Learning to manage life – lived citizenship of children and young people with a psy-diagnosis
This sub-project focuses on the tensions between empowerment, discipline and resistance in interactions between social workers and children and young people with a psy-diagnosis at residential institutions. The aim is to provide knowledge about the shaping of these children and young people’s lived citizenship, both as a process and a product. The sub-project contributes to the main project with knowledge about:
1. How governing in the form of care, treatment, education and support contributes to the shaping of lived citizenship
2. The role of generation and psy-diagnoses in the shaping of spaces of lived citizenship
3. The role of spatial flow for interrelated social constructions of the power relation between children/young people and adults, care, education, pathological psy-diviation, treatment, ‘the good life’ and support
Within the framework of the main project, this sub-project draws upon insights from the new social studies of childhood emphasizing the social construction of childhood, the generational order as part of the societal structure intersecting with other social orders (gender, ethnicity, vulnerability etc), children’s agency and their right for citizenship and participation. Regarding the latter, research has shown how children and young people’s lived citizenship despite widespread support to the idea of children’s rights for participation and citizenship – but due to the generational order – is still a struggle over recognition. Especially children and young people, who are considered to be vulnerable such as those with psy-diagnosis seems to be met with distrust with negative consequences for their lived citizenship.
The case institutions are selected because the staff explicitly seek to empower and facilitate inclusive citizenship learning. This makes these institutions critical and paradigmatic cases: critical with regard to disciplining and discriminating dynamics; and paradigmatic insofar as they reveal, and thus enable exploration of, the dilemmas and tensions of empowerment, discipline and resistance. They also offer opportunities to identify future directions for inclusive practices.
The project is directed by project manager Hanne Warming
