Register now!

March 12-15, 2015 — Long Beach, CA
Hosted by California State University, Long Beach
Conference Hotel: Ayres Hotel Seal Beach

Keynote Speaker: Susan Terrio (Georgetown University)
Susan will speak about her widely touted research chronicling the experiences of undocumented children and youth in U.S. immigration custody, in advance of her new book Whose Child Am I? Unaccompanied, Undocumented Children in U.S. Immigration Custody, to be published by the University of California Press in May 2015.


See our Conferences page for more information about registration, lodging, paper & session submission, and special events!


 

 

Ebola Response & the Anthropology of Childhood

Eight Ways that Ebola Response Efforts can benefit from the Anthropology of Childhood

by Jean Hunleth

I peg myself as an anthropologist of childhood. I’m not trying to put myself in a box with this label. I like the label because it emphasizes my firm belief that we need to understand children’s perspectives to truly comprehend the problems in our world. I see value in paying attention to children’s perspectives on many social issues. Insert most news items and I’m thinking: How are children experiencing and responding to this issue? How would understanding children’s perspectives change our own perceptions and responses? In what ways can we best make sense of children’s experiences and talk with them about this issue? And so, when I receive my daily Google updates on “Ebola and children,” I can’t help but think that anthropologists of childhood should play a tremendous role in assisting organizations and funding agencies in their relief efforts aimed at children in the Ebola outbreak.

Population figures alone demand that we pay attention to children in the Ebola outbreak. Children under the age of 15 years old make up more than 40 percent of the population in each of the West African countries most heavily affected by Ebola- Liberia, Guinea, and Sierra Leone (Population Reference Bureau). Children have borne direct effects of the outbreak. UNICEF estimated that 2,542 children had been infected with Ebola by December 2014. More than 10,000 children have lost one or both parents. Even children who haven’t been directly impacted by Ebola experience Ebola in other ways: through public health protocols, humanitarian efforts, school closures, stories and rumors, to name just a few.

Photo by Melissa Minor Peters
Photo by Melissa Minor Peters

The urgency of humanitarian efforts to address children’s needs in Ebola-affected areas is unmistakable. However, the best ways to support children are not always self-evident. Sometimes the most self-evident interventions can cause more harm than good. For this reason, I have made a quick list of eight reasons why anthropologists of childhood should be involved in Ebola response efforts. Some of these are very general, and most researchers in the anthropology of childhood subscribe to them. Others are more particular. They come out of my research with children living through the tuberculosis and HIV epidemics in southern Africa and my reading of the anthropological research with children in Africa. Of course, there are many specifics I am also leaving out because Ebola is not tuberculosis or HIV and West Africa is not southern Africa. …read more at Jean Hunleth’s blog. 

Seeking new title suggestions for ACYIG Newsletter

In response to member feedback, we are enlisting suggestions for a new name for the ACYIG Newsletter. We are looking for a unique name that would be followed by the tagline, “A publication of the Anthropology of Children and Youth Interest Group.” Our intent is to professionalize the publication with a title that better reflects the peer-reviewed nature and high caliber of our authors’ work. We hope that the new name will embody the spirit and future direction of ACYIG, be indicative of our membership’s common goals, and provide name-recognition. We encourage submissions that are descriptive, memorable, and intuitive.

If your suggestion is selected, we will award you a $100 gift certificate to a local or online bookstore of your choice. Please submit your entry at https://acyig.americananthro.org/newsletter/survey-name-acyigs-newsletter/ by March 6th. The new title will be announced at the 2015 ACYIG Annual Meeting on March 12-15, and implemented in our October 2015 issue.

CFP: The Anxious Publics of Literature for Young People

Call for Papers for a panel at the MLA 2016

 

The readership of children’s and young adult literature has always been diverse. Yet 2014 witnessed an explosion of anxious discourse surrounding adult interest in the genre. Ruth Graham’s polemical Slate essay “Against YA: Adults Should Be Embarrassed to Read Children’s Books” spawned an array of meditations on children’s literature and cultural narratives of “growing up,” including pieces by A.O. Scott in The New York Times Magazine and Christopher Beha in The New Yorker. Together, these articles seem to bespeak a “cultural anxiety of immaturity,” to borrow a phrase from Beverly Lyon Clark, who has traced the prehistory of this phenomenon in her book Kiddie Lit (2004). Continue reading CFP: The Anxious Publics of Literature for Young People

Isla Mujeres Ethnographic Field School 2015

The Isla Mujeres Ethnographic Field School (I.F.S.) is now accepting applications for the Summer 2015 sessions.

