/or challenge inequalities, and the ways that children and young people negotiate and resist institutional governance. She is the author of Conditional Citizens: Rethinking Children and Young People’s Participation (2017) and Young People, Citizenship, and Political Participation: Combatting Civic Deficit? (2017, with Chou, Gagnon, and Pruitt).

Chika Hosoda is a PhD candidate at the Department of Education at the University of York, UK. She has researched language ideology in Japanese media discourse and economic, social and cultural rights in the context of international development. Her PhD examines citizenship education in England and Japan and explores English and Japanese teachers’ views on citizenship, their pedagogical approaches, and the influence of their life experiences and backgrounds on their work. Research from her doctoral study will soon be published in the journal, Citizenship Teaching and Learning.

Iida Kauhanen is a doctoral researcher at the University of Oulu, Finland. Her research examines barriers to social justice for unaccompanied migrant youth in Finland. She is especially interested in how practices in educational settings and institutional living create obstacles for participation and hinder possibilities for creating loving relationships. Her research interests include social justice issues in the lives of people who are marginalised in their communities. Her previous work as a preparatory class teacher for newly arrived immigrant youth has greatly inspired her current research.

Maija Lanas is a Professor of Education in the University of Oulu, the Department of Education and Psychology, and a Docent of Teacher Education in the University of Helsinki, Finland. She leads the research group Social Justice at the Focus of Education with 14 doctoral and post-doctoral researchers. The group carries out research on normative discourses and subject formation, especially in education. Recently, the group has looked at what bullying speech, deviance and disturbing behaviour produce, how the school as a material environment creates practices and what subjectification and participation look like for asylum-seeking youth.

Therese Boje Mortensen is a PhD candidate at the Department of Human Rights Studies, Lund University, Sweden. With an interdisciplinary background in fields that combine law, anthropology, Hindi language and political theory, her research interests lie at the cross-section of human rights, child rights, contemporary Indian society and politics, civil society, NGOs, voluntarism and activism. Her doctoral dissertation examines how NGO workers negotiate human rights duties in ‘partnership’ with a rights-based, neoliberal and increasingly authoritarian Indian state. Beyond academia, she has worked in project management for child rights NGOs in Denmark and India.

Maria Petäjäniemi is a postdoctoral researcher at Tampere University, Finland. Her current research focusses on normative discourses in refugee education. In her PhD, she examined the subjectification of asylum-seeking men by looking at the boundaries and possibilities the men faced in Finnish society in their everyday lives during the asylum decision waiting period. She is part of a research group, SAFE, which broadly focusses on issues of social justice in education. She is also involved in the interdisciplinary group Mobile North which takes inspiration from critical fields of inquiry, such as feminist studies and critical race theory.

Jenny Ritchie, of Te Herenga Waka Victoria University of Wellington, Aotearoa New Zealand, has a longstanding teaching and research focus on education for social, cultural, ecological and climate justice. She has researched transforming a commitment to Te Tiriti o Waitangi into enactment within teacher education and beyond; pedagogies that affirm and support children’s cultural, spiritual and emotional wellbeing and citizenship enactment; and ways that Māori conceptualisations can enhance pedagogies that protect and care for our planet. As Co-PI in a Spencer funded research project, she co-authored the book, Young Children’s Community Building in Action: Embodied, Emplaced and Relational Citizenship (2020).

Roberto S. Salva is a doctoral candidate in Social Policy at the Heller School for Social Policy and Management, Brandeis University, USA, he was a Sol Chick and Rosalind B. Chaikin Endowed Fellow, Frank and Theresa Caplan Endowed Fellow, and Marjorie S. Trotter Doctoral Fellow of the Heller School. He previously led the baseline study on child participation in the ASEAN and its 10 member states; drafted guidelines on child participation for the ASEAN Commission on the Promotion and Protection of the Rights of Women and Children; peer reviewed the Philippine study on violence against children, and has consulted for various NGOs.

Johanna Sköld is an economic historian and Professor in the Department of Child Studies at Linköping University, Sweden. She is a former member of the Swedish Commission to Inquire into Child Abuse and Neglect in Institutions and Foster Homes and is the founder of an international network on child abuse inquiries. Her research focusses on the history of foster care, war child evacuations and comparative studies of child abuse inquiries internationally. Her latest publications focus on how the stigma associated with illegitimacy has created markets for keeping pregnancies, child births and children secret.

Janina Suppers is a Lecturer for Social Sciences in Education at Te Kura Toi Tangata, School of Education at the University of Waikato, New Zealand. Her research focusses on citizenship education, young people’s political participation and rural communities. She is particularly interested in the interrelationship between place, citizenship education and young people’s engagement as active and critical citizens. She completed initial teacher training and she has worked as a teacher in middle and secondary schools, specialising in social studies, citizenship education, geography and English as an additional language.

Shurlee Swain is an Emeritus Professor in the National School of Arts at Australian Catholic University in Melbourne, Australia. A social historian, her work has informed most of the recent inquiries into historical institutional abuse in Australia. She is also a Chief Investigator on the Commonwealth Government funded Find and Connect Web resource project and a collaborator with Katie Wright on a range of projects designed to keep the memory of the Australian Royal Commission into Institutional Responses to Child Sexual Abuse current.

Anne-Mari Väisänen is a Doctor of Education. She has taught at the University of Oulu in Finland and currently works as a mentoring teacher for primary school educators. She undertakes critical research on school bullying and completed a PhD about expert discourses on bullying. Currently she is conducting research on discourses of peer relations of school children and youth, and contextual and educational views on school bullying. She is interested in social justice issues in schools.

Rob Watts, FASSA, is Professor of Social Policy at RMIT University in Melbourne, Australia. He has a range of research interests and has published many books, beginning with The Foundations of the National Welfare State (1987) and, more recently, Criminalizing Dissent: The Liberal State and the Problem of Legitimacy (2021).

Kirsi Yliniva is a doctoral researcher examining the potentials and limits for the political agency of children in the Anthropocene, an era characterised by escalating human-induced environmental emergencies. By investigating political, policy and scholarly discourses, her work delves into topics such as the future of education, political agency and subjectivity and biopolitics. Her research takes place within the Social Justice as the Focus of Education research group at the University of Oulu, Finland. She is also affiliated with the AGORA Research Centre at the University of Helsinki, Finland.

Acknowledgements

Many people helped make this book possible, and we are grateful for the generous spirit of collaboration that went into its development. Most importantly, we extend our thanks to the contributors for their insightful and engaging chapters and enthusiasm for this project. We especially appreciated their patience and considered responses throughout the peer review process. We are very grateful for the generosity of the anonymous peer reviewers, who provided timely feedback and shared their knowledge and expertise. We thank Diana Langmead for her skilful copy-editing and for being wonderful to work with. We also thank Loretta E. Bass, the Series Editor of Sociological Studies of Children and Youth for her support for this project, along with the team at Emerald, in particular, Katy Mathers, Abinaya Chinnasamy, Rajachitra S, and Lauren Kammerdiener for their assistance and advice throughout the process of bringing this book to fruition. Finally, we would like to acknowledge the support of our academic homes, respectively La Trobe University and the University of Melbourne; we also acknowledge funding from the Australian Research Council, for the research project, Reclaiming Child Rights: Activism, Public Inquiries and Social Change (K. Wright and J. Sköld, DP220100376). The initial ideas for the book grew out of this project and it provided valuable support for the work undertaken to bring this volume to completion.