Generationing development: a commentary

The articles in this special issue present a persuasive case for accounts of development to recognise the integral and fundamental roles played by age and generation. While the past two decades have witnessed a burgeoning of literature demonstrating that children and youth are impacted by development, and that they can and do participate in development, the literature has tended to portray young people as a special group whose perspectives should not be forgotten. By contrast, the articles collected here make the case that age and generation, as relational constructs, cannot be ignored. Appropriating the term ‘generationing’, the editors argue that a variety of types of age relations profoundly structure the ways in which societies are transformed through development – both immanent processes of neoliberal modernisation and the interventions of development agencies that both respond and contribute to these. Drawing on the seven empirical articles, I attempt to draw some of the ideas together into a narrative that further argues the case for ‘generationing’ but also identifies gaps, questions and implications for further research

Generationing development

The articles in this special issue present a persuasive case for accounts of development to recognise the integral and fundamental roles played by age and generation. While the past two decades have witnessed a burgeoning of literature demonstrating that children and youth are impacted by development, and that they can and do participate in development, the literature has tended to portray young people as a special group whose perspectives should not be forgotten. By contrast, the articles collected here make the case that age and generation, as relational constructs, cannot be ignored. Appropriating the term ‘generationing’, the editors argue that a variety of types of age relations profoundly structure the ways in which societies are transformed through development – both immanent processes of neoliberal modernisation and the interventions of development agencies that both respond and contribute to these. Drawing on the seven empirical articles, I attempt to draw some of the ideas together into a narrative that further argues the case for ‘generationing’ but also identifies gaps, questions and implications for further research

AIDS-affected young people's access to livelihood assets:exploring 'new variant famine' in rural southern Africa

AbstractThe ‘new variant famine’ hypothesis suggests AIDS is contributing to food insecurity in southern Africa. Proposed causal mechanisms include a loss of livelihood assets and skills, brought about through AIDS′ impacts on children’s access to inherited property and intergenerationally-transferred knowledge. This paper employs a sustainable livelihoods framework to examine how AIDS is impacting on young people’s access to assets and skills in two southern African countries: Malawi and Lesotho. Drawing on qualitative research with rural youth, the paper shows that AIDS affects some young people’s access to some livelihood assets, but does not do so in a systematic or predictable way, nor are its impacts invariably negative. The broader cultural and institutional context is of key importance. The paper also demonstrates the need for the sustainable livelihoods framework to take greater account of the temporalities of livelihoods, and in particular the significance of lifecourse and generation

Producing interventions for AIDS-affected young people in Lesotho's schools: Scalar relations and power differentials

This is the post-print version of the final paper published in Geoforum. The published article is available from the link below. Changes resulting from the publishing process, such as peer review, editing, corrections, structural formatting, and other quality control mechanisms may not be reflected in this document. Changes may have been made to this work since it was submitted for publication. Copyright @ 2009 Elsevier B.V.Children and youth are a key target group for interventions to address southern Africa’s AIDS pandemic. Such interventions are frequently implemented through schools, and are often complex products of negotiation between a range of institutional actors including international agencies, NGOs, government departments and individual schools. These institutions not only stand in different (horizontally scaled) spatial relationships to students in schools; they also appear to operate at different hierarchical levels. Empirical research with policy makers and practitioners in Lesotho, however, reveals how interventions are produced through flows of knowledge, funding and personnel within and between institutions that make it difficult to assert that any intervention is manifestly more international or more local than any other. Scale theory offers the metaphor of a network or web which usefully serves to move attention away from discrete organisations, sectors and scalar positionings and onto the relationships and flows between them. Nevertheless, organisations and development interventions are often partly structured in scalar hierarchical ways that express substantive power differentials and shape the forms of interaction that take place, albeit not binding them to strict binaries or nested hierarchies. A modified network metaphor is useful in aiding understanding of how particular interventions are produced through intermeshing scales and diverse fluid interactions, and why they take the form they do.RGS-IB

Women’s changing domestic responsibilities in neoliberal Africa: a relational time-space analysis of Lesotho’s garment industry

Since 2001 when Lesotho embraced the neoliberal African Growth and Opportunities Act that offers preferential access to the US market, its garment industry has expanded dramatically to become the nation’s leading employer. Elsewhere, large-scale employment of women in low-paid factory jobs has entailed spatial restructuring of gender and age relations. Lesotho is a distinctive context, with socio-spatial relations historically adjusted to male labour migration, high levels of contemporary male unemployment and alarming AIDS prevalence. Based on semi-structured interviews with 40 female factoryworkers and 37 dependents, this article applies a relational time-space analysis to explore how financial and spatio-temporal aspects of factory employment articulate to alter women’s relationships with those for whom they have culturally determined responsibilities: their children, those suffering from ill health and their (generally rural) home communities. The analysis highlights that such employment is not merely adding to women’s responsibilities, but transforming how they are able to undertake social reproduction, as practical, social and emotional roles are converted to largely financial obligations

Ethical Principles, Social Harm and The Economic Relations of Research: negotiating ethics committee requirements and community expectations in ethnographic research in rural Malawi

Conventional research ethics focus on avoidance of harm to individual participants through measures to ensure informed consent. In long-term ethnographic research projects involving multiple actors, however, a wider concept of harm is needed. We apply the criminological concept of social harm, which focuses on harm produced through and affecting wider social relations, to a research project that we undertook in Malawi. Through this, we show how structural economic inequalities shape the consequences of research for the differently positioned parties involved. Specifically, we focus on dilemmas around transferring resources within three social fields: our relations with a Malawian ethics committee; our interventions in a rural community; and our efforts to engage the policy community. Each of these involved multiple and differently placed individuals within broader, multi-scalar structural relations and reveals the inadequacies of conventional codes of ethics

Childhood and the politics of scale: Descaling children's geographies?

