POTENTIALS AND LIMITATIONS OF A TRUST APPROACH TO CHILDREN’S LIVES, PARTICIPATION AND CITIZENSHIP

Description

For a period of two years, a group of researchers have worked on a collaborative book on trust dynamics in children’s lives, participation and citizenship. The part of departure was two observations: Firstly an increasing sociological recognition of trust as essential to agency, social coherence and citizenship in globalized societies characterized by complexity and risk. Second that trust and mistrust very often is recognized in (other parts of) sociological childhood research as significant – but under-theorized and very seldom systematically explored - factors in the shaping of children’s participation, citizenship and well being. The work covers theorizing of trust dynamics in children’s lives, participation and citizenship as well as empirical analyses moving from trust dynamics on a subjective level, over interactions and institutional dynamics to the discursive and social structural level.
Based on this collaborative work, this presentation discusses how the concept of trust can contribute to the analysis and theorizing of children’s participation, citizenship and life quality. I draw the following three main conclusions: 1) that trust dynamics are spatial contextualized, 2) that the various concepts of trust each pose great potentials for analysis and theorizing of separate dimensions of children’s participation, citizenship and life quality, however also limitations, 3) that these great potentials, as well as the limitations, are embedded in the incongruence of the different theoretical conceptualizations of trust and in the spatial contextualization of trust dynamics. Based on this, I suggest directions for future research.


Poster presentation

Period	2012
Event title	ESA Research Network 4. Sociology of Children and Childhood - Mid-term Symposium: Sociology of Childhood – Theorising Childhood
Event type	Symposium
Location	Jyväskyla, FinlandShow on map