Children as Interactional Brokers of Care

Abstract

Bringing together ethnographic approaches to childhood, linguistic anthropology, and relational–feminist perspectives on care, this review focuses on the role of children as interactional brokers of care, a role that has been underappreciated. Building from the premise that, through language, children perform a fundamental form of other-oriented care—that of mediating another person's ability to express themselves—this review explores the material, political, moral, and affective dimensions of children's interactional care work. Attention to the interactional–relational aspects of children's caregiving shows the extent to which children are involved in facilitating the circulation of care and enabling community care networks, and it opens up new possibilities for how we conceptualize care: It illuminates the processes through which care practices are organized, negotiated, and enacted at the intersection of the local and the global; it reveals care as a reciprocal, distributed interactional achievement; and it helps us transcend dichotomies that have characterized scholarly thinking about care.