Abstract
Since age and generation first started to be problematized, the focus has been on childhood, while adulthood has attracted less attention. In this article four examples are presented of how adulthood is constructed within the specific context of childhood research. Taking the departure in Deleuzian and actor network theories, four examples are given of subjectivites that emerge in specific events, where humans as well as non-humans are active agents: the ‘adult-in-charge’, the ‘adult-included-in-commonality’, the ‘incompetent child’ and the ‘adult-as-other’. It is argued that there are always the possibilities of, on the one hand, performing the expected acts and, on the other hand, escaping from a stable and restricted adult subjectivity.
There is a general consensus among researchers in childhood studies that childhood is constructed. Philippe Ariès, in his Centuries of Childhood (1962), suggested that, though children have always existed in the history of humankind, childhood as a meaningful concept is an invention of the emerging modern society. When researchers first paid attention to childhood as something more than an uncomplicated natural condition, a new paradigm in childhood studies emerged (Prout and James, 1990) and huge opportunities were opened up for problematizing childhood. Today, researchers frequently use expressions such as ‘doing age/childhood’ and ‘generationing’ and study the multiple ways in which these actions are carried out.
In this article I take my point of departure in this constructionist way of looking at age and generation, and focus on a part of the construction that has been less investigated, the component that most often constitutes the opposite of childhood, namely adulthood. I give some examples of how adulthood is constructed in the specific context of childhood research, what subjectivities could be produced and through what materials; and what these subjectivities do to the relations between adults and children. Finally, I share some thoughts on what the analysis of these examples can bring to the discussion of the relations between adulthood and childhood.
There is a fundamental difference in the experiences of being a child and of being an adult that lies in the interdependence between generations. Every society is dependent on children for its continued existence and all children are dependent on adults for their survival, but individual adults are not dependent on children (unless all of us – childhood researchers, teachers, paediatricians, toy producers, etc. – who are dependent on children to earn our living are counted). Children’s dependence is part of a power order, a generational order, which implies a hierarchical relation between people of different ages and concretely affects their everyday lives. Children’s dependence on adults is a fact that has implications for how to understand children’s and adults’ agency (Cook, 2009; Halldén, 2005). It also has implications for how to understand the construction of adulthood. The study of children’s lives is essentially the study of child–adult relations (Mayall, 2002: 27). It is therefore not far-fetched to argue that children take part in constructing the lives of adults that surround them, as well as the definitions of adulthood.
Adulthood versus childhood – being versus becoming
The basis for problematizing adulthood, or, indeed, for catching sight of it, is its relational character (Alanen, 1992; Jenks, 1996; Qvortrup, 1987). As the opposite of childhood, adulthood includes everything that childhood is not. Children are immature – adults are mature; children are irrational – adults are rational; children play – adults work; children are natural beings – adults are cultural beings, etc. (James and James, 2004; Johansson, 2005; Prout, 2005). Statements like these have been questioned by childhood researchers in recent decades. It has also been important to highlight the asymmetric power relations between children and adults. Being positioned as predominantly ‘becomings’ with few resources (economic, political, discursive, physical) of their own, children are structurally as well as situationally at the mercy of adults’ arbitrariness, more or less the property of their parents or other guardians and later of the school system. The responsibility for children’s lives as well as the interpretational priority of their actions, personalities and of childhood as such lie in the hands of adults (Qvortrup, 1994, 2005). The implications of an adult interpretational priority have also been the focus of attention in research, in that children are regarded as ‘others’, as ‘marked subjects’ and their actions interpreted from an adultist point of view (Aitken, 2008; Cook, 2009; Davies, 1989; James and James, 2004; Prout, 2005).
Childhood studies breached the partition between childhood and adulthood, showing that not only adults are capable and reflecting human beings. The project was to problematize childhood, to pay attention to how childhood and adulthood had been constructed as dichotomies. It was to show that adulthood was the norm against which childhood had been measured, resulting in childhood being defined as a lack, deviation or imperfection. This work has resulted in a rich body of knowledge about modern childhood and of the life conditions of today’s children, mediated by children’s own voices. Up until recently it is, however, the child part of the relation that has attracted most interest and been analysed.
