In fairness we trust : children making sense of economic insecurity

Abstract

This thesis examines a series of social and emotional strategies undertaken by children to cope with social situations that arise through economic insecurity. Drawing on 18 months fieldwork in regional Victoria with children, parents and two school communities, I argue that children in this cultural environment make sense of economic insecurity through the re-appropriation of cultural narratives of "fairness". I distill four sets of strategies that children develop and enact in order to cultivate and sustain feelings of belonging when faced with situations of economic uncertainty. I call these practices Going Without, Staying Within, Cutting Down and Managing Stigma, and show how each is distinctively tied to cultural ideas around fairness. As I evidence, these strategies are shaped by children's own experiences of classed and racialised identities, cultural constructions of stigma, and the socio-cultural, political and economic environment in which they live. Through this analysis, I show how cultural narratives around fairness, recreated by children in different social spaces of everyday life, provide an avenue through which to repatriate feelings of envy and sustain meaningful relationships with others. Furthermore, I demonstrate ways in which such actions, while generating forms of inclusion, potentially recreate boundaries of exclusion in children's social worlds. More broadly, I argue that children's understandings of economic insecurity in post-industrial contexts are deeply tied to the dominant cultural narratives that underpin their lives. I contend that such narratives intersect with market-based imperatives, neoliberal articulations of childhood, and the culture-making practices of children's own collectively-focused peer group interactions. In making sense of economic insecurity, children must strategically balance these interests as they both compete and converge, in ways that generate and sustain feelings of belonging. By focusing on children's uses of "fairness" in this local context, I further bring to light the overt and subtle social and emotional impacts of broad economic restructuring on children and parents in Australia. The ethnographic focus here moves between the collective worlds of children and the private lives of their families, illuminating how market-driven global and state changes in education and employment are negotiated and absorbed in relationships between children, their peers and their parents. As I demonstrate, these structural and social transformations surface in daily life through dilemmas over care, dignity and belonging. The ways in which children use the cultural resources available to manage such experiences forms the subject of this thesis. Show more