Chilrens emotions in policy and practice mapping and maling spaces on childhood

Studies in Childhood and YouthSeries Editors: Allison James, University of Sheffield, UK, and Adrian James, University of Sheffield, UK Titles include: Leena Alanen, Liz Brooker and Berry

Children’s Emotions in Policy and Practice

Mapping and Making Spaces of Childhood

Edited by

Matej Blazek

Peter Kraftl

Studies in Childhood and Youth

Series Editors: Allison James, University of Sheffield, UK, and Adrian James,

University of Sheffield, UK

Titles include:

Leena Alanen, Liz Brooker and Berry Mayall (editors)

CHILDHOOD WITH BOURDIEU

Kate Bacon

TWINS IN SOCIETY

Parents, Bodies, Space and Talk

Matej Blazek and Peter Kraftl (editors)

CHILDREN’S EMOTIONS IN POLICY AND PRACTICE

Mapping and Making Spaces of Childhood

Emma Bond

CHILDHOOD, MOBILE TECHNOLOGIES AND EVERYDAY EXPERIENCES Changing Technologies = Changing Childhoods?

David Buckingham, Sara Bragg and Mary Jane Kehily

YOUTH CULTURES IN THE AGE OF GLOBAL MEDIA

David Buckingham and Vebjørg Tingstad (editors)

CHILDHOOD AND CONSUMER CULTURE

Allison James, Anne Trine Kjørholt and Vebjørg Tingstad (editors)

CHILDREN, FOOD AND IDENTITY IN EVERYDAY LIFE

Nicholas Lee

CHILDHOOD AND BIOPOLITICS

Climate Change, Life Processes and Human Futures

Manfred Liebel, Karl Hanson, Iven Saadi and Wouter Vandenhole (editors)

CHILDREN’S RIGHTS FROM BELOW

Cross-Cultural Perspectives

Orna Naftali

CHILDREN, RIGHTS AND MODERNITY IN CHINA

Raising Self-Governing Citizens

Karen M Smith

THE GOVERNMENT OF CHILDHOOD

Discourse, Power and Subjectivity

CHILDREN AND BORDERS

Helen Stapleton

SURVIVING TEENAGE MOTHERHOOD

Myths and Realities

E Kay M Tisdall, Andressa M Gadda and Udi M Butler

CHILDREN AND YOUNG PEOPLE’S PARTICIPATION AND ITS

TRANSFORMATIVE POTENTIAL

Learning from across Countries

Afua Twum-Danso Imoh and Robert Ame (editors)

CHILDHOODS AT THE INTERSECTION OF THE LOCAL AND THE GLOBAL

Hanne Warming (editor)

PARTICIPATION, CITIZENSHIP AND TRUST IN CHILDREN’S LIVES

Karen Wells, Erica Burman, Heather Montgomery and Alison Watson (editors)

CHILDHOOD, YOUTH AND VIOLENCE IN GLOBAL CONTEXTS

Research and Practice in Dialogue

Rebekah Willett, Chris Richards, Jackie Marsh, Andrew Burn and

Julia C Bishop (editors)

CHILDREN, MEDIA AND PLAYGROUND CULTURES

Ethnographic Studies of School Playtimes

Studies in Childhood and Youth

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Children’s Emotions in

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Mapping and Making Spaces of Childhood

Peter Kraftl 2015

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1 Introduction: Children’s Emotions in Policy and Practice 1

Matej Blazek and Peter Kraftl

Part I Spaces of Care, Home and Family

2 The Role of Emotion in Institutional Spaces of Russian

Tom Disney

3 Inappropriate Aid: The Experiences and Emotions of

Tsunami ‘Orphans’ Living in Children’s Homes in Aceh,

Harriot Beazley

4 Young People’s Emotional and Sensory Experiences of

Sarah Wilson

5 Smoke-Free Cars: Placing Children’s Emotions 68

Damian Collins and Morgan Tymko

Part II Spaces of the Public Realm, Community and

Peer Relationships

6 Planning for Resilience: Urban Nature and the Emotional

Geographies of Children’s Political Engagement 87

Pascale Joassart-Marcelli and Fernando J Bosco

7 Geographies of Hanging Out: Connecting Everyday

Noora Pyyry

vii

8 Young People, Work and Worklessness 122

10 Emotion, Volunteer-Tourism and Marginalised Youth 157

Ruth Cheung Judge

11 Are You Listening? Voicing What Matters in Non-Formal

Douglas Lonie and Luke Dickens

12 Biographical Interviews as Emotional Encounters in Street

Youth’s Lives: The Role of Research in Facilitating

Lorraine van Blerk and Daryl van Blerk

13 Understanding (How to Be with) Children’s Emotions:

Relationships, Spaces and Politics of Reconnection in

Matej Blazek and Petra Hricová

Part IV Spaces of School, Formal Education and

Citizenship

14 Children, Nature and Emotion: Exploring How Children’s

Emotional Experiences of ‘Green’ Spaces Shape Their

Lisa Procter

15 Reconstituting Social, Emotional and Mental Health

Difficulties? The Use of Restorative Approaches to Justice

Jennifer Lea, Sophie Bowlby and Louise Holt

16 Freedom or Coercion? Citizenship Education Policies and

Bronwyn E Wood

Contents ix

Kathrin Hörschelmann

Peter Kraftl and Matej Blazek

3.1 Girl’s map of the Children’s Home: A fence through the

middle, dividing the girls’ living area from the boys 403.2 (Boy’s picture, aged 15): Left: Cleaning the ditch (for

girls) Right: Standing in the sun (for boys) 433.3 (Boy’s drawing, aged 14): A student who disobeys the

teacher says: ‘Ya, Allah !’ Tengku says: ‘From now on

you are going to be whipped with a chain and you have

to stand in the field until evening prayer’ 433.4 (Girl’s drawing, aged 11): ‘Last night I dreamt I was

walking with my family, I really missed my little sister

6.1 Children swimming and fishing in the creek 98

14.1 Children view the roof through this glass balustrade 23214.2 The children explained that their peers hold on to the

trunks of these young trees and swing around them 23314.3 The green roof: Image showing how the roof blends

14.4 Service entrance: A space that the children deemed to

have similar felt qualities to the green roof 237

x

We both wish to express our thanks to all the chapter authors, as well

as to the original presenters and participants of a co-organised session

at the Fourth International and Interdisciplinary Conference on tional Geographies, Groningen, July 2013 Several of those presentershave contributed to this volume and have shaped the collection We areespecially grateful to Bettina van Hoven for her help with the session,and to the Geographies of Children, Youth and Families Research Group

Emo-of the Royal Geographical Society (with the Institute Emo-of British raphers) for co-sponsoring the session We would also like to thankPalgrave Macmillan, in particular Andrew James, Harriet Barker andAmelia Derkatsch, for their editorial support

