Research on children in transnational families benefits from a conceptual input as provided by the studies presented in this special issue. The input aims to overcome the usual juxtaposition of agency and vulnerability dominating the research field, a juxtaposition resulting from disciplinary preconceptions and not from empirical insights. In contrast, the results of the studies in this special issue clearly show that both agency and vulnerability exist, and in such a way that vulnerability may even be the result of the children’s actions. Therefore, a pragmatic theory of vulnerability is developed, based on the relational action concept of Emirbayer and Mische (1998). This theory understands vulnerability both as an accompanying phenomenon and as a consequence of agency, and links various forms of agency with the associated risks of vulnerability. Such an approach may be useful in research on children in various family constellations.

More than other life phases, childhood is closely surrounded by rules and regulations, monitored by experts, channeled by welfare state regulations, and tightly structured in terms of time and space; all of this is supposed to ensure a 'good childhood'. The chapter provides insight into the history of the normative pattern of 'good childhood', which is closely linked to the European bourgeoisie and its classist aspirations. It points out the fundamental inequality inherent in this demanding pattern, which is its constitutive element. It will then explore the question of what the claim to spread this pattern globally means. While it is undeniable that the international community must focus its attention on the world's children, the rigid pattern of 'good childhood' brings new disadvantages. This pattern is at odds with the intergenerational relations as they apply in large parts of the world and regulate social life. The contribution is therefore intended as an impetus to rethink the childhood pattern as we take it for granted and not to further intensify it through the devaluation of alternative patterns.

Academic second-chance education (SCE) provides young adults with the opportunity for upward mobility. However, many young people in academic SCE have unfavourable prerequisites, which make it difficult for them to meet academic requirements. In this article, we explore how teachers respond to this challenge in their practice and the extent to which teacher practice matches learner expectations. We look at formal academic SCE and the following aspects of teacher practice: supporting weak learners, applying rules on discipline and grading, and building teacher-learner relationships. Our basis is a dataset of 176 teachers and 600 learners in 9 schools of academic SCE in Germany. The results show that a majority of teachers report that they support weak learners and address learners' personal needs whilst insisting on general rules for discipline and grading. However, almost half of the learners want more recognition of their adult status - more that is than their teachers perceive - by being granted autonomy, professional relational distance and more flexibility on absence rules. This article discusses the extent to which structural features of academic SCE make it difficult to perceive the adult needs of learners and at the same time to pursue challenging learning goals.

This article develops a theoretical approach by arguing that success in academic secondchance education leading to the eligibility to study is (besides academic achievement) influenced by normative orientations relevant to success acquired during compulsory secondary education. More precisely, we argue that in the highly stratified German school system at secondary level I (years 5 to 10), school-type specific socialization contexts lead to the development of school-type specific normative orientations relevant to success. This contributes to creating unequal starting points for academic second-chance education. Based on this assumption, we develop a theoretical grid using the contrastive analysis of ten interviews with students in their first semester of second-chance education. The results show that existing normative orientations are only partially related to the school type that was previously attended. This raises questions concerning the extent to which there is a normative school socialization effect. However, this study is a first step in using a classic approach of the sociology of education to empirically explore the effects of stratification, which has not been done before.

We focus the concept of "awareness context" to capture trajectories of violence against children. This sociological concept of knowledge goes beyond the concept of "disclosure". It does not focus on the child's mere communication and thus the individuals' being informed about a fact, but aims at the shared knowledge based on which the interaction takes place. The (asymmetrical) relationships between children and adults can prevent children from influencing such shared and action-oriented knowledge, even if they provide information that they suffer violence. The empirical basis of this article is the reconstruction of 154 events of communication, extracted from 15 extensive case files and categorized in a longitudinal research design. These events comprise messages of victims and the reactions of family members, child protection professionals and other interaction partners to them; 64 events can be considered active disclosing already during childhood. For these histories of long and multiple violence where at least one perpetrator was part of the family household, the following insights can be gained: (a) repeated and various attempts by those affected are undertaken to communicate that violence is happening to them, (b) these attempts are countered by a bundle of different strategies to make those affected inaudible, and (c) this happens throughout the lives of these persons.

Smartphones play an integral part in many children's lives. Their constant presence in various contexts and the multitude of affordances they present have a tremendous effect on how childhoods are lived today. One important aspect is the way children's interaction with smartphones can affect relationships and particularly generational relations. In this explorative study, we investigated Azerbaijani children's interaction with smartphones in the family and at school using the sociomaterial and relational approaches. Thinking relationally, we followed children's stories to unravel how smartphones can mediate different types of behavior and assist children in negotiating their place in generational order with the adults in their lives. Analyses suggest that smartphones can both present children with bargaining power to negotiate pleasure and fun as well as means to reinforce the generational order by children themselves. The findings point out that children often transfer social norms and expectations placed on them to the ways they use smartphones. Keywords Azerbaijan Children and youth Generational order Smartphones Sociomateriality Relationality Citation Sultan, A., Bühler-Niederberger, D. and Nasrullayeva, N. (2023), "Sociomaterial Analysis of Azerbaijani Children’s Smartphone Use: Generational Ordering Through User-Technology Interactions", Bühler-Niederberger, D., Gu, X., Schwittek, J. and Kim, E. (Ed.) The Emerald Handbook of Childhood and Youth in Asian Societies, Emerald Publishing Limited, Bingley, pp. 213-232. https://doi.org/10.1108/978-1-80382-283-920231014 Publisher: Emerald Publishing Limited Copyright © 2023 Aysel Sultan, Doris Bühler-Niederberger and Nigar Nasrullayeva. Published under exclusive licence by Emerald Publishing Limited. These works are published under the Creative Commons Attribution (CC BY 4.0) licence. Anyone may reproduce, distribute, translate and create derivative works of these works (for both commercial and non-commercial purposes), subject to full attribution to the original publication and authors. The full terms of this licence may be seen at http://creativecommons.org/licences/by/4.0/legalcode. License These works are published under the Creative Commons Attribution (CC BY 4.0) licence. Anyone may reproduce, distribute, translate and create derivative works of these works (for both commercial and non-commercial purposes), subject to full attribution to the original publication and authors. The full terms of this licence may be seen at http://creativecommons.org/licences/by/4.0/legalcode. Introduction Children's use of smartphones has been of prominent interest to many childhood and youth researchers. Recently, with the COVID-19 pandemic, more studies emerged showing that children's screen time has risen to ‘alarming’ levels (Richtel, 2021). Studies have focused on the harms and potential negative outcomes of children's exposure to smart devices, especially with access to the internet. General findings indicate that children's use of smartphones is often tied to concerns about physical health (e.g. eye strain, sleep, mental well-being, attention span, cognitive and other developmental processes) (Oliveira et al., 2022; Serra et al., 2021). However, in many countries, smartphones and tablets have become an integral part of children's lives, not least in education, both in classroom and at-home formats. Smartphones prominently feature in learning processes and knowledge-construction via digital educational programs, with this need especially exacerbated during the pandemic. While this is more relevant in wealthier countries (e.g., Goh, Bay, & Chen, 2015), in other parts of the world, having access to a smart device can be a more demanding requirement (Mathrani, Sarvesh, & Umer, 2022). In addition, many children have cultural and normative limitations set to their use of smart devices that requires balancing between the necessary, even inevitable use of smartphones and the strict curation to reduce distractions and harms (e.g., Lauricella, Wartella, & Rideout, 2015). The distractions that smartphones provide also have social and emotional consequences, and have direct impacts on the relationships in domestic environment (Kushlev & Dunn, 2019). Earlier works on the role of digital media in family have already highlighted the values that adults uphold and gate keep to restrain the potential disruptions that media and communication technologies presented. For example, in an ethnographic study of a family in their London home, Silverstone and Hirsch (1992, p. 218) depict the following picture: Charles and Natalie both enjoy television plays, but only Charles watches films on television. [...] The television viewing of their children is carefully regulated and only the eldest is allowed to watch television after supper. The doing of homework has a high priority among the children and is clearly separated from any TV viewing. Homework is often done by several children in a group around the kitchen table. Again and again in our discussions about television, it was downgraded as passive and inappropriate form of activity to spend much time on. [...] Their relationships with objects and others, and those of their children, are informed by these and related values. Today, we are observing similar concerns around children's use of smartphones. Although the technological advancements and the values that smartphones represent might differ from those of a television, they are still often treated as vices of distraction and sources of multitude harms. Parental control and mediation remain central to shaping children's relationships, socialization and learning experiences when