About the Project
As articulated by Margaret Thatcher in her famous phrase, if there is “no such thing as society,” then is there no such thing as childhood?
New Childhoods in Turkey and Britain in the 1980s and 1990s
Based on an analysis of the news coverage of children in national newspapers, this research project focuses on changing ideas about childhood in Turkey and in Britain in the last decades of the twentieth century, an era characterised with the erosion of traditional safety nets, increased inequality, and social insecurity.
Aims
The project traces the ways that policies and ideas about childhood travel, and are appropriated and re-contextualised, with impacts on the status of children and childhood. In addressing these points the aim is to analyse the changing social meanings of childhood in a period that is crucial in making sense of today’s world.
CHIBRIT is funded by the EC and hosted by the UCL DSS.
Sources and Data
Methodology in numbers
12
Newspapers
Including broadsheets and tabloids.
20
Years
From the late 1970s to the late 1990s.
+7000
News Clippings
Collected, collated, categorised
Research Questions
How was social change translated into ideas about childhood in this period?
Did the newsmakers’ priorities correlate with academic, intellectual, and public concerns?
How were concepts such as children’s culpability, parental liabilities, and social responsibilities to children defined by newspapers?
Were there any discrepancies between attitudes to different groups of children?
Who were the children included in the category of “ordinary childhood,” and who were the outcasts that did not fit this definition?
In what ways did changing ideas about childhood transform the social and political status of children?
Historical context
Britain
Following the 1976 IMF crisis and the Winter of Discontent, the United Kingdom entered a period of economic recession. The consecutive Conservative governments of Margaret Thatcher and John Major tackled these problems by radically reforming taxation and redistribution policies, which led to a wave of de-industrialisation, soaring unemployment, and increasing inequality. At the same time, family and household structures were significantly transformed, and cultural tensions surfaced with the rise of civil and social movements.
Turkey
Meanwhile in Turkey, the heightened politicisation of the late 1970s was abruptly suspended by the 1980 coup d’état that cleared the way for uncontested neoliberal restructuring executed by Özal’s New Right party, which was a variegation of the simultaneous transformation in Britain led by Margaret Thatcher, with whom Özal was in close contact. Cuts to public services, increasing privatisation of health and education, deterioration of income distribution, and the emergence of new living standards for people from different social strata deepened persistent inequalities between children. These were also the years when voluntary and forced migration transferred Turkey’s great urban-rural gap into crammed city centres. The coming together of unequal childhoods in close proximity made children’s inequality more visible, and perceptible.
The social, economic, political, cultural, and structural transformations of this period were so profound that new concepts were needed for analysis; such as neoliberalism, new capitalism, advanced marginality, and liquid modernity. It is with a similar concern that this study uses the term “new childhood.”
About the Researcher
Dr. Deniz Arzuk is a Marie Curie fellow based at the University College London. She was awarded her MA and PhD degrees from the Ataturk Institute for Modern Turkish History at Bogazici University, and worked as a SI and RWI researcher at the Child Studies Unit at Linköping University in Sweden. Her research primarily deals with the relations between social change and the conceptualisations of childhood in the contemporary world, with a particular focus on inequality, discrimination, and distinction. View IRIS profile.
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