Geog-Matej’s thanks go to Peter for the very enjoyable collaboration and forhis vision about the book and childhood/emotions more broadly He isvery grateful to everyone who helped trigger and shape his interest inemotions and childhood during his time at the University of Dundee,especially Fiona Smith, Morgan Windram-Geddes, Donna Brown, ChrisPhilo, Liz Bondi and all colleagues and young people with whom heworked at the Kopˇcany Community Centre in Slovakia The book came

to fruition while he was benefitting from the support of colleagues fromLoughborough University, and he is especially thankful to Darren Smithand Helen Rendell Last but not least, he owes so much to the support

of his closest ones

Peter would like to thank Matej for initiating and organising the nal conference session, and for driving forward both the intellectual andpractical aspects of this book with such enthusiasm He would like tothank all of the participants who took part in his alternative educationresearch at 59 learning spaces in the UK, who have inspired an interest

origi-in emotion, learnorigi-ing and youth work origi-in its many guises The ment of Geography at the University of Leicester – where Peter workedwhen this book was written – is a supportive, rich and vibrant place towork Peter is particularly grateful to several human geographers at (orpreviously at) Leicester with whom he has enjoyed discussions aboutemotion, affect, education and young people: Gavin Brown, JennyPickerill, Sarah Mills, Clare Madge, Jen Dickinson, Katy Bennett, CathieTraynor, Grace Sykes and Tom Grant Finally, Peter would like thank hisfamily and friends for their ongoing love and support

Depart-xi

Harriot Beazley is Senior Lecturer in Human Geography and

Pro-gram Coordinator in International Development at the University ofthe Sunshine Coast, Australia His research interests are located withinsocial and development geography and children’s geographies, utilisingchild-centred research with children and young people in South-EastAsia, especially Indonesia and Cambodia

Matej Blazek is Lecturer in Human Geography at Loughborough

Uni-versity He is a social geographer with interest in the formation ofagency, geography of marginalisation and community development,working usually with, for or as a practitioner

Fernando J Bosco is Associate Professor of Geography at San Diego

State University He works at the intersection of urban, political and tural geographies, with an overarching interest in social change in thecontext of Latin America and the US His research areas include anal-yses of the geographic dimensions of social movements and collectiveaction, and of children, families and their communities

cul-Sophie Bowlby is a feminist social geographer with interests in issues

of access, care and friendship She is now retired but continues to

do research as a visiting professor at Loughborough University and avisiting research fellow at Reading University

Ruth Cheung Judge is completing a PhD at University College

London Her broader interests include youth identity and ity, transnational mobilities, relations of power and inequality, and theintersections between these areas

subjectiv-Damian Collins is Associate Professor of Human Geography at the

University of Alberta He has a long-standing interest in the place ofchildren in public policy debates

Luke Dickens is a research associate at the Open University His

research develops critical understandings of the relationships between

xii

Notes on Contributors xiii

young people’s cultural practices and social identity formation, and thecomplex, unequal socio-spatial dynamics of the cultural economy

Tom Disney is a doctoral researcher in the School of Geography, Earth

and Environmental Sciences at the University of Birmingham Since

2005 he has worked with a number of different NGOs involved inorphan care in Russia

Louise Holt is Senior Lecturer in Human Geography at Loughborough

University Her research interests as a critical social and cultural rapher focus upon exploring how enduring inequalities are reproducedand/or transformed at a variety of intersecting spatial scales and in theways in which everyday, bodily practices in specific spaces/places areconnected to, reproduce and can potentially transform broader-scaleinequalities

geog-Kathrin Hörschelmann is a research associate at the Leibniz-Institute

for Regional Geography in Leipzig, whose work focuses on post-socialisttransformations, gender, social inequalities, critical geopolitics, and thepolitical and cultural geographies of children and youth Her publica-tions in the area of young people’s geographies include a co-authored

monograph on Children, Youth and the City and a co-edited collection on Contested Bodies of Childhood and Youth.

Petra Hricová is a psychologist, community and youth worker, active

in detached youth work since 2003 She is the coordinator of theKopˇcany Community Centre in Bratislava, the chair of the Association

of Low-Threshold Programmes for Children and Youth in Slovakia and

a national representative of Slovakia in Dynamo International – StreetWorkers Network

Pascale Joassart-Marcelli is Associate Professor of Geography at San

Diego State University Her research focuses on the role of place andspace in shaping immigrant integration, belonging and citizenship,with a particular interest in the everyday lives of immigrant childrenand families and the spatial and emotional relationships surroundingthese

Peter Kraftl is Professor of Human Geography at the University of

Birmingham His research interests focus on children’s geographies,geographies of mainstream and alternative education, and architecture

Recently, he authored Geographies of Alternative Education and, with Sarah Mills, Informal Education, Childhood and Youth.

Jennifer Lea is Lecturer in Human Geography at the University of

Exeter She has research interests in embodied practices, spiritualities,and the production and expression of differences related to disabilityand mental health

Douglas Lonie is a research consultant at BOP Consulting, working

across many projects exploring the social impact of cultural policy Prior

to this, he was research and evaluation manager for the National dation for Youth Music, managing the charity’s evaluation and researchprojects and establishing the impact of distributed funds

Foun-Anoop Nayak is Head of Geography at Newcastle University He is

Pro-fessor of Social & Cultural Geography and the author/co-author of Race, Place and Globalization: Youth Cultures in a Changing World (2003), Geo- graphical Thought: An Introduction to Ideas in Human Geography (2011) and Gender, Youth and Culture: Global Masculinities and Femininities (2013, 2nd

edn)

Tamasine Preece is Head of Personal and Social Education at a

sec-ondary school in Bridgend, Wales She holds a PhD from SwanseaUniversity (2014) and consults for a number of private and public agen-cies on the subjects of social media, self-harm, suicide, sexual health andsubstance misuse

Lisa Procter is Lecturer in Early Childhood Education at the School of

Education, University of Sheffield Her work explores the relationshipsbetween emotion and place in children’s meaning-making

Noora Pyyry is finalising her PhD thesis on teenage girls’ hanging out

at the Department of Teacher Education, University of Helsinki She isinterested in youth participation, everyday politics and learning ‘with’urban spaces

Morgan Tymko holds an MA in human geography from the University

of Alberta (2013) The results reported in her chapter in this book stemfrom her thesis research

Daryl van Blerk is a registered practitioner psychologist in the UK He

previously worked in South Africa at a youth offending residency, and

Notes on Contributors xv

as a result had the opportunity to work with street children and youth

He is trained in, and has extensive experience of, offering therapeuticinterventions to children and youth

Lorraine van Blerk is Reader in Human Geography at the University

of Dundee She has published widely on issues affecting street childrenand youth and is Chair of the Consortium for Street Children Research

Expert Forum She is the co-editor of Doing Children’s Geographies and co-author of Children, Youth and Cities.

