Describing children at risk: experiments with context

ABSTRACT

Drawing on science and technology studies (STS), this article explores information practices around children deemed to be ‘at risk’. Risk is not a self-evident epistemic object. Different professional instructions mobilize the concept of context to emphasize the partiality and contingency of descriptions of ‘risk’. This article develops the concept of ‘description device’ to account for how the concept of context (1) displaces a teacher’s attention from child to context, hence materializing a relational view of the child, and (2) results in written statements rendering children at risk informational. Empirically, it compares how social services and educational psychology enact different ‘contexts’ in need of teachers’ description, and how these descriptions tame the uncertainty deemed to pertain to children at risk. This type of description has consequences not only for the children being described but also for teacher subjectivities. The article concludes that context is both an opaque and generative description device, displacing teachers’ attention from child to context. This effects an enlargement of the world but also a teacher subjectivity that is reflexive about the partiality of her descriptions.

KEYWORDS:

• Context
• children at risk
• information practices
• description
• science and technology studies (STS)
• actor-network theory
• multi-agency collaboration

Acknowledgments

This article was made possible by my interlocutors in the ethnography. I thank the school principals, teachers, and the consultants behind UMEIMA for their time and trust as well as Christopher Gad and Ann-Christina Lange for helpful comments on an early version of this paper. I also wish to thank the editors of the special issue and the anonymous reviewers for their supportive and constructive readings and comments to this paper.

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author.

Notes

1. UMEIMA is developed by Danish psychologists Louise Juul and Annemette H. Knudsen.