At the Horizons of the Subject: Neo-liberalism, neo-conservatism and the rights of the child Part One: From ‘knowing’ fetus to ‘confused’ child

‘Change4Life for your kids’: embodied collectives and public health pedagogy

“…It is valorised, but treated as a given but previously overlooked attribute of children.' In a similar vein, Ruddick (2006;2007a;2007b) has argued that simply asserting children's agency without questioning the model of subjecthood to which 'agency' is attributed has led to an increasing responsibilisation of children within contemporary policy. Moreover, Ruddick (2007a;2007b) goes on to argue that failing to question the notion of agency/subjecthood within which children are being fitted, leaves a situation whereby women's and children's rights are antagonistically positioned.…”

“…In a similar vein, Ruddick (2006;2007a;2007b) has argued that simply asserting children's agency without questioning the model of subjecthood to which 'agency' is attributed has led to an increasing responsibilisation of children within contemporary policy. Moreover, Ruddick (2007a;2007b) goes on to argue that failing to question the notion of agency/subjecthood within which children are being fitted, leaves a situation whereby women's and children's rights are antagonistically positioned. Here, she states that the unacknowledged problematic relation of the child to a neoliberal (bounded, individual) concept of the subject allows a ventriloquist politics whereby the 'rights' of the child are used by those who claim to speak on behalf of the child to 'undercut the rights of children themselves and a range of 'unruly subjects'; and to reestablish neo-conservative, patriarchial and neo-liberal boundaries of the subject ' (2007a, 514).…”

“…To counter this, it has been suggested that a relational approach offers an alternative way to challenge the conceptualisation of children as partial/non-subjects, by questioning the notion of a bounded, independent embodied-subject for all adults and children. The consequence of such a call has been explorations of the lived dynamics of age by centring relational concepts such as intergenerationality and intersectionality (Hopkins and Pain, 2007;Vanderbeck, 2007), intersubjectivity and intercorporeality (Ruddick, 2007a;2007b;Hörschelmann and Colls, 2009). This includes research on collective responsibilities for children's food consumption (Colls and Evans B, 2008) and the dynamic relations of care within families (Robson 2000, Evans R 2005, Evans R and Becker 2009, Holloway 1998.…”

Searching for safe space: the absent presence of childhood sexual abuse in human geography

“…Most recently this has focused on the enrolment of CSA in socially conservative, far right discourses about the dangerous, potentially-paedophile other (Ruddick 2007b;Caluya 2011;Cooper 2011;Ghertner 2011;Howlett et al 2011;Howitt et al 2012) and in the control of the spaces of sex work (Hubbard 2005;Hubbard and Whowell 2008;Mai 2013;Yea, 2013). It is also present in studies that examine the silencing of those who protect children from harm, including sexual abuse (Ruddick 2007a). Other work in human geography has touched on the act of sexual abuse itself as part of broader socio-political strategies (Mohammad 1999;De Leeuw, 2007) and on the cover-up of CSA as part of nation-building (Crowley and Kitchin 2008).…”

The geopolitics of vulnerability: children's legal subjectivity, immigrant family detention and US immigration law and enforcement policy

“…Intriguingly, some citizen children have been vocal spokespersons for their undocumented parents, a form of political theater that dramatizes the parents' displacement from what is implicitly their proper role as family representatives (Pallares 2009). While child-subjects are always already in a relation of dependence with a series of caregivers (Ruddick 2007a(Ruddick , 2007b, the political agency of children is not materially confined to the child-object of immigration law or the partial subject of domestic family law.…”