Prelims

Half Title Page

The Emerald Handbook of Childhood and Youth in Asian Societies

Title Page

The Emerald Handbook of Childhood and Youth in Asian Societies: Generations Between Local and Global Dynamics

Edited by

Doris Bühler-Niederberger

University of Wuppertal, Germany

Xiaorong Gu

University of Suffolk, UK

Jessica Schwittek

University of Duisburg-Essen, Germany

And

Elena Kim

American University of Central Asia, Kyrgyzstan

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 2023

Editorial matter and selection © 2023 Doris Bühler-Niederberger, Xiaorong Gu, Jessica Schwittek and Elena Kim.

Individual chapters © 2023 The authors.

Published under exclusive licence by Emerald Publishing Limited.

This work is published under the Creative Commons Attribution (CC BY 4.0) licence.

Anyone may reproduce, distribute, translate and create derivative works of these works (for both commercial and non-commercial purposes), subject to full attribution to the original publication and authors. The full terms of this licence may be seen at http://creativecommons.org/licences/by/4.0/legalcode

The ebook edition of this title is Open Access and is freely available to read online.

British Library Cataloguing in Publication Data

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

ISBN: 978-1-80382-284-6 (Print)

ISBN: 978-1-80382-283-9 (Online)

ISBN: 978-1-80382-285-3 (Epub)

About the Contributors

Adrienne Lee Atterberry is a US-based Sociologist. Her research interests include parenting, elite childhoods and teachers’ work. She recently published the coedited volume, Children and Youths' Migration in a Global Landscape (Emerald). Her work has appeared in the journals Current Sociology and Contemporary Education Dialogue. She is the author of several book chapters, including Optimizing the Benefits From Schooling: School-Switching Behavior Among Return Migrants in India, and Pathways to US Higher Education: Capital, Citizenship and Indian Women MBA Students. Currently, she is working on a book project that examines parenting practices among transnationally mobile Indians and Indian Americans living in Bangalore, India.

Giuseppe Bolotta is Assistant Professor of Southeast Asian Studies in the Department of Asian and North African Studies at Ca' Foscari University of Venice, in Italy, and Research Associate of the National University of Singapore's Asia Research Institute. His research interests focus on the history and cultural politics of childhood and youth in Thailand; development, religion and humanitarianism in Southeast Asia; transnational governance of childhood; and the politics of children's rights in the Global South. He is the author of Belittled Citizens: The Cultural Politics of Childhood on Bangkok's Margins (NIAS Press, 2021).

Doris Bühler-Niederberger, PhD, is a Sociologist and Rudolf Carnap Senior Professor at the University of Wuppertal. She researches childhood, youth and transition to adulthood in different countries. She is particularly interested in age as a social structural dimension, the definition of age categories and intergenerational relations in public and private contexts. Her recent publications include: When the family occupies the future – Self-processes and well-being of Kyrgyz children and young people. Child Indicators Research, 2022, 15(4), 1179–1208 (with Jessica Schwittek); Victim, perpetrator, or what else – generational and gender perspectives on children, youth and violence. Sociological Studies of Children and Youth (SSCY), Volume 25, 2020 (edited with Lars Albert); Struggling for open awareness – trajectories of violence against children. Children and Youth Services Review, 2022 https://doi.org/10.1016/j.childyouth.2022.106769 (with Lars Albert).

Ekaterina Chicherina completed her master's degree in Sociology at the University of Wuppertal. For many years, Chicherina has been actively engaged in studies devoted to the life worlds of children and adolescents. Her research has focused on the Central Asian post-Soviet space, particularly Kyrgyzstan. Currently, Chicherina is completing a PhD program, studying the changes and continuation in biographic projecting by adolescents in Kyrgyzstan. Her research interests include adolescents' educational choices and the effects of social transformations on the formation of individuals' biographic projects.

Dr Elizer Jay de los Reyes is a Lecturer at the Southampton Education School of the University of Southampton, UK. His work examines the impact of mobilities of labour and risks on the educational experiences of learners and higher education academics. Jay investigates how the emigration of rural women from the northern Philippines shapes their left-behind children's imagination of possible futures. He was previously a Postdoctoral Fellow and an NUS Fellow (Southeast Asia) at the Department of Communications and New Media, National University of Singapore.

