Precarities of 21st Century Childhoods

This interdisciplinary collection of essays explores internal and external precarities in the lives of children. The goal of the book is to illuminate, promote, and help situate subjectivities that are often blotted out for both the child and society.

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.

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

Chapter 7. Uncertain, Shaky, Touch-And-Go? The Precarity of Children’s Mental Health in Aotearoa New Zealand

Kaye P. Cederman

Chapter 8. Storying: Re-Writing History of Children and Families in Migration

Elizabeth Quintero

Chapter 9. States of Nowhere-Ness in Children and Adolescents

Ionas Sapountzis

Chapter 10. Inconspicuous Precarity: The Impossibility of the Inherently Creative Child

Katherine Martin

Part III: Identities

Chapter 11. The Weaponization of Childhood in Mussolini’s Ethiopian Laboratory and Its Revenants in the Present Day Italy

Paula Salvio

Chapter 12. Necrophobia as a Nihilistic Preoccupation in Paternal Fantasies of Maturation Gone Awry

Louis Rothschild

Chapter 13. Re-Finding Lost Boys: Lessons from Literature and the Clinic

Marilyn Charles

Chapter 14. Fractional Distillation: On Psychoanalysis’ (Mis)Formulation of Autistic Children

Ben Morsa

Chapter 15. Negotiating Agency in the Formation of Subjectivity: The Child, the Parental

Other, and the Sovereign Other

Michael O’Loughlin

About the Contributors