Abstract
This chapter examines the value of a transnational, qualitative approach for understanding children’s vulnerability. Using data drawn from the Children’s Understandings of Well-being (CUWB) project, a multinational qualitative study of children’s well-being across 29 countries, the chapter demonstrates the context-sensitivity of children’s experiences of vulnerability, demonstrating the importance of local and regional political-economic and sociocultural contexts for structuring children’s well-being and vulnerability. However, we also demonstrate that certain experiences of vulnerability, whilst context dependent, can be identified across different contexts, demonstrating the specific situational vulnerabilities of children that are an aspect of generational relations as well as its intersectional entanglement with social dimensions such as gender and class. We demonstrate this in relation to children’s experiences of school, in education’s role in developing children’s ability to manage harms; but also that education, by its structural nature, generates vulnerabilities, establishing an interdependence between autonomy and dependency in important relationships.
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Fattore, T., Fegter, S., Hunner-Kreisel, C. (2022). The Value of Transnational, Qualitative Comparative Research on Children’s Vulnerability: Methodological and Epistemological Reflections. In: Tiliouine, H., Benatuil, D., Lau, M.K.W. (eds) Handbook of Children’s Risk, Vulnerability and Quality of Life. International Handbooks of Quality-of-Life. Springer, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-031-01783-4_3
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