Disputing Discipline: Child Protection, Punishment, and Piety in Zanzibar Schools
Rutgers University Press 2021Disputing Discipline explores how global and local children’s rights activists’ efforts within the school systems of Zanzibar to eradicate corporal punishment are changing the archipelago’s moral and political landscape. Through an equal consideration of child and adult perspectives, Fay explores what child protection means for Zanzibari children who have to negotiate their lives at the intersections of universalized and local "child protection" aspirations while growing up to be pious and responsible adults. Through a visual and participatory ethnographic approach that foregrounds young people’s voices through their poetry, photographs, and drawings, paired with in-depth Swahili language analysis, Fay shows how children’s views and experiences can transform our understanding of child protection. This book demonstrates that to improve interventions, policy makers and practitioners need to understand child protection beyond a policy sense of the term and respond to the reality of children’s lives to avoid unintentionally compromising, rather than improving, young people’s well-being.
Endorsements for Disputing Discipline
"Disputing Discipline insightfully examines the tensions produced between global, decontextualized child protection policies and vernacular practices of care including Muslim children’s relational achievement of social and moral personhood in Zanzibar. By arguing for the need to decolonize the child protection apparatus in Zanzibar, it makes an important addition to existing studies that interrogate the hegemony of universal certitudes, like children’s rights, not to debunk these, but to better fulfill their assurances."
– Sarada Balagopalan, author of Inhabiting ‘Childhood’: Children, Labour and Schooling in Postcolonial India
"Disputing Discipline is an important intervention in universalist children’s rights discourse. Fay’s nuanced and sensitive treatment of a highly polemic topic demonstrates what happens when development initiatives fail to reckon with religious and cultural specificities. This book clearly and compellingly articulates the need to decolonize international child protection efforts, if they hope to succeed. Scholars and practitioners alike take heed."
– Kristen Cheney, author of Crying for Our Elders: African Orphanhood in the Age of HIV and AIDS
Watch the BOOK LAUNCH of Disputing Discipline at the Research Center Normative Orders/University of Frankfurt and with a comment by Dr. Claudia Seymour (Graduate Institute, Geneva/SOAS)
Reviews of Disputing Discipline
“Fay suggests that decolonisation is possible only if the interventions are grounded in the local realities and consider the voices of children. Critical engagement with the book will allow practitioners to not only question international child protection programs but also help in aligning these interventions with the local needs and expectations.”
– Additti Munshi, Ohio State University, in International Journal of Community and Social Development, 2022, 4(3): 362-363.
“Despite the challenges of investigating such a sensitive topic, Fay manages to write a nuanced critique of child protection and discipline in Zanzibar. (…) From a Childhood Studies perspective, the brilliancy of the book relies on methods that allowed children to utter opinions despite their deference to elders. (…) Disputing Discipline adds to a fertile discussion on decolonisation in both Childhood and Development Studies. It is also an excellent example of the importance of foregrounding children in social research. The book showcases the shortcomings of global initiatives targeting children, and therefore warrants its relevancy for both researchers and practitioners. The combination of traditional and innovative methods in this ethnography makes the book equally relevant for Anthropologists aiming to integrate children in their research.”
– Thaís de Carvalho, University of East Anglia, in Children and Society, 2023, 00: 1-2.