My first independent scholarly work is published!
…And it is published in Time & Society, one of my favourite peer-reviewed journals! What is the article about, then?
At some point during my previous analyses of child welfare assessment reports, I wanted to look more into those cases in which children are taken into care immediately when for others this happens after several years and continuous assessments. Of particular interest were those situations in which this was the case but where the problems the children experienced were similar. This made me reflect on what I call the uneven timings of child welfare interventions.
The study is written from a temporal point of view, thus, it is inspired by my earlier work on migration and asylum-seeking as contexts of waiting and being out of time as opposed to following normative and “right” timings. Here, however, I use some of these approaches to analyse child welfare practice in Sweden.
I analyse uneven timings of child welfare interventions by drawing on postcolonial theory, queer theory and critical childhood studies. The article critically discusses developmentalism, which links to theories of developmental psychology which are popular in child welfare policy and practice. Developmentalism is also linked to modernist and colonial linear temporal orders that, for instance, appear in narratives about “West and the rest”, or binaries between the developed versus those underdeveloped/developing, the progressive versus the backward, to name a few examples.
Themes addressed in the article are the absences and limitations of “the social” in terms of perspectives on problems and (social) change – central themes for social work. The article discusses how ideas about change are deeply rooted in developmentalist, modernist and neoliberal frameworks and reproduce wider societal and intersecting inequalities.
While my Ph.D. thesis focuses on children, this article pays more attention to assessments of parents, including differentiations made in terms of their potential to change for the better (changeability).
The article encourages educators, policymakers, and practitioners in fields that promote social perspectives and social change to take a closer look at how theoretical approaches and legacies within their field limit the scope of the social – including who embodies the position of a social agent, who does not, and how this creates multiple and intersecting inequalities.
As an independent scholar, I submitted the article to a journal I like without having to comply with preferences of fields, universities and well-intended advice from others. This article is a personal victory and a reminder to keep on researching, despite a precarious affiliation to academia.
More on temporality and differentiation/othering:
Fabian, J. (2014) Time and the Other: How Anthropology Makes its Object. New York: Columbia University Press, 3rd edn.
ZLATANA KNEZEVIC research page 