Problematizing adulthood
However, from around the turn of the century researchers increasingly started to pay attention to the ‘adult’ part of the relation. A starting-point for this problematizing was the experiences of the ethnographic childhood researchers and the subsequent discussion of the researcher’s role. Prolonged fieldwork with participant observations, informal interviews and other qualitative methods demand other attitudes and a different researcher’s role than methods based on experiments or surveys. Here, the guiding light is rather how to cooperate in the creation of knowledge; the informant becomes a kind of ‘co-researcher’ as well as a ‘co-producer’ of childhood and adulthood (Alderson, 2000; Christensen and Prout, 2002; Kellett, 2010; Kellett et al., 2004; Mayall, 2000).
Various strategies have been used in trying to overcome the power asymmetry between adults and children in childhood research. One strategy is to take a ‘least-adult role’, trying to become part of children’s social worlds (Corsaro, 1985; Davies, 1989; Thorne, 1993). Another strategy is to choose methods that suit the persons involved, the research issues and the research context, irrespective of the research being done with children or adults (Alderson, 1995; Christensen and James, 2000). Pia Christensen and Alan Prout call this ‘ethical symmetry’ (Christensen and Prout, 2002), where the point of departure is that the same ethical principles should be applied, regardless of the informants’ age (Christensen and Prout, 2002: 482; Kellett, 2010; Kellett et al., 2004).
Other researchers have pointed to the importance of regarding the adult as one part of a relation characterized by dependence. Gunilla Halldén (2005, 2007) takes her point of departure in preschool and demands an upgrading of the concept of ‘care’, which, she claims, has been disadvantaged at the expense of learning. Autonomy is highly valued in our society, she writes. Care, on the other hand, is not about autonomy, but relations, and a child’s development takes place in a specific cultural context, where the adult has responsibility for the relation between adult and child (Halldén, 2005, 2007). Daniel Thomas Cook (2009) points to the interdependence of consumption by children and parents. He challenges the view of the autonomous economic man as well as of children as residing outside economic life and then being brought into it by parents or the media. Instead he suggests an understanding of consumption as a process including individuals engaging in relationships, obligations and reciprocity (Cook, 2009: 237).
Becoming as a general condition
Becoming, as the opposite of being, contrasts human beings with ‘human becomings’. In these discussions becoming is associated with incompleteness and deviation from the normal, and the statement is that children are beings in their own right. This definition was introduced and elaborated by childhood researchers predominantly situated within sociology, and they braced their feet against theories of sociology as well as development psychology, rooted in modernity (Alanen, 1992; James and Prout, 1990; Mayall, 2000; Qvortrup, 1987). Ethnologists and anthropologists, who adopted the ideas from the new sociology of childhood could relate to their institutional traditions, where children were studied as part of family systems or as representatives of an authentic children’s culture (Brembeck et al., 2004).
A quite different contribution to the discussions of beings and becomings came from researchers who were inspired by neo-materialistic and actor network theories (cf. Deleuze and Guattari, 1984; Latour, 2005). In these theories, what is studied is not fixed entities interacting with each other, but the event and the motion in itself, in which entities are produced. Maturity/immaturity, dependence/independence and competence/incompetence are thus the results of elements assembling in an event rather than inherent characteristics of specific individuals. These assemblages could be composed of children’s and adults’ bodies, discourses of childhood, artefacts, school as an institution, etc. that work together as if being a single unit. In this definition becoming stands for a common trait within everybody and everything. Nobody (and nothing) is completed or finished; we are always transforming and connecting to other humans and non-humans. Nick Lee (2001) argues that today, the category ‘being’ is being emptied, since growing up is no longer about completion, stability and journey’s end (2001: 85). This second definition has later, in childhood studies, been elaborated into a definition of becoming as ‘lines of flight’, drawing on first and foremost the philosopher Gilles Deleuze, who describes desire as the engine of all activity and creation. Desire is a positive force aiming at change (Deleuze and Guattari, 1984). Deleuze distinguishes between ‘becoming-the-same’ and ‘becoming-other’. Becoming-the-same means establishing, in Deleuze’s words, territorializing, the existing order, while becoming-other denotes escaping, deterritorialization, finding lines of flight which lead away from the categorization. He uses Spinoza’s concept of ‘affection’ (Affectio), which denotes the effect of an encounter, and ‘affect’ (Affectus), which is the capacity of being affected by the encounter, a capacity that belongs to humans as well as non-humans (Spinoza, 2000).
