Childhood

Street children in Makutano, northwest Kenya, form strong, stable social groups. Group activity functions through a well-defined structure involving leadership and close personal and economic relationships. This article shows how group solidarity is maintained through the sharing of a common subculture of spatial understandings, games, activities, dress, language and bodily actions. Through the group, the children experience a quality of life that negates the validity of common interventionist strategies. Moreover, given their high levels of competency, policies for working with these street children should be based on dialogue and should act to empower them through expanding the choices available to them.

Globally, migration statistics indicate rising numbers of people who have for various reasons left their local community. Of these, a considerable proportion is below the age of 18 and often engaged in some kind of work. Yet, the phenomenon of children working beyond their localities receives little special attention in migration studies or child labour studies. It is, however, increasingly addressed under the label of human trafficking. This article critically discusses the notion of human trafficking in relation to childhood and combines this with an analysis of a set of recent studies on Lao children working in Thailand. Based on this, the article concludes with some suggestions to come to a greater understanding of, and more relevant interventions for, children working beyond their localities.

This article focuses on children's narrated experiences of fosterage in East Cameroon. It seeks to complement the predominantly adult approaches to fosterage with children's views of the intimate, emotional and competitive aspects of kinship in everyday life. As kinship evolves in homes through sharing food and intimacy, children directly experience how kinship is created, disputed and defined and how lived kinship is inextricably linked with mobility, flexibility and power dynamics. It is argued that children's multiple and changing experiences of fosterage depend on three interconnected factors: changing household compositions, power dynamics in the homes and the changes in women's life histories.

This article discusses the complexities of aid-giving using the example of early childhood policies in Namibia. It supports a critical view of aid processes and of World Bank endeavours in particular. Using an analysis of the World Bank funded education sector-wide improvement plan (ETSIP) in Namibia and three Namibian local case studies, it shows how the local circumstances of young children and their parents are ignored in order to fit in with donor preconceptions, and how senior officials come to adopt those views. It argues that universally derived policies on early childhood development are misapplied, and poverty and inequality are ignored in the search for technocratic solutions.

This article conceptualizes Second World War children of German soldiers and native women in Norway as `border children', who became symbolic bearers of deep societal conflicts. The authors demonstrate that this position had painful consequences in the personal experiences of the children, experiences that were shared with war children in other occupied countries in Europe. Being a `border child' is discussed in relation to three topics: (1) the construction of a national narrative expressing the collective memory of war and occupation; (2) the cultural pattern making the sexuality of women national property; and (3) the transformation of social and political conflicts into biological and medical terms and categories.

The analytical focus in this article is on how social categories intersect in daily school life and how intersections intertwine with other empirically relevant categories such as normality, pupilness and (in)appropriatedness. The point of empirical departure is a daily ritual where teams for football are selected. The article opens up for a microanalysis of everyday practices at the margins and at the core of what this article terms `pupilness'. The concept of intersectionality is suggested as a useful analytical tool to understand the multiple activities of pupils in everyday school life. The concept is applied to an analysis of the particular selection of teams and to practices of inclusion and exclusion. The understandings and practices within this ritualistic selection mingle with and lend meaning to wider relationships.