Discursive Tensions on the Landscape of Modern Childhood

Abstract

This text was delivered as a plenary lecture at the conference Barndom och ungdom i förändring (Childhood and Youth in Transition: Discipline and unrest in the modern welfare state) on October 29, 2010 at Malmo University, Sweden. It offers a diagram for visualizing modern childhood as a product of the discursive tensions between four dominant figures: the conditioned child, the authentic child, the developing child, and the political child. The lecture focuses on the creative dynamics between conditioning and authenticity as they appeared in the 17th through the 19th-centuries in Anglo-American discourse. It argues that a search for the conditions of authenticity through childhood became manifest in the disciplinary practices of institutions for children’s education and care. The resulting generative tensions were important for constructing the landscape of modern childhood as a whole. Finally, it suggests that the tensions between romantic authenticity and rational conditioning continue to provide a significant discursive framework for contemporary child rights talk.