it comes to the use of smartphones. In this interaction, parent–child relationships and family values take various forms. For example, studies have investigated how the innovation and availability of various parental mediation tools affect children's use of digital media (Bakó & Tőkés, 2018; Ko et al., 2015). Some parents rely on the use of such tools by setting limits to daily use, restricting access to certain sites and applications and controlling screen time. These control measures are higher among educated parents whose digital literacy allows for more nuanced interventions. Studies show that negotiated and mutually agreed rule-setting has been proven to be most effective especially among tweens (Ko et al., 2015). As our study will show, however, some parents and especially teachers rely on other more ‘hands-on’ interventions, not least with admonishment and punishment for excessive or noneducational use. Smartphone usage and parent–child relations are manifold and manifest in accordance with family values and the household's moral economies (Mascheroni, 2014; Mascheroni et al., 2018). Family values as understood in terms of generational relationships and parent–child interactions, in turn, reflect local, context-specific social norms that can affect the ways in which children themselves perceive and practice smartphone use. Social norms embedded in the learned ways of communication, especially in domestic adult–child relationships, constitute children's interactions, self-control and self-discipline practices involving digital technologies at large. As children explore ‘new’ ways in digital spaces, they transfer previously learned modes of face-to-face communication, social norms and values to these spaces, too (Yoon, 2006). Moreover, understanding how children themselves perceive the role of smartphones in their lives and learn to use them provides insights into local contexts of family values, social norms and social constructions of childhood itself (Abbasi et al., 2021). Our interest in this chapter focuses on children from Azerbaijan where, to the best of our knowledge, no studies have been conducted on children's perspectives on smartphone use in school and domestic environments. The study's initial hypothesis expected to find smartphone use to be strictly tied to family and cultural values besides being reflective of hierarchical generational order and strict parental mediation (Savadova, 2021). This study explores how smartphones mediate parent–child relationships and generational order in Azerbaijani families and schools. Drawing on five interviews with groups of children and tweens aged from 9 to 15 years, we investigate how smartphones mediate parent–child relations and how affordances of smartphones continuously challenge hierarchical generational relations. Contextualizing Childhood in Azerbaijan Azerbaijan counts in the ranks of resource-rich countries that have poor child development, welfare, education and care systems, despite its comparatively high gross national product and the state's high revenues from natural oil and gas resources (Huseynov & Abbasova, 2021). In addition, infant and under-the-age-of-five mortality rates are considerably higher, for example, in Kyrgyzstan with considerably less resources (SABER Country Report, 2018). The implementation of children's rights to protection and provision remains significantly underdeveloped and has been attracting the critical attention of international researchers (e.g. Ismayilova et al., 2014). As for child protection, existing institutions no longer meet the requirements that are placed on child protection today, as the institutionalization of children in need of protection is still the usual procedure (Huseynov & Abbasova, 2021). The ‘State Programme on Alternative Care and Deinstitutionalization’ created with the purpose to address this issue is slow to progress and represents the lack of political will in this regard (Huseynli, 2018). Moreover, the lack of allocated resources shows gaps in the professional coordination of services and in the shortage of social services that could provide alternatives and effective prevention (Huseynov & Abbasova, 2021). There is also a critical need for fundamental educational reforms in the refs. Early childhood education is insufficient and underfinanced, even in comparison to several other and with comparatively lower income countries in the region (SABER Country Report, 2018). Scores in reading, mathematics and science among the students in the capital Baku, in the Programme for International Student Assessment (PISA) are below the average for Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development (OECD) (OECD, 2019). In the recent years, some infrastructural progress has been made showing a substantial improvement in children's rights, social protection and ‘child-friendly’ learning environments in Azerbaijan (UNICEF, 2016). International organizations, most notably UNICEF's international comparative data on childhood, mainly highlight the priorities of international rights and legislations. These focus on early childhood development and disciplinary practices, especially on the use of violence in disciplining. Although based on data collected by UNICEF in 2006, a recent study states a high level of violent disciplinary practices in Azerbaijani families (Huseynli & Jonson-Reid, 2022). Previous studies on Azerbaijani children's role in traditional (i.e. heteronormative) family environments have also shown that children rarely question their parents' parenting strategies and generally agree with the expectations and demands set for them (Hunner-Kreisel, Nasrullayeva et al., 2022). Similar findings were published on other Muslim-majority post-Soviet States such as Kyrgyzstan (Bühler-Niederberger & Schwittek, 2022). In part, this is interpreted as a legacy of Soviet educational doctrines, which did not make domestic violence an issue, but warned against ‘too much coddling’ (Huseynli & Jonson-Reid, 2022). According to the World Health Organization (WHO, 2013), Azerbaijan within the comparative context to European and CIS (Commonwealth of Independent States) countries shows a particularly harsh parental discipline, partly because the country has fewer corresponding child protection laws. Criticism is leveled at the state's overall lack of commitment to a social policy for children where children's well-being is highly dependent on their families and their resources (Hunner-Kreisel, Bühler-Niederberger et al., 2022). Yet, there is still a significant gap in the literature around the upbringing of children within families, children’s voices and their own understanding of subjective well-being. In their pioneering work, Hunner-Kreisel asked about the well-being of children in Azerbaijan and tried to capture this from the children's own perspectives (Hunner-Kreisel et al., 2020; Hunner-Kreisel, Nasrullayeva et al., 2022). They used a concept of a ‘spatial well-being’ (Fattore et al., 2021), which studies showed to be limited for children in Baku because children are hardly allocated any place in the public infrastructure that they can use with a certain degree of autonomy. In the family, their studies showed that children have limited activities and perceive themselves in a strongly hierarchical age structure and recognize its limitations as such (Hunner-Kreisel, Ben-Arieh et al., 2022). This research already encountered the possible relevance of a ‘translocal own space with friends constructed through the use of digital technologies’ (Fattore et al., 2021, p. 18), although without systematic consideration of the design of such spaces by the children and the affordances of digital media. Taking smartphones as our primary focus, we explore upbringing in Azerbaijani families by asking how children navigate smartphone's presence in the family's life on a day-to-day basis. This perspective allows approaching limits, possibilities and modes of negotiating generational relations as continuous and fluid processes embedded in the heterogenous relations mediated by smartphones. In this way, our study aims to contribute to the study of children's place and well-being in Azerbaijani families by showing how the use of smartphone can continuously reestablish generational relations and renegotiate them as afforded by the device. To do this, we turn to the sociomaterial approach and draw on recent ontological scholarship in childhood studies. Approach The ontological theorization of childhood and recent attention to sociomaterial approaches rethinking childhood as a phenomenon have been important impulses in childhood research. The arrival of the ‘new’ materialism has been received with much debate in childhood studies. Many studies around materialism, especially inspirations drawing on Science and Technology Studies (STS) have focused on rethinking and decentering children's agency (Spyrou, 2018). Against this background, debates have carried on whether understanding childhood as a relational and sociomaterially constructed phenomenon would strip the childhood sociology off its agential achievements (Alanen, 2019). Hence, the recent contributions have engaged with agency differently, to show that seeing agency as distributed and heterogenous (meaning that it includes both human and nonhuman forces) can help deessentialize the idea of childhood. The main reason behind deessentialization is to liberate childhood as a phenomenon from structural and hierarchical interdependencies (Sørenssen & Franck, 2021). If understood as a relational phenomenon, childhood becomes more than just an age category or a structural layer in the society and instead manifests as continuously constructed and shaped in heterogenous relations (Spyrou, 2018, 2019). This has borne studies of material mediation and childhood as a relational achievement to highlight the multiple realities in which childhood can be understood and conceptualized. Shifting the focus from child-centered interpretation of children's experiences and meanings, sociomaterial approach shows how experiences acquire meaning and form in relations between the social and the material. Children's relationships hence shape and become shaped by the effects of material objects in their lives. The term sociomaterial here does not denote a harmonious merged state of fixed being; rather, it means the relationality of social and material that do not always combine coherently (Law & Mol, 1995; Sørenssen, 2022). The social and the material shape each other and become in fluid constellation of complexities that coproduce our experiences. The relations of the social and material hence are not causal; they do not become from a single source or contain a single agent doing the action, rather they are heterogenous and asymmetrical in ways they come to be (Latour, 2005). While such relationality primarily means the distribution of agency between human and nonhuman, it also highlights the relations and continuous motion at the center of all experiences. It is not merely about adding another dimension, that is materiality, to the array of forces that shape children's social lives, but rather highlighting the social within the materiality itself. To do this, we follow how affordances of smartphones shape the sociomateriality of children's experiences (Hutchby, 2001). In this framework, affordances of the devices are not merely enhancement or extension of children's various abilities and desires, rather active enabling and/or constraining of certain environments, reshaping the very way children understand themselves in different