Sarah Wilson is a senior lecturer at the University of Stirling, Scotland,

and an associate director of the Centre for Research on Families andRelationships (CRFR)

Bronwyn E Wood is a lecturer at the Faculty of Education, Victoria

University of Wellington Her research interests lie at the intersection

of education, sociology and geography She has a particular interest inyoung people’s experiences and expressions of belonging, identity, placeand citizenship participation

Highlights for Policy and Practice

The stressful nature of institutional care environments might mean that staff fail to handle cases of abuse properly.

(In Chapter 2, Tom Disney draws on his research in Russian orphanages

and argues that even if dysfunctional provisions of care are unlikely toundergo a systemic transformation, implementing urgent, micro-scalechanges to the emotional wellbeing of carers, volunteers and clients willenhance the quality of care.)

Risk assessments addressing emotional impacts are necessary for all decisions affecting children and their families in emergency situations.

(In Chapter 3, Harriot Beazley explores the emotional impact of placing

children in care after the 2004 earthquake and tsunami in Indonesia andcritiques the policies that prioritise institutional care over supportingchildren’s families.)

Young people might benefit from emotional autonomy as an ment of the professional provision for coping with difficult family situations.

ele-(In Chapter 4, Sarah Wilson shows that young people might

experi-ence parents’ substance misuse differently from professionals and thatthey consequently benefit from relationships with practitioners that aredeveloped on their own terms and at their own pace.)

Public debates on children’s wellbeing can be overtly emotionally charged, yet fail to address children’s own embodied and emotional perspectives.

(In Chapter 5, Damian Collins and Morgan Tymko use the example of

smoking in cars to demonstrate that, not having their concerns heard byadults, children may develop strategies of resistance but still experiencediscontent about being excluded from policy-making.)

Children’s participation in policy-making is motivated by adults’ emotions about children and administered through symbolic

xvi

Highlights for Policy and Practice xvii

gestures and disciplining of children’s emotions, rather than transformative, emotionally attentive partnerships.

(In Chapter 6, Pascale Joassart-Marcelli and Fernando J Bosco critique

approaches to planning that fail to recognise the often contradictoryand unpredictable nature of emotions and privilege certain emotionalresponses over children’s own perspectives.)

Connecting spaces of formal education and young people’s own everyday realms creates an emotional dynamics in which young people find learning important, meaningful and safe.

(In Chapter 7, Noora Pyyry investigates how young people learn about

their surroundings through hanging out in atmospheres of friendship,producing new understandings of the familiar and developing newemotional attitudes to learning.)

Young people marginalised by media and policy depictions of poverty and periphery identify and dis-identify with these images through powerful emotional mechanisms involving social affinity, care and aspirations.

(In Chapter 8, Anoop Nayak illustrates how the contrasting use of terms

such as ‘Chav’ includes the perpetuation of myths about the urban poor,

on the one hand, and young people’s tools for emotional coping withpsychosocial experiences of abjection, on the other.)

Virtual spaces gain more importance in the lives of young people

as they provide them with distinctive emotional resources, largely misinterpreted by adults.

(In Chapter 9, Tamasine Preece employs a psychoanalytical perspective

to theorise young people’s self-abuse in online spaces as an attempt toelicit an emotional response in others.)

Interventions with marginalised youth entail certain degrees of emotional governance, yet young people’s adoption of these efforts might resist the idealised conception of neoliberal subjects.

(In Chapter 10, Ruth Cheung Judge explores volunteering trips of

young people from disadvantaged neighbourhoods in London to Saharan Africa, arguing that young people’s emotional responses might

Sub-be ambivalent and discomforting, as they are emSub-bedded in power andinjustice relations in both global and local contexts.)

Given the importance and intricacy of young people’s emotional responses to professional interventions, policy needs to be led by practice.

(In Chapter 11, Douglas Lonie and Luke Dickens analyse the process

and architecture of non-formal music education, suggesting that tional responses and developments are yet to be acknowledged inpolicy-making to the same level as instrumental functions and targetedobjectives.)

emo-For many vulnerable young people lacking access to provisions

of psychological support, encounters with social researchers might become gateways to therapeutic interventions.

(In Chapter 12, Lorraine van Blerk and Daryl van Blerk discuss their

collaborative work with street youth in South Africa, showing howengagements between researchers and therapeutic practitioners build

on initial research encounters with young people with past traumaticevents to offer further and more targeted mental health support.)

Handling the presence and role of young people’s emotions and developing relationships on young people’s own terms might be as important as diagnosing what young people actually feel.

(In Chapter 13, Matej Blazek and Petra Hricová draw on perspectives

from detached youth work and argue that efforts to fully understandyoung people’s emotions often reinforce adult-centric constructions ofchildhood and subjugate young people to adult politics of space.)

Children’s multi-sensory engagement with a diversity of spaces shapes their meaning-making and intersects with their perception

of formal curriculum.

(In Chapter 14, Lisa Procter investigates the impact of children’s

embod-ied presence in outdoor green spaces, not just on sustainability tion but also on wider opportunities offered by place-based practices forlearning about the world and themselves.)

educa-Some young people experience the difference in accessing stream schools as an embodied condition.

main-(In Chapter 15, Jennifer Lea, Sophie Bowlby and Louise Holt consider the

use of restorative justice approaches in schools to address Behavioural,

Highlights for Policy and Practice xix

Emotional and Social Difficulties (BESD), arguing that young peoplereferred to special units might experience the distancing created by sucharrangements as very hard to surmount.)

Citizenship education requires young people to foster only able forms of emotions that foreground compliance, empathy and commitment.

accept-(In Chapter 16, Bronwyn Wood explores policies and educational

pro-grammes on active citizenship in New Zealand, demonstrating howthey implicitly require certain emotional responses from young peo-ple and either overlook or suppress the wider range of multiple anddynamic emotions experienced by young people in the context of powerinequalities in schools.)

Should children be sheltered from some aspects of politics? Who should carry the responsibility?

(In Chapter 17, Kathrin Hörschelmann analyses depictions of children

in relation to war and military politics, suggesting that there are ferences between discourses on childhood, citizenship and warfare, andraising questions about the wider political responsibility for educationand peace promotion.)

