Families and poverty: everyday life on a low income

Abstract

vulnerability are lived, understood, accommodated, and contested by a selected group of youth deemed to fall either inside or outside its parameters. This is a particularly refreshing approach to examining the workings of child and youth governance from the ground up; it takes into account clients’ contextual and structural environments, together with their assumed ability to assess how policy relates to their lives. I appreciated Brown’s thoughtful insights into the ways in which gender serves as a structuring logic for determining markers of vulnerability. This line of inquiry alerts us to how gendered accountings of vulnerability serve to restrict or expand the types of regulatory/caring responses depending on both the gender of clients, and whether clients conform to codes of proper gendered behavior. I would contend, however, that the scope of analysis needs to be broadened to include class and gender’s relation to other factors shaping experiences of marginalization and social exclusion. Specifically, I would have liked to see attention paid to how discourses of vulnerability figure in determining the livability of youth and children’s lives marked differently by the rationalities and experiences of race, racism, and citizenship status. This critique notwithstanding, this is an important book for readers of the Journal of Children and Poverty. Brown concludes her text by offering the following challenge articulated by one youth participant in her study: as policy-makers, policy scholars, and practitioners, it is imperative that we ‘“figure it [our concept(s)] out first”’ before deploying it.