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    Governing the global child

    Wells, Karen (2016) Governing the global child. In: Ansell, N. and Klocker, N. and Skelton, T. (eds.) Geographies of Global Issues: Change and Threat. Geographies of Children and Young People 8. Berlin, Germany: Springer. ISBN 9789814585538.

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    Abstract

    This chapter shows how governmentality theory can illuminate the processes through which childhood is governed on a global scale. It attends to the intersection between liberalism, capitalism and the governing of childhood through an analysis of how NGOs, international law and academic disciplines produce and circulate specific ideas about the figure of the child. Locating the analysis in a historical perspective it demonstrates that the division between contemporary child-rights and historical child-saving is far from complete. It argues that child-rights and child-saving exist contemporaneously and construct the child as an immanently liberal subject. This liberal subject and the particular kinds of freedom that it affords are the figures through which the inequalities of global capitalism are partially obscured. For this reason, the chapter concludes, researchers and practitioners may wish to consider (and resist) the ways that they are incorporated into the governing of contemporary childhoods.

    Metadata

    Item Type: Book Section
    School: Birkbeck Faculties and Schools > Faculty of Humanities and Social Sciences > School of Social Sciences
    Research Centres and Institutes: Gender and Sexuality, Birkbeck (BiGS), Social Research, Birkbeck Institute for (BISR)
    Depositing User: Karen Wells
    Date Deposited: 02 Jun 2016 16:31
    Last Modified: 02 Aug 2023 17:22
    URI: https://eprints.bbk.ac.uk/id/eprint/14621

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