Introduction: Children’s Emotions

in Policy and Practice

Matej Blazek and Peter Kraftl

This edited collection focuses on children’s and young people’s (aged0–25) emotions in policy-making and professional practice It exploresdiverse kinds of policy and practice: from governmental policies toinformal education, from psychotherapy to volunteering schemes

It covers multiple substantive issues: from youth offending to nature,and from military recruitment to suicide Critically, however, given asurge in interest in emotion, affect and feeling across several social-scientific disciplines over the past decade, the book examines the manyways in which emotions matter within these diverse contexts andforms of intervention The chapters explore diverse forms of emotionand emotion work, including: emotions experienced during the course

of professional interventions; emotions underpinning and evident (oroverlooked and absent) in policy-making for children; management ofyoung people’s emotions as part of professional practice; and the use ofemotion to justify particular moral or political imperatives

Each chapter draws principally upon research by academics, takenfrom various international contexts and academic disciplines Grounded

in and developing recent theorisations of emotion and affect, thechapters draw upon rich, original empirical materials The chapters alsotease out ways in which emotions ‘make space’ – how emotions con-stitute, and are constituted by, a range of scales, places, geographicalcontexts, mobilities and boundaries Finally, each chapter ends with

a short bulleted list indicating key implications for policy-makers andprofessionals working with children and young people They are notintended to serve as ‘recommendations’ but, rather, as pointers to criti-cal themes for consideration by those working or engaging with childrenand young people

1

2 Introduction

This book examines children’s and young people’s emotions in making and professional practice with children and young people Thebook seeks both to inform readers about up-to-date research and toprovoke debate, encouraging and enabling critical reflections upon emo-tions in policy/professional practices relevant to readers’ own context

policy-It combines theoretical and empirical rigour with a clear focus on policyand/or practice relevance; most of the academics whose work is pre-sented work (and some of them write) together with practitioners Theprimary aims of the book are as follows:

• to outline and critically analyse how emotions, affects and feelingsmatter in policy and professional practice with children;

• to consider emotions within the diversity of forms of icy/professional practice with children and young people acrossseveral international contexts;

pol-• to disseminate new findings and original understandings of dren’s and young people’s emotions in the everyday contexts ofdiverse policy landscapes and professional practices;

chil-• to develop existing theorisations of emotions in policy/professionalpractice contexts, drawing upon rich empirical studies of interven-tions aimed at children;

• to constitute an engaging resource for students and academics, as well

as (trainee) professionals who work with or on behalf of children

Institutionalising children’s emotions?

In March 2014, the British newspaper The Guardian reported on an

app designed to help children aged from three to nine deal with stress

(The Guardian, 2014) The app, which takes the form of a virtual world,

enables children to play games and asks them to reflect upon how theyare feeling The app’s designer argues that for a variety of reasons parentsare unable to communicate with their children, and that this – with awhole host of other factors, from schoolwork to the influence of socialmedia – has led to a rising incidence of stress among even very young

children The app is intended as a ‘resilience tool’ (The Guardian, 2014,

unpaginated): rather than a cure for the apparent ills of contemporarychildhood, it offers strategies for dealing with stress as well as acting as

a prompt for parents and children to discuss such matters together.The app raises a number of questions about the management andinstitutionalisation of children’s emotions, all of which are pertinent

to this book First, it works as a reminder of long-standing concerns

for childhood that are overtly emotional in nature, and which havefor decades been the focus of critical scholarship by childhood studiesand youth scholars Whether expressed as a ‘crisis’ (Scraton, 2004) or interms of the fears that adults have for children (Valentine, 1996), theapp acts as a rather more contemporary reminder of the ways in whichdebates about childhood quickly become emotive in nature Indeed,childhood is mobilised as a kind of ‘affect’ (Kraftl, 2008; Evans, 2010),

a harbinger of society’s deepest fears for the future, and thus acts asboth a prompt and a justification for a wide variety of interventions

In this case, those interventions are technological and based on fearsabout rising levels of stress among young children; but, as the chapters

in this book demonstrate, such solutions may take the form of ernment policies, professionalised practices, media reportage and more.The contributors to this book do not necessarily argue that there is any-

gov-thing fundamentally wrong with constituting policies or practices on the

basis of (often powerful) emotions and affects Rather, they offer criticalanalyses that attempt to expose the multiple mobilisations of emotionthat – on occasion – remain hidden or unspoken within policies andprofessional practices for children

Second, the status of the app – developed by a mother as a

busi-ness proposition – raises questions about who, exactly, could or should

intervene in the emotional lives of children On the basis of the almostuniversally accepted proposition that children are both physically andemotionally vulnerable, a variety of actors could claim the properauthority to – in this case – offer ways to deal with children’s emotionalstress In recent years, as the tenets of neoliberalism have been accom-panied by the logics of ‘austerity’, countries like the UK have witnessedwhat Conroy (2010, p 326) terms a ‘schizophrenic’ approach to policyand professional practice for children On the one hand, he notes thatthe state has increasingly compelled individuals to take responsibilityfor themselves, rather than rely on state support In this context, it isnot surprising to see (if in this case implicitly) parents being blamed fornot being able to talk to their children in the ‘right’ way to help themmanage their emotions On the other hand, Conroy notes that the state

has sought to intervene in the intimate details of children’s lives as never

before, especially in schools: from diet (in the name of pervasive fearsabout obesity), to toilet use, to their neurological functioning (Pykett,2012; Gagen, 2015) If ‘schizophrenia’ is too strong a word, then thecombination of a contradictory approach to the governance of child-hood, alongside the withdrawal of the state from a wide range of servicesfor children and families, has certainly created a significant schism Both

4 Introduction

by accident and by design, that schism has left an opening for a widevariety of actors and organisations – some new, some not – to provideservices and support for children Those actors include the diverse andgrowing voluntary sector, private businesses and social enterprise, andnew, often complex forms of subcontracting between the public sec-tor and their voluntary or private partners Once again, based on theassumption that something must be done about today’s children (in thecase of the app, about their emotions), two important questions areraised, which this book begins to broach In contemporary contexts –

and not just in the UK – who are the actors and organisations that claim

the authority and the expertise to intervene in children’s lives, and,especially, their emotions? And: are we witnessing, in diverse forms,

the deinstitutionalisation of childhood or the re-institutionalisation of

childhood in complex, contradictory ways?

Third, the app – and the questions raised above – also presages

impor-tant debates about both when and where adults should intervene in the

emotional lives of children As Ecclestone and Hayes (2008), among ers, note, there has been a therapeutic turn in several professional fields

oth-in the past decade that has seen some practitioners categorisoth-ing anddealing with children on the basis of children’s emotional literacy, com-petency or behaviour Again, the argument is not that working with

or talking about emotions is inappropriate – far from it Rather, it isthat, most often, the very same children who were in the past deemed

to be educationally or socially deficient (for instance, teenage boysfrom socio-economically disadvantaged circumstances) are rebranded

as emotionally deficient – and in terms that those children are haps even less likely to understand On the one hand, these critiquesopen out questions as to the timing of interventions in individuals’emotional lives The logic – for instance of Children’s Centres, whichwork with disadvantaged families in the UK – has been one of earlyintervention; of catching and dealing with problems early, with theattendant logic that to wait until the teenage or adult years is ‘toolate’ (Horton and Kraftl, 2009a; Hartas, 2014) Thus, there is a logic

per-of futurity inherent here: that dealing with problems now will preventthose problems from manifesting in more serious ways later down theline – for instance, in the explosion of an obesity ‘time-bomb’ (Evans,2010) The chapters in this book cover the full range of childhood andyouth – from age 0 to 25, and in some cases beyond Each offers a series

of critical perspectives on policies and practices aimed at different agegroups, and, whether in terms of smoking, orphan care, music or vol-unteering, each chapter provides a different perspective on the logics

of futurity that undergird much policy and practice around children’semotions.