sociomaterial contexts. For example, Ruckenstein's (2015, p. 353) study of children playing the Nintendo-DS game console shows how by the creation of new worlds and new kinds of social bonds they create a “context-specific nature of material encounters”. By integrating a sociomaterial approach in this study, we aim to elaborate on the concept of generational order in the frames of relational and material sociology of childhood. We build on Alanen and Mayall's (2001) ideas of generational order as a relational phenomenon, namely, of ongoing processes of attributing values, duties, rights and scopes of action to members of different age categories and generational position within the kinship lineage. These age categories always figure in relation to each other (Bühler-Niederberger, 2020). In such a relational perspective, the researcher is not endowed with a priori knowledge and competencies, to study such processes in which the relationship between individuals, groups and material entities is continuously shaped (Emirbayer, 1997). In other words, generational order emerges in fluid constellations of sociomaterial interactions, with fluidity meaning no causality or correlation. Hence, the focus shifts onto emergent relations in which all entities involved simultaneously shape each other without assuming any unilateral direction of impact. Part of the reason why sociomaterial thinking can be fruitful for exploring hierarchical generational relations is precisely due to methodological tools provided to avert hierarchical and causal or symmetrical interpretations (Latour, 1984, 2005). Within the context of Azerbaijan, the aim is to understand how nonhuman actors such as smartphones can help us see beyond culturally familiar depictions of Azerbaijani family relations that are often presumed as old-fashioned, hierarchical and neglectful of children's perspectives and voices (cf. Hunner-Kreisel et al., 2022). The materialist framework can offer powerful analytical tools in achieving other forms of storytelling in which childhood and children's experiences can be interpreted beyond the traditional, heteronormative and Eurocentric understandings. While still drawing on Western scholarship and concepts such as ‘generational order’ and ‘sociomateriality’ for methodological and analytical purposes, it is nonetheless possible to unravel generational order and children's role in families by moving away from familiar narratives on parent–child and family constructs. This approach can help ‘target hegemonic interpretive power of specific concepts and its inherent epistemic violence to diverse forms of living’ (Hunner-Kreisel, Ben-Arieh et al., 2022). Using the example of smartphones – a device with global usage and many culturally familiar meanings – Azerbaijani children's lives in families and at school is portrayed in a ‘new’ light where hierarchies, dependencies, agencies and normative expectations acquire meaning through dynamic contexts and complex, heterogenous relations between human and nonhuman actors (Sørenssen & Bergschöld, 2021). This chapter provides insights into how a sociomaterial approach can be a useful analytical tool in understanding generational order through focusing on the example of children's use of smartphones. To guide our study, we focus on the various practices that surround the use of smartphones and illustrate the heterogenous relations in which children's relationships, learning and leisure emerge. In this framework, the formative power of the material object, in this case, the smartphone, becomes of interest through the very possibilities it opens up as well as the expectations from and for its use. Using sociomaterial analysis allows us to show that the relationships between parents and children undergo continuous negotiations that emerge within the heterogenous relations between human and nonhuman actors. In addition, we outline the scopes and limits of these negotiations as well as the basic standards that the relationships between parents and children must meet from the point of view of adult participants and the children. Methods and Materials We have conducted five peer-supported interviews via video-conferencing tool Zoom with a total of 13 children and tweens – eight girls and five boys – living in Baku (see Table 1). Interviews were carried out in five groups with a maximum of three interviewees and mostly two researchers in one group. Nigar Nasrullayeva (NN) was responsible for conducting the interviews. Aysel Sultan (AS) and Doris Bühler-Niederberger (DBN) each participated in one interview to facilitate the interviewing process and to collect additional observational data. One interview was conducted in English (DBN and NN) with three siblings who were enrolled in a private English-speaking school; the remaining interviews were conducted in Azerbaijani. Children were recruited through NN's networks (from previous studies) across public and private schools in Baku and were from various socioeconomic backgrounds. In three out of five group interviews, children joined the video call from a separately allocated room at home, without parents’ involvement. In the other two interviews, mothers were present in the room and sometimes intervened in children's responses, mostly in the background and after children muted their microphones so the interaction wasn't audible to the interviewers. This occurrence corresponded with our anticipations of parents monitoring the way children's smartphone use could be presented to outsiders henceforth interlinking parental monitoring and children's own perspectives that characterized our analyses. Table 1. Overview of the Interviewed Children. Groups Pseudonym Age Sex SocioEconomic Status Languages Spoken at Home 1 (in English) Firangiz 13 Female Upper middle class Azerbaijan, English Zarifa 15 Female Teymur 11 Male 2 (in Azerbaijani and Russian) Raul 14 Male Middle class Russian, Azerbaijani Sayyara 12 Female 3 (in Azerbaijani) Haydar 10 Male Lower middle class Azerbaijani Hamid 12 Male Rana 10 Female 4 (in Azerbaijani) Tahira 12 Female Lower middle class Azerbaijani Namiq 10 Male 5 (in Azerbaijani) Maryam 9 Female (Upper) middle class Azerbaijani, English Afat 9 Female Sevinj 14 Female Only six of the children owned their personal smartphone and the rest shared with a sibling, used a parent’s phone, or a different family device such as tablets or laptops. Parents of all 13 children provided their oral or written assent for their children's participation and video-recording of the interviews. Additional to the informed consent form, DBN also provided a signed letter explaining to the parents the purpose of the study and the general theme of this edited volume. The children were informed about the study's purpose at the beginning of each interview and were asked to choose their own pseudonyms for the case if their statements would appear in this publication. Interviews were semistructured guided by questions around children's use of smartphones and any other smart devices (e.g. tablets and computers) in their daily life or what they thought about smartphones if they did not possess one yet. We included questions about various ways and settings in which children used their personal or their sibling's or parent's smartphones and asked if they had any restrictions for their use. We were interested in children's conceptions and constructions of privacy, (in)dependency, learning, fun, socialization with peers and relationships with parents and other family members as narrated about smartphones. While different children were involved in the interview, this was not a focus-group interview in a strict sense (Barbour, 2018) as the interviewers did not focus on the interaction and exchange between the children as focus groups require (Adler et al., 2019). The latter would have been difficult because, although the children all stated that they liked participating in the interviews, they were more oriented toward an adult–child interaction exemplified in the formal addressing of the interviewers, raising their hands to speak, etc. Hence, we have called this style of interviewing a ‘peer-supported interview’ (see also Parrish et al., 2012). In a peer-supported interview, the presence of several children was intended to address the power imbalance due to adult interviewers and reduce the pressure on an individual child to respond. This also allowed the children to occasionally make jokes or giggle among themselves to potentially ‘escape’ the hierarchies in the interview setting. Analysis: Affordances and Use-ability of Smartphones The analysis focuses on different contexts in which smartphones mediate generational relations. Children as users of smartphones exhibit varied values and behaviors that continuously reposition their role and the role of adults in generational relations (see also Hadad, Meishar-Tal, & Blau, 2020). Smartphones, as the nonhuman actors in these relations, mediate the enactment of social norms and values in children's lives (Sørenssen & Franck, 2021) at home, at school and in communication with peers. Studying these enactments of the sociomaterial encounters (Law & Urry, 2004) unveils the normative cornerstones of the generational ordering and children's perspectives on their own role in this ordering. They become recognizable in children's practices of smartphone use, in the reported conflicts with parents and teachers, in the judgments of ‘other’ children and adults about their ‘mostly wrong’ use of smartphones and the strategies through which these norms and expectations are to be adhered to or approximated. In many cases, children had to share devices with others. This had implications as to what smart devices can be used for and under which circumstances. Since in all cases smartphone use at schools was either forbidden or strictly regulated, smartphones often emerged in punishment scenarios or accidents such as bringing a parent's smartphone in the backpack unknowingly or forgetting to switch off the device. Our data show that the use of smartphones in classrooms is rendered either useful thereby elevating the pupil's status as docile and well-behaved or in contrast, distracting and disrespectful of the classroom environment deserving reprimand and punishment. Children describe a smartphone's use-ability in this preconditioned form. Children in our study expressed significant alertness to such categorization of behavior. When asked to describe their daily use of the phone, children usually began with the examples that are typically associated with the ‘right’ form of use such as preparing for a class, staying in touch with their parents, or watching extracurricular educational content on YouTube. The approved or ‘right’ use of smartphones translates into how children align their own understandings about what a smartphone use should be like with expectations of their parents and teachers. Smartphones as mediators help enact different identities and become a part of being a responsible child, a smart user, a good daughter/son, or a good friend. In the ‘proper’ understanding of the term mediator, smartphones as technologies of mediation do not simply enhance the already existing customs and relations in which children find themselves. Rather, we observe how children with smartphones transform and become in very specific, dynamic contexts (Latour & Venn, 2002). Zarifa: When you are chatting with someone, you are not quite expressing your feelings towards them. Like, they don’t even know if you are sad or happy, like in general. Like when you chat with them, they don’t really know your true feelings. So, they might confuse it with wrong feelings, and instead of thinking positively, they might start thinking negatively. If I say something too straightforward, that will stand pretty mean in chat. That would sound kind of not really… That would not have a positive impact, or it would not sound as positive as it would sound in real life. So, in chat, it might sound rude. Communication over a chat instead of live communication is hence dissatisfactory because of the technological barriers. Here the device simultaneously reinforces Zarifa's need to communicate her feelings while at the same time restricting a full expressivity changing the appearance of her outward personality. This form of meaning-making of the device's specific affordances highlights different ontological realities which children and smartphones co-

