The ACYIG is delighted to present our latest Spotlight on Scholarship:

A Life in State Care: Yusuke’s Story

Chapman, C. (2025). Yusuke’s story: Journey, precarity, and coming of age in care. Ethnography, 0(0). https://doi.org/10.1177/14661381251317819

In principle, child protection services aim to safeguard children’s health and well-being.  Yet, interventions may often involve a paradoxical practice: child-family separation. Removing a child from an unsafe environment makes sense in the eyes of authorities, but in a relational sense, it is children whose social lives are displaced and remade. Children are blameless, yet they are the ones to be separated from their home and community. This context offers an insightful space to learn about and appreciate personhood, care, and welfare state politics.

In Japan, the use of residential care institutions is relatively high and a staple of the child protection system. In Yusuke’s Story, I chart my encounters with a young person living in group care, Yusuke, and how their journey through the social protection system indexes how displacement, resocialization, and normativity come together to create a complicated political subjectivity. [Read more]