Precarities of 21st Century Childhoods

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, psychoanalyst and child psychiatrist
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, Cardiff University
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, University of Dallas