Childhood Publics

by

Sevasti-Melissa Nolas

• LAST MODIFIED: 24 October 2024
• DOI: 10.1093/obo/9780199791231-0288

Introduction

Childhood publics are the ways in which children are connected through issues of common care and concern and the processes of mediation that can connect children and give these issues a broader audience. The term “childhood publics” came to the fore with the publication of Children’s Participation, Childhood Publics, and Social Change: A Review, cited under Children and the Public Sphere. Publics, a key phenomenon of modernity, emerge in everyday life and at the margins of institutional life and the market. In childhood, this might bring researchers to focus on the peripheries of schooling and of family life, the settings and times of leisure and play both in person and online, and/or the in-between-institutional times and spaces, such as walking to and from school or a friend’s place, when children themselves may be left largely to their own devices, with little to no adult supervision and input. Finding such spaces and times is itself a challenge, and it might be that childhood publics is only ever partial and/or relies on intergenerational solidarities. For example, younger children are far more dependent on an adult presence and mediated by adult interlocutors, because childhood and youth itself as increasingly instrumentalized and the spaces and times for idling, boredom, daydreaming, meandering, plotting, alone and together, have shrunk considerably within the family (children’s, especially middle-class children’s, timetables are full with extracurricular activities), but also because the funding for public infrastructures which all children, but especially those from lower-income families, might access in order to congregate (e.g., youth centers) has steadily declined in postindustrialized societies. Concerns over children’s safety in cities, children’s restricted access to their own income and availability, and age restrictions on places where children could meet all mean that meeting places like streets and squares and cafes, traditional locations of publics formation, might need to be rethought in childhood publics. Children are also vastly underrepresented and under-researched as cultural producers. At the same time, a range of online spaces have emerged where some publics formation can take place, although again, such spaces may pose (typically, age) restrictions on younger children; safety over their use is also an issue. Developing an understanding of publics requires unpacking the relationship between public and private, the personal and the political, as well as modes and media of connection in children’s lives both in person and online, all of which are covered in this article. There is also a key question of how adult interlocutors might understand and act on children’s speech acts and other forms of expression. Finally, as a phenomenon of modernity much of the initial literature on the topic has been written with a Western context in mind. This does not mean that publics do not exist outside the postindustrialized democracies; instead it is a reminder to be mindful of their historical and cultural specificity of writing and research on the topic and to be sensitive to local variations. The entry starts by introducing key readings on publics, followed by historical and contemporary examples of childhood publics, before proceeding to cover analytical dimensions of childhood publics and closing with an overview of publics-creating methodologies with children. The entry has been written with a global childhood publics in mind, and where available and accessible, international examples have been included.

General Overviews

Given the relative newness of the concept of childhood publics, there are currently no general overviews. Nevertheless, the literature on publics in the social sciences is broad, spanning political science, critical social theory, and the arts and humanities, and this section summarizes key works. Publics is a concept for thinking through a particular assemblage of people that may or may not be visible and known to a broader audience but nevertheless exists, but it also refers to actual social realities, and experiences of belonging and action. Barnett 2014 refers to publics as relationships between strangers. Dayan 2005 describes publics as “heterogenous ensembles”—in this sense, publics signify differences and commonalities at the same time. They are dispersed, distributed, and often unwieldy or whimsical to the outside observer, coming in and out of view, as they do, with the help of different modes and media of connection. In this sense, it could be argued that publics become known through their participation, through shared interests, and through their participants’ affective relationship to social issues. The classical formulation of Dewey 1954 helps us think about the relationship between the private and the public in the invention of the democratic state. Della Porta 2013 conceptualizes the links between social movements and public spheres, and McRobbie and Garber 1976, a classic intervention into cultural studies, offers an opportunity to think about the relationship between gendered youth subcultures and publics. Fraser 1990 and Habermas 1991 should be read independently and as a conversation: the latter establishes the concept of the public sphere in the coffeehouses and salons of late-18th-century Europe, and the former responds with the missing gender analysis. The authors of Mahoney, et al. 2010 bring writing and thinking on publics and the public sphere into contemporary times, developing their analysis from empirically grounded case studies as opposed to historical sources. Muthukumaraswamy and Kaushal 2004, written from a South Asian context, discusses the links between publics and folklore. Negt and Kluge 1972 extends Habermas’s thesis analyzing the role of the working classes in publics formations. Warner 2002 describes publics as forms of attention that are driven by issues of common concern, and their distributed and hidden existence appeals to the imagination of publics’ non-members: it is an act of imagination to bring a publics into being. Intellectual traditions emerging from German and American social theory, often in conversation, shape considerable thinking around publics in mainstream social theory, and it is important to note, as does Dayan 2005, the cultural contingency in the understanding and use of the term “publics,” which is shaped by traditions of citizenship, liberal democracy, the media, and local cultures of participation in public issues.

• Barnett, Clive. “Theorising Emergent Public Spheres: Negotiating Democracy, Development, and Dissent.” Acta Academica 46.1 (2014): 1–21.

  Explores the meaning and use of the term “public” in South Africa. The analysis puts forward an understanding of publicness as sharedness amongst strangers, and the author argues that “public life can [ . . . ] be thought of as a family of practices of anonymous sharing with others of various risks, rewards, and responsibilities” (p. 10). Importantly, this analysis allows for thinking about the transformation of public spheres across different contexts.

