Kamp Annelies - Re/Assembling the pregnant and parenting teenager: narratives from the field (s)

RE/ASSEMBLING
THE
PREGNANT
AND
PARENTING
TEENAGER

Narratives from the field(s)

Edited by

Annelies Kamp and Majella McSharry

PETER LANG

Oxford Bern Berlin Bruxelles Frankfurt am Main New York Wien

Bibliographic information published by Die Deutsche Nationalbibliothek.
Die Deutsche Nationalbibliothek lists this publication in the Deutsche National-bibliografie; detailed bibliographic data is available on the Internet at http://dnb.d-nb.de.

A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library.

Library of Congress Control Number: 2017957164

Cover image: Abstract Art of Life, Desifoto - Illustration 535705205 iStock Getty Images.

Cover design: Peter Lang Ltd.

ISBN 978-1-78707-180-3 (print) ISBN 978-1-78707-513-9 (ePDF)
ISBN 978-1-78707-514-6 (ePub) ISBN 978-1-78707-515-3 (mobi)

Peter Lang AG 2018

Published by Peter Lang Ltd, International Academic Publishers,
52 St Giles, Oxford, OX1 3LU, United Kingdom

Annelies Kamp and Majella McSharry have asserted their right under the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act, 1988, to be identified as Editors of this Work.

All rights reserved.
All parts of this publication are protected by copyright.
Any utilisation outside the strict limits of the copyright law, without the permission of the publisher, is forbidden and liable to prosecution. This applies in particular to reproductions, translations, microfilming, and storage and processing in electronic retrieval systems.

This publication has been peer reviewed.

About the author(s)/editor(s)

Annelies Kamp is Associate Professor in Leadership in the College of Education, Health and Human Development at the University of Canterbury in Aotearoa New Zealand. She was also a teenage parent. In the years since her daughter was born Annelies has completed her education and held senior leadership roles in the public service, industry training and the non-government sector. Her most recent book, A Critical Youth Studies for the 21st Century, was published in 2014.

Majella McSharry is a lecturer at the Institute of Education, Dublin City University in Ireland. She has worked as a secondary school teacher and is currently director of the Professional Master of Education at DCU. Her research has focused predominantly on the embodied experiences of teenagers and particularly the construction and arti culation of gender through embodied praxis.

About the book

In 2003, Wendy Luttrell posed an important question: what might result if we were able to turn questions of judgement about pregnant and parenting teenagers into questions of interest about their sense of self and identity-making? This book takes up the challenge, offering a re/assemblage of what is, can be and perhaps should be known about teenage pregnancy and parenting in the context of the twenty-first century. The collection presents original contributions from leading commentators in four key contexts: the United States of America, the United Kingdom, Aotearoa New Zealand and the Republic of Ireland, all sites of elevated incidence of and/or concern around what is commonly articulated as the problem of teenage pregnancy and parenting. In off ering a multi-disciplinary reading of the narratives of young men and women, this volume engages with the ambiguity shared by all of us in confronting the life transition that is pregnancy and parenting.

This eBook can be cited

This edition of the eBook can be cited. To enable this we have marked the start and end of a page. In cases where a word straddles a page break, the marker is placed inside the word at exactly the same position as in the physical book. This means that occasionally a word might be bifurcated by this marker.

| v

Annelies
for my parents and my sisters, with gratitude

Majella
for rn, Elora and the one who kicks inside!

| ix

Annelies Kamp and Majella McSharry have compiled a set of stunning articles about teenage pregnancy and parenting across four countries the United States of America, the United Kingdom, the Republic of Ireland and Aotearoa New Zealand. The volume offers passionate and personal tales embroidered with empirical and critical theoretical insights to cement our understanding that pregnant and parenting teenagers are a far more diverse group than stereotypes, media images and policy frameworks suggest, and that decades of research have established.

This volume is bold; it calls for two paradigm shifts. The first is a shift in how to study individual lives as they intersect with social, cultural and political forces. The second is a shift in how we imagine the purpose of education, not simply for pregnant and parenting teenagers, but for all young people. The purpose of education that is suggested by this volume goes beyond individual outcomes and attainment to encompass a collectivist/community ethos of belonging, care, well-being, justice and possibility.

Kamp and McSharry succeed in the first paradigm-shifting because they make creative use of the concept of re/assemblage. I appreciate and applaud the way the volume brings to life and makes accessible assemblage thinking. In the most general way, the book itself is an assemblage of different elements in the study of teenage pregnancy and parenting and how these can come together to create an understanding of issues larger than itself, including insights into the sprawling structures, unattainable expectations and human consequences of neoliberalism.

The breadth of approaches gathered into one place will inform and inspire readers both familiar and unfamiliar with a topic that for decades has thrived on what Eve Tuck would call damage-based research. She writes:

Much of social science and educational research seeks to document pain, loss, brokenness or damage in order to establish the grounds to informally or formally petition ix | x for reparations composed of political, material, or sovereign gains (Tuck 2009). Examples are easy to locate they are studies that depict entire schools, tribes, and communities as flattened, ruined, devastated. (2010: 638)

Damage-based research relies on one-dimensional analyses of individuals who have been lumped together as one. For example, that all pregnant teenagers suffer harm; that all teenage mothers are unfit; that all teenage fathers are irresponsible. This volume provides an antidote; the range of multi-dimensional tools of analysis and angles of vision are impressive. The volume includes articles that utilize discourse analysis, examining how girls and women remain caught within an array of discursive demands about how to be good women, daughters, sexual beings, mothers, partners, students, community members all amidst competing expectations and wildly different resources. Other chapters analyse news, television and media sources, exposing the ways that teenage pregnancy, abortion and mothering are cast in deficit, stigmatizing, sensationalized and blaming ways. A further chapter provides a rigorous critique of decades and generations of alarmist research on teenage mothering in the United States, which will prompt readers to think about and want to scrutinize the science on teenage mothering in other nations. An argument is made for the importance of longitudinal and multigenerational studies that are able to shed light on how lives are composed over time and in relationship to a constellation of family relationships, neighborhood resources, community contexts and national policies (SmithBattle 2017: 75103).