On the other hand, the app reported in The Guardian article prompts reflection upon where interventions in children’s lives take place In the

case of the app, its designer makes an initial distinction between digitaland physical spaces, wherein the former are being viewed as both a causeand a panacea for the emergence of emotional, social and behaviouralproblems in the latter In fact, the app seeks to bridge this apparentdivide between the digital and physical worlds, recognising that thetwo are, in fact, mutually and inextricably interwoven (Madge andO’Connor, 2006) This example – as well as the discussion of institu-tionalisation above – serves to illustrate the importance of space andplace to the mapping and making of children’s emotions in policy andpractice Nowhere have these debates been more prominent than in thevibrant, interdisciplinary field of children’s geographies In that schol-arship, researchers have made several pertinent observations, which arecarried through many of the chapters in this volume:

• that childhood is not merely a social construction but a spatial one,

premised on, for instance, powerful emotions (usually fear) aboutchildren in public spaces (Holloway and Valentine, 2000);

• that images or constructions of childhood prevalent in the

Minor-ity Global North maybe irrelevant to, offensive to, or even harmfulfor children in the Majority Global South – from decontextualisedimages of poverty-stricken children, deliberately photographed with-out their parents/carers to elicit shame or guilt among potentialcharity donors (Ruddick, 2003), to global discourses of children’srights that seek a universal ban on child labour when in some cases,and with clearer legislation, it could be appropriate (Bromley andMackie, 2009);

• that the changing forms of the institutionalisation of childhood are

shot through with various ‘geographies’ (Philo and Parr, 2000): fromthe material construction of schools to evoke particular kinds ofatmospheres (such as homeliness) for the benefit of children (Kraftl,2006), to the management of school dining halls by lunchtime super-visors in ways that control children’s behaviours (Pike, 2008), to theways in which children negotiate and feel about bullying in schoolcorridors (Valentine, 2000);

• that emotions are relational, constituting experiences of place at

various geographical scales (Blazek and Windram-Geddes, 2013):from the ways in which children’s ‘sense of place’ is developed in

6 Introduction

an iterative relationship between their emotional development andtheir sensing of physical spaces (Bartos, 2013), to the ways in whichinteractions between adults and children may not simply constitute

fleeting, micro-scale interactions, but have effects that matter over

larger scales and time periods (Kraftl, 2013a, b)

Therefore, a key aim of this book is to tease out the manifold, often tradictory ways in which policies and practices for children map andmake spaces for children, from the local to the global scale The notesabove offer some signposts, but the following chapters flesh out theseand several other critical and theoretical discussions as they subjectspecific policies and professional practices to detailed scrutiny

con-Emotions, policy and practice

Over the last 15 years, policies around the globe focused on childrenand youth have flourished at both national and local scales (Kraftl

et al., 2012; Youth Policy, 2015), establishing childhood as a cipal interest of governments and a subject of governance Policies

prin-are indisputably important elements in the making of spaces of

child-hood, with their complexities evoking what Foucault (1980) called a

dispositif, ‘a thoroughly heterogeneous set consisting of discourses,

insti-tutions, architectural forms, regulatory decisions, laws, administrativemeasures, scientific statements, philosophical, moral, and philanthropicpropositions’ (p 194) However, as such, they also offer an opportu-

nity to map these spaces – and indeed childhood itself – in the sense

of ‘finding a way’ (Pile and Thrift, 1995) for adults, professionals ornot, to approach children in complex landscapes of ethics and politics

A scrutiny of the role and implications of emotions in such a process of

‘way-finding’ raises three themes that constitute the core of this book’scontribution

First, policies are usually declared and vindicated as rationallygrounded frameworks providing a guideline for action Yet, policy-making itself is, paradoxically, often emotionally driven and charged,

as are the embodied acts of advocating, promoting and disseminatingpolicy Evans (2010) and Brown (2012), for instance, demonstrate how

policies related to children are propelled by emotions and they target

emotions at the same time Fischer (2010) shows that, while emotionsare seen as a ‘barrier to reasoned judgment’ (p 407) in policy-making,

they are instrumental in policy deliberation, while emotions associated with policies in media representation usually have a stronger effect on the

reception of policies than any substantive coverage (Gross and Brewer,2007) Emotional media representations of childhood are, in turn, used

to influence and negotiate policies (Khan, 2010), as are other tations of emotions (Cass and Walker, 2009; Whittier, 2009; Coe and

represen-Schnabel, 2011) The very implementation of policies is an emotional process (Horton and Kraftl, 2009b), and it invokes emotional responses

from those affected, including children and their parents (Duncan et al.,2004) Yet, in order to justify policy frameworks, a significant effort isbeing made to distance policy aims and narratives from the very emo-tional nature of the experiences, dilemmas and contexts that embedchildren’s lives (Cooper, 2005; Kenway and Youdell, 2011) In response,this book does not simply seek to establish a place for emotions in thepolicy area It acknowledges that the duality of the ‘reason’ and emo-tion and its implications for power relations in the society have beenchallenged – by feminist and psychodynamic theorists, among oth-ers – and the chapters in the book unfold the role of emotions in thepolicy-making and the development of professional practice as a way of

reconnecting emotions with the more rational deliberations and practical

actions over childhoods The chapters explore the emotional dynamicsbehind policy-making, in policy implementation and of policy effects,yet they link the findings back to the wider question of children’s livesand how adults approach them

Second, while reading through childhood and youth policies, fromthe UN Convention on the Rights of the Child (UNCRC), throughnational policies such as Every Child Matters (ECM) in the UK or

