Professional Practice and Children’s Participation in Troubled Times

1. Professional Practice and Children’s Participation in Troubled Times Erica Burman Manchester Metropolitan University e.burman@mmu.ac.uk www.Discourseunit.com

2. Steedman (1995) on childhood as interiority ‘The idea of the child was used both to recall and to express the past that each individual life contained: what was turned inside in the course of individual development was that which was also latent: the child was the story waiting to be told.’ (p.10-11) ‘The idea of the child was the figure that provided the largest number of people living in the recent past of Western societies with the means for thinking about a self: something grasped and understood: a shape, moving in the body… something inside: an interiority.’ (p.20)

3. Childhood and emotion: but whose? ‘..the very idea of childhood itself is crucially implicated in the structures of feeling that define the bourgeois nuclear family and which prioritize emotion as a structuring and motivating force both for public and private life in contemporary capitalism.’ (Lesnik-Oberstein, 1998:7)

4. Why treating the child as text is particularly appropriate - as signifier of the authentic self – potential, actual or even past ‘…the child is both that which must be figured in order to make a claim on the human, and the body from which the “facts” of human nature’s makings must be ascertained. Their figuration therefore instantiates the workings of ontological privilege: the power to claim what is; what the child is, and what the adult is that the child will become.’ (Castaňeda 2002 p.81)

5. Childhood as a malleable and describable state – fashioning the future ‘…the child is both that which must be figured in order to make a claim on the human, and the body from which the “facts” of human nature’s makings must be ascertained. Their figuration therefore instantiates the workings of ontological privilege: the power to claim what is; what the child is, and what the adult is that the child will become.’ (Castaňeda 2002 p.81)

6. The over-expressiveness of childhood ‘Routinely accused of being too fluffy or, conversely, too worthy for its own good, the study of the child entails its own superfluity.’ (Caselli, 2011: 122) …‘If the child, as a cultural notion, is still in the position in which ‘the woman’ was before the impact of feminist theory in the 1960s and ‘70s….[w]hat remains to be fully accounted for is the peculiar way in which the self – stubbornly and familiarly – stares back every time we constitute the child into an object of study.’ (Caselli, 2011: 129)

7. ‘Sentimentality is useless for parents, as it contains a denial of hate, and sentimentality in a mother is no good at all from the infant’s point of view.’ (Winnicott, p.202) Winnicott, D.W. (1949) The International Journal of Psychoanalysis. 30 (2): 69-74.

9. Troubling professions • Valuing work with children vs. critiquing ‘expertise’ • The question of disciplines in childhood studies • The problem of disciplinary interpellations: "The adverse attitudes to education of disadvantaged mothers are one of the most important factors associated with the lower educational attainment of their children...” (source: ESRC Social Mobility briefings series, published on 8 March 2012.  http://www.esrc.ac.uk/publications/evidence-briefings/index.aspx page 2)

10. Some relevant tropes:Cameron’s ‘Broken Britain’ • ‘Feral underclass’ • ‘Lost generation’ • ‘Invisible children’ • And now (as of 28 March 2012) • ‘Forgotten families’

14. more professional complicities… • Psychologisation: ‘worklessness’/’employability’ • Social work: ‘Merton assessments’ – the UKBA search for a measure of age • State regulation of professions – protecting the public, demystifying expertise • How ‘accountability’ and ‘transparency’ consolidate managerialism and bureaucracy

15. Laurie Anderson (2010) – ‘Only an expert’ (Homeland) Now only an expert can deal with the problem Cause half the problem is seeing the problem Only an expert can deal with the problem Only an expert can deal with the problem. So if there’s no expert dealing with the problem It’s really actually twice the problem Cause only an expert can deal with the problem Only an expert can deal with the problem …. But if some experts say it’s no problem And if other experts claim it’s no problem or explain why it’s no problem Then it’s simply not a problem. But when an expert says it’s a problem and makes a movie about the problem And wins an Oscar about the problem And gets the Nobel Prize about the problem Then all the other experts have to agree it is most likely a problem…. …. Cause only an expert can see there’s a problem And seeing the problem is half the problem Cause only an expert can deal with the problem Cause only an expert can deal with the problem.

16. Applicability of knowledge trumps truth value • Reconstructing disciplines implicitly via debates over relations between method and theory

17. Troubling participation • Participation as euphemism • Participation as consumption • Participation as responsibilisation • Participation as surveillance/regulation • Participation as capitalist production

18. (i) Participation as euphemism synonymns for earlier terms such as: ‘subject’, or service-oriented versions, such as: ‘patient’ ‘user’ or ‘client’ or ‘customer’….