• Dayan, Daniel. “Mothers, Midwives and Abortionists: Genealogy, Obstetrics, Audiences & Publics.” In Audiences and Publics: When Cultural Engagement Matters for the Public Sphere. Edited by Sonia Livingstone, 43–76. Bristol, UK: Intellect Press, 2005.

  An excellent comparative analysis of publics, audience, and other collectives (communities). Publics are analyzed along three axes: as a concept, as sociological realities, and as subjective experiences. The chapter is part of an edited book that explores the relationship between audiences and publics, and crucially their technological, material, and discursive mediation, which tends to blur traditional distinctions between public and private, global and local, work and leisure, and education and entertainment.

• della Porta, Donnatella. “Social Movements and Public Sphere.” In Rethinking the Public Sphere through Transnationalizing Processes. Edited by Armando Salvatore, Oliver Schmidtke, and Hans-Jörg Trenz, 107–133. Houndmills, UK: Palgrave Macmillan, 2013.

  DOI: 10.1057/9781137283207_6

  Explores the relationship between the Enlightenment, social movements, and the public sphere, and shows the ways in which ideal types of representative democracy often do not hold up to empirical scrutiny. The historical analysis of the emergence of actual democracies historically shows a more complicated reality, one in which the public sphere grew alongside the institutionalization of democracy through Parliament and drew participants from those not enfranchised at the time.

• Dewey, John. The Public and Its Problems. Athens, OH: Swallow Press, 1954.

  Originally written in 1927, Dewey’s text is a compilation of lectures on the topic of the invention of the (democratic) state, its relationship to private (human acts) and public (the consequences of human acts) spheres of life, and the role of participatory democracy. Public is understood as “shared consciousness,” public culture as an ethos—“matters of the mind, heart, and spirit”—and public life is founded on dialogue and deliberation.

• Fraser, Nancy. “Rethinking the Public Sphere: A Contribution to the Critique of Actually Existing Democracy.” Social Text 25–26 (1990): 56–80.

  DOI: 10.2307/466240

  Engages with the key challenges of Habermas’s original conception of the public sphere, specifically addressing the ways in which women participated in the public sphere at a historical time when they were not enfranchised. Highlights two important idioms of public life available to women in the nineteenth century before suffrage: these are motherhood and domesticity, as women were expected to keep homes and raise the next generation.

• Habermas, Jurgen. The Structural Transformation of the Public Sphere: An Inquiry into the Category of Bourgeois Society. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 1991.

  Habermas’s case study of publicness and the emergence and dissipation of the bourgeois (liberal) public sphere in western Europe in the eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries is a widely cited text. Habermas’s original case study treated the public sphere as a historical category of a particular time and place. It is a case study that has inspired rich discussions and disagreements of an interdisciplinary nature and continues to exert influence in the way we think about public debate, democracy, dissent, opinion, and consensus in contemporary times. First published 1962.

• Mahoney, Nick, J. Newman, and Clive Barnett, eds. Rethinking the Public: Innovations in Research, Theory and Politics. Bristol, UK: The Policy Press, 2010.

  This edited collection, which emerged from a group of scholars associated with the Publics Research Programme at the Open University, offers a number of empirically grounded case studies that evidence the context, emergence, and dynamics of changing landscapes of publicness and the public sphere. Offers a refreshing look at the tensions and contradictions of contemporary publics and aims to offer a language for publicness that goes beyond normative concepts often derived from an uncritical application of Habermas’s work.

• McRobbie, Angela, and Jenny Garber. “Girls and Subcultures.” In Resistance through Ritual: Youth Subcultures in Post-war Britain. Edited by Stuart Hall and Tony Jefferson, 209–222. London: Routledge, 1976.

  A classic piece of feminist analysis of girls and subcultures. Much of the canonical writing on subcultures in sociology and cultural studies until this text had focus on young men, and girls and young women were largely invisible. Tackles questions of girls’ absence/presence in postwar subcultures, their role within them relative to their male peers, and whether girls have other ways of organizing their cultural lives.

• Muthukumaraswamy, M. D., and Molly Kaushal. Folklore, Public Sphere, and Civil Society. New Delhi: Indira Gandhi National Centre for the Arts, 2004.

  This edited collection explores the meaning and practices of the public sphere from a South Asian context, paying particular attention to folkloric traditions that are characteristic of oral cultures such as that of India. Offers a counterpoint to thinking about the public sphere from the perspective of societies and cultures whose trajectories did not fall out of the Enlightenment narrative that is central to the work of Jurgen Habermas and Eurocentric theories of the public sphere.

• Negt, Oskar, and Alexander Kluge. Public Sphere and Experience: Towards an Analysis of the Bourgeois and Proletarian Public Sphere. Minneapolis and London: Verso, 1972.

  A treatise on the public sphere written collaboratively by social theorist Oskar Negt and filmmaker Alexander Kluge. Offers an expansion to Habermas’s thesis, namely by addressing the missing “proletarian” publics. “Social experience” is a key category of analysis, and the authors focus on everyday life and on ordinary, working-class people and the vast social changes and their associated social movements in 1970s Germany. Contains several “commentaries,” including one on “the public sphere of children.” Republished 2016.

• Warner, Michael. Publics and Counterpublics. New York: Zone Books, 2002.

  The key study on the public sphere and counterpublics; composed of several chapters that analyze the relationship between the private and the public, publics and counterpublics, and the different intellectual styles of publics. Of note is Warner’s recognition and elucidation of the curious, ephemeral, and slippery nature of publics and their centrality to much of the texture of modern life.