To contextualise the contributions in this section, we present some data on growing up in South Asian societies. It is important to consider the fundamental diversity of conditions in which children and youth live. We suggest some theoretical terms that are helpful in this regard and preview the contributions against this background. The studies on which the contributions are based impressively document the striking inequality in this region. Keywords South Asia Childhood Multiple childhoods Unequal childhoods Normative pattern “good childhood” Generational order Citation Bühler-Niederberger, D. and Khalid, A. (2023), "Section Two – Introduction Multiplicity and Fundamental Inequality of Childhoods in South Asia", Bühler-Niederberger, D., Gu, X., Schwittek, J. and Kim, E. (Ed.) The Emerald Handbook of Childhood and Youth in Asian Societies, Emerald Publishing Limited, Bingley, pp. 107-119. https://doi.org/10.1108/978-1-80382-283-920231007 Publisher: Emerald Publishing Limited Copyright © 2023 Doris Bühler-Niederberger and Asma Khalid. Published under exclusive licence by Emerald Publishing Limited. These works are published under the Creative Commons Attribution (CC BY 4.0) licence. Anyone may reproduce, distribute, translate and create derivative works of these works (for both commercial and non-commercial purposes), subject to full attribution to the original publication and authors. The full terms of this licence may be seen at http://creativecommons.org/licences/by/4.0/legalcode. License These works are published under the Creative Commons Attribution (CC BY 4.0) licence. Anyone may reproduce, distribute, translate and create derivative works of these works (for both commercial and non-commercial purposes), subject to full attribution to the original publication and authors. The full terms of this licence may be seen at http://creativecommons.org/licences/by/4.0/legalcode. More than one fourth of the world's children (under 18 years old) are living in South Asia, in the countries Afghanistan, Bangladesh, Bhutan, India, Maldives, Nepal, Pakistan and Sri Lanka (UNICEF, 2023). To get to the point: this common regional affiliation does not tell us very much about their childhoods, which can be very different. Internationally, it is above all the often problematic conditions of growing up that are perceived. When reports about children and adolescents in South Asia reach the public beyond the narrow circle of childhood researchers, they usually do so as bad news. For example, the (still) high child mortality rate in South Asian countries or the high rate of child labour is mentioned (ILO, 2014, 2017; UNICEF South Asia, 2021). Reading reports and studies from these countries, one gets the impression that every crisis, every national and international conflict and every national peculiarity is directly reflected in the conditions of growing up: in groups of children with special vulnerability. One might think here of the child soldiers in Sri Lanka (Gates & Reich, 2010), of illegal international adoptions in the wake of civil war and poverty in this country as well (Loibl, 2021), of children who grow up in the area of border conflicts between India and Pakistan (Malik, 2020), of so-called “street children” in India without families or with parents who themselves had been “street children” (Dutta, 2018), of the enormously high proportion of working children in very agricultural Nepal (ILO, 2014), of children in hazardous work in Bangladesh (Hoque, 2022), of the children of the Rohingiya refugees in Bangladesh (Hoque, 2021) – this list could go on for a long time. However, it should not be overlooked that the South Asian region has achieved an economic take-off in the past decades (Devarajan, 2007). Compared to other poor regions of the world, considerable progress has been made in an astonishingly short time. The region has achieved “a dramatic shift over the past 5 decades from a region of mainly low-income economies towards one that is largely middle-income” (Estrada et al., 2017, p. v). With the exception of Afghanistan, none of the South Asian countries are still classified as low-income economies (World Bank, 2023). Child-focused policy programmes have been implemented and have been successful, improving some of the key indicators commonly used to characterise growing-up conditions. A new UNICEF report recognises the following achievements: “In the past quarter century, the number of children dying before their fifth birthday in South Asia has more than halved. Since 2000, the number of stunted children under 5 has fallen by over one third. In the past 25 years, the likelihood of a girl under 18 becoming a bride has dropped by a similar percentage. Secondary school enrolment has risen steadily, including for girls. And more than 90% of the population today has access to safe drinking water” (UNICEF South Asia, 2021, p. 6). However, the same report cautions that the consequences of the pandemic and renewed economic crises of recent years are not yet fully apparent. Furthermore, one common root of all these problems remains: social protection systems are still partly inadequate, although many projects and programmes are running (Chanaveer et al., 2019; Devarajan, 2017). This lack of social protection is then also a reason why events such as internal conflicts, environmental disasters and economic difficulties hit children and adolescents – or at least parts of them – hard, and why there are still vulnerable groups of children despite all of the achievements. However, it must be added that there are differences between the South Asian countries in this respect. Sri Lanka, for example, has a child mortality rate that is 10 times lower than that of Pakistan or Afghanistan (Index Mundi, n.d.). It can be assumed that medical care and the position of mothers play a role, possibly also the much lower proportion of children and young people in the total population. 1 Although some serious problems affecting the situation of children have been somewhat mitigated by positive economic developments and socio-political and humanitarian efforts, this does not mean that there is less variation in the way that children grow up in South Asia. The economic rise has also exacerbated the already considerable social inequality. For example, the economic conditions of the already better-off social classes have improved to a very different extent than those of the less affluent and the poor population during the years of the economic upswing (Devarajan, 2007). Inequality is undoubtedly not a new phenomenon in South Asia. A complex structure of caste, social class and ethnicity is rooted in not only the religious tradition but also the colonial past, in the sense of “divide and rule” (Ganguly, 2006; Riser-Kositsky, 2009; Simha, 2015); and all countries in South Asia, except Nepal, were under British colonial rule. Beyond the groups of particularly vulnerable children, of which we have given a far from exhaustive list above, this results in a further diversity of conditions for growing up. Riser-Kositsky (2009), for example, illustrates the complex structure of caste and class in Sri Lanka using the example of the different childhoods that the various groups establish, and describes these differences primarily in terms of the type of schooling that the children receive, whether the children are educated privately or publicly, in the language of the country or in English. In the following, we will focus on India and Pakistan, whose children alone account for more than 85% of the children in South Asia. These are also the two countries from which the contributions in our volume originate. Especially as far as India is concerned, research and theoretical reflection on childhood has already progressed far beyond the alarming reports on groups of marginal children. Why such a research scene has developed in India, while for the other countries it has remained rather isolated studies and reports, cannot be clarified at this point. With 55% of people under 25 years old in Pakistan and 43% in India (CIA, 2003), children and young people make up a huge group of the population in these two countries. However, they can only be called “a group” of the population to a limited extent, for the uniformity of this group is far less striking than the fundamental differences that can be found. This begins with the sheer variety of ethnicities, tribes and cultures in these countries. For example, in an overview chapter on growing up in India, Behera and Nath (2008) mention that people are speaking “1600 languages, grouped somewhat arbitrarily into 114 groups” (p. 190). They then discuss major quality differences of schools according to regions and the language of instruction (p. 193), a different valuation of girls and boys resulting in different percentages of school enrolment, different work and different recognition of the work between girls and boys (p. 195), just to mention some of the heterogeneity. One difference between girls and boys that has not been addressed as such in research so far results from the more frequent very early marriage of girls: almost a fifth of girls in Pakistan and more than a quarter in India are already married by the age of 18 – the figures are four to five times lower for boys (CIA, 2003). This means that the childhood of girls can also be a very short one, and we don't know what this time perspective alone means for girls. There are also large differences in social stratification, i.e. between poor and rich populations, castes and social classes, all of which are also reflected in the conditions of growing up (Barn, 2021). Gulrez and Hafeez (2008) conclude their overview on childhood in Pakistan with the statement of “the rich getting richer and the poor getting poorer” (p. 342), with corresponding implications for childhood. In the three contributions, we will present in this section on these two countries, the differences between the childhoods that they report about could hardly be greater. Recent years have not been conducive to narrowing the differences. Pakistan was among the countries with the longest school closures in the aftermath of the COVID-19 pandemic (UNICEF, 2022), and there were high differences in the learning level between the poorest and wealthiest quartiles, as well as gender gaps in favour of boys for both literacy and numeracy as well before (ASER Pakistan, 2019). Pakistan is also one of the countries hit particularly hard by climate change, and this has devastating effects for many children. A Conceptual Inventory to Study Multiple Childhoods One may question to what extent, with such differences, the subsumption of these realities of young and very young people under one term, “childhood,” and the application of