Precarities of 21st Century Childhoods: Critical Explorations of Time(s), Place(s), and Identities

by Michael O'Loughlin (Editor), Carol Owens (Editor), Louis Rothschild (Editor), Michael O'Loughlin (Contribution by), Carol Owens (Contribution by)

Overview

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.

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9781666907780
Publisher:	Lexington Books
Publication date:	02/28/2023
Sold by:	Barnes & Noble
Format:	eBook
Pages:	292
File size:	4 MB

About the Author

Michael O’Loughlin is professor at Adelphi University, New York.

Carol Owens is a psychoanalyst and Lacanian scholar in Dublin, Ireland.

Louis Rothschild is a clinical psychologist in Baltimore County, Maryland.

Table of Contents

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

Editorial Reviews

This welcome collection challenges long-held normative assumptions about the development of children. Taking us to locations as various as New Zealand, the El Paso border, ‘nowhereness’, the times of liminality, the ‘pause’ in the pandemic. This excellent book opens our eyes to diverse ways of investigating and perceiving the experiences, narratives, losses, transitions, and traumas of childhoods that have heretofore been marginalized.

Stephanie Swales

While the subject that emerges in particular moments of a treatment is marked by timelessness, the child or adolescent is a developmental being who is steeped in a particular time and place. For Freud the intrusion of the ‘accidents of history’—are moments of crisis that can be crushing, but which also offer the chance of a new foundation. This collection bring to life such times of crisis rooted in authors’ specific cultural, historical, and geographical contexts.

Michael Gerard Plastow

This is a beautiful book about the exigencies of childhood across the globe. I found myself captivated by tales that took me from discarded children’s clothing in the UK, through the complex investments of North American childhoods to border crossings, migrations, refugees, to comings and goings in different moments in history. Thus, any sense of theorizing ‘Childhood’ with a capital C for this reader at least, was utterly dispelled by the thoughtfulness of the ‘being with’ that comes from a psychoanalytic sensibility.

Valerie Walkerdine