Governing Abandoned Children: The Discursive Construction of Space in the Case of Babybox
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| Year of publication | 2009 |
| Type | Chapter of a book |
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| Description | The analysis concentrates on the discursive representations of space and time space in the texts, which were produced during the years 2005 and 2006 in relation to the initiative of the NGO STATIM to establish the first babyboxes to save the lives of unwanted infants in the Czech Republic. Specifically it analyses the conflict between the dominant discourse maintained in state institutions and the alternative discourses that are created in the sphere of NGOs. The focus on the linguistic aspects of the conflicting dominant and alternative discourses allows us to see the several ways the social category of childhood is constructed. It also explicates these discursive practices as a form of maintaining power in the postsocialist era. The paper asks how post-communist discourses about babybox construct social space and time space for children. The governing discourse about children is grounded in a specific cultural field which is constructed as the collective Czech cultural and political identity. This discourse conserves the old (state-socialistic) discursive practices of state disciplinization; however it also faces the pressure to the individualization (in sense of realization of individual rights) that comes from NGOs and civic initiatives as well as from international organisations and the EU. |
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