19. ‘To fail to take into account children’s own self-perceptions when describing their lives is to violate their dignity’ (Beazley et al., 2009, p374) ‘taking advantage of children’s schooled docility’ (Gallacher and Gallagher, 2008 p506)

20. The problem of ‘pseudo-participation’ When the meanings and consequences of participating remain at best ambiguous: ‘Participation means taking part, which necessitates some predefined activity in which the participants can take part’ (Gallacher and Gallagher 2008, p507)

21. ‘Children may do a range of things with cameras: take pictures of things they find interesting; take pictures of what they think the researcher wants to see; take pictures of their friends; explain to the researcher why they are taking each picture; take lots of pictures but say nothing about them, even when asked; ask the researcher to take pictures for them; give the camera to someone else; take no pictures; they may even break the camera deliberately. All of these would be doing something, but not all of them could be described as ‘participation’. Indeed requiring that children participate might actually constrain the possibilities for them to act.’ (Gallacher and Gallagher 2008, p507)

22. (ii) Participation as consumption • Restricted modes of agency fostered under neoliberalism • Problems of individualisation • Possibilities of exploitation? • Engagement but no power?

25. “Tim just realised his parents get HD channels at no extra cost” The child as active, combative consumer….

27. (iii) Participation as responsibilisation • focus on what the child will become • moulding an economically independent, productive citizen • emphasis on flexilibility and skills treats the vicissitudes of the markets and employment conditions as if they were personal qualities or attributes.

28. c.f. O’Brien and Salonen’s (2011) cross-national comparison of the impact of active citizenship policies on child rights in Sweden and New Zealand • in both countries poverty levels have increased the most in single parent and immigrant families. ‘Our cross-country analysis of active citizenship and child rights shows that the trade-off between the two, which priorities active citizenship, leaves significant numbers of children in poverty because the two policies are moving in opposite directions, movement in which children bear the consequences’ (p223). => children are being made responsible for outcomes that they have played no part in forming.

29. ‘Adults like children are to be governed by modes of ‘conducting conduct’ premised on learning, while children like adults are to be governed by modes of ‘conducting conduct’ premised on autonomy and participation (Kryger, 2004). Here participation serves as a means to perfectibility with ‘flexible souls’ (Fendler, 2001). As the desired end products… somewhat ironically, ideas about children’s agency can be deployed in the kinds of instrumental, future-oriented strategies that the image of the child as ‘competent social actor’ was developed to counter.’ (Smith, 2012 p34)

30. (iv) Participation as surveillance/regulation ‘… current enthusiasm for practical, “policy-relevant” social research on children is closely connected to adult anxieties about young people: how to improve them, make them more employable, more productive and healthier; how to encourage and regulate their moral conduct and to participate in democratic politics. That is, it is concerned with the production of ideal future citizens …’ (Gallacher and Gallagher, 2008) p503-4)

31. Giving voice or constructing narratives? • The importance of silence (Silverman et al, 1998; Mazzei, 2007) • Beyond ‘giving voice/consultation’: ‘Giving a voice to young people to shape an intervention programme to help young people out of disadvantage is likely to have less impact in addressing that disadvantage and improving young people’s lifechances than direct work which widens opportunities and choices for young people and that helps young people to realise and develop their interests and abilities to engage with the world’ (Percy-Smith, 2010 p112).

32. Lessons from feminist development studies: • Strategies for the management of compliance • Reproducing dominant power relations? • Recruiting children into their own surveillance • Making visible and undermining local/’indigenous’ strategies of resistance • Colonising and appropriating children’s experience

33. (v) Participation as capitalist production • NGO practice as social enterprise • Business values • Competition, not alliances • Service provision not activism • Active citizenship not activism

34. Reformulating claims, and enlarging participation On the need to be ‘methodological immature’: ‘…participatory methods are no less problematic, or ethically ambiguous, than any other research method… Methodological immaturity privileges open-ended process over predefined technique. It does not aim to discover or uncover a pre-existing world, offering instead experimentation, innovation and “making do”. While “participation” may seem laudable, it does not and cannot deliver all that it promises – perhaps simply because in the face of the unpredictability of the social world, it tries to offer some kind of guarantee.’ (Gallacher & Gallagher, 2009, p513)