Jakob Wenzer (2004) asserts that the being child promoted by childhood studies provided a line of flight – a deterritorialization – from the territory of the incomplete, future-oriented becoming that used to dominate theories of childhood (2004: 330). Alan Prout (2005) suggests that it is time to ‘include the excluded middle’ between the dichotomies of child and adult (2005: 69) and ‘to see whether and how different versions of child or adult emerge from the complex interplay, networking or orchestration of different natural, discursive, collective and hybrid materials’ (2005: 114). Stuart Aitken (2008) argues that the view of children as incomplete and pre-adult becomings is equivalent to becoming-the-same, and that being is a no more attractive designation, since it indeed ‘celebrates children’s resourcefulness and creativity’ but also ‘carries a huge burden of responsibility and separateness’ (2008: 119; cf. Lee, 2005). Helene Brembeck and Barbro Johansson (2010) give examples of how children are designated learning subjects, growing and incomplete humans or greedy ‘food monsters’ and show how children’s actions in assemblages, consisting of bodies, space, foodstuffs, etc. enable them to deterritorialize the adult-defined designations, and create more powerful performances. Nick Lee addresses the interdependence between adults and children and introduces the concept of ‘separability’ in order to pay attention to the space between dependence and separation. He advocates ‘a more flexible view’, where all human connections, each separation and each attachment are seen as ‘partial’ (Lee, 2005: 20), a view that makes it possible to see all the different ways in which adulthood is performed.
The two ways of using the concept of becoming – as an opposite of being and as a general condition – certainly create totally different subjects: on the one hand there is a coherent subject that takes its subjectivity along from one event to another and on the other, hand there is a floating and temporal subject, that appears, transforms and disappears. Nevertheless, they are both useful, for different purposes. It is still not self-evident to problematize the dimension of age and I have noticed that people, when faced with the concept of generational order and with the statement that children are more often regarded as human becomings than as human beings, have an ‘aha’ experience. The focus on childhood as a permanent minority category in every society (Qvortrup, 1987, 1994) helps to provide an understanding of the conditions of the lives of actual children, and the assertion that children are active and valuable in the present challenges the traditional and non-reflected notions of childhood as a biological, natural condition. Challenging the positioning of adults as beings and children as becomings means conceding that age, as well as gender, class, sexuality, etc., is constructed and accordingly could be ‘done’ in a different way.
Talking about becoming as a general condition is useful if one wants to dig into the processes in which childhood, adulthood, tweenage, youth, middle age, old age or any other age are constructed, the events in which age is performed in one way or another. The Deleuzian concepts of ‘territorialization’, ‘re- and deterritorialization’, ‘becoming-other’, ‘becoming-the-same’ and ‘lines of flight’ help in understanding the fragility of identities as well as catching sight of all the human and non-human agents that are involved in activities of separating, connecting, struggling and caring, thereby constructing multiple childhoods and adulthoods.
Some examples of constructions of adulthood
I now give four examples from research that I have been involved in, and investigate how adulthood is constructed in these arenas, in cooperation between adults, children and non-humans. Adulthood could be done in a multitude of ways, and the reasons for choosing these specific examples are my wish to discuss adulthood construction from as many perspectives as possible within the limitations of an article. Different research projects with different aims, informants and methods, variation in settings, activities and number of people involved form the background to what happens in the four particular events that are described and analysed. The four events are thus chosen to differ as much as possible from each other both in their preconditions and in the production of adulthood, but at the same time we will see that the different subjectivities that are constructed are connected to each other. Equally important is that each example contains several analytical dimensions, which make it possible to discuss several aspects in a limited space.
It is not random chance what happens in encounters between adults and children in areas and activities where adults and children meet. Every element brings its history along with it, consisting of materiality, meanings, values and presuppositions of the world, often sealed in ‘black boxes’ (Latour, 1993). While people carry more or less conscious memories in their minds and their bodies, artefacts carry ‘inscriptions’, which prescribe what the actor should do with them (Akrich, 1992). Childhood and adulthood are not constructed from the bottom each time, instead the constructions should be understood as translations or repetitions of collectively shared conceptions, experiences and conditions. For example, a child who comes to school will expect adults to teach, a chair designed for children in the first grade ‘expects’ its users to be small, and a schoolyard brings the ‘presupposition’ that children and adults will use it in specific ways. When adults and children meet, power and caring relations are most often constructed in one way or another since the categories of adult and child as black-boxed concepts bring certain assumptions of their relations to each other. Adults are expected to teach, guide, rear and provide for children, to take responsibility and to be models for them. These are ready-made subjectivities, designations, requests for becoming-the-same, available for adults, materialized and stabilized by constant repetitions and translations in law, custom, family structures, literature, professions, etc.
