Challenging empowerment: AIDS-affected South African children and the need for a multi-level relational approach.
Critics of empowerment have highlighted the concept's mutability, focus on individual transformation, one-dimensionality and challenges of operationalisation. Relating these critiques to children's empowerment raises new challenges. Drawing on scholarship on children's subjecthood and exercise of power, alongside empirical research with children affected by AIDS, I argue that empowerment envisaged as individual self-transformation and increased capacity to act independently offers little basis for progressive change. Rather it is essential to adopt a relational approach that recognises the need to transform power relationships at multiple levels. This analysis has implications for our wider understanding of empowerment in the 21st century.
Brunel University, UK.
Nicola
N
Ansell
D000163:Acquired Immunodeficiency Syndrome / Q000523:psychology*; D002648:Child; D006801:Humans; D011209:Power, Psychological; D012933:Social Identification; D062487:Social Marginalization / Q000523:psychology; D013019:South Africa; D014171:Transients and Migrants / Q000523:psychology
AIDS; children; empowerment; relationality; theory