Precarities of 21st Century Childhoods

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, the goal of this volume is to illuminate, promote, and help situate subjectivities that are often blotted out for both the child and society. Developmental and linear assumptions and hegemonies are called into question. Chapters address the challenges involved in working with children who have experienced traumas of dis-location that do not fit neatly into normative theories of development The 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. What is ‘lost’ in childhood finds its way into narratives of loss in adult functioning and these narratives are of interest since they allow us to re-theorize ideas of child, family, and society. To that end, these essays focus in and on dissociated places and moments across varied childhood(s).