The "Child" in Child Study: Disrupting the Boundaries of Race and Gender in the Field

• In Event: 16.061 - Roundtable Session 4
  In Roundtable Session: 16.061-3 - Child Protection? Engaging the Politics of Childhood in a Carceral Landscape

Abstract

Our convener asks: How is the child produced in relation to shifting boundaries surrounding other developmental and symbolic categories such as juvenile and adult? In this paper, we consider the ostensibly apolitical educational processes by which “the child” is differentially and politically produced across race, legal status, and gender. Specifically, we attend to two different educational contexts: one state, juvenile prison school; and, one private, trade school on the Outside. Drawing on qualitative data, we consider how “students” in these school sites are subjects of pre-professional curricular practices that appear apolitical and uniform. We argue that these consistent approaches across dramatically different sites produce outcomes seemingly located in the differences (and imagined attendant deficiencies or resources) in the students rather than in the systems that produced the varying locations of the students (Cho, 2009; Sojoyner, 2013). In particular, we consider how the mechanisms of pre-professional curriculum serve to mask state and societal reproduction of racial labor and citizenship inequity in young men (MacLeod, 1987; Meiners, 2007; Vaught, 2011).

This paper considers this curricular mechanism in the larger context of the field of Child Study and Human Development (within what is called “developmental science”), which contributes significantly to the scholarly and commonsense understandings of the child in U.S. society. The field of Child Study understands the development of the child as derived from the dynamic and mutually constitutive and influential relationship between the person and context. This meta-theoretical perspective undergirds the field's understanding of within-person attributes, such as: cognitions; coping; intentional self-regulation; resilience; and “grit” among others. However, when applied in theory and practice, these meta-theoretical claims often mimic racist hetero-patriarchal practices (Cammarota, 2004; Carmen, et al, 2015; Davis, 2006; Ginwright, 2015).

For instance, some resilience theories suggest that adversity can be promotive for children and their families depending on how the child and the family perceive adversity. Focusing on the perception of adversity rather than the sources that produce adversity, places the responsibility for outcomes on the child and family. This approach not only allows for blaming youth for their own incarceration, but also fails to account for systemic and systematic violence against groups of youth and their families. So, when a young, Black man is harassed or murdered by police officers—a context of severe, violent, repressive adversity—there are no ample theoretical approaches for interrogating the systemic conditions of repression such as White supremacy. In other words, Child Study must expand and shift its framing to attend to the realities and conditions of life for many children in a carceral state. Ultimately, this paper considers the potential within Child Study to disrupt apolitical scholarly practices and engage systemic analyses—to reconsider how the child is produced in relation to shifting boundaries surrounding developmental and symbolic categories.

Authors

• Sabina Elena Vaught, Tufts University

• Elise M. Harris, Tufts University