The adult-in-charge
In the school context several subjectivities are assigned to adults, all with a common purpose to support children’s learning. This applies not only to teachers, who educate, but also to school canteen staff, premise managers, recreation leaders and others, whose duty is to give the pupils resources to make learning work as well as possible during school hours. Furthermore, school is an environment with clear-cut distinctions between age groups: some people (children) are there to learn and others (adults) are there to teach or to facilitate learning. The school environment provides rich opportunities to study the ‘adult-in-charge’. The adult-in-charge is an adult who knows what should be done and by whom. He or she has the unquestioned authority to decide which activities are allowed, forbidden and prescribed, to tell pupils what to do and how to behave. Standing in front of a class, walking in the schoolyard, having coffee in the staff room, the adult-in-charge is someone that one could confidently turn to with any problem or question and who will give a firm and clear answer.
In the project ‘Children as co-researchers of foodscapes’ (Brembeck et al., 2010), we, nine researchers from different disciplines, landed in this learning-defined arena, with the ambition to perform a different kind of adulthood than the adult-in-charge. The aim of our project was to engage children in research concerning food and eating and to treat them as our co-workers in this endeavour. We presented concepts and methods of collecting, analysing and presenting data in a small ‘research school’, we helped the children to formulate research questions and to carry out studies to find the answers to their questions. Our intention was to act as tutors and co-researchers, working as far as possible on equal terms with the children. However, this ambition proved to be difficult to maintain. One reason was of course that our research was more ‘school-like’ than ordinary ethnographic research. We did carry out a research school, and we introduced several research activities, such as tasting, taking photos, evaluating commercials and carrying out studies in the shop. The ‘affection’ of the encounter between our previous experiences from school environments, the expectations of the children, the organization of time and space in school thus resulted in researchers being positioned in the teacher’s role. Some of us were able to shoulder this subjectivity, while others, being untrained as teachers and explicitly trying to downplay our adult authority, were allotted the roles of substitute teachers, a designation characterized by being constantly challenged and risking failure.
‘Pupil’ and ‘teacher’ hence mutually affected and constructed each other, and we were designated teachers by children who performed a pupil’s subjectivity by asking questions, collecting facts, making creative presentations and constructively participating in group work. But the pupil subjectivity was also expressed by taking on an irresponsible attitude, making the pretence of working or diverting attention from the work. We researchers, with our optimistic intentions of researching on equal terms, thus found ourselves nailed to the subjectivity of ‘adult-in-charge’, with no other options than to rebuke and keep order or to refrain from doing so. The children were afterwards interviewed about their experiences (Eliasson, 2010), and a boy then mentioned that the researchers had sometimes been too kind: ‘They listened, but sometimes they were too kind, they didn’t tell us off properly. We became a bit too participative’ (Eliasson, 2010: 56; my translation).
The lines of flight from the ‘adult-in-charge’ designation were contested not only by the children and the school as an organization. The localities and the objects also affected what happened. Things that were used in the research project, such as research diaries, pencils, sheets of paper and cameras, not to mention the sights, smells and spaces offered in shop and restaurant environments, revealed their capacity to direct attention along different trajectories than we had intended. These material agents thus forced the adults to repeatedly decide whether to permit or forbid, whether to refuse or to accept.
