Yearly Archives: 2015

Events

Seminar at UCLan – ‘Participation in the Corporate Parenting Agenda – Can a shift in the power relationship really happen?’

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The Centre for Children and Young People’s Participation
University of Central Lancashire
Harrington Building, Room 338a

February 26, 2015 / 4-5:30pm

Participation in the Corporate Parenting agenda – Can a shift in the power relationship really happen?

Gavin Redhead
Children and Young Peoples Participation Officer, Children’s Services Department at Blackburn with Darwen Borough Council

There is increasing emphasis on listening to the ‘Voice of the Child’, especially those children and young people who are, or have been, involved in the care system. For many of these children and young people, the opportunities to influence life changing decisions are often dependent on the relationship with their key workers. This can often prove challenging, given the bureaucratic nature of care processes and procedures. If services are failing to even evidence that they are listening, how can they hope to demonstrate that what they are being told is having an impact and influencing the decisions that are being taken for those children and young people.

Continue reading Seminar at UCLan – ‘Participation in the Corporate Parenting Agenda – Can a shift in the power relationship really happen?’ →

New Books

New Book – Shirley Temple and the Performance of Girlhood by Kristen Hatch

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Just released from Rutgers University Press ProductImageHandler.ashx
In the 1930s, Shirley Temple was heralded as “America’s sweetheart,” and she remains the icon of wholesome American girlhood, but Temple’s films strike many modern viewers as perverse. Shirley Temple and the Performance of Girlhood examines her early career in the context of the history of girlhood and considers how Temple’s star image emerged out of the Victorian cult of the child.

Beginning her career in “Baby Burlesks,” short films where she played vamps and harlots, her biggest hits were marketed as romances between Temple and her adult male costars. Kristen Hatch helps modern audiences make sense of the erotic undercurrents that seem to run through these movies. Placing Temple’s films in their historical context and reading them alongside earlier representations of girlhood in Victorian theater and silent film, Hatch shows how Shirley Temple emerged at the very moment that long standing beliefs about childhood innocence and sexuality were starting to change. Where we might now see a wholesome child in danger of adult corruption, earlier audiences saw Temple’s films as demonstrations of the purifying power of childhood innocence.
Hatch examines the cultural history of the time to view Temple’s performances in terms of sexuality, but in relation to changing views about gender, class, and race. Filled with new archival research, Shirley Temple and the Performance of Girlhood enables us to appreciate the “simpler times” of Temple’s stardom in all its thorny complexity.

 

Calls for Papers: Publishing

CFP – Girls’ Economies: Work & Play Cultures (edited volume)

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Call for Papers
Girls’ Economies: Work & Play Cultures

Edited by Miriam Forman-Brunell and Diana Anselmo-Sequeira
foreword by Dr. Eileen Boris

We know more about the history of grownups’ labor than we do about girls’ work, especially in informal domains. We know more about adult women workers than about girlhood employment and work-themed amusements. We know more about girls’ consumption practices than about their production patterns. We know more about childhood and play than we do about how play informs girls’ work skills, sensibilities, and identities as workers. We know more about businessmen and women than about moneymaking girls.
Continue reading CFP – Girls’ Economies: Work & Play Cultures (edited volume) →

Events

Art Opening: ‘We are all the same’ Children, War, and Humanity in Northern Uganda

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Art exhibit by Liu Scholar and PhD candidate (Institute for Gender, Race, Sexuality, and Social Justice at UBC) Beth W. Stewart. 

‘We are all the Same’
Children, War, and Humanity in Northern Uganda

Opening:
Thursday January 15, 2015 @ 5pm, Liu Institute for Global Issues, Vancouver, BC.

About Northern Uganda: 

For 20 years, the conflict between the rebel group the Lord’s Resistance Army (LRA) and the Ugandan government forces destroyed the landscape, economy, communities, culture, relationships, and lives. And while the active conflict moved out of Northern Uganda by 2007, the legacy of war lives on in people’s everyday lives even as they actively reconstruct their world. As one frontline justice worker described to me in August 2014, “Our whole society is traumatized.”

About the collection:

Despite this difficult context, I believe that if we look and listen closely and creatively we begin to see impressive acts of resistance and resilience. This belief in human agency despite such dire constraints lies at the heart of each painting in this collection. The collection seeks to challenge our assumptions about war-affected people, and children especially, while also inviting you the viewer to bear witness to their stories and experiences.

Most of the paintings are collaborations with the children participants in the artist’s PhD research project. These are children who were born into the captivity of the LRA.

Questions, RSVP: bethwstew@gmail.com

ACYIG Updates

CALL FOR SELF-NOMINATIONS for ACYIG BOARD POSITION OF STUDENT REPRESENTATIVE

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Dear ACYIG Members,

This is a reminder that the deadline to self-nominate for the ACYIG Board position of Student Representative is this Thursday, January 15th. Details about the position are re-posted below:

This position is titled, STUDENT REPRESENTATIVE. Whoever serves in this position is charged with liaising with ACYIG graduate and undergraduate student members to communicate ideas, policies, and concerns from students between members and the ACYIG Advisory Board.

