Overview
- Provides a new conceptual framework for understanding children’s everyday negotiation of economic insecurity, difference and belonging
- Offers deep insights into how inequality shapes the everyday lives of diverse children in rural contexts
- A lucid and engaging ethnography consisting of extensive qualitative research data with children and young people
Part of the book series: Perspectives on Children and Young People (PCYP, volume 7)
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Table of contents (7 chapters)
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Front Matter
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Back Matter
Keywords
About this book
This book explores how rural children negotiate economic insecurity and difference. Based on long-term ethnographic research in rural Australia, it shows that children draw on class-based ideas of moral worth, anchored in racialised and gendered understandings, to negotiate financial hardship and insecurity. Through close observations in the classroom, school yard and the home, and interviews with diverse young people, their parents and teachers, Class, Culture and Belonging in Rural Childhoods takes us deep into children’s everyday struggles and their efforts to manage insecurity and belonging within a polarised economic landscape. This book offers compelling new analysis of children’s experiences at a time of rapid and far-reaching change in rural communities and the world at large. This unique and engaging ethnography of rural Australia makes an important and timely contribution to wider understandings of how children navigate the precarious circumstances of the present.
Reviews
“Rose Butler provides a powerful analysis of the social labour that children deploy to make sense of their lives amidst the economic realities facing rural communities. Drawing on rich ethnographic fieldwork with young people, their families and schools, Butler argues that children draw on a range of moral resources, grounded in their classed worlds, to traverse the inequalities of wealth and poverty, and the cultural meanings of work, hardship and fairness. Class, Culture and Belonging in Rural Childhoods offers an original and insightful account of the strategies through which the young fashion sustaining senses of identity and belonging, and build relations of care and self-worth, within the context of growing economic insecurity.” (Greg Noble, Professor at the Institute for Culture and Society at Western Sydney University, Australia, and author of Disposed to Learn: Schooling, Ethnicity and the Scholarly Habitus)
“In this insightful and nuanced book Rose Butler brings the voices of rural children to the fore, drawing on rich ethnographic data to examine the dynamics of race and class in their everyday interactions and practices. With great clarity and care she recounts the children's experiences of inclusion and exclusion in their rural schools and communities and demonstrates how these are given shape by a fundamentally unjust politics of morality.” (Barbara Pini, Professor in the School of Humanities, Languages and Social Science at Griffith University, Australia, and author of Gender and Rurality)
“How do children navigate class and belonging in a setting in which ‘fairness’ is of iconic cultural importance, even when neoliberalism, increasing economic inequality, and social tensions around migration make such claims harder and harder to sustain? This is the crucial question that Class, Culture and Belonging in Rural Childhoods broaches, and its answers promise an important contribution to thisactive debate. This book manages to demystify the nuanced cultural challenges facing children of varying backgrounds, maintaining a watchful eye on the commonalities of their experience and the diverse prisms through which they view it, and has important insights to offer to very current scholarly debates. I highly recommend.” (Allison Pugh, Professor of Sociology at the University of Virginia and author of Longing and Belonging: Parents, Children, and Consumer Culture)
Authors and Affiliations
About the author
Rose Butler is a postdoctoral researcher at the Alfred Deakin Institute for Citizenship and Globalisation at Deakin University, Australia. Her research crosses the disciplines of Sociology, Youth Studies and Anthropology with a focus on class and culture, multiculturalism and globalisation, schooling and social change, and rural livelihoods. Her current postdoctoral project investigates the changing landscape of rural multicultures for youth. Rose is co-editor of the Special Issue ‘Asian Migration and Education Cultures in the Anglo-Sphere’ in the Journal of Ethnic and Migration Studies and has published with journals including the Journal of Youth Studies, Journal of Sociology and the Journal of Intercultural Studies. She has a PhD from the Australian National University.
Bibliographic Information
Book Title: Class, Culture and Belonging in Rural Childhoods
Authors: Rose Butler
Series Title: Perspectives on Children and Young People
DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/978-981-13-1102-4
Publisher: Springer Singapore
eBook Packages: Social Sciences, Social Sciences (R0)
Copyright Information: Springer Nature Singapore Pte Ltd. 2019
Hardcover ISBN: 978-981-13-1101-7Published: 03 September 2018
Softcover ISBN: 978-981-13-4568-5Published: 26 January 2019
eBook ISBN: 978-981-13-1102-4Published: 23 August 2018
Series ISSN: 2365-2977
Series E-ISSN: 2365-2985
Edition Number: 1
Number of Pages: VIII, 133
Topics: Sociology, general, Children, Youth and Family Policy, Social Anthropology, Social Work and Community Development, Politics of the Welfare State