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The terrors of hypervigilance: Security and the new spatialities of childhood
Abstract
Building upon earlier work that brought together an examination of children's geographies with an analysis of the effects of global economic restructuring on social reproduction, this paper addresses the new spatialities of childhood in the United States. I argue that the spaces of contemporary childhood at all scales from the body to the globe are compromised under the corrosive effects of neoliberal capitalist globalism, the heightened concern with security, and escalating privatization. Reclaiming the language of "terror" to examine these effects and their entailments for children's everyday lives in an increasingly privatized public environment and evermore exposed private environment, I will look at the insecurity that arises from broad retreats in the social wage on the part of the state and capitalists. I argue that much of the mundane hypervigilance that has come to characterize daily life in the U.S. can be traced to the insecurities provoked by «globalization» and the deterioration of the social wage. The paper describes some of the new surveillance technologies in the home such as «nanny cams» and child monitors, and argues that these are means of negotiating the altered landscape of social reproduction, the inequalities associated with global economic restructuring, and enduring gendered divisions of labor. I suggest that these privatized measures simultaneously elide and mystify the real sources of insecurity, failing to redress them at all. My broader argument is that the geographies of contemporary childhood are most compromised by widespread retreats in the social wage enabled by the globalization of capitalist production the ascendance of neoliberalism, and it is these issues that demand our attention.
This article presents the role of age as an important axis of analysis in the framework of social and cultural geography. The fieldwork includes focus groups, interviews and walking tours around the neighborhood, to identify the more used places, the preferred places and the places young people don't like. We want to know how they build their lives in the neighborhood, how they spend their time and how they use public spaces. Analyzing the neighborhood life is essential to understand the different needs and interests of boys and girls in relation to their experiences and perceptions of lived spaces.
In this paper we compare the social networks of children growing up in three different neighbourhoods in contemporary Amsterdam, the multicultural capital of the Netherland. Central question is how children growing up in specific neighbourhoods develop friendships and build on their social network and to what extent they are able to meet children with a different social background. We focus on conditions related to school and neighbourhood, taking into account that (crossed) social networks are not naturally given, but are constructed under certain spatial and social conditions. Three neighbourhoods are selected that differ in social and physical conditions for growing up: Tuindorp Nieuwendam, Indische Buurt i Museumkwartier. We distinguished two social dimensions: class and ethnic composition. It becomes clear that childhood varies across space and that homogeneous friendships are more at stake in children's lives than social relationships that cross age, class and ethnicity.
This piece grows out of my on-going project, 'Childhood as Spectacle', and my enduringconcern with social reproduction and what it does for and to Marxist and othercritical political-economic analyses. After more than 30 years of Marxist-feministinterventions around these issues, symptomatic silences around social reproductionremain all too common in analyses of capitalism. Working through these issues andtheir occlusion, I offer what I hope is a useful and vibrant theoretical framework forexamining geographies of children, youth, and families. Building this framework callsinto play three overlapping issues; neoliberal capitalism in crisis and David Harvey'snotion of accumulation by dispossession, my ideas around childhood as spectacle,as a cultural formation associated with contemporary political economic crisis andits figuration of the child as waste, and how this figuration might be turned aroundto find libratory potential in and from the site of children's play and time.
Youth is an heterogeneous group, crossed by different identities such as gender, ethnicity, sexual orientation class and age. These identities condition the way they live the city, limiting or allowing their access to it. In this paper I analyze the uses and experiences of young people in Manresa from a feminist intersectional perspective, it is, taking into account their multiple identities as mutually constituted and simoultaneously experienced. Through diverse qualitative methodologies I examine the experiences of thirty one young people with the aim to explore how they are in the street, focusing on their abilities to negotiate spatial conditioning. Fear, social control by their own community and heteronormativity appeared as the most determinant factors for their access to public space, showing at the same time the necessity of analyzing the forms of subordination in private space to understand the spatial dynamics in the public sphere.
The paper addresses a gap in the literature on childhood and/in post-socialism and uses everydayness as the conceptual means that links both themes. It presents a story of Lina, a seven-year old Roma girl from a deprived urban neighbourhood in Bratislava, and maps everyday encounters, practices and recognitions that imply what matters in Lina's life. The paper stresses importance of ungrounded empirical inquiry, and through identifying complex and heterogeneous associations in Lina's life, it highlights acknowledgment of both broader social situations (such as post-socialism), but also mundane and often unremarkable moments in children's lives. The notion of post-socialism is thus situated within the 'descaled' geographies of Lina's everyday life, rather than as an imposing social condition.
This chapter presents a conceptually- and historically-grounded account of state policy concerning childcare in the province of Quebec, Canada, and examines how access to the current array of "organized' services and "informal' childcare arrangements is determined in three Montreal neighbourhoods. Focusing on Canadian-born and immigrant families with young children needing pre-school and before- and after-school childcare, it explores how the ways that these parents arrange childcare reflect the interplay of life course position with class, ethnicity and family structure. The options they have and the choices they make are situated within the parameters of the wider politico-institutional framework as this is mediated by socio-economic and cultural factors which vary from one neighbourhood to another. -from Author
Dual-career couples in urban areas commonly rely upon nannies or housekeepers to allow them to flexibly combine work and family lives. Highly personalized services allow parents to manage competing demands. Such forms of child care also contain their own tensions and dilemmas, though, in part because they are based on profound social inequality between parents and caregivers. Based on 155 in-depth, tape-recorded interviews with parents and caregivers in the New York and Los Angeles metropolitan areas, dilemmas arising between even parents with egalitarian ideologies and caregivers are analyzed. One dilemma concerns the parents' authority over the caregiver. Parents may want to let the caregiver exercise her own authority and judgment; yet, to the extent that there are class differences between caregivers and parents, there are likely to also be different definitions of quality child care. The second dilemma arises from parents' and caregivers' efforts to maintain some social distance while still wanting commitments that transcend employment obligations. Private forms of child care solve some problems but have limits that must be considered in assessing social policy options.