a uniform conceptual inventory to childhood – and this is the claim of a social scientific study of growing up – is still justified. After all, the scientific use of the term childhood and the theoretical concepts attached to it that have been gained in and for the study of childhood – Barrie Thorne (1987, p. 103) speaks of a “conceptual autonomy” of childhood studies – presupposes a certain uniformity of the phenomenon and must sensibly do so. However, if one goes back a bit in the still young history of childhood studies, then the idea of a uniform childhood was first sustainably undermined in the best-cited book of childhood studies ever: “Constructing and Reconstructing Childhood” of Allison James and Alan Prout (1990a). Based on historical and culture-comparative studies showing a variety of different ways and ideas of growing up, these social constructivist childhood researchers of the 1990s relativised the idea of a universal childhood, and certainly did well to do so, since – prior to the rise of childhood studies – this claim was based on the argument that biological laws of development would dictate one single and appropriate form of childhood (James & Prout, 1990b). But what should now take the place of this deconstructed uniformity if one wants to preserve the conceptual autonomy of childhood research? In any case, the concept of children as “independent social actors” (James & James, 2012, p. 3), which was offered and often used after this deconstruction of uniformity, does not lend itself to studies in countries of the Majority World. These countries must be understood in their strong intergenerational relations, as we have also underlined in the introduction to Central Asia and Caucasus countries (Kim & Bühler-Niederberger, in this volume). A social structural approach to childhood research offers the notion of a structural commonality that characterises children as a group. Qvortrup (2009), for example, bases his claim to a conceptualisation of children and childhood as a social phenomenon on the fact that they all inhabit the “segment childhood” and thus occupy a particular position in the generational structure (2009, p. 24). This, he argues, is a segment that is always distinct from the segment of adulthood and old age. Qvortrup admits that this “structural form” (p. 25) of childhood varies because it is influenced by political, social, economic, cultural and technological parameters. He illustrates this variation in time and uses the example of France in 1920, 1940, 1960 etc. However, it is unclear to what extent he is informed about this, but he chooses a country where centuries of efforts to standardise this early phase of life preceded the period that he uses for his argumentation – on the part of the Church, the State, moralists and gradually emerging experts (Ariès, 1962; Donzelot, 1979; Snyder, 1965). The goal of these efforts was a disciplined population. These efforts were, therefore, not motivated by the attempt to give children a happy childhood, nor by the attempt to give all children an equally happy one. This interest was not even there for the children of their own country. This is an important point when talking about the “uniform” childhood, which was in any case based on a government claim and corresponding efforts, which involved a lot of coercion – we will take this up again later on. For the countries we are talking about in this section, the argumentation of a structural commonality is only partly convincing, since, for example, the variation between childhoods that take place at one and the same time is already much larger than the one Qvortrup refers to in his example. The heterogeneity mentioned here at the beginning of the text should have made this recognisable. But how are we to approach this first phase of life scientifically if this notion of a structural commonality of childhood – across times and societies – also breaks away? The explosive nature of the question of whether childhood is a phenomenon for which a uniform interpretative framework should be chosen also arises from the fact that it is not only a question of scientific analysis. It is equally a question of normative settings, which gains in explosiveness around the issue of children's rights as a governmental claim that has worldwide validity (Barn, 2021). The answers in both areas are in principle given independently, once on an analytical basis and once on a normative basis. However, childhood studies have understood their concepts, especially their concept of a strongly individualistically conceived agency, as not only analytical but also advocatory (Mayall, 2000). Sarada Balagopalan has become visible in a debate about uniform versus “multiple” childhoods as a representative of a standpoint from which borrowings from a common conceptual inventory are rejected. In a study of Indian children involved in the informal labour market, she sets herself very clearly apart from the notion of a uniform childhood (Balagopalan, 2014). These children do not inhabit a somehow (globally or even regionally) uniformly shaped segment of society; rather, her study shows how principally different the reality of daily life is for these children and what other notions of childhood apply. This is measured against the contemporary notion and reality of Western childhood but also, for example, Indian middle-class childhood (Barn et al., 2022). From this, she also derives a reproach to childhood research: a Western bias is inherent in its theoretical conceptual vocabulary and thus this vocabulary remains inappropriate because it is gained from a fundamentally differently structured phase of life. She recognises in this conceptual approach, in postcolonial critique, a cultural paternalism (Balagopalan, 2019). Therefore, it requires argumentation if we approach the situation of young people in South Asia, despite this heterogeneity, with the notion of childhood, which thus implicates a certain uniformity and a distinction from the programmes of other age groups. And the follow-up question arises: which further theoretical concepts are suitable for the analysis of a reality of growing up, which is characterised by such heterogeneity? There are three concepts in particular that we would like to propose, and with some reflections on what these three concepts can contribute to approaching childhoods in South Asia, we also justify why – despite the multiplicity of the first phase of life – it makes sense to analyse them as childhoods, hence with a certain conceptual autonomy. The three concepts are able – despite or even because of the multiplicity of situations and conditions of growing up – to span an overarching theoretical grid. It is, first, the concept of a generational order (Alanen, 2009), of relations between age groups, in the sense of the structured and continuing reciprocal attribution of scopes of action, valuations, obligations and rights. The concept guides the whole volume and will not be elaborated here, as we did that in the introduction to the whole volume and we will only recall that we start from the in-principle diversity of these intergenerational relations (cf. Cole & Durham, 2007). As Alanen states, we have to leave it “to empirical study to find out what actually is the constitutive principle in the social ordering, an organizing, of adult-child relation in each (e.g. national) case and in different social fields” (2009, p. 167). One of these constitutive principles – as all our contributions in this section show – is that South Asian childhoods are very much involved in intergenerational commitments that will last a lifetime and in which the younger generation in particular will have to assume responsibilities. Second, it is the concept of a normative pattern of good childhood (Bühler-Niederberger, 2021, p. 57; Donzelot, 1979). This is a substantive idea of how childhood should be, namely the idea of children embedded into and protected by families that are coming up to their public duty of contributing to an industrious population. These families have to conceive of their children as “economically useless and emotionally priceless” (Zelizer, 1985, p. x). The idea of this childhood is not mere ideal, as there is always a claim of the enforcement of such a childhood, which comes along with some pressure and manifold ways to exert this pressure. In this way, the normative pattern of the “good childhood” has the double content of a moral devaluation of the cultures and social classes that do not practice it and the promised (future) valorisation through the conversion to the “right” education of their children. The real growing up in the countries which are under discussion here corresponds to this pattern partly more, partly less and partly not at all. Just from this, paradoxically, the pattern gets its relevance – in the measuring of the distance and proximity to it which happens constantly – by the participants themselves, by the policy but also not least by many researchers who regard the deviation depending upon their point of view as deficit or as cultural inherent value and necessity or as both (see, for example, the various chapters in Behera, 2007, and Maithreyi et al., 2022). Whether the pattern is rejected or adopted, it dominates scholarly debates on childhoods in these countries and the childhood programmes of international and national organisations, where they are launched. Therefore, it is useful to describe what pressures it exerts on which populations and growing up in them, through what processes and with what results. In India, interesting studies have emerged on how – in the publicly organised attempt to approximate the normative pattern of good childhood – poorly equipped and corrupt institutions can also significantly reduce the quality of growing up, especially for marginal groups and tribal students (Behera, 2009), how relevant knowledge stocks other than those imparted at school may be lost in formal education (Behera, 2017) as well as how children and adults may consider education as a risky investment as they face severe obstacles when transforming education into a decent livelihood (Froerer, 2015). It is urgent to study these dynamics in more detail. The changing nature of the multifaceted reality of growing up could thus be better captured (cf. Graner, 2020). Insights should be gained into how these processes can be better governed, more appropriately governed for these children living in colonial legacies and nevertheless and because of that in very different concrete life situations (Balagopalan, 2011). As long as very different ways of growing up take place in different and largely socially and regionally isolated groups, we may speak of a multiplicity of ways of growing up. However, multiplicity becomes inequality as well if the offspring of groups with different modes of raising their children aspire to the same positions in the society, as different childhoods implicate different chances to get access to good positions: based on acquired skills, manners and “habitus” (Bourdieu, 1977) as well as certificates. This content of childhood becomes more important with the growing middle class in South Asia and thus the growing segment of the labour market, whose positions are also awarded through a (tough) competition in the educational sector. Inequality, then, is the third concept we would like to propose for analysing childhood in South Asia. It would be an illusion to believe that this inequality and injustice could be decisively reduced by aligning childhoods with the normative pattern of “good childhood.” For it