Digitisation, securitisation, and upbringing: interrelations and emerging questions

ABSTRACT

In recent years a tightening of safeguarding legislation and protocols that overlap with anti-terror legislation have given particular shape to discourses and practices of risk management and early intervention, particularly in early childhood education and parenting. Such developments have taken place in a context in which digital technology has become ubiquitous, enabling the role of surveillance in modes of governing to take on new forms. Here as well as giving an overview of literature on the digital in general, we also focus more specifically on the parent-child relationship and the use of digital technology by parents. We then survey recent theorisations of securitisation from other fields, but again focus specifically on its relation to childhood and parenting. We bring digitisation and securitisation together here to consider how the particular form of individualisation produced today is recasting how we think about parents, teachers and children.

KEYWORDS:

• Digitisation
• securitisation
• education
• upbringing
• parents
• childhood

Acknowledgments

The authors wish to thank the Centre for Education & Policy Analysis at Liverpool Hope University for their ongoing support for this project.

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the authors.

Notes

1. https://www.actionforchildren.org.uk/news-and-blogs/press-releases/2019/july/childhood-in-crisis/

2. https://www.theguardian.com/society/2020/may/06/work-child-mental-health-coronavirus; https://news.un.org/en/story/2020/05/1063822

3. https://www.gov.uk/government/publications/prevent-duty-guidance

4. https://www.birminghammail.co.uk/all-about/trojan-horse

5. Riots broke out due to racial tensions in a number of northern towns and cities, including Oldham, Burnley, and Bradford http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/uk/5032166.stm https://www.theguardian.com/politics/2001/jul/08/uk.race

6. http://tedcantle.co.uk/pdf/communitycohesion%20cantlereport.pdf

7. https://www.oecd.org/economy/growth/economic-resilience.htm

8. https://www.bayareaparent.com/Article/Wearable-Tech-for-Parents/