Being a (Female) Child in Baku: Social Order and Understandings of Well-Being

Abstract

What does it mean to be a (female) child in the city of Baku, Azerbaijan? How can we critically interpret the girls’ understandings of well-being considering different forms of compliance with unequal social orders? What conclusions may be drawn from understandings of well- being about the nature of welfare state structures and there-in children’s specific positioning? To answer this question, we conducted qualitative interviews with 13 girls during their various leisure activities. The study shows that parents and in particular mothers are children’s key reference persons, while there are hardly any spaces the girls can explore or reference persons outside their immediate families. The article reconstructs how the 13 girls view the social practices of adults and how they relate these practices to their own perceptions of well-being. We inductively reconstruct different forms of compliance, i.e., the extent to which social practices are consistent with the symbolic representations (norms and values) of a specific social order and specific relations of power and hegemony. The analysis shows how girls make differentiations between adult social practices based on their knowledge orders: some practices they justify through a sort of complicity with adultist structures (competent compliance), others they must accept due to their own vulnerabilities as children (compliance and constitutive vulnerability), still others irritate, are rejected, or sabotaged (fragile compliance).

Sociomaterial Analysis of Azerbaijani Children’s Smartphone Use: Generational Ordering Through User-Technology Interactions

“…Previous studies on Azerbaijani children's role in traditional (i.e. heteronormative) family environments have also shown that children rarely question their parents' parenting strategies and generally agree with the expectations and demands set for them (Hunner-Kreisel, Nasrullayeva et al, 2022). Similar findings were published on other Muslim-majority post-Soviet States such as Kyrgyzstan (B ühler-Niederberger & Schwittek, 2022).…”

“…Yet, there is still a significant gap in the literature around the upbringing of children within families, children's voices and their own understanding of subjective well-being. In their pioneering work, Hunner-Kreisel asked about the well-being of children in Azerbaijan and tried to capture this from the children's own perspectives (Hunner-Kreisel et al, 2020;Hunner-Kreisel, Nasrullayeva et al, 2022). They used a concept of a 'spatial well-being' (Fattore et al, 2021), which studies showed to be limited for children in Baku because children are hardly allocated any place in the public infrastructure that they can use with a certain degree of autonomy.…”