SOC08017 2022 Childhood 3: Multiple Childhoods

This module aims to build on understandings introduced at earlier stages in the programme by exploring and theorising the multiplicity of childhoods beyond universalist or West-centric conceptualisations.  It combines critical sociological and anthropological perspectives on childhood to examine ongoing debates around bio-social dualisms. It further explores the implications of these perspectives for contemporary children’s everyday lives, cultural activities and participation, both in western (WEIRD) countries and in the majority world.  Through reading, case studies, reflection and discussion, students will be encouraged to consider children’s lives in context, and the importance of interactions between children and adults.  

The module informs practice in Early Years Education by enabling students to examine their own point of views and perceptions, challenge their ‘truths’ and maybe reach new perspectives. The emerging ECCE professionals will develop an informed understanding of culturally diverse approaches to growing up in order to support the cultural and social well-being of children and young people they may be working with, to support parents and inform policy in terms of cultural diversity, anti-racism,children’s agency and empowerment. They will also explore children's intra-actions in networks and assemblages involving human and non-human actors.

Reimagining Childhood Studies incites, and provides a forum for, dialogue and debate about the direction and impetus for critical and global approaches to social-cultural studies of children and their childhoods. Set against the backdrop of a quarter century of research and theorising arising out of the new social studies of childhood, each of the 13 original contributions strives to extend the conceptual reach and relevance of the work being undertaken in the dynamic and expanding field of childhood studies in the 21st century. Internationally renowned contributors engage with contemporary scholarship from both the global north and south to address questions of power, inequity, reflexivity, subjectivities and representation from poststructuralist, posthumanist, postcolonial, feminist, queer studies and political economy perspectives. In so doing, the book provides a deconstructive and reconstructive dialogue, offering a renewed agenda for future scholarship. The book also moves the insights of childhood studies beyond the boundaries of this field, helping to mainstream insights about children's everyday lives from this burgeoning area of study and avoid the dangers of marginalizing both children and scholarship about childhood. This carefully curated collection extends beyond critiques of specified research arenas, traditions, concepts or approaches to serve as a bridge in the transformation of childhood studies at this important juncture in its history.

Brings sophisticated but accessible theoretical tools together with ethnographic data from real schools Demonstrates the inseparability of categories such as gender, sexuality, race, ethnicity, class, ability, disability, special needs Develops tools for understanding the relationships between schools, subjectivities, and students as learners Works across national contexts to show the wide applicability of these tools Problematises narrow understandings of inclusion found in contemporary policy Explores a new politics for interrupting educational inequalities

This book takes an unrelenting look at the hidden worlds of young children's sexualities.

In this groundbreaking text, Youdell and Lindley bring together cutting-edge research from the fields of biology and social science to explore the complex interactions between the diverse processes which impact on education and learning. Transforming the way we think about our students, our classrooms, teaching and learning, Biosocial Education draws on advances in genetics and metabolomics, epigenetics, biochemistry and neuroscience, to illustrate how new understandings of how bodies function can and must inform educational theory, policy and everyday pedagogical practices. Offering detailed insight into new findings in these areas and providing a compelling account of both the implications and limits of this new-found knowledge, the text confronts the mechanisms of interaction between multiple biological and social factors, and explores how educators might mobilize these 'biosocial' influences to enhance learning and enable each child to attain educational success. By seeking out transdisciplinary and multi-factor answers to the question of how education works and how children learn, this book lays the foundations for a step-change in the way we approach learning. It is an essential read for researchers, teachers and practitioners involved in educational policy and practice at any level.

Enriched with anecdotes from ethnography and the daily media, this revised edition examines family structure, reproduction, profiles of children's caretakers, their treatment at different ages, their play, work, schooling, and transition to adulthood. The result is a nuanced and credible picture of childhood in different cultures, past and present.

Child Care and Culture examines parenthood, infancy, and early childhood in an African community, revealing patterns unanticipated by current theories of child development and raising provocative questions about the concept of "normal" child care. Comparing the Gusii people of Kenya with the American white middle class, the authors show how divergent cultural priorities create differing conditions for early childhood development. Combining the perspectives of social anthropology, pediatrics, and developmental psychology, the authors demonstrate how child care customs can be responsive to varied socioeconomic, demographic, and cultural conditions without inflicting harm on children. This text will be of interest to researchers in child development and anthropology.

Based on in-depth ethnographic research, this book examines the ways in which children and adults, from their different vantage-points in society, negotiate the "proper place" of children in both social and spatial terms.