Frederick de Moll, Bielefeld University, Germany, is a Professor of Educational Science with a specialization in Childhood and Youth Studies. His research focuses on social and educational inequalities in (early) childhood and youth, family life and parenting practices in relation to organizational expectations. Recent work addresses children's views on inequalities and their beliefs regarding educational opportunities and parenting practices vis-à-vis children's access to higher education. Frederick has published book chapters and articles on topics such as societal notions of “good” parenting, children's agency in processes of sociocultural reproduction, social class differences in childcare arrangements and teenagers' alienation from school. He has done several research stays and given lectures abroad, visiting the United States, Canada, France and Japan.

Asuncion Fresnoza-Flot is a tenured research associate of the Belgian Fund for Scientific Research (F.R.S.-FNRS) and Senior Lecturer at the Laboratory of Anthropology of Contemporary Worlds (LAMC) of the Université libre de Bruxelles (ULB). She has published widely on Filipino transnational families including issues concerning children and youth growing up within this social unit. Together with Itaru Nagasaka, she coedited the volume Mobile Childhoods in Filipino Transnational Families. Migrant Children With Similar Roots in Different Routes (2015, Palgrave Macmillan). Her current research examines Belgian-Asian couples in transnational social spaces.

Xiaorong Gu is Lecturer in Childhood Studies at University of Suffolk (UK). Prior to this, she held several research positions with Asia Research Institute of National University of Singapore and on the “Doing Intimacy” Project at SOAS, University of London. She is a sociologist of children and youths, writing about their migration and mobilities, education, socioemotions, relations and their social positioning vis-à-vis family, educational institutions and the nation-state. Her area focus is on contemporary China, from a comparative-Asia perspective. She guest-edited the special issue on The Value of Children and Social Transformations in Asia with Child Indicators Research (2021) and the special monograph on The Value of Children in The Global South: A Critical Engagement with Current Sociology (2022). Her research article – “‘Save the children!’: Governing Left-behind Children through Family in China's Great Migration” – has been shortlisted for the Annual SAGE Current Sociology Best Paper Prize in 2022.

Akihide Inaba, Keio University, Japan, is a Professor in the Department of Human Sciences. He is an expert in Quantitative Sociology and Social Statistics and has published both in English and Japanese in the fields of Social Policy, Sociology of Education and Health Sciences. His work has been published in edited volumes and journals such as the International Journal of Japanese Sociology and Social Science and Medicine. In addition, he has collaborated on comparative research in the United States while visiting Vanderbilt University in Nashville. Akihide is mainly concerned with the relationship between family structure, gender issues and child-rearing. In recent years, his focus has been geared toward inequalities among children and their life course, the effects of nonresident fathers and single parenting on children's upbringing and statistical methods for handling missing data in social statistics.

Ravneet Kaur is presently teaching as Associate Professor at the Department of Elementary Education, Mata Sundri College for Women, University of Delhi, New Delhi, India. She has a doctorate from the University of Delhi. She holds a Master's Degree in both Child Development and Education from the University of Delhi. She has been extensively engaged in teaching and research in the areas of Human Development, Childhood Studies, Psychology and Education. Her recent book titled, Constructions of Childhood in India: Exploring the Personal and Sociocultural Contours, has been well received. She was awarded with a Major Project by the Indian Council of Social Science Research, India.

Asma Khalid holds a PhD in Sociology from the University of Wollongong, Australia. Her research interests are children and young people working on the streets, rights-based approach, children and young people's everyday lives and cultures, children and young people's participation in community development, women and gender issues and equitable society, among others. She has won DAAD and HEC scholarships to pursue her studies abroad and has also published both nationally and internationally. She has published a book chapter entitled “Street children (2020).” In The SAGE Encyclopaedia of Children and Childhood Studies, edited by Daniel Thomas Cook. She has also published another chapter entitled “What would Korczak do? Reflections on education, well-being and children's rights in the times of the Covid-19 pandemic (2020).” In What would Korczak Do? Reflections on education, well-being and children's rights in the times of the covid-19 pandemic, Anna Odrowąż-Coates (Ed.). pp. 41–57, Warsaw 2020.

Elena Kim is a Psychology Professor at the American University of Central Asia, Bishkek Kyrgyzstan. She is currently a visiting Psychology Professor at Bard college, New York. Elena's teaching and research focus is on gender and international development, gender-based violence and gender politics in Central Asia. More specifically, her ethnographies concerned practices such as child marriage, bride kidnapping and foreign-funded crisis intervention in Kyrgyzstan. Elena has served as a consultant to the United Nations Development Program, United Nations Environmental Program, UN Women on matters of investigating intersections among gender, women and violence. Her peer-reviewed publications include chapters in several books and journal articles including the Child Indicators Research, Violence Against Women, Journal of Gender Studies, Gender, Technology and Development, Central Asian Survey, Rural Society and Women and Therapy.