No Child Left Behind (NCLB) in the US, to the variety of local andsector-specific documents, one gets an ambiguous sense of the supposedrole of emotions in children’s wellbeing The word ‘emotion’ is men-tioned in ECM only in reference to emotional ‘problems’ or ‘needs’,although it is contained within a frequent but somehow more equivo-cal term ‘mental health’; ‘emotions’ do not appear at all in the UNCRC;and they are mentioned in relation to ‘needs’, ‘development’ or ‘impair-ment’ in NCLB A difficulty with such a framing is that even theselimited acknowledgements of emotions tend to approach emotionality

in children’s lives within a referential model oriented towards a fication of children’s realities in order to achieve a targeted (emotional)state, rather than to attend to how children actually feel Along withaddressing children’s emotions as a (potential) problem, emotions havebeen also shown as a means for achieving wider policy goals, such as

modi-on participatimodi-on and citizenship (Brown, 2011) or educatimodi-on Riordan and Aguilar, 2009) In contrast, the chapters in the book avoid

(Lagana-8 Introduction

the instrumentalist attitude to emotions and seek to adopt an openapproach by building accounts of children’s own emotions in variouspolicy and practical contexts The authors refrain from seeing emotions

as a problem or a target, although they pay attention to how such aconceptualisation might serve as an anchor for policy and practice Sev-eral authors thus adopt a ‘child-centred’ approach in their narratives,but with a focus not only on what ‘matters’ (Horton and Kraftl, 2009b)

in institutions, protocols, spaces and materialities, but also on adults’own emotions and their often unpredicted and overlooked effects andentanglements with the emotions of children

Finally, various forms of professional, semi-professional and day practice with children, such as education (Schutz et al., 2007),youth work (Sapin, 2013), care (Arnold, 2010) or psychotherapy (Barish,2010), are perhaps more explicit about children’s emotions than thepolicy arena While the debates in this book are situated in some

every-of these contexts, and the chapters are designed as aids for makers and practitioners, they are not written as guidelines Instead,the book explores the complexity of emotions as emerging and mani-fested through a variety of ways in practice, not always easily accessible(Blazek, 2013), and it goes beyond the instrumentalism of emotionalengineering embedded in some policy materials Rather, the chaptersseek to understand professional practices through the prism of emo-tions: as systematic interventions not only in children’s lives throughformal and informal power mechanisms, but also in connections withpolicy and the wider issue of politics in adult-child relationship Emo-tions have been shown to shape the spaces of professional practice(Nairn and Higgins, 2011) and to emerge at the entanglements of thestructural organisation of practitioners’ work and their embodied expe-riences with clients (Evans, 2011; Watkins, 2011) Yet, as Bondi (2004)shows, there are ruptures in how policies are translated into everydayexperiences of professionals’ work, and emotions, rather than rationaldeliberateness, are often key in the formation of these disconnections(also Pinkney, 2011)

policy-Book synopsis

The subtitle of the book – ‘Mapping and Making Spaces of Childhood’ –highlights the focus upon the diverse spaces of policy and practicethat embrace children’s and young people’s everyday lives While eachchapter addresses particular theoretical, empirical and/or political con-cerns of relevance to the case study/ies in question, the organisation of

the book into four parts reflects distinctive – yet interconnected – spatialprocesses across several scales.

The chapters in Part I thus explore spaces of care, affiliated withfamily and home, or developing in their absence In Chapter 2, TomDisney examines the space of a Russian orphanage, focusing on theemergence of emotional entanglements at the intersection of the macro-institutional landscape and the micro-scale dynamics He points to thecentral role of emotions in the constitution of relationships between thestaff, volunteers and young people, and offers a critique of the rigidity

in the organisation of care Chapter 3 is situated in a similar context,yet follows a different topic Harriot Beazley assesses the institutionalresponse to children affected by disasters She shows how humanitar-ian action addresses central institutional provision rather than supportfor children’s families and communities, effectively ‘creating’ orphans.Like Disney, Beazley illustrates how looking at children’s emotions shiftsthe centrality of care from institutional frames to the lived experi-ences of those involved in caring Such a topic is also investigated inChapter 4 by Sarah Wilson, who highlights children’s agency againstthe predominant notion of dependence in challenging circumstances.Exploring the neglected significance of children’s sensory experiences athome, Wilson suggests that children have underappreciated capacities

of ‘getting by’, and she calls for reformulating the role of social ers and other practitioners beyond the conventional language of familyintervention Finally, regarding the debates on smoking bans in cars,Damian Collins and Morgan Tymko look in Chapter 5 at an example

work-of policy in which concerns over children’s wellbeing and discourses

of care and caring fail to encompass children’s own experiences LikeWilson, Collins and Tymko emphasise the importance of children’s vis-ceral and emotional experiences and also highlight their exclusion frompolicy-making, but they also point to the limited ability of children

to address these issues on their own, advocating further engagementbetween adults and children

Part II loosely links to some of these discussions, but its principalconcern is in public spaces and spaces on the verge of institutional con-trol, including spaces of children’s own peer relationships In Chapter 6,Pascale Joassart-Marcelli and Fernando J Bosco explore planning in thecontext of urban resilience They critique the often symbolic nature ofchildren’s participation, which fails to acknowledge the unpredictableand often problematic impact of emotions, and problematise the idea ofchildren’s participation without emotional attentiveness Noora Pyyry,

in Chapter 7, also looks at emotions associated with young people’s

10 Introduction

activities in public spaces, as she suggests translating the emotionalqualities of ‘hanging out’ and the engagement young people have withthe city through such activities into the design and practices of formaleducation In Chapter 8, Anoop Nayak investigates how media and pol-icy discourses engineer and sustain the marginalisation of some youngpeople, but also how young people’s response to such discourses stim-ulates their emotional literacy and gives rise to a new individual andcollective agency In Chapter 9, Tamasine Preece looks at young peo-ple’s peer relationships from a different perspective, as she investigatesself-harm in virtual spaces She suggests that the existing policies fail toappreciate the importance of online spaces in young people’s lives, andshe discusses the role of emotions in the establishment of relationshipsbetween young people’s online and offline identities

Part III explores children’s emotions in the context of spaces ofinformal education and professional interventions that operate on thelow-threshold principles and/or as forms of outreach interventions

In Chapter 10, Ruth Cheung Judge analyses emotional governance inthe context of volunteering trips between London and sub-SaharanAfrica and young people’s responses to it, highlighting how emotionsare embedded in power relations that problematise the idealised notion

of young people as neoliberal subjects Chapter 11 offers an account

of how emotional qualities of young people’s positioning in youthwork practice fail to be acknowledged by the associated policies, lead-ing Douglas Lonie and Luke Dickens to suggest a more symmetricalrelation between policy and practice In Chapter 12, Lorraine van Blerkand Daryl van Blerk discuss potential connections between therapeuticpractice and research, seen as a form of intervention Looking at thespatialities of professional practice, they point out how research might

be the first and only engagement of some young people with helpinginstitutions, and they argue for a coordinated approach to first-contactprovision In Chapter 13, Matej Blazek and Petra Hricová draw on theirexperience from detached youth work to retheorise the approach toworking with children’s emotions itself They draw links between dif-ferent forms of power inequalities between adults and children, andsuggest focusing on relationships with young people that would besupportive of their social, spatial and emotional autonomy, instead ofstriving to diagnose how young people feel

