Overview

Disputing Discipline explores how global and local children's rights activists' efforts within the school systems of Zanzibar to eradicate corporal punishment are changing the archipelago's moral and political landscape. Through an equal consideration of child and adult perspectives, Fay explores what child protection means for Zanzibari children who have to negotiate their lives at the intersections of universalized and local ""child protection"" aspirations while growing up to be pious and responsible adults. Through a visual and participatory ethnographic approach that foregrounds young people's voices through their poetry, photographs, and drawings, paired with in-depth Swahili language analysis, Fay shows how children's views and experiences can transform our understanding of child protection. This book demonstrates that to improve interventions, policy makers and practitioners need to understand child protection beyond a policy sense of the term and respond to the reality of children's lives to avoid unintentionally compromising, rather than improving, young people's well-being.

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9781978821743

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Reviews

Disputing Discipline insightfully examines the tensions produced between global, decontextualized child protection policies and vernacular practices of care including Muslim children's relational achievement of social and moral personhood in Zanzibar. By arguing for the need to decolonize the child protection apparatus in Zanzibar, it makes an important addition to existing studies that interrogate the hegemony of universal certitudes, like children's rights, not to debunk these, but to better fulfill their assurances. Disputing Discipline is an important intervention in universalist children's rights discourse. Fay's nuanced and sensitive treatment of a highly polemic topic demonstrates what happens when development initiatives fail to reckon with religious and cultural specificities. This book clearly and compellingly articulates the need to decolonize international child protection efforts, if they hope to succeed. Scholars and practitioners alike take heed.

Disputing Discipline insightfully examines the tensions produced between global, decontextualized child protection policies and vernacular practices of care including Muslim children's relational achievement of social and moral personhood in Zanzibar. By arguing for the need to decolonize the child protection apparatus in Zanzibar, it makes an important addition to existing studies that interrogate the hegemony of universal certitudes, like children's rights, not to debunk these, but to better fulfill their assurances. --Sarada Balagopalan author of Inhabiting 'Childhood' Children, Labour and Schooling in Postcolonial India Disputing Discipline is an important intervention in universalist children's rights discourse. Fay's nuanced and sensitive treatment of a highly polemic topic demonstrates what happens when development initiatives fail to reckon with religious and cultural specificities. This book clearly and compellingly articulates the need to decolonize international child protection efforts, if they hope to succeed. Scholars and practitioners alike take heed. --Kristen Cheney author of Crying for Our Elders: African Orphanhood in the Age of HIV and AIDS

Author Information

FRANZISKA FAY is a postdoctoral researcher in anthropology at the Research Centre ‘Normative Orders’ at Goethe University in Frankfurt, Germany.

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