| Summary: |
The spaces of contemporary childhood at all scales from the body to the globe are withering in the global north under the corrosive effects of global economic restructuring, the heightened concern with security, and escalating privatization. Reclaiming the language of 'terror' to examine these effects and their entailments for children's everyday lives in an increasingly privatized public environment and evermore exposed private environment, I will look at the personal and ontological insecurity that arises from these broader issues to suggest that much of the mundane hypervigilance that increasingly characterizes daily life in the US can be traced to the insecurities provoked by 'globalization' and the deterioration of the social wage. I argue first that hypervigilance within the home--through such devices as 'nannycams,' child monitors, and alarm systems--parallels heightened security in the public environment, witnessed in such things as airport screening, desert camouflaged soldiers guarding urban public spaces, surveillance cameras, and all manner of fortressing; second that these measures simultaneously elide and mystify the real sources of insecurity, failing to redress them at all; and third that it is those underlying issues that most compromise the geographies of contemporary childhood and demand our attention.
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