Included in commonality
The preceding example is taken from a research project carried out in school, but it differs from a more traditional ethnographic study, where the researcher comes to school, joins the children in the classroom and the schoolyard and sits down in private with a few children at a time to talk about issues that concern them. In such studies it is easier for the researcher to take part in play and games on fairly equal terms with children, in situations where age is not an active distinction. Occasions where age is not relevant also arise recurrently during interview sessions. As the methodological literature shows (Alderson, 1995; Christensen, 2004; Kellett, 2010), it is in fact an aim of every ethnographic childhood researcher to stretch the limits of the generational order, to find lines of flight from destinations such as ‘adult-in-charge’, ‘parent’ or ‘unimaginative adult’. It is the quest for ‘another’ subjectivity, a less contained, more flexible and fluid position that allows the researcher and her or his informants to affect each other in new ways, producing new knowledge about new issues. By extension there is an ambition to empower children and work for improvements in children’s lives (Kellett, 2010). I am therefore happy when I am invited by the child informants to take part in activities that cross the borders of generation and challenge the seriousness of research and to become an ‘adult-included-in-commonality’. When I have conducted interviews with children in school as well as in their homes I have listened to songs and stories, been absorbed by the computer games I was there to study (Johansson, 2000, 2002) and laughed and joked together with the children, with the sole purpose of enjoying ourselves. On these occasions we met in a common play experience, and I also experienced that a female feeling of community could arise between me and girl informants.
In the project ‘Children’s lifestyles and the obesity epidemic’ 1 we were two researchers who conducted a qualitative study of children’s and parents’ habits and attitudes concerning food and health, and interviewed parents and children in their homes. A girl aged 8 who I interviewed was talkative and full of fun and we had a nice time together. We sat at the kitchen table and our talk and the things that were there thus mutually affected each other. The fruit bowl on the work surface, the family task list on the refrigerator, a recipe for a root vegetable gratin on the cupboard door, a paper fish on the window, made by one of the children, framed our conversation and situated the two of us in the girl’s domain, me being a guest, at the same time as they provided concrete material for our talk. The things I brought to the encounter also helped to assign a particular position to each of us. The Dictaphone between us made me an interviewer and device keeper and made the girl a performer. The big white sheet of paper and the glittery crayons made me a good giver and the girl an artist.
As the interview proceeded, the mood became all the merrier. The girl made up songs about chocolate and lingonberries that I encouraged her to sing, so that I could record it, and we listened to it together and laughed. My colleague researcher, interviewing the parents on the floor above, heard our laughter and commented on it afterwards, which made me feel happy and a successful researcher. The success thus lay in the results of the actions of the two of us, the girl and me, claiming different identities than those assigned to us. Convention tells us that in research situations the researcher should be serious and objective, that an informant should seriously consider and answer the questions and that both should keep to the subject. However, when both the researcher and the informant follow the same line of flight out of their designations, the result is an encounter beyond age, where the pleasurable practice of laughing and small-talking continues to produce positive relations. An affective connection (cf. Dolphijn, 2004: 10) is established which changes the aim of the event from knowledge-gaining to entertainment (which does not of course prevent knowledge being produced).
The incompetent child
As mentioned in the introduction, the main criticism from the new childhood studies concerned the fact that children to a great extent are regarded as insufficient and incompetent human becomings, instead of being appreciated for what they are here and now. It was stressed that children do have many competencies, even those normally associated with adulthood, such as reflexivity, responsibility and rationality. Less accentuated, maybe because there was a risk of designating children as a ‘tribe’, were the specific ‘childish’ competencies of play and imagination, those competencies that cultural research has regarded as the main characteristics of childhood. In play the ‘child-as-a-child’ emerges, a powerful subjectivity that might position the adult as slow, unimaginative, ungainly and awkward. In this relation, the child has every advantage: the size and capabilities of the body, the mode of expression, the knowledge, the language, everything is superior to those of adults. In comparison the adult stands out as an ‘incompetent child’.
As a researcher doing fieldwork with children, one frequently encounters the ‘child-as-a-child’ and experiences its counterpart the ‘incompetent child’ adult designation. In a project on children and consumption, ‘Children in consumer society’, 2 I visited two schools and conducted interviews in small groups with children aged 8–12 about money, work, consumer goods and advertising (Johansson, 2005). I often spent the breaks in the schoolyard, talking to and getting to know the children, and sometimes I was invited to take part in their play. During this period some of the children in one of the schools frequently played a ball game called ‘The Crow’. The game was organized with the players standing in a queue in front of the wall of the school building and one at a time throwing the ball against the wall in certain ways and with increasing degree of difficulty. It consisted of several elements that demanded skill in throwing, catching and placing one’s body in the right position for the ball to bounce between one’s legs. After some attempts I managed to master the technique, but only when a big ball was used. Sometimes, though, we used a small bouncing ball, which I was simply not able to master. Once, 11-year-old Mikaela took on the task of teaching me. She explained to me how to calculate the movement of the ball so that I could place myself in the right position to make the ball bounce between my legs, but however I tried I could not master it. I tried to laugh at my mistakes, but Mikaela seriously and patiently continued to explain. Gradually I started to worry that her and the other girls’ patience would run out, I felt incompetent and unsuccessful, but also happy and proud the few times I succeeded and received praise.
