Abstract
Neoliberal capitalism is in the throes of crisis – crises actually – associated with overaccumulation and several decades of privatization, commodification, and financialization, each sieved through the other. These crises have profound consequences for the present and future that can be seen in the shifting discourses and material social practices concerning children and childhood. This chapter reframes David Harvey’s analysis of accumulation crisis around questions of social reproduction to examine its relationship to contemporary childhood and selected configurations of the child. It pays particular attention to the configuration of the child as waste, not only as the constitutive outside to those of the child as accumulation strategy, commodity, and ornament but also as a means of managing the current political economic crisis discursively and materially. The chapter points to some key strategies of “waste management” around children and childhood, including such material social forms and practices as policing and the juvenile justice system, the military and militarization of children’s lives, and panics around youth and childhood focused variously on education, drugs, sex, and violence, teasing out some of their sociospatial implications. Connecting global north and south, the chapter traces a countertopography of childhood risk and waste from which current crises of accumulation might be reimagined and redressed.
Portions of this chapter appeared in ‘Accumulation, Excess, Childhood: Toward a Countertopography of Risk and Waste’ (Documents d’Anàlisi Geogràfica 57(1) (2011): 47–60, by Cindi Katz.)
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Katz, C. (2019). Accumulation, Dispossession, and Waste in Childhood and Children’s Everyday Lives. In: Skelton, T., Aitken, S. (eds) Establishing Geographies of Children and Young People. Geographies of Children and Young People, vol 1. Springer, Singapore. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-981-287-041-4_15
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