is precisely childhood, oriented around this ideal of the economically useless and emotionally unaffordable child, that is fundamentally unequal. This childhood prevails in social classes and strata – via corresponding parenting patterns – that distinguish themselves from other social strata. Offering one's offspring a “good childhood” allows distinction per se (Barn et al., 2022), but it allows distinction also in the future via the hoped-for head start for the children in the competitive education system and later on the labour market. “Good childhood” consists essentially of the investment of financial, cultural and social capital in the child (Bourdieu, 1986), and this investment can be constantly increased, in principle almost indefinitely, as evidenced by today's development in the upwardly mobile middle class worldwide (Barn et al., 2022; Lareau, 2003; Vincent & Ball, 2007). Contextualising the Contributions in This Section This basic inequality of a “good childhood” is not only a problem of social justice but also produces, especially under precarious economic conditions, childhoods that are strongly committed to social advancement or at least to status preservation. This is shown by the contribution of Adrienne Atterberry. Adrienne impressively shows that Indian parents do not simply copy the childhoods of Western countries when they prepare their children for demanding careers. It is precisely in this group of parents that had been successful in a profession in the United States and where the financial and social resources are available to plan childhoods in a maximally thoughtful way that parents move back to India. In order to optimally prepare their children for the future in a globalised world, they are not relying on an education according to the American model and in this environment. The parents want to achieve something that Western pedagogy would consider incompatible to some extent; Adrienne speaks of “high achieving, hardworking and empathetic children.” To that end, the parents are developing careful plans. And they very openly confided in Adrienne their deliberations, implementation of plans and successes and disappointments in implementation. Their stories show that – once back in India – they rely on various means to achieve their goals. One of these is private schools, where it is known that their students subsequently go on to prestigious colleges at home and abroad. But they also rely on contacts with members of the extended family, which the parents assume are important in fostering not only their children's aspirations but also their social ties. Contacts with the grandparent generation then also play an important role. Finally, they rely on a third means that may be particularly surprising: parents also value exposing their children to the lives of those from less affluent backgrounds, whether it is domestic staff whose daily concerns the children learn about or whether it is through volunteer activities in which the children participate. We don't yet know whether this careful and complex planning by the parents will bear the desired fruit in the end. And, of course, the pressure for success and the threat that exposure to the lives of poor people also poses are unmistakable. But what we see very clearly is that this is a very particular pattern of education, against the background of the economic conditions of the country and the ideals of social relations and embedding that apply to these parents. In contrast, there is little evidence of democratic parenting as propagated in the advice books of Western middle classes (Cleverly & Phillips, 1986); the parents clearly set the plan, and the children in the studied group were by no means only enthusiastic about returning to India. Therefore, while aspects of the normative pattern of “good childhood” have found expression in this upbringing by parents of an internationally mobile elite group, it is clearly not a mere adaptation of a Western childhood pattern, despite, or perhaps because of, the resources available in this group. And such specific adaptations of the idea of a “good childhood” we also recognise in the contributions of Ravneet Kaur. The urban middle-class groups in which Ravneet conducted her ethnographic research have significantly fewer resources to prepare their children to compete in the education sector and the job market. But even here, parents clearly place their children's upbringing under this demand. They send the children to moderate fee-paying private schools. Long bus rides to school take up children's time. After school, the children attend additional tuition and hobby classes – many designed to boost academic performance as well. For these children, the extended family also plays an important role: it is the household context in which one grows up. Childhoods in the rural area differ very markedly, if one disregards embeddedness in extended or joint families, which is also the rule here. While urban children are only minimally involved in household chores, and are considered – as Ravneet writes – “too young” for that, these rural children are heavily involved in the household's activities once they have finished school. Children in urban and rural contexts are being prepared for completely different social futures, and the circles do not seem to overlap. However, if one considers the rapid urbanisation in India (World Bank, 2011), the children from the rural context could nevertheless push into an urban labour market in the future, where they would then – we can assume – probably have significantly worse chances. So, from that point of view, we have to talk about unequal childhoods, and that's probably also true when you look at the access to social resources like health care, education and especially higher education that they have while they're growing up. Ravneet highlights that in both contexts, parents play with children and make an effort to take good care of them. Occasionally, her descriptions of rural childhood evoke the idea of an idyll, such as when we imagine rural children in extended families, when the older ones help the smaller ones with their homework, while the mothers – themselves mostly still illiterate – do their chores, take care of the animals and keep an eye on the children. As with growing up in the middle classes of the city, however, clear hierarchies apply by generation and gender. In both contexts, children are clearly expected to keep a low profile with adults and to stay out of serious discussions. Corporal punishment is also mentioned for rural childhood. Different goals apply to girls than to boys: respectable marriage and not a successful future career. Also, mothers play a very different role in education than fathers. On the other hand, the childhood of Afghan refugee children in Pakistan, presented by Asma Khalid, takes place far away from a globally propagated normative pattern of childhood. Using an ethnographic approach, Asma gained access to a group of children who fled Afghanistan with their parents and now work in the markets and streets of the cities of Rawalpindi and Islamabad. Having gained the trust of these boys, Asma could observe them at work but also visit them at home and talk to the family. These boys confidently perceive themselves as supporting their families. They can only count on their family and the wider network of relati

This section focuses on Azerbaijan, Kazakhstan, Kyrgyzstan and Türkiye where knowledge on children and youth has been misconstrued as homogenous and ahistorical. To address this epistemic gap, authors explore the social, cultural and economic experiences of children and youth, their expectations, aspirations and risks under the premise that the region's imperial history, participation in the Soviet Union and postindependence transition, and postimperial present account for and produce social and historical continuities which persist and make for differently experienced childhood, adolescence and youth. Chapters in this section emphasize diverse and creative ways in which young citizens living in Central Asia and Caucasus (CAC) countries engage in negotiating, collaborating, adapting and confronting challenges and barriers presented by the rapidly changing social realities shaped by global labor market transformation, growing economic inequalities and advanced communication systems. This analysis is done from the standpoint of those on whose behalf research is conducted – the youth and children themselves. Keywords Azerbaijan Kazakhstan Kyrgyzstan Türkiye Childhood and youth Intergenerational solidary Citation Kim, E. and Bühler-Niederberger, D. (2023), "Section Three – Introduction Living as a Child in Azerbaijan, Kazakhstan, Kyrgyzstan and Türkiye: Navigating Between Solidarity, Collective Pressures and Kinship Support in the Times of Disruption", Bühler-Niederberger, D., Gu, X., Schwittek, J. and Kim, E. (Ed.) The Emerald Handbook of Childhood and Youth in Asian Societies, Emerald Publishing Limited, Bingley, pp. 171-176. https://doi.org/10.1108/978-1-80382-283-920231011 Publisher: Emerald Publishing Limited Copyright © 2023 Elena Kim and Doris Bühler-Niederberger. Published under exclusive licence by Emerald Publishing Limited. These works are published under the Creative Commons Attribution (CC BY 4.0) licence. Anyone may reproduce, distribute, translate and create derivative works of these works (for both commercial and non-commercial purposes), subject to full attribution to the original publication and authors. The full terms of this licence may be seen at http://creativecommons.org/licences/by/4.0/legalcode. License These works are published under the Creative Commons Attribution (CC BY 4.0) licence. Anyone may reproduce, distribute, translate and create derivative works of these works (for both commercial and non-commercial purposes), subject to full attribution to the original publication and authors. The full terms of this licence may be seen at http://creativecommons.org/licences/by/4.0/legalcode. This section's geographic focus is on three countries of post-Soviet Central Asia and Caucasus (CAC) countries – Azerbaijan, Kazakhstan and Kyrgyzstan. In addition, we have added a study of childhood in Türkey to this section, as this country does after all have some proximity to the CAC countries (linguistically, in terms of religion and in geographical location). This particular choice is necessitated by a problem of a missing account in the accumulated body of knowledge on children and youth, produced predominantly in North America and Europe – the peculiar silence about or/and a misconstrued representation of the region's domestic and family life. Indeed, more often than not we have been subjected to superficial, homogenous, ahistorical and synchronized portrayals of contemporary Central Asian children and youth bereft of pertinent historical and social backgrounds. It was also noted that youth in transition and children's life stories have been constructed with no references or recourse to the older generations (Bhat, 2018). Our goal here is to reinstate a meaningful analysis of childhood and youth experiences conducted under the premise that the region's imperial history, participation in the Soviet Union's civilization mission, postindependence transition and postimperial present account for and produce social and historical continuities which persist and make for differently experienced childhood, adolescence and youth. We set out to use empirically based and locally produced approaches to analytically explore the social, cultural and economic experiences