Special issue of Children and Society, Vol 24.4, July 2010
Edited by Gina Crivello, Laura Camfield and Catherine Porter (Young Lives, University of Oxford)
This special issue of Children & Society brings together eight papers focusing on children's everyday experiences of poverty and risk in developing country contexts. Research into the impact of poverty on children's well-being takes many forms, from large-scale monitoring and evaluation studies through to detailed ethnographies. As a rule, international development efforts to counter child poverty continue to depend on crude indicators and league tables of child well-being which may or may not reflect the priorities and views of children. This may relate to the sheer scale of poverty in developing countries which appears to demand an equivalent response in research terms, notably through large-scale survey approaches that favour quantification and measurement, aggregates and averages, and with a strong disciplinary bias towards economics and social policy. Although it is now widely recognised that poverty is multi-dimensional, much poverty discourse remains fixed on income measures and material poverty.
By contrast, the papers presented here highlight the importance of research and participatory activities involving children themselves, which adds specificity and depth to these quantitative approaches, as well as complementary data from the perspectives of caregivers, professionals or advocates. Carrying out research with rather than on children remains relatively rare within poverty research, despite the growth in development studies of 'participatory' research with adults. While initiatives such as UNICEF's Multiple Indicator Cluster Surveys and the State of the World reports have increased our understanding of the scale of child poverty, participatory approaches can offer nuanced understandings, with a particular emphasis on children's own experiences, perspectives and agency.
The main focus is on the daily lives of individual children experiencing economic and other forms of disadvantage, within the context of resource-poor families, communities and countries that have experienced the risks of greater integration into the global economy without the benefits. In particular, we explore the way poverty interacts with what are often constructed as other sources of vulnerability in children's lives. For example, how does poverty shape the experience of being a young refugee, an orphan, or a working child trying to balance the demands of school and family, or of belonging to a poor ethnic minority group or living in a community prone to natural disaster?
Contents
Editorial: Researching Children's Understandings of Poverty and Risk in Diverse Contexts Gina Crivello, Laura Camfield and Catherine Porter
'Finding a Life' Among Undocumented Congolese Refugee Children in Tanzania Gillian Mann
'Stew Without Bread or Bread Without Stew': Children's Understandings of Poverty in Ethiopia Laura Camfield
Assembling Webs of Support: Child Domestic Workers in India Shaziah Wasiuzzaman and Karen Wells
Raising Malawi's Children: Unanticipated Outcomes Associated with Institutionalised Care Andrea Freidus
Combining Work and School: The Dynamics of Girls' Involvement in Agricultural Work in Andhra Pradesh, India Virginia Morrow and Uma Vennam
Understanding Vulnerability and Resilience in the Context of Poverty and Ethnicity in Vietnam Truong Huyen Chi
Children's Perspectives on their Economic Activity as a Pathway to Resilience Renata Maria Coimbra Libório and Michael Ungar
Shifting the Narrative: Child-led Responses to Climate Change and Disasters in El Salvador and the Philippines Thomas Tanner
Book reviews
Generations in Africa: Connections and Conflicts, reviewed by Afua Twum-Danso
The World of Child Labor: an Historical and Regional Survey, reviewed by Nicola Hilliard
Table of contents, abstracts and full-text of articles available at: http://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/10.1111/chso.2010.24.issue-4/issuetoc
Special issue of Children and Society, Vol 24.4, July 2010
Edited by Gina Crivello, Laura Camfield and Catherine Porter (Young Lives, University of Oxford)
This special issue of Children & Society brings together eight papers focusing on children's everyday experiences of poverty and risk in developing country contexts. Research into the impact of poverty on children's well-being takes many forms, from large-scale monitoring and evaluation studies through to detailed ethnographies. As a rule, international development efforts to counter child poverty continue to depend on crude indicators and league tables of child well-being which may or may not reflect the priorities and views of children. This may relate to the sheer scale of poverty in developing countries which appears to demand an equivalent response in research terms, notably through large-scale survey approaches that favour quantification and measurement, aggregates and averages, and with a strong disciplinary bias towards economics and social policy. Although it is now widely recognised that poverty is multi-dimensional, much poverty discourse remains fixed on income measures and material poverty.
By contrast, the papers presented here highlight the importance of research and participatory activities involving children themselves, which adds specificity and depth to these quantitative approaches, as well as complementary data from the perspectives of caregivers, professionals or advocates. Carrying out research with rather than on children remains relatively rare within poverty research, despite the growth in development studies of 'participatory' research with adults. While initiatives such as UNICEF's Multiple Indicator Cluster Surveys and the State of the World reports have increased our understanding of the scale of child poverty, participatory approaches can offer nuanced understandings, with a particular emphasis on children's own experiences, perspectives and agency.
The main focus is on the daily lives of individual children experiencing economic and other forms of disadvantage, within the context of resource-poor families, communities and countries that have experienced the risks of greater integration into the global economy without the benefits. In particular, we explore the way poverty interacts with what are often constructed as other sources of vulnerability in children's lives. For example, how does poverty shape the experience of being a young refugee, an orphan, or a working child trying to balance the demands of school and family, or of belonging to a poor ethnic minority group or living in a community prone to natural disaster?
Contents
Editorial: Researching Children's Understandings of Poverty and Risk in Diverse Contexts Gina Crivello, Laura Camfield and Catherine Porter
'Finding a Life' Among Undocumented Congolese Refugee Children in Tanzania Gillian Mann
'Stew Without Bread or Bread Without Stew': Children's Understandings of Poverty in Ethiopia Laura Camfield
Assembling Webs of Support: Child Domestic Workers in India Shaziah Wasiuzzaman and Karen Wells
Raising Malawi's Children: Unanticipated Outcomes Associated with Institutionalised Care Andrea Freidus
Combining Work and School: The Dynamics of Girls' Involvement in Agricultural Work in Andhra Pradesh, India Virginia Morrow and Uma Vennam
Understanding Vulnerability and Resilience in the Context of Poverty and Ethnicity in Vietnam Truong Huyen Chi
Children's Perspectives on their Economic Activity as a Pathway to Resilience Renata Maria Coimbra Libório and Michael Ungar
Shifting the Narrative: Child-led Responses to Climate Change and Disasters in El Salvador and the Philippines Thomas Tanner
Book reviews
Generations in Africa: Connections and Conflicts, reviewed by Afua Twum-Danso
The World of Child Labor: an Historical and Regional Survey, reviewed by Nicola Hilliard
Table of contents, abstracts and full-text of articles available at: http://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/10.1111/chso.2010.24.issue-4/issuetoc