Care, Vulnerability and Trust In Times of Global Uncertainty: Perspectives on Marginalized Childhoods

Global crises—including war, displacement, widening social inequalities, and climate change—profoundly shape children’s lives. Although children are portrayed in public discourse as particularly vulnerable, the social conditions that produce vulnerability, as well as their caregiving and trusting relationships, often remain overlooked. A sociology of childhood perspective shifts attention to processes of vulnerabilization, generational orders, and transnational inequalities, asking how children exercise agency in precarious contexts, engage in care practices, and negotiate trust in others, institutions, and infrastructures.

This session explores the intersections of care, vulnerability, and trust within the field of childhood research. Drawing on feminist theories (Butler 2009; Fineman 2008; Mackenzie et al. 2014), vulnerability is understood as an ontological yet relational condition that is unevenly produced and distributed across generations, class, gender, migration, ethnicity, and global power relations. Care is approached as a socially and transnationally organized practice shaped by unequal access to resources and responsibilities (Tronto 1993). Trust, conceptualized as “accepted vulnerability” (Baier 1986), is understood as a key condition for agency, belonging, and future-making under conditions of uncertainty. Yet care and trust are often fragile and contested, particularly in contexts of migration, displacement, poverty, and institutional exclusion.

The session invites theoretical, empirical, and methodological contributions from the sociology of childhood, care research, and migration and inequality studies. The contributions will explore how global crises shape children’s lives, forms of care, and relationships of trust, and how global and decolonial perspectives on childhood can enrich the sociological understanding of contemporary social transformation processes.