of children and youth, their expectations, aspirations and risks. Importantly, our objective here is to elucidate and radiate diverse and creative ways in which young citizens living in CAC countries engage in negotiating, collaborating, adapting and confronting challenges and barriers presented by the rapidly changing social realities shaped by global labor market transformation, growing economic inequalities and advanced communication systems. The youth and children, we are looking at in this section, were born in families or/and to parents whose lives were abruptly disrupted in the 1990s by uncertainties, postcolonial nation-state building, access to global markets and erosion of state welfare. These circumstances meant more diversity, opportunity and flexibility for these new generations as well as new threats and insecurities, yet these rich sites of experiences have not yet been thoroughly understood. This section embraces the unique opportunity to study various youth scenarios by mobilizing five systematically and methodically conducted studies pertaining to youth and children's everyday life experiences in modern CAC countries. The strikingly insignificant references to the region's youth in serious and critical debates about youth and children are a recurrent theme in all the contributions in this section. As Mariya Levitanus describes it, paucity of sources on childhood in the region was consistent prior to the region's encounters with the imperial Russia and later when the Soviet Union turned these countries into the Soviet Socialist Republics. With research interest to children and child rearing growing in the socialist era, it focused on the imperial center of Russia and the European part of the USSR, leaving behind its peripheral Southern territories. As a result, today the discipline of childhood studies is nonexistent, while research on childhood is limited to ethnographies of childhood rituals and customs. Aysel Sultan, Doris Bühler-Niederberger and Nigar Nasrullayeva echo the reckoning about the gap in the literature around child rearing, children's voices and their own understanding of subjective well-being. Acuteness of the necessity to urgently address this gap evolves from the considerations that after three decades of transition, economic crisis of 2008, COVID-19 pandemic, climate change, the ongoing war in Ukraine present a mix of old and new challenges for improving the lives of children and youth. These predicaments have and will continue affecting youth and children disproportionately. Yet, it would be unfair not to mention the 2022 special issue in the Journal of Child Indicators Research on Foundations of Children's and Youth's Well-being in Azerbaijan and Kyrgyzstan, edited by Hunner-Kreisel and coeditors. The authors focus on two countries, Azerbaijan and Kyrgyzstan, to discover various sources of influences on children's well-being with a shared thread of arguments centering upon dysfunctions within the countries' state-funded social infrastructure. Editors there posited that the interactions among such institutions as the family, the state and international human rights interventions form important impacts for the well-being and welfare of youth and children, and these observations were generalizable to the areas beyond the said geographic regions (Hunner-Kreisel et al., 2022). From this special issue we learned about several current challenges in the region. One was that the international discourse on children's welfare and the local social policies were often in discord with each other. The commitments made in international treaties did not align with the realities and practicalities of the various local circumstances and institutions. Second, the youth and children having the right to participate in society and needing protection were almost never consulted about how they can best access them (Hunner-Kreisel et al., 2022). Third, in understanding childhood and youth development in these two countries, relationships between the family and the state must be questioned on such parameters as “formal and informal education, questions of mobility and space, normality, and deviation from it through children's and young people's social and cultural practices, institutional welfare, social and health policies, and their problematizations including questions of socially ordered (power) relations according to class, gender and generation” (p. 1134). The special issue showed how interactions between patriarchal social institutions and contemporary families tended to discard youth's well-being as a value. In this subsection of the Handbook, we extend these authors' scholarship to build more knowledge about how young people in CAC countries themselves actively interact with what they see as oppressive and cope with adversities asserting their own resilient capacities and agency in distinct contexts and conditions. It must be understood as one reads the chapters in this section, that in the countries we are examining, following the collapse of the Soviet Union, deinstitutionalization and erosion of state-funded social services shifted the responsibility of social reproduction from the state to families (Huseynli, 2018) to provide care for children, the sick and the elderly. Bearing in mind the conditions of malfunctioning welfare state, decaying social and physical infrastructure, unemployment and insufficient financial resources, this placed a considerable burden on families and women in particular. Indeed, the historical backdrop in which we invite you to contemplate the questions we are posing is complex and multifaceted. Briefly speaking, this kaleidoscope necessarily incorporates postimperial collective trauma exacerbated by political uncertainty and instability, revivalist national ideology and ethnic identity formation policies riddled with traditionalization of gender norms and hierarchized gender order, valorization of patriarchy, Islamization of social norms and everyday practices, corruption, labor migration, but also globalization, urbanization, international humanitarian presence and a notable discourse of a democratic vector of development (Kim, 2022a, 2022b). Nonetheless, this section's geographic focus rationale extends beyond filling a gap in the childhood literature on the peripheral regions like the CAC countries. We offer a valuable research standpoint from which we explore childhood experiences by adopting an epistemological approach to speak from the standpoint of those on whose behalf research is conducted. It is our position that any talk about inequality, poverty and injustices cannot be fully grasped without an epistemological turn to a bottom-up approach in which the silenced ones can occupy an agentic standpoint from which our knowledge and understandings are derived from. This contrasts itself from the more classic decorum of scholarly process, one in which dominant theories inform conceptualization of inquiries and shape the findings in terms of the categories inherent to these theories (Smith, 1987, 2005). Contextualizing Contributions This section begins with the contribution by Mariya Levitanus who reports on queer childhood in Kazakhstan and, specifically, on the cultural production of queer childhood narratives. She pays attention to the notion of silence around nonconforming sexuality and the impacts this silence has on queer-identifying Kazakh youth. Quite in the spirit of this handbook, Mariya incorporates her analysis about youth's own contestation of social pressures and refusal to play along with their relegated role of what she calls an “impossible subject.” She notes the dire absence of queer childhood studies in the region and offers to bridge this gap by moving beyond the ethnocentric and heteronormative perspective of childhood in Kazakhstan. Next is a chapter by Ekaterina Chicherina whose analysis centers on migration aspirations among the teenagers in Kyrgyzstan. Drawing upon 14 interviews with adolescent participants living in Kyrgyzstan, she reveals predominance of out-migration in the narratives for future among these young Kyrgyz citizens. They seek to remove themselves from the Kyrgyzstan's unsatisfactory education and employment opportunities. Interestingly, Ekaterina's findings illustrate that their individual mobility desires have a rather collective nature and underpinning, such that she labels them as “the collective project of the family.” Personal life trajectories are embedded in the interests and expectations of their families and shaped by what is considered best for their kinship. In children's own mental schema of adulthood, their success is defined in terms of their ability to provide care to their parents and siblings – something that only becomes possible if they live and work outside of Kyrgyzstan. Conflicts emerge when parental wishes collide with young people's own imagined lifestyles. This contestation becomes a site for them to overcome ambivalences and establish their own agency, including adapting and transforming their aspirations for the future. Aysel Sultan, Doris Bühler-Niederberger and Nigar Nasrullayeva's chapter on Azerbaijani children's smartphone use unravels the moderating role of the device on the quality of interactions among generations. Their findings are impressive in, for example, showing how smartphones mediate enactment of different identities in children, including those of a “responsible child” and how smartphone use can both reinforce and disrupt familial solidarity. The authors move further into confident demonstration of how the use of smartphones can help children to reestablish and renegotiate generational relations and facilitate generationing. This happens as a function of smartphones' affordability to foster shifting of social boundaries, norms, expectations and needs of parents and children in new ways and spaces. Notably, this contribution boasts an innovative approach to the modern study of childhood, the sociomaterial approach, which allows for a new understanding of children's agency as distributed among human and nonhuman forces and its inherently relational nature. This is followed by a chapter on children at the threshold between childhood and youth in Türkiye. Türkiye is also a mainly Muslim country of Asia and it is very present in Central Asian countries, with the offer of schools, universities, consumer goods, and accordingly it plays an important role in the migration plans of young Central Asians. In addition, there is a certain linguistic proximity because the majority of the inhabitants in the three countries of Central Asia/Caucasus speak Turkic languages. Türkiye is sometimes seen as a “between country” (reference?), a bridge between Europe and Asia. But it is also true for this country – with a conflict-ridden history and present – that large groups of adolescents are affected by the numerous unresolved political and social problems in the country and that the scientific study of these problems has only gained momentum in recent years. Aytüre Türkyilmaz provides more detailed information on the achievements and gaps of childhood research in Türkiye in her chapter. The pubescents Aytüre studied are striving to expand the scope of action in their rather hierarchically structured families. They are partially successful in this, via a skillful “trust management” that they engage in. At other points, they have to or want to give in, in order to prevent their relationships with their parents from becoming too conflictual. Lastly, Elena Kim takes us back to Kyrgyzstan to examine nebere aluu, an intergenerational