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Third World Girl as an Educative Spectacle

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Encyclopedia of Educational Philosophy and Theory

Introduction

Children and youth have long been bodies in/upon which adult hopes and anxieties about political-economic futures rest. This social category mobilizes moral panics, articulation of social problems, and respective solutions (Lesko 2001; Katz 2008) – these hopes and anxieties manifest in image form. Accordingly, childhood has become a spectacle, “a site of accumulation and commodification – in whose name much is done” (Katz 2008, p. 5). Following Cindy Katz, in her analysis of Western media, Sarah Projansky (2014) contends that “spectacularization is a discursive and economic strategy” of the twenty-first century that is acutely applicable to girls. By this, she means that girls have turned into visual objects on display, as spectacular and/or scandalous, which results in the surveillance and discipline of everyday girls. The bodies of girls in and from the global South circulate as a cultural form, positioned as a vector of development with the greatest potential, yet...

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Correspondence to Karishma Desai .

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Desai, K. (2016). Third World Girl as an Educative Spectacle. In: Peters, M. (eds) Encyclopedia of Educational Philosophy and Theory. Springer, Singapore. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-981-287-532-7_88-1

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  • DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/978-981-287-532-7_88-1

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