The skills of playing The Crow had been integrated in the bodies of the girls and boys who played the ball game daily, and with Michael (2000) one could claim that the agent who performs the ball art is the hybrid or co(a)gent ‘body-ball-wall’. The competence was furthermore supplemented by Mikaela’s knowledge of physical laws – a type of knowledge that is more often ascribed to adults – which made me even more incompetent. The children’s bodies incorporated the ball into their actions, while my body failed to do so. When the ball bounced away from my outstretched hands, it threw not only my body, but also my adult identity off balance. Every time it went out of reach it shattered my image of myself as an adult, who is both intelligent and able to control her body and coordinate her movements. My apologetic laughter was an attempt to reterritorialize a hierarchical generational order, where I as an adult failed because the ball game was a ‘child activity’. If they had laughed with me they would have given me recognition of my status as an adult who is superior in everything except in child activities and I could have taken refuge in the stable territory of the able adult. But Mikaela did not laugh and persisted in treating me like anyone who could not play The Crow. The schoolyard persisted in offering spaces for physical activities performed by small and lithe child bodies. I failed in making generation relevant and remained an incompetent Crow player and an incompetent child.
Adult-as-other
The fourth and final subjectivity I discuss here is, in a way, the opposite of the second example, the adult-included-in-commonality, namely the adult-as-other. The adult-as-other tends to be ascribed to adults by children at sites where hierarchical relations between adults and children are explicit and institutionalized, such as school. It designates the adult as strange, dictatorial, unfair and unreasonable. It is a designation that is very difficult to get away from, since the children hold a position as innocent victims of adult authority, which means that they have no power and thus no responsibility to make things better, or to cooperate with the adults. The power instead lies in their possibility of forming a kinship that only includes the children and to exert counter-power in the shape of ‘kids versus grown-ups’ (Greene and Hill, 2005:10), with the sole purpose of strengthening their inner solidarity against the other, perhaps also protesting and undermining adult authority.
In the late 1990s I made an extensive study of the computer in children’s everyday lives, following children of 7–12 in school and at home, doing participant observations as well as conducting interviews with children, teachers and parents (Johansson, 2000, 2002). On one occasion I conducted an interview with two girls and two boys, aged 10, in a school, where each classroom had just one computer, and the use of it was highly regulated. In the interview the children vividly discussed the injustice of the teacher’s rules:
Are you allowed to play games at school?
Naah, hardly ever. We usually go in during the breaks a bit early and play without being allowed.
I see. But the door is usually locked, isn’t it?
Yes, but we just go and ask some teacher. It’s not that difficult.
Or else Ante [a school-mate] takes a paper clip, and …
Ouch.
It’s not that difficult. For Ante, that is.
…
Miss is a bit grumpy, too, ‘cause she never lets us sit at the computer unless we type.
No, she doesn’t want you to sit there just playing.
We can’t even play on the computer in quiet hours.
No, that’s bad!
…
It just sits there like a decoration in our classroom.
…
After school, Miss goes and polishes the computer. ‘No one’s allowed to touch it, just me.’
I’m sure she wears protective gloves.
‘There’ll be grease spots from my fingers.’
The discussion goes on for a long time, the children being very engaged and resentful. With the classroom computer as the material object of the power struggle, the adult–child hierarchies acquire a concrete shape. On other occasions I considered their teacher to be popular among the pupils, but in this discussion she is positioned as a representative of inflexible adult power. Ridicule is both an enjoyable and effective method of challenging authorities. The teacher is said to use gloves when taking care of the computer and the children conjure up the image of adults who brag about their status symbols.