This is the post-print version of the final published paper that is available from the link below. Copyright @ 2008 SAGE Publications.The past decade has witnessed a resurgence of interest in the geographies of children's lives, and particularly in engaging the voices and activities of young people in geographical research. Much of this growing body of scholarship is characterized by a very parochial locus of interest — the neighbourhood, playground, shopping mall or journey to school. In this paper I explore some of the roots of children's geographies' preoccupation with the micro-scale and argue that it limits the relevance of research, both politically and to other areas of geography. In order to widen the scope of children's geographies, some scholars have engaged with developments in the theorization of scale. I present these arguments but also point to their limitations. As an alternative, I propose that the notion of a flat ontology might help overcome some difficulties around scalar thinking, and provide a useful means of conceptualizing sociospatiality in material and non-hierarchical terms. Bringing together flat ontology and work in children's geographies on embodied subjectivity, I argue that it is important to examine the nature and limits of children's spaces of perception and action. While these spaces are not simply `local', they seldom afford children opportunities to comment on, or intervene in, the events, processes and decisions that shape their own lives. The implications for the substance and method of children's geographies and for geographical work on scale are considered

‘Because it’s our culture!’ (Re)negotiating the meaning of lobola in Southern African secondary schools

Payment of bridewealth or lobola is a significant element of marriage among the Basotho of Lesotho and the Shona of Zimbabwe. However, the functions and meanings attached to the practice are constantly changing. In order to gauge the interpretations attached to lobola by young people today, this paper analyses a series of focus group discussions conducted among senior students at two rural secondary schools. It compares the interpretations attached by the students to the practice of lobola with academic interpretations (both historical and contemporary). Among young people the meanings and functions of lobola are hotly contested, but differ markedly from those set out in the academic literature. While many students see lobola as a valued part of ‘African culture’, most also view it as a financial transaction which necessarily disadvantages women. The paper then seeks to explain the young people’s interpretations by reference to discourses of ‘equal rights’ and ‘culture’ prevalent in secondary schools. Young people make use of these discourses in (re)negotiating the meaning of lobola, but the limitations of the discourses restrict the interpretations of lobola available to them

Embodied learning: Responding to AIDS in Lesotho's education sector

This is an Author's Accepted Manuscript of an article published in Children's Geographies, 7(1), 2009. Copyright @ 2009 Taylor & Francis, available online at: http://www.tandfonline.com/doi/abs/10.1080/14733280802630981.In contrast to pre-colonial practices, education in Lesotho's formal school system has historically assumed a Cartesian separation of mind and body, the disciplining of students' bodies serving principally to facilitate cognitive learning. Lesotho has among the highest HIV-prevalence rates worldwide, and AIDS has both direct and indirect impacts on the bodies of many children. Thus, students' bodies can no longer be taken for granted but present a challenge for education. Schools are increasingly seen as a key point of intervention to reduce young people's risk of contracting the disease and also to assist them to cope with its consequences: there is growing recognition that such goals require more than cognitive learning. The approaches adopted, however, range from those that posit a linear and causal relationship between knowledge, attitudes and practices (so-called ‘KAP’ approaches, in which the role of schools is principally to inculcate the pre-requisite knowledge) to ‘life skills programmes’ that advocate a more embodied learning practice in schools. Based on interviews with policy-makers and practitioners and a variety of documentary sources, this paper examines a series of school-based AIDS interventions, arguing that they represent a less radical departure from ‘education for the mind’ than might appear to be the case. The paper concludes that most interventions serve to cast on children responsibility for averting a social risk, and to ‘normalise’ aberrant children's bodies to ensure they conform to what the cognitively-oriented education system expects

Secondary schooling and rural youth transitions in Lesotho and Zimbabwe

Based on case studies centred on two rural secondary schools in Lesotho and Zimbabwe, this paper examines the gendered impacts of schooling on young people’s transitions to adulthood. School attendance is shown, first, to disrupt the conventional pathways to adulthood: young people attending school may leave home sooner than they otherwise would, and take responsibility for their day-to-day survival, while marriage and childbearing are often delayed. More significantly, secondary schooling reflects, and contributes to, a growing sense that adulthood itself is not fixed. An alternative version of adulthood is promoted through schools in which formal sector employment is central. Yet while young people are encouraged to opt for, and work towards, this goal, only a minority are able to obtain paid employment. The apparent possibility of determining one’s own lifecourse serves to cast the majority of young people as failures in their transitions to adulthood