child-rearing setting of informal kinship fosterage wherein grandparents adopt their first grandchild to raise as their own. Elena is concerned with the contemporary iteration of nebere aluu from the perspectives of the grandparents themselves, responding to the opaqueness of their roles in this practice in media and scarce scholarly sources. Holding their standpoint central to the inquiry, Elena discusses the phenomenon as reflective of a destabilizing social, economic and political context of contemporary Kyrgyzstan, in which the practice acquires unique social significance and reinforces intergenerational care and continuity allowing for reconciliation and solidarity among diverse family members. Elena illuminates grandparents' voices to unfold grandmothers' own grappling with generational and gender asymmetries as they raise the children and expect reciprocation of care and gratitude in the future. Building upon their higher status of authority these participants partake in and perpetuate the power relations imposed on them but simultaneously enhance solidarity and mobilize support for the benefit of the younger generations. In compiling these five chapters in this section, we seek to provide our audience with a reflective reading of the dynamic connections between contemporary social transformations in Central and Western Asia and childhood/youth experiences of everyday lives from the intergenerational and relational lens. We believe that we are offering enough material for you to ponder upon the questions of specifying the diverse experiences of people we study from the vantage point of local and global dynamic processes and transformations posing causal consequences in shaping children's and youth's life opportunities and entering into communication with them. We hope that this section can be used to establish a possible conceptual frame to widen and foster a locally relevant and theoretically sophisticated childhood and youth study in Central and Western Asia. References Bhat, 2018 Bhat, M. A. (2018). The sociology of Central Asian youth. Choice, constraints, risk. Routledge. Hunner-Kreisel et al., 2022 Hunner-Kreisel, C. , Bühler-Niederberger, D. , & Sultan, A. (2022). Foundations of well-being in children's and youth's everyday lives in Azerbaijan and Kyrgyzstan. Child Indicators Research, 15, 1131–1138. https://doi.org/10.1007/s12187-022-09933-5 Huseynli, 2018 Huseynli, A. (2018). Implementation of deinstitutionalization of child care institutions in post-Soviet countries: The case of Azerbaijan. Child Abuse and Neglect, 76, 160–172. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.chiabu.2017.10.020 Kim, 2022a Kim, E. (2022a). Competing discourses in the child protection system in Kyrgyzstan: Implications for redressing gender violence against girls. Child Indicators Research, 15, 1209–1232. https://doi.org/10.1007/s12187-021-09900-6 Kim, 2022b Kim, E. (2022b). The global ruling of local crisis intervention. An institutional ethnography of anti-violence work in Kyrgyzstan. Violence Against Women, 28(2), 593–616. https://doi.org/10.1177/1077801220985933 Smith, 1987 Smith, D. (1987). The everyday world as problematic: A feminist sociology. University of Toronto Press. Smith, 2005 Smith, D. (2005). Institutional ethnography: A sociology for people. AltaMira Press/Rowman and Littlefield. Book Chapters Prelims Introduction Section One – Introduction Childhood on a Modern Drive: Growing up in East Asia Chapter 1 Can Subaltern Children Speak? What China’s Children of Migrants Say About Mobility, Inequality and Agency Chapter 2 Emotional Dimensions of Transnational Education: Parent–Child Relationships of the Chinese “Parachute Generation” in the United States Chapter 3 Fluid Childhoods: Chinese Migrants' Descendants Growing Up Transnationally Chapter 4 Transformations of Early Childhood in Japan: From Free Play to Extended Education Section Two – Introduction Multiplicity and Fundamental Inequality of Childhoods in South Asia Chapter 5 Return Migration, Parenting and the Subcontinent: Parents and Youths' Perspectives of Life in India Chapter 6 Pluralising Indian Childhood: Children's Experiences and Adult–Child Relations in Urban and Rural Contexts Chapter 7 Childhood Construction: Intergenerational Relations in the Afghan Refugee Community Living in Pakistan Section Three – Introduction Living as a Child in Azerbaijan, Kazakhstan, Kyrgyzstan and Türkiye: Navigating Between Solidarity, Collective Pressures and Kinship Support in the Times of Disruption Chapter 8 ‘I Thought I'd Kill Myself When I Grew Up’: Queer Childhood Narratives in Kazakhstan Chapter 9 Adolescents' Migration Aspirations in Kyrgyzstan: A Migration Project as a ‘Collective Project’ of the Family Chapter 10 Sociomaterial Analysis of Azerbaijani Children’s Smartphone Use: Generational Ordering Through User-Technology Interactions Chapter 11 Türkiye – Negotiating More Adulthood in an ‘In-between’ Country Chapter 12 Grandparenting the Firstborn in Central Asia: Exploring the “Nebere Aluu” Practice Section Four – Introduction Childhood and Youth in Southeast Asia: Confronting Diversity and Social Change Chapter 13 Parenthood Versus Childhood: Young People's Generational Rebellion in Thailand Chapter 14 Refusing the Mobility Imperative Among the Left-Behind Generation in the Northern Philippines Chapter 15 Social Relatedness and Forenaming in ‘Mixed’ Families: Valuing Children of Filipino-Belgian Couples Chapter 16 “In This Way My Parents Could Really Develop.” Individualized Interdependence in Viet-German Families Index

The mixed-methods study examines institutions of second-chance education, with an interest in the problems and success chances of these institutions. The fact that the age-categorical logic that characterizes the educational system is partially suspended in the second educational pathway allows us, at least to some extent, to ask questions that the social sciences have hardly asked so far with regard to age. We ask (1) to what extent it is possible to break through age categorization in second-chance education at the level of institutional rules and everyday practices; (2) to what extent it is aggravating for the individuals concerned to be "out of sync" in an age-conscious society and in its particularly age-oriented educational system, i.e., to graduate massively late; (3) what learners' understanding of their own age is at such an institution and to what extent they perceive a discrepancy with the institution's expectations.

In this contribution, we study the transition to adolescence as part of societies’ age status system. Based on quantitative and qualitative data collected from 11- to 15-years-olds in Germany, Turkey and Kyrgyzstan, we show how this age status transition is actively negotiated between teenagers and their parents. Fundamental inequalities between the age groups are identified and remain central in intersection with further status dimensions such as gender and the context of growing up. Being a child appears as a “master status” which can hardly be compensated by the further status affiliations of individuals.

This article focuses on young people between 18 and around 30 in Germany returning to school after dropping out or finishing their education at a lower level than they are now striving for. The facilities they attend provide what is called a “second-chance education”; the possibility of upgrading their school-leaving certificate at a later stage. However, the curricula and school regulations of the secondary schools apply in these institutions. Therefore, despite their age, students must meet the expectations placed on secondary school students. Six focus group discussions show how students cope with what they consider a contradiction: institutional requirements and their own perception of age. The students' interpretations and strategies are analyzed in light of Erving Goffman’s concepts of role conflict and role distance. The findings indicate that such education programs need to be better adapted to emerging adults and offer clues as to how they might do so.

What does it mean to be a (female) child in the city of Baku, Azerbaijan? How can we critically interpret the girls’ understandings of well-being considering different forms of compliance with unequal social orders? What conclusions may be drawn from understandings of well- being about the nature of welfare state structures and there-in children’s specific positioning? To answer this question, we conducted qualitative interviews with 13 girls during their various leisure activities. The study shows that parents and in particular mothers are children’s key reference persons, while there are hardly any spaces the girls can explore or reference persons outside their immediate families. The article reconstructs how the 13 girls view the social practices of adults and how they relate these practices to their own perceptions of well-being. We inductively reconstruct different forms of compliance, i.e., the extent to which social practices are consistent with the symbolic representations (norms and values) of a specific social order and specific relations of power and hegemony. The analysis shows how girls make differentiations between adult social practices based on their knowledge orders: some practices they justify through a sort of complicity with adultist structures (competent compliance), others they must accept due to their own vulnerabilities as children (compliance and constitutive vulnerability), still others irritate, are rejected, or sabotaged (fragile compliance).

The contributions in this special section deal with growing up in two post-Soviet states – Azerbaijan and Kyrgyzstan. Each contribution has a different priority on the variety of forces that shape the wellbeing of children and youth as structured in the interaction between the efforts and abilities of their families, the state, as well as social and health policies in both national and cross-national contexts. In this special section, we understand infrastructure as places and institutions for day-care, education, leisure, social and health services. The papers identify barriers that children and young people encounter as they attempt to realize their potential and wishes in a variety of social, educational, and health contexts. These obstacles have something in common: they are rooted in a deficit of public and social infrastructure that is evident in these two states (European Commission, 2011; Sardarova, 2020; OECD, 2018; UNICEF, 2015).

Die mixed-methods Studie untersucht Einrichtungen des zweiten Bildungswegs, mit dem Interesse an Problemen und Erfolgschancen dieser Institutionen. Im zweiten Bildungsweg wird die alterskategoriale Logik, die das Bildungssystem kennzeichnet, teilweise außer Kraft gesetzt. Das erlaubt uns, zumindest im Ansatz Fragen zu stellen, wie sie die Sozialwissenschaften bisher im Hinblick auf das Alter kaum gestellt haben. Wir fragen (1), inwieweit es gelingt, die Alterskategorisierung im zweiten Bildungsweg auf der Ebene der institutionellen Regeln und der alltäglichen Praktiken zu durchbrechen; (2) inwiefern es für die betroffenen Individuen erschwerend ist, in einer altersbewussten Gesellschaft und in dessen besonders altersorientierten Bildungswesen außerhalb des „Taktes“ zu sein, d. h. einen Abschluss mit massiver Verspätung zu erwerben; (3) welches Verständnis des eigenen Alters die Studierenden an einer solchen Institution haben und inwiefern sie eine Diskrepanz wahrnehmen zu den Erwartungen der Institution.

Einführung in den Heft-Schwerpunkt "Bildung als Taktgeber des Lebenslaufs"