Owning cared for children

Sabine Jørgensen

In conversation people are generally treated as having the rights to hold and articulate knowledge about their own experiences and as being more knowledgeable about their relatives, friends, job, etc. relative to others. In that regard parents are generally treated as having the right and responsibility to know more about their own children than non-family members. However, when children are placed in out-of-home care, this epistemic authority is challenged since the access to everyday life experiences with the child is limited and shared with professional carers or foster parents. In this presentation I explore the ways in which professionals and parents to children placed in out-of-home care engage in negotiations about the rights and responsibilities to claim knowledge about the child. The focus is on relational implications of the way epistemic authority is managed in the conversation and the consequences of the management of such rights and responsibilities for the accomplishment of conversational activities and institutional goals.