Children’s Abilities, Freedom, and the Process of Capability-Formation

Brando, Nico

doi:10.1080/19452829.2020.1767547

Cited by 11 publications

(5 citation statements)

References 38 publications

Supporting

Mentioning

Contrasting

Order By: Relevance

“…Moreover, the broader scope of education in relation to the expansion of capabilities is antithetic to any form of reductionist pedagogy, such as the pedagogy of poverty outlined earlier, but supports instead forms of pedagogical interaction and co-construction of the learning and teaching process (Brando 2020;Adamson 2021).…”

Section: An Ethically Informed Perspective On Child Poverty and Educa...mentioning

confidence: 89%

Philosophical Reflections on Child Poverty and Education

2023

View full text Add to dashboard Cite

The harmful effects of Covid 19 on children living in poverty have refocused attention on the complex nature of child poverty and the vexed question of its relationship to education. The paper examines a tension at the heart of much discussion of child poverty and education. On the one hand, education is often regarded as essential for children’s flourishing and a means by which children can “escape” poverty; yet on the other hand, education systems, institutions, and practices, often reflect and entrench the disadvantages associated with poverty. Narratives concerning education as an escape from poverty tend not to deal in any depth with the injustices associated with poverty, stressing instead the transformative potential of education. By contrast, largely sociological analyses of the ways in which schooling reproduces inequalities tend to stop short of developing a normative account of how education can contribute to transforming the structural injustices related to poverty and its effects on children’s lives. In working to move beyond this analytic impasse, the paper shows how the cluster of concepts, which Robeyns (2018) locates as central to the capability approach, give insights which help to address these two different lacunae. The notion of conversion factors highlights the significance of taking account of existing relationships in education, while the distinction between capabilities and functionings helps guide practices regarding the education of children living in poverty. Drawing on literature on the heightened inequalities associated with poor children’s experience of lack of schooling during the COVID pandemic, the paper sketches some of the ways in which sociological analysis and normative evaluation can be linked in taking forward an “ethically engaged political philosophy” (Wolff, 2018) to discuss child poverty and education in real schools.

show abstract

Section: An Ethically Informed Perspective On Child Poverty and Educa...mentioning

confidence: 89%

Philosophical Reflections on Child Poverty and Education

2023

View full text Add to dashboard Cite

show abstract

“…The development of capabilities, and the processes of exercising freedoms to achieve goals, depends on a number of factors representing the interactions between a person’s internal resources and external contexts (Brando, 2020). These personal, social, and structural conditions, called conversion factors , in turn influence an individual’s ability to convert resources into actual opportunities and abilities (Robeyns, 2005).…”

Section: Leveraging the Capability Approach To Support Youth Particip...mentioning

confidence: 99%

“…Operationalizing the Capability Approach within YPAR can help researchers to better understand goal development in youth, and to rationalize how social arrangements impact aspirations and capability formation (Campbell & McKendrick, 2017). The democratic foundations of both the CA and YPAR also situate well-being within a social justice schema; both frameworks require an understanding of what affects the healthy development of individuals and how to implement capacity building toward the systematic break down of inequalities and power imbalances (Brando, 2020).…”

Section: Leveraging the Capability Approach To Support Youth Particip...mentioning

confidence: 99%

Fostering Youth-Enabling Environments: A Participatory Affordance-Capability Framework for the Development and Use of Youth-Engaged Environmental Assessments

Jaffe

Loebach

2023

Youth & Society

View full text Add to dashboard Cite

This paper proposes a new conceptual approach to the development and utilization of youth-led environmental assessments to inform the planning of youth-enabling environments. Interdisciplinary research has established the influential effects of the physical environment on children and adolescents’ well-being and development, yet there is a gap in our understanding of how to create everyday environments for youth that speak to their needs and interests and provide opportunities for them to flourish. Engaging youth through participatory action research to both develop and conduct environmental assessments can have positive implications for youth empowerment and well-being while also altering research and planning practices to effectively integrate youth voice. The proposed approach integrates elements from affordance theory, the Capability Approach, and positive youth development within a youth participatory action research framework to create a process that encourages capability formation, fosters positive development, and improves our understanding of what constitutes a youth-enabling environment.

show abstract

“…In short, within the CA, language (as a form of communication) is a fundamental conversion factor that enables or restricts our possibilities to be and to do that which we have reason to value in various fundamental aspects of our lives (Brando, 2020: 254–256). 6 Language enables the pursuance of social, political and expressive goals; most of our valued agency objectives depend and are conditioned by the existence of language, even if merely due to its instrumentality.…”

Section: The Value Of Language In the Camentioning

confidence: 99%

Capabilities and Linguistic Justice

Brando

Morales-Gálvez

2021

Political Studies

Self Cite

View full text Add to dashboard Cite

Language conditions our socio-political world in fundamental ways. How public institutions deal with linguistic diversity, and how they distribute linguistic benefits, has an important impact on an individuals’ life. This article studies the value of language in multilingual environments by evaluating the debate on linguistic justice through the capabilities approach. It studies the value of language to assess what principles of justice are required to secure individual freedom. First, we explore the value of language within the framework proposed by the capabilities approach. Second, we assess the role of language in enabling the development of certain capabilities. As a first attempt to comprehensively address the relationship between linguistic justice and the capabilities approach, it evaluates how linguistic justice theories fare in fostering four capabilities from Martha Nussbaum’s list. We provide a conceptually sound normative assessment of the role played by language within the capabilities framework, and how it translates into policy.

show abstract

Children’s Abilities, Freedom, and the Process of Capability-Formation

Cited by 11 publications

References 38 publications

Philosophical Reflections on Child Poverty and Education

Philosophical Reflections on Child Poverty and Education

Fostering Youth-Enabling Environments: A Participatory Affordance-Capability Framework for the Development and Use of Youth-Engaged Environmental Assessments

Capabilities and Linguistic Justice

Contact Info

Product

Resources

About