Precarities of 21st Century Childhoods: Critical Explorations of Time(s), Place(s), and Identities(Critical Childhood & Youth Studies: Theoretical Explorations and Practices in Clinical, Educational, Social, and Cultural Settings)

This book locates internally focused, critical perspectives regarding the social, political, emotional, and mental growth of children. Through the radical openness afforded by psychoanalytic and related frameworks, this volume illuminates, promotes, and helps situate subjectivities that are often blotted out for both the child and society. The overall emphasis is on motifs of lostness and foundness, in terms of the geographies of the psycho-social, and how such motifs govern and regulate what have come to count as the normative indexes of childhood as well as how they exclude other real childhoods.

Table of Contents:
List of Figures Foreword Annie G. Rogers Acknowledgments Introduction: Meditations on Precarity in Childhood Michael O'Loughlin, Carol Owens & Louis Rothschild Part I: Times Chapter 1. Found Objects Of/As Re-Membering Through the Lens of Child as Method Erica Burman Chapter 2. “School Is a Time-out in My Tough Life!” Use of Pause, Bridge and Intermittence as Resources for Student Development in School Ana Archangelo, Fábio Camargo Bandeira Villela, & Rosiane Cristina dos Santos Chapter 3. Making Space for the Unfathomable: Liminality in Inner City Schools Aileen Schloerb Chapter 4. Psychoanalyzing “From Both Sides Now”: At the Extremities of Adolescence – “The Tweenies” and “The Twenties” as New Geo-Psychical Positions Carol Owens & Jamieson Webster Chapter 5. Childhood and Adolescence: The Familiar Strangeness of Virtuality Liora Stavchansky Part II: Places Chapter 6. “I Love You More”: Making Childing Visible. Children's Emotional Labor in Affluent Libidinal Economies Anne-Marie Cummins

About the Author :
Michael O’Loughlin is professor at Adelphi University, New York. Carol Owens is a psychoanalyst and Lacanian scholar in Dublin, Ireland. Louis Rothschild is a clinical psychologist in Baltimore County, Maryland.

Review :
While the subject that emerges in particular moments of a treatment is marked by timelessness, the child or adolescent is a developmental being who is steeped in a particular time and place. For Freud the intrusion of the ‘accidents of history’—are moments of crisis that can be crushing, but which also offer the chance of a new foundation. This collection bring to life such times of crisis rooted in authors’ specific cultural, historical, and geographical contexts. This is a beautiful book about the exigencies of childhood across the globe. I found myself captivated by tales that took me from discarded children’s clothing in the UK, through the complex investments of North American childhoods to border crossings, migrations, refugees, to comings and goings in different moments in history. Thus, any sense of theorizing ‘Childhood’ with a capital C for this reader at least, was utterly dispelled by the thoughtfulness of the ‘being with’ that comes from a psychoanalytic sensibility. This welcome collection challenges long-held normative assumptions about the development of children. Taking us to locations as various as New Zealand, the El Paso border, ‘nowhereness’, the times of liminality, the ‘pause’ in the pandemic. This excellent book opens our eyes to diverse ways of investigating and perceiving the experiences, narratives, losses, transitions, and traumas of childhoods that have heretofore been marginalized.