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The concern of this article is that some prevailing theoretical dualisms in child research may be traced back to a split between time and space, and the argument is that securing a temporal as well as a spatial dimension in the research methodology may allow to transgress such dualisms. The article analyses how an insufficient account of the temporal dimension in different theoretical moments in childhood studies has led to theoretical dualisms between agency and development and between change and continuity in the process of subject formation. Confronting these theoretical dualisms with a qualitative longitudinal study of children indicates that the two sides of each dualism may be understood as interdependent dimensions that co‐constitute subjectivity. The article suggests that temporal and spatial dimensions may be easier to integrate if they are conceived of as two interacting temporal modes, one connected to linear time (the arrow of time) and one connected to non‐linear processes (significations in the space of the present). Theoretically, this is elaborated on with a hermeneutic interpretation of Henri Bergson and Freud's thinking about time and space.

Young women have taken up new subject positions in a historical period when the subject of modernity has been declared dead. Subject positions have been far from selfevident either in the cultural context, or in the young women themselves, a fact that may, paradoxically, have helped them produce modern reflexive subjectivities with greater ease. It has been more necessary for contemporary girls than for boys to ask who they are and who they want to become. By gradually changing the norms for how gender, body or sexuality can be represented in public space, by reframing sexuality and morality in public as well as private, young women over the last three generations have simultaneously carved spaces for new subjectivities for women that are not reducible to gender.Thus, the 'work of culture' has also been a 'work of subjectivity'. General claims of what the processes of modernization entail need specification, not only in relation to gender and other particular identities, but also in relation to societal contexts and to lived life. The new subjectivities are contextualized as 'made in Scandinavia' as well as discussed in an ethical perspective as a new form for 'relational individualism'.

Equality versus difference between girls and boys has been a returning issue in Scandinavian educational debates en this century. Until the turn of the century gendered differentiation was an explicit goal of education. While this lost favour in the period after the Second World War, when the political ideologiy of child centered development and learning gained dominance, many of the assumptions and practices constitutive of gendered difference remained remarkably intact.

Most social and cultural researchers emphasize the way people use cultural concepts to organize their social world and to constitute themselves and others in meaningful ways. In this article, this is taken one step further through taking into account the way that such cultural constructions are animated and loaded with personal meaning and emotions that stem from specific psycho-biographies. Making use of object-relational theory in general, and Chodorow's theory of 'power of feeling' in particular, the authors analyse the self-talk of two young women, positioning themselves in a 'modern' and 'postmodern' discourse respectively, relating these discursive positions to the generational context in which they seem to have evolved. The aim is to contribute to a more concrete and historically situated understanding of subjectivities as ongoing processes interweaving both cultural demands and personal constructions, which always involve emotional meaning.