Rubio Hormazabal, Pavel; (2025) Reimagining Protection in Children’s Everyday Life: An Ethnography in Southern Chile. Doctoral thesis (Ph.D), UCL (University College London).

Text Pavel RH Thesis Reimagining Protection.pdf - Accepted Version Access restricted to UCL open access staff until 1 March 2026. Download (3MB)

Abstract

Hegemonic understandings of protection in relation to children are profoundly linked to views of their individual development as well as charitable, human rights and resource management frameworks, and are often depicted as operating in institutionalised spaces beyond daily-life encounters. Using an analytical framework based on generational orderings, intersectional and new materialist perspectives, I undertook an ethnography with children, their main carers, and professionals in a small city in Southern Chile, exploring three main research questions: How are children engaging in protection in daily life interactions in this city? How does protection operate through understandings of the social position of childhood? And how are competing modes of protection at work, with what effects? My fieldwork unfolded immediately after a social uprising, and during a pandemic, in territories strongly marked by ongoing forms of colonialism intertwined with classed, gendered, raced and generational distinctions. I demonstrate how institutional interventions, commonly known as ‘child protection’, as well as more informal protection encounters, are dependent upon complex intersectional positionings used, imposed and created through what are generally viewed as ‘protection measures’. I contribute to literature in the field by showing how childhood and motherhood lie at the core of tensions and conflicts about how protection occurs in daily life settings. Taking an everyday perspective allows us to interrogate current forms of protection, inviting us to expand the boundaries of actors recognised as involved in protection, including the active protagonism of children in these encounters. It also prompts us to re-imagine, in a speculative exercise, what multiple forms of protection co-exist. Thus, in conclusion, I move towards an understanding of protection not restricted to children, institutions, nor exclusively human actors, and call for situational perspectives to be applied as a step towards protection encounters with less oppressive effects.

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