In this event, there is a reterritorialization of the generational order, where adults are positioned as powerful and children as powerless. At the same time there is a deterritorialization of a power order where the lower class forms itself in opposition, using the means of power available to them, such as protesting, or breaking the rules on the sly (opening the classroom door with the aid of a paper-clip). At the same time this performance is made possible thanks to the research project. When I enter the school site as a researcher I bring discourses as well as devices that make it possible to perform both childhood and adulthood in new ways. In the particular event of the interview, the children, the researchers, the classroom computer, the room and the artefacts enter into compositions with each other (Dolphijn, 2004) and it offers time and place for the children to talk about things that concern them outside the immediate learning agenda of the school system and a way for them to air their opinions with each other and to hone their arguments. The tape-recorder, which materializes and preserves their discussion in time, acts as an extension of their protests. Likewise, the event offers an adult who listens to them without judging, an adult who is linked to the university and society outside school, where their protests perhaps might reach. To me, the event thus offers a possibility of becoming-other than the criticized adult subjectivity. I can appear as a confidant of the children and represent a contrast to the adult-as-other.
Becoming-adult in today’s society
Age is a meaning-making category, and every adult has certain experiences that he or she shares with other adults. As an adult one has experiences of both being a child and being an adult (in contrast to children, who only have the experience of being children), one has had at least two decades to become acquainted with the physical world – to master body, language, objects, environments and relations with other people. One has acquired knowledge and familiarity of living in this world and one has, through one’s majority status, the right to participate in the concerns of society as well as the duty to be accountable for one’s own deeds. Many adults, in addition, have, as parents, teachers or others, responsibility for one or more individuals who have not yet reached their majority. Adulthood is therefore created by partially different material than childhood is.
The use of the word ‘partially’, as in the sentence above, is important, and has been highlighted in current childhood research. When adults are described as totally autonomous, self-possessed and independent and when these characteristics are understood to constitute the very definition of adulthood, it has consequences for both children and adults and for the relations between them. Nick Lee (2005) suggests that since children’s dependency is closely connected to notions of love and care, while ‘rights’ is a concept associated with autonomy, self-possession and adulthood, asserting children’s rights constitutes a threat to the bonds between parents and children. His solution to the problem is to replace separation with separability, a ‘peaceful co-existence of love and rights’, where the pros and cons of both separation and dependence are acknowledged. Gunilla Halldén claims that the consequence of autonomy being so highly valued is a denial of adults’ dependence (Halldén, 2007). If the adult is no longer defined by his/her separateness it opens up the possibility of cross-overs between life phases, and age becomes less important as a meaning-making category.
In this article I have aimed at shedding light on the constructions of adulthood, claiming that it is an enterprise in which not only adults, but also objects, environments and not least children are involved. I have used concepts that make it possible to understand subjectivity as both continuing and mobile, constructed in translations and repetitions, where specific events constitute the actors, composed as hybrids of humans and non-humans. The agency performed in these events creates certain subjectivities or designations for adults, such as ‘adult-in-charge’, ‘adult-included-in-commonality’, ‘incompetent-child’ and ‘adult-as-other’. From every designation, there is always the possibility of, on the one hand, becoming-the-same, that is buying into the offered subjectivity, performing its expected acts and identity. On the other hand it is possible to follow lines of flight that lead to deterritorialization and ‘becoming-other’, that is, to escape from a stable and restricted adult subjectivity and in the next move generate a new, more attractive territory. That is not to say that it is a simple choice or a matter of the individual’s personal will, rather the possibilities are themselves characteristics of the situation. Some adult designations are solid constructions, carefully sealed in black boxes, and difficult to escape. Each of the four discussed subjectivities (as well as every other subjectivity) holds both opportunities and restrictions, and might arouse attraction as well as repulsion in those involved. They are examples of established, yet constantly contested, territories, where people, matter, discourse and space affect and are affected in the ongoing production of adult identities and adulthood. The examples show that adulthood is no more homogeneous, complete or unambiguous than childhood, though the challenges and possibilities to a great extent differ in character due to age. Nevertheless, it is practically impossible to separate adulthood and childhood into distinct categories. Perhaps it is most realistic to regard childhood and adulthood as leaking black boxes or cracking territories that never totally manage to hold together.
Footnotes
The research projects referred to in this text were supported by the the Swedish Research Council FORMAS (grant number 2007:1623); the Swedish Council for Working Life and Social Research (grant number 2006-1624); and Riksbankens Jubileumsfond (grant number K2001-0784).