In the vast anthropological literature devoted to hunter-gatherer societies, surprisingly little attention has been paid to the place of hunter-gatherer children. Children often represent 40 percent of hunter-gatherer populations, thus nearly half the population is omitted from most hunter-gatherer ethnographies and research. This volume is designed to bridge the gap in our understanding of the daily lives, knowledge, and development of hunter-gatherer children. The twenty-six contributors to Hunter-Gatherer Childhoods use three general but complementary theoretical approaches--evolutionary, developmental, cultural--in their presentations of new and insightful ethnographic data. For instance, the authors employ these theoretical orientations to provide the first systematic studies of hunter-gatherer children's hunting, play, infant care by children, weaning and expressions of grief. The chapters focus on understanding the daily life experiences of children, and their views and feelings about their lives and cultural change. Chapters address some of the following questions: why does childhood exist, who cares for hunter-gatherer children, what are the characteristic features of hunter-gatherer children's development and what are the impacts of culture change on hunter-gatherer child care? The book is divided into five parts. The first section provides historical, theoretical and conceptual framework for the volume; the second section examines data to test competing hypotheses regarding why childhood is particularly long in humans; the third section expands on the second section by looking at who cares for hunter-gatherer children; the fourth section explores several developmental issues such as weaning, play and loss of loved ones; and, the final section examines the impact of sedentism and schools on hunter-gatherer children. This pioneering volume will help to stimulate further research and scholarship on hunter-gatherer childhoods, thereby advancing our understanding of the way of life that characterized most of human history and of the processes that may have shaped both human development and human evolution. Barry S. Hewlett is professor of anthropology at Washington State University, Vancouver. Michael E. Lamb is professor of psychology in the social sciences, Cambridge University.

Rarely do science and literature come together in the same book. When they do -- as in Charles Darwin's On the Origin of Species, for example -- they become classics, quoted and studied by scholars and the general public alike. Margaret Mead accomplished this remarkable feat not once but several times, beginning with Coming of Age in Samoa. It details her historic journey to American Samoa, taken where she was just twenty-three, where she did her first fieldwork. Here, for the first time, she presented to the public the idea that the individual experience of developmental stages could be shaped by cultural demands and expectations. Adolescence, she wrote, might be more or less stormy, and sexual development more or less problematic in different cultures. The "civilized" world, she taught us had much to learn from the "primitive." Now this groundbreaking, beautifully written work as been reissued for the centennial of her birth, featuring introductions by Mary Pipher and by Mead's daughter, Mary Catherine Bateson.

Never shying away from the most pressing topics in the field, this book provides a multifaceted and extensive analysis of the study of children and childhood. Linking key concepts, themes and problems together, this text offers an interdisciplinary approach with its topical and timely case studies and illustrations which illuminate the latest research in the field. The book: Features a number of international case studies including children and military conflict, child migrants, children and networking sites, child trafficking, and children as consumers Includes questions which help you to make connections between topics and get you reflecting on your own childhood Is packed with engaging learning features including chapter aims, boxed sections, summaries and further reading suggestions

The second and fully revised edition of James and Prout's acclaimed seminal work on the study of childhood.

The Posthuman Childcombats institutionalised ageist practices in primary, early childhood and teacher education. Grounded in a critical posthumanist perspective on the purpose of education, it provides a genealogy of psychology, sociology and philosophy of childhood in which dominant figurations of child and childhood are exposed as positioning child as epistemically and ontologically inferior. Entangled throughout this book are practical and theorised examples of philosophical work with student teachers, teachers, other practitioners and children (aged 3-11) from South Africa and Britain. These engage arguments about how children are routinely marginalised, discriminated against and denied, especially when the child is also female, black, lives in poverty and whose home language is not English. The book makes a distinctive contribution to the decolonisation of childhood discourses. Underpinned by good quality picturebooks and other striking images, the book's radical proposal for transformation is to reconfigure the child as rich, resourceful and resilient through relationships with (non) human others, and explores the implications for literary and literacy education, teacher education, curriculum construction, implementation and assessment. It is essential reading for all who research, work and live with children.

When situated in the wider European context, 'the Irish family' has undergone a process of profound transformation and rapid change in very recent decades. Recent data cites a significant increase in one parent households and a high non-marital birth rate for instance alongside the emergence of cohabitation, divorce, same sex families and reconstituted families. At the same time, the majority of children in Ireland still live in a two-parent family based on marriage and the divorce rate in Ireland is comparatively lower than other European countries. 21st century family life is, in reality, characterised by continuity and change in the Irish context. This book seeks to understand, interpret and theorise family life in Ireland by providing a detailed analysis of historical change, demographic trends, fertility and reproduction, marriage, separation and divorce, sexualities, children and young people, class, gender, motherhood, intergenerational relations, grandparents, ethnicity, globalisation, technology and family practices. A comprehensive analysis of key developments and trends over the course of the twentieth and twenty-first centuries is provided.

Holt, L, Bowlby, S. and Lea, J. (2017) “Everyone knows me …. I sort of like move about”: The friendships and encounters of young people with Special Educational Needs in different school settings, Environment and Planning A, 49(6): 1-1378

 Lee, N. and Motzkau, J. ( Navigating the bio-politics of childhood Childhood 18(1) 7–19  

Prout A. (2011) Taking a Step Away from Modernity: Reconsidering the New Sociology of Childhood. Global Studies of Childhood. 2011;1(1):4-14.

 Ryan, K (2012) The new wave of childhood studies: Breaking the grip of bio-social dualism?Childhood 19(4):439-452  

Jane Merewether (2019) New materialisms and children’s outdoor environments: murmurative diffractions, Children's Geographies, 17:1, 105-117, DOI: 10.1080/14733285.2018.1471449