Disadvantaged Childhoods and Humanitarian Intervention: Processes of Affective Commodification and Objectification - Hardcover

by Kristen Cheney (Editor), Aviva Sinervo (Editor)

This book explores how humanitarian interventions for children in difficult circumstances engage in affective commodification of disadvantaged childhoods. The chapters consider how transnational charitable industries are created and mobilized around childhood need--highlighting children in situations of war and poverty, and with indeterminate access to health and education--to redirect global resource flows and sentiments in order to address concerns of child suffering. The authors discuss examples from around the world to show how, as much as these processes can help achieve the goals of aid organizations, such practices can also perpetuate the conditions that organizations seek to alleviate and thereby endanger the very children they intend to help.

Back Jacket

This book explores how humanitarian interventions for children in difficult circumstances engage in affective commodification of disadvantaged childhoods. The chapters consider how transnational charitable industries are created and mobilized around childhood need--highlighting children in situations of war and poverty, and with indeterminate access to health and education--to redirect global resource flows and sentiments in order to address concerns of child suffering. The authors discuss examples from around the world to show how, as much as these processes can help achieve the goals of aid organizations, such practices can also perpetuate the conditions that organizations seek to alleviate and thereby endanger the very children they intend to help.

Author Biography

Kristen Cheney is Associate Professor of Children and Youth Studies at the International Institute of Social Studies in the Hague, the Netherlands. Her current research focuses on adolescent sexual and reproductive health, surrogacy, and the impact of global humanitarian interventions for children on child protection and wellbeing in developing countries.
Aviva Sinervo is a Lecturer of Anthropology at San Francisco State University and Human Development at California State University, East Bay, USA. She researches the moral and affective economies of child labor, international aid, volunteer tourism, and urban street vending; current interests include generational/maturational shifts in wage-earning strategies, cosmopolitanism, and government-NGO collaborations in Peru.