"A rich and multidimensional portrait of the historical and actual forces that govern the child in various corners of today's world." --Kenneth Hultqvist, Stockholm Institute of Education "Through their new understanding of the embedded systems of cultural reasoning governing the state, this intellectual tool may influence social and educational policy and practice for decades." --Louis F. Miron, Educational Policy Studies, University of Illinois "This collection performs important conceptual work by crossing and combining fields that are all too often kept apart: child studies, education, and social policy. Using a variety of disciplinary approaches, the authors show convincingly how policymakers in all of these domains use children as a wedge issue in efforts to reform families and restructure welfare states. By ranging across societies and over time, the articles map the impact of cross-cultural exchanges and trace the consolidation of global patterns of governance. Taken as a whole, the volume offers a fresh perspective on governmentality and the power/knowledge nexus; unique in its ambition, it has the potential to revise thinking in all of the fields it addresses." --Sonya Michel, Professor of American Studies and History, University of Maryland, author of Children's Interests / Mothers' Rights: The Shaping of America's Child Care Policy "Editors and international colleagues, Bloch, Holmlund, Moqvist and Popkewitz present in this collection a rich smorgasbord of critical views of topics all too infrequently explored.

Discourses, ideologies, research methodologies and theoretical perspectives are appropriately diverse in what amounts to a comprehensive reconceptualization of education's private-public realms. Central to all contributions are thematics and relations of governing and government, of care and welfare, of reason and knowledge, of freedom and control. This is exciting reading with something for everyone who seriously considers reform." -- Lynda Stone, Professor, Philosophy of Education, University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill "This book is an important contribution to our understanding of the effects of globalization on welfare policies and the education of children in the early 2000s. It highlights both the main assumptions of today's discourses that travel and traverse nations and the immense variety in the way these are perceived and transcribed in different national contexts. Although there is a global child, it certainly has many faces. The book provides a rich and multidimensional portrait of the historical and actual forces that govern the child in various corners of today's world." -- Kenneth Hultqvist, Professor, Stockholm Institute of Education "This book offers conceptually powerful and historically grounded tools for scholars, policy analysts, and educators working in the broad arena of global studies in social welfare and education.

Co-editors Bloch, Holmlund, Moqvist, and Popkewitz and their contributors provide sophisticated theoretical language and methodologies to aid in the understanding of the rapidly changing relations among knowledge/power and the state, both in its social as well as its 'non social' forms. Through their new understanding of hte embedded systems fo cultural reasoning governing the state, this intellectual tool may influence social and educational policy and practice for decades." -- Louis F. Miron, Professor of Educational Policy Studies, University of Illinois, Urbana-Champaign.