Kamila Labuda is a social scientist who works on various topics related to migration, participation and education. She studied International Migration and Intercultural Relations (Master of Arts) at the University of Osnabrück/Institute for Migration Research and Intercultural Studies. She is currently working at the German Center for Integration and Migration Research (DeZIM) on the project “Exploring the Transferability of the Canoo. Cultural Access Pass from Canada to Germany”.

Laura Lamas-Abraira, CSIC (Spanish National Research Council), is a graduate in Social and Cultural Anthropology and holds an international PhD in Intercultural Studies. Her research interests include migration and transnationalism, family and care, interculturalism and social inclusion. Since 2017, she has been a member of the InterAsia research group (Universitat Autònoma de Barcelona) with a line of research on Chinese transnational families, and she has conducted research stays in prestigious Asian institutions such as the University of Xiamen and the National Taipei University. After obtaining her PhD (2009) she has worked as a postdoctoral researcher in several EU funded projects. Currently she is a junior Ramón y Cajal junior fellow at the Department of Anthropology of the Spanish National Research Council (ILLA-CSIC).

Mariya Levitanus is a scholar, queer activist and a psychotherapist. She works as a Lecturer in Counseling and Psychotherapy at the University of Edinburgh. Mariya holds a Doctorate in Psychotherapy and is particularly interested in studying the everyday lives of queer people in Central Asia. Her work foregrounds lived experiences, examining how the sociopolitical shapes the personal – subjective. Her recent publications include a chapter on the role of uyat or the culture of shame in the regulation of queer subjectivities in Kazakhstan (Levitanus, 2022a), and an article on agency and resistance amongst queer people in Kazakhstan (Levitanus, 2022b).

Nigar Nasrullayeva has been working in the education sector in Baku, Azerbaijan, since 2007 as a part of education development programmes including various national and international institutions (UNICEF, State Agency or Vocational Development, British Council and IREX). The key areas of her engagement were mainly in the development of vocational, higher and inclusive education in Azerbaijan. She currently works on the development of youth and adolescent skills as a national consultant with a particular interest in children's well-being, quality and inclusive education. She holds a master's degree in Comparative International Education from the University of Oslo and has coauthored several publications on the study of Azerbaijan children.

Jessica Schwittek is a Postdoctoral Researcher in the work group of Socialization Research at the Faculty of Educational Sciences at the University of Duisburg-Essen. Her work focuses on childhood, youth and family in different societies and in the contexts of migration and transnationality. Of special interest to her work are variations and negotiations of the generational order and normative patterns of childhood and intergenerational solidarity. Her recent publications include: When the family occupies the future – Self-processes and well-being of Kyrgyz children and young people. Child Indicators Research, 2022, 15(4), 1179–1208 (with Doris Bühler-Niederberger); Double Facework. Aushandlungsprozesse junger Erwachsener in Kirgistan zwischen Selbst und Kollektiv, 2017.

Dr Aysel Sultan is a Lecturer at the Technical University of Munich, Department of Science, Technology and Society. Her work is situated at the intersection of the sociology of health and illness and Science and Technology Studies (STS) with a particular interest in the application of materialist and posthuman theory in public health and healthcare policies. Her recent book Recovering Assemblages: Unfolding sociometrical relations of drug use and recovery published by Palgrave Macmillan explores the recovery experiences of young people from Azerbaijan and Germany from the perspective of critical drug studies.

Siqi Tu is a Postdoctoral Research Fellow of Social Science at the Center for Applied Social and Economic Research at NYU Shanghai. Her works focus on issues of global citizenship, elite education, international (im)mobility and migration and the political economy of global cities. Her forthcoming book, Destination Diploma: How Chinese Upper-Middle Class Families “Outsource” Secondary Education to the United States (under contract with Columbia University Press), investigates why and how Chinese upper-middle-class families made educational decisions to send their children as young as 14 to the United States for private high schools, as well as documents and analyzes the lived experiences of the “parachute generation.”

Aytüre Türkyilmaz, Dr phil., is a post doc Research Associate at the University of Bamberg, Germany. Her research interests include childhood, educational inequalities, and age transitions. Her current work focuses on generational relations in different socialization contexts, cross-, and transnational research.

List of Contributors

Acknowledgments

The open access publication of this book has been generously supported by the University of Wuppertal, the University Library of Duisburg-Essen's Open Access Publication Fund, and the American University of Central Asia, Bishkek.