Part IV follows by examining spaces of schooling, formal tion and the ‘making of’ future citizens It begins with Chapter 14, inwhich Lisa Procter revisits the multi-sensory nature of children’s engage-ment with their environments, investigating the potential of outdoor

educa-spaces for a wider notion of curricular education, based on children’sties with their everyday environments In Chapter 15, Jennifer Lea,Sophie Bowlby and Louise Holt draw on their research on Behavioural,Emotional and Social Difficulties (BESD), exploring impacts of thesocio-spatial organisation of special units in schools on the forma-tion of young people’s identities Chapter 16 then provides an explicitaccount of emotional governance in formal education, as Bronwyn

E Wood shows how citizenship education is based on reducing thearray of young people’s emotional responses to only those that aredeemed acceptable Wood puts this within a perspective of powerinequalities in schools, and traces the breadth and depth of emo-tions which remain disregarded or suppressed Finally, in Chapter 17,Kathrin Hörschelmann problematises the responsibility for young peo-ple’s futures in her analysis of military depictions of childhood, andconcludes the empirically based chapters of the book with a series

of questions about ethics and politics of childhood across the ric of adult society The book concludes with Chapter 18, written bythe editors, which ties together the key implications of the individ-ual chapters for theorising emotions, both in general and in terms ofpolicy/professional practices with children

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Part I

Spaces of Care, Home and Family

The Role of Emotion in

Institutional Spaces of Russian

Orphan Care: Policy and Practical Matters

Tom Disney

Introduction

The latter half of the 20th century saw the West largely pursuing policies

of deinstitutionalisation in orphan care, with orphanages seen as spaces

of extreme emotional deprivation capable of causing considerable harm

to their inhabitants (IJzendoorn et al., 2008) Yet, large-scale tionalisation of orphaned children continues to be the norm in manycountries across the globe (Ainsworth and Thoburn, 2014)

institu-There have been several quantitative studies that have striven to linkthe poor physical and mental health of orphaned children to their insti-tutional environments (Rutter et al., 2001; Johnson et al., 2006) Whilevaluable, these studies have often focused at the macro-institutionallevel, with emotions understood through a bio-psychological lens,neglecting the intricacies of micro-scale interactions between agents insuch spaces There remains a need to balance these studies with morequalitative, and particularly ethnographic, studies of the experience

of orphanage life for children, to understand how these spaces

oper-ate, shape and interact with the individuals within them (Crockenburg,2008; Disney, 2015)

This chapter makes two contributions First, it provides an overview

of how the macro-institutional landscape of orphan care has been(de)constructed in the West and the Russian Federation through psy-chological theories of emotional attachment Following a discussion ofthe historical context, this chapter advocates the need for contextualknowledge in policies for orphan care, given problematic Western

17

18 Spaces of Care, Home and Family

interventions in Russian domestic policy since the collapse of the SovietUnion (Wedel, 1998) In looking at the macro-institutional context oforphan care in Russia for disabled children, this chapter emphasises thelimitations of Western policy in Russia, instead promoting micro-scale,practice-based recommendations Second, drawing upon the author’sethnographic work in a Russian orphanage for disabled children, itexamines the importance of emotion in the lives of three groups (staff,volunteers, orphans) Through a consideration of the orphanage as ahybrid space, comprising a domestic and a work environment, thischapter builds upon existing work in Children’s Geographies on therole of emotions, such as fear in public spaces (Valentine, 1997; Pain,2006), and offers insights into the impact of such emotions on the lives

of vulnerable children

(De)constructing orphan spaces

Early examples of institutional environments of orphan care, such asfoundling hospitals in the West, can be traced back to the 7th century

in Italy and France (O’Sullivan and McMahon, 2006) In the UK, as withmuch of Western Europe, large-scale institutionalisation of orphanedchildren did not become prevalent until the 19th century Althoughwidespread, orphanages were not always thought of as ideal care spaces;

this ambivalence is captured in Victorian novels such as Oliver Twist by

Charles Dickens, which highlighted the abuse of orphaned children in19th-century British institutions (Dickens, 2002)

It was not until increasing interest in developmental psychology andpsychiatry in the 20th century that unease with orphanage care wastranslated into policies of deinstitutionalisation in the West Particularlyinfluential was John Bowlby’s ‘attachment theory’ (Bowlby, 1969, 1973,

1980), which posited that an attentive, emotionally sensitive caregiver is

essential for normal human development (refined by Ainsworth et al.,1979) The scope and impact of his work are illustrated by the report

he wrote for the World Health Organization in 1951, entitled Maternal Care and Mental Health, which was translated into 14 different languages

and widely distributed (Bretherton, 1992) Studies from other plinary backgrounds, such as paediatrics and neuroscience, have furthercriticised large-scale institutional orphan care, arguing that emotionaldeprivation can have physiological manifestations as well as psychologi-cal effects (Groark and Mccall, 2011) This trend of deinstitutionalisation

disci-is now the dominant mode of practice in orphan care in most Western

countries, privileging foster care over institutionalisation for orphanedchildren.

Orphan care in Russia

The roots of Russian orphan spaces are much the same as in the West,emerging from the Church for babies ‘born of shame’ (Pantiukhina,

2009, p 4) These spaces subsequently developed differently from those

in the West, however, and today Russia retains a large system of tutional orphan care When the Bolsheviks came to power in 1917 theywere horrified by vagrant youths wandering the countryside, and there

insti-were calls to properly care for the so called besprizornye deti

(home-less/vagrant children) There was also genuine fear of what were seen as

hordes of feral children who suffered from moral’no defektivnost’ (moral

defectiveness) inherent in their own ‘psychological defects’ rather than

as a result of their environment or upbringing (Ball, 1993, p 234;Iarskaia-Smirnova and Romanov, 2005) Systems of institutional care

were set up to hold these children with the creation of Soviet destkie doma (orphanages), key to which were the role of the kollektiv (col-

lective/group importance) and ‘socially useful labour’ (Nikolaev, 1990)

As Stryker (2012, p 87) points out, these spaces became seen as ‘sites

of hegemonic social education that sought to teach children without

parental care [ ] the knowledge and skill-sets that would firmly

estab-lish the wealth of the emerging Communist Party’ Clearly, these werehighly normative spaces, imbued with cultural and social tropes Fol-lowing the Second World War, the orphanage system was flooded withchildren, due to both the war itself and a famine in 1946 (Pantiukhina,2009)