Summer 2015 Research & Training on Isla Mujeres, Mexico

The Isla Mujeres Ethnographic Field School specializes in community based projects and trains students on how to conduct ethnographic research. Located on a small Mexican Caribbean island, much of the student research is focused on community needs. Some of our current areas of interest: Culture & Environment, Latin America & Caribbean, Medical Anthropology, Gender & Identity, Anthropology of Education, Childhood and Youth Studies, History, Space & Meaning, and Economic Development. There is a wide variety of subjects to research. In the past, students have conducted research on teenage pregnancy, HIV and Dengue Fever prevention, Catholic and Maya religion, Economic Development and tourism, Sea Turtle and Whale Shark conservation. For more information, please see our website: http://www.AnthroFieldSchool.com/

Two Fully-funded PhD Studentships at Oxford

Funded through TORCH | The Oxford Research Centre in the Humanities by the Andrew W. Mellon Foundation

For more information on these studentships: http://torch.ox.ac.uk/childhoodstudentships

Applicants are sought for two PhD (DPhil) studentships as part of an interdisciplinary project on ‘Childhood maltreatment and lifetime resilience’ at University of Oxford. One student will work in Faculty of History on ‘Child abuse and neglect in mid-twentieth-century Britain’. The other student will work in Department of Experimental Psychology on ‘Child maltreatment and psychopathology: an investigation of risk and resilience’.  Continue reading Two Fully-funded PhD Studentships at Oxford

Interrogating the Wave: Media Representations of African Migrant Youth

by Stephanie Maher

“Images are not just a particular kind of sign, but something like an actor on the historical stage, a presence or character endowed with legendary status, a history that parallels and participates in the stories we tell ourselves about our own evolution”– (W. J. T. Mitchell 1984, 504)

Media representations are powerful. Not only do they embody the appealing veneer of journalistic impartiality, which seems to objectively reflect world in unadulterated ways, but also they help to generate public opinion and thus create consensus when crafting and mobilizing particular policy responses.

Such an image-policy nexus is exemplified in the hyper-mediatized phenomenon of clandestine migration out of West Africa during 2006 and 2007. While the Western route was effectively crippled by the implementation of border controls and surveillance technologies, the images we see today of boat migrants leaving North African shores bear a striking similarity to those circulated nearly a decade ago.

In order to highlight the productive relationship between image and policy, this photo essay explores some of the visual and rhetorical representations of West African boat migrants that circulated widely in the European and American press during what was called a “wave” of clandestine arrivals in the Canary Islands.   …read more on the Youth Circulations blog.

2006, Juan Medina / Reuters
2006, Juan Medina / Reuters

 

CFP: Global Studies of Childhood

Philosophical and Sociological Perspectives on Childhood, Youth and Adolescence:
troubling the global/local nexus

Special Issue of Global Studies of Childhood

Guest Editors:
DAVID W. KUPFERMAN, University of Hawaiʻi-West Oʻahu SOPHIA RODRIGUEZ, College of Charleston
MAREK TESAR, University of Auckland

Childhood, youth and adolescence are contested notions. What do we mean by these terms and how do we employ them? How do/did we come to know these categories? Who or what invented them? The concern of this special issue is with the ontological and epistemological knowledges in play with regard to the categories of childhood, youth and adolescence, what they do and how they perform, what they represent and how these categories and brackets are perceived by all actors, both those that are inside and those who are out-side of them. This special issue calls for a re-thinking of these concepts. The disciplines of philosophy and sociology are elevated in this call for papers, with the expectation that these perspectives will allow authors to theorize these concerns in unexpected, innovative and cutting edge ways, in relation to the complicated globalized contexts of local experiences and lives.  Continue reading CFP: Global Studies of Childhood