Re-Visioning Women and Social Change:

Abstract

Feminists have re-visioned women as active subjects in knowledge by granting them agency and diversity and by challenging divisions like public versus private. But both feminist and traditional knowledge remain deeply adult centered. Adult perspectives infuse three contemporary images of children: as threats to adult society, as victims of adults, and as learners of adult culture (“socialization”). We can bring children more fully into knowledge by clarifying ideological constructions, with attention to the diversity of children's actual lives and circumstances; by emphasizing children's agency as well as their subordination; and by challenging their conceptual privatization. The re-visioning of children involves complex issues of gender, generation, autonomy, and relatedness.

Transnational Childhoods: The Participation of Children in Processes of Family Migration

“…Sociologists of childhood also seek to bring children's experiences and actions more fully into the study of society (Thorne 1987). Age divisions, like those of gender and "race," vary in organization and meaning; in different cultural and historical contexts, there may be different assumptions about the needs, capacities, and appropriate activities of children of different ages.…”

“Third World” Girls: Gender, Childhood and Colonialism

“…For example, this approach is unable to go beyond binarisms such as the adult world of "labor" versus the childhood world of "playing" [6], a question that we emphasize in view of its relevance to understand the lives of children in the "global South".…”

A Political Space for Children? The Age Order and Children’s Right to Participation

“…When children are understood as under development and in need of protection, this gives legitimacy to the primacy of adults which can be compared to how women, in a binary understanding of gender, are constructed as weak and emotionally unstable and how this gives legitimacy to male superiority. The age order is about how adults use children to define themselves in an ideological process of dominance and self-definition that can be compared with processes where men have defined women and colonizers have defined the persons they colonized as "the Other" (Sundhall, 2012;Thorne, 1987).…”