While the West was developing interest in the theories of ment propounded by Bowlby and Ainsworth, Soviet psychologists weredeveloping their own frameworks, in which emotional socialisation gar-nered only marginal interest The pioneers of Soviet psychology were,instead, more interested in ‘identifying developmental periods through-out the lifespan and elaborating psychological principles to develop alarge-scale, cognitively based, and unified public system of educationspanning childhood’ (Stryker, 2012, p 87) Emotions were seen as sec-ondary to cognitive functioning; they were something to be controlledand manipulated to preferable ends rather than intrinsic to child devel-opment Indeed, for the Soviet establishment, attachment theory wasconsidered unscientific

attach-20 Spaces of Care, Home and Family

Mapping the system

A full discussion of the orphanage system in Russia is beyond the scope

of this chapter; this is particularly so since the Russian Federation iscomprised of 89 federal regions, all of which have some legal powers

in deciding how orphan care is actualised within their territory Hansen et al., 2003) The orphanage system in Russia developed intotwo broadly separate strands of institutional care: institutions for thosechildren considered to be disabled (including both social/biologicalorphans and non-orphans) and a system for those without disabilities

(Holm-My ethnographic work was based in an institution for children withdisabilities, and so the chapter focuses on this context (on the latter,see Khlinovskaya Rockhill, 2010; Stryker, 2012) What follows is a briefhistory of the development of the system of orphanages for childrenconsidered intellectually disabled

Institutions for those with intellectual disabilities in Russia can betraced back to the 18th century, with the establishment of ‘mad-houses’, which were also common across Europe (Philo, 1989, 2012;Phillips, 2009) With the success of the Bolshevik revolution, the ways

in which disability was understood began to change; people were sified according to their ability to provide socially valuable labour tothe state Following this Soviet classification of disability, people withimpairments (mental or physical) were institutionalised along threebroad categories: those unable to work (these institutions were ‘medi-cal’ in their nature); those who could be retrained to engage in ‘light’ or

clas-‘irregular’ work; and those who required ‘supplementary social support’following a ‘partial loss of labour capacity’ (Phillips, 2009) Childrenwith disabilities often ended up in institutions which were classified as

doma-internaty (boarding homes).

In post-Soviet Russia, the lines between orphanage and disabilityinstitution are porous and complex The orphanage system in Russiadivides at the point when children leave the baby home, at age three or

four, when they are assessed by the Psikhologo-mediko-pedagogicheskaya Komissiya or PMPC (Psychological-Medical-Pedagogical Commission), a

committee including a pedagogue, a psychiatrist, a psychologist and

a speech therapist, which evaluates ‘the children’s development andassigns them either to a pre-school Children’s Home for normal chil-dren or a Children’s Home for disabled children’ (Khlinovskaya Rockhill,

2010, p 198) An assessment that a child is ‘disabled’ leads into yetanother complex web of institutional environments; the orphanage sys-tem for children with impairments numbers from one to eight, with

each category of institution theoretically designed to offer support forthe specific needs of the child Further complicating the institutionalsystem is that not all children within these institutions are necessarilyorphans; parents may use these institutions as mechanisms of child-care support, placing the child in the institution but retaining theirlegal-parental rights (Schmidt, 2009) Thus, some children enter thesystem after being legally ‘refused’ by their parents, or because theyrequire significant medical treatment (Klepikova and Utekhin, 2010).This complexity is further highlighted by the fact that children’s legalstatuses change as parents’ ability or desire to visit their child in theinstitution changes, and the child, initially not an orphan, may findthemselves (socially) orphaned by the very institution that is supposed

to help them To some of my participants, these institutions were clearlyorphanages; to others, they were more akin to institutional care spacesfor children with disabilities that just happened to house orphans Forthe purposes of this chapter, however, I refer to this kind of institution

as an orphanage

An important point to draw from this discussion of heterogeneousperspectives on developmental psychology, emotion and care prac-tices is the ways in which it illustrates the cultural construction ofknowledge, and the extent to which the socio-political forces oper-ating within a country (particularly a closed society such as theUSSR) shape knowledge(s) that translates into very real policy out-comes These cultural and historical legacies are important contextfor policy-makers or practitioners in related fields What follows is abrief discussion of the importance of contextual knowledge in policyengagement

The importance of context

Following the collapse of the USSR, interactions between the West andRussia surged; policy-makers were swept up in a wave of euphoria andmoved quickly to be involved in helping Russia to become another

‘Western’ state Problematically, however, much of this interest in thenewly formed Russian Federation often failed to engage with the his-torical legacies of the USSR, and referred to Russia in reductionist terms

as a country ‘in transition’ This emphasis on ‘transition’ presents socialist space as simply understood through ‘discourses of neoliberaleconomic change’, and focuses analysis ‘on macro-level social conse-quences of change’ (Flynn and Oldfield, 2008, p 5), while neglectingthe micro-level legacies of Russia’s Soviet past

post-22 Spaces of Care, Home and Family

In the case of orphanages in Russia, it should be acknowledged thatthere still exists a vast system of institutional spaces of care that, despiteassurances from the Russian government, are unlikely to be dismantled

in the near future Furthermore, deinstitutionalisation of orphanage tems must be balanced with a developed system of community careand foster services, or perhaps other innovative spaces of orphan care(Disney, 2015) It should also not be assumed that deinstitutionalisationnecessarily leads to improved care for those in need (see Milligan, 1998),

sys-as hsys-as been illustrated comprehensively by Wolch and Dear (1987)researching the fate of those discharged from institutions in the US (alsoAinsworth and Hansen, 2005)

Rather than macro-scale changes to the Russian orphanage system,which appear unlikely to happen soon, more realisable micro-scale,practice-based adjustments in the interim, focusing on the emotionalaspects of daily life in orphanages, appear to be more realistic andurgent There is some precedent for this in Russia, as described by the

St Petersburg-USA Orphanage Research Team (2009), who conducted

a quasi-experiment implementing a number of structural and emotional changes to a Russian baby home In particular, this includedenhanced training with staff on the importance of emotion to grow-ing children They claim to have seen significant improvements in thelives of the orphaned children who were exposed to increased socio-emotional contact with members of staff While acknowledging that

socio-it may be problematic to overemphasise the generalisabilsocio-ity of thisstudy for different orphanages, given the specific ages of the children(0–4) and other factors, it provides a useful case study to considerfor further micro-inventions in other care spaces With these impor-tant caveats, this chapter examines the role of emotion in the dailylives of carers, volunteers and children in an orphanage for disabledchildren

Understanding emotion in orphan care: Ethnographic perspectives

This ethnography of institutional orphan care took place in a Russianorphanage for over 400 physically and mentally disabled children,which would be classified as the ‘8th type’ of disability institution

for orphaned children with intellectual disabilities (dlya detei-sirot s umstvennoi otstalost’u) The institution is divided up into four build-

ings, and children are placed in different buildings according to the