ACYIG has conducted open Board appointments whenever possible. The ACYIG Advisory Board is now officially making a call for self-nominations for this position.

Graduate students and undergraduate students currently enrolled in an accredited academic program are eligible to apply. MAs or Ph.D.s who have graduated from an accredited program within one year of the submission deadline for nominations (so, anytime during 2014) are also eligible to apply.

Board appointments are considered to be two-year positions and are encouraged to attend the annual meeting of the AAA and the ACYIG joint conferences during one’s tenure.

All ACYIG Board member duties also include: maintaining official interest group status within AAA; optimizing professional opportunities for members available via AAA; overseeing and growing professional presence within and outside AAA; and organizing the ACYIG conference.

If you would like to be considered for the position of Student Representative on the ACYIG Board, please email one to two paragraphs to Dr. Rachael Stryker at rachael.stryker@csueastbay.edu by Thursday, January 15, 2015 stating why you would like to become a Board member and what you feel you can bring to ACYIG.

Please be sure to include your name, title, affiliation (academic or otherwise) and email/phone number so that we can respond to you.

The ACYIG Board will make its decision by Sunday, February 1, 2015, and notify you soon after.

Your duties as an ACYIG Board Member begin on Sunday, February 15, 2015, and your appointment will be confirmed at the ACYIG Business meeting in Long Beach, CA in March, 2015, when you are formally introduced to the membership.

If you have any questions about ACYIG Board member duties or this open Board appointment process, please do not hesitate to contact me. I am very happy to answer them.

Sincerely,

Rachael Stryker
Convener, ACYIG

Calls for Papers: Conferences

CFP – (De)constructing childhoods in daily life relationships in MENA countries

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PANEL PROPOSAL for the
49th Annual Meeting of the Middle East Studies Association (MESA)
 November 21-24, 2015 Denver, Colorado
http://mesana.org/annual-meeting/index.html

(De)constructing childhoods in daily life relationships in Middle East and North African countries

Childhood does not occur in a vacuum. Although largely viewed as a period of life isolated from the trials and tribulations of the adult world, childhoods of the modern and contemporary eras are deeply entrenched in complex and ongoing historically important phenomenon, such as colonization, war, and globalization.  Continue reading CFP – (De)constructing childhoods in daily life relationships in MENA countries →

Funding Opportunities, Training/Education

Funded PhD opportunity – Bloomsbury Scholarships (UK)

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The Food Practices of Young Children at Home and in Daycare: A Cross Context Approach in a Multiethnic London Region

http://www.bloomsbury.ac.uk/studentships/

Principal Supervisor: Professor Harry West (SOAS)

Co-Supervisor: Dr Rebecca O’Connell (UCL IOE)

Whilst much UK research on children’s food in nurseries has focussed on its nutritional qualities, anthropological and sociological approaches provide a lens to examine the contextual meanings of ‘food use’, the embodiment of food practices, and their embeddedness in the interconnected spheres of children’s lives in home and daycare (Bronfenbrenner, 1979). The successful candidate will take a multi-sited approach to the study of young children’s food practices in nurseries and in the home that takes account of children’s agency. Adopting a sociological/ anthropological/ social policy perspective, this study will complement current and recently completed research by the supervisors.

Research Questions: How do parents and nurseries together provide for children’s food requirements? In particular, how do nurseries and parents’ employment commitments, occupations and socio-economic circumstances facilitate and constrain food provisioning for young children? How do children’s food practices and preferences shape and how are they shaped by cultures around food and meals in each environment? How consistent are children in their eating practices across contexts? What ideas, beliefs and practices do children bring to each environment from the other? (How) do parents and daycare institutions encourage children to eat healthy diets and what do they see as the challenges and opportunities of feeding children in these intersecting environments?

The limited research conducted to date on food in UK daycare has relied heavily on questionnaires to study staff attitudes to healthy eating as well as on the analysis of menus, which cannot give a good indication of children’s food consumption. Because of the types of research questions and the different groups to be studied, this project will adopt a mix of methods to generate complementary data (Greene et al. 1989): surveys of nurseries and parents in a particular multi-ethnic London area and an ethnographic approach to explore food practices, uses and meanings in daycare and, where possible, family homes.

The overarching aims of the research are to:

  1. Theorise connections between children’s and parents’ food practices and beliefs and broader social processes relating to structural and spatial characteristics of nursery, family and local contexts; it will do this by drawing on a mix of disciplines and subdisciplinary areas including the sociology of childhood, the sociology/ anthropology of food and contemporary childcare research.
  2. Advance methods for exploring the ways in which food is implicated in children’s ‘interactive reproduction’ (Corsaro, 2005) of their cultures in both daycare and at home.
  3. Address and inform local and national public policy concerning children’s food practices across home and childcare contexts.

The project objectives are to:

  • Examine food provision in nurseries in one London Local Authority (LA) through characterising the range of mealtime provision.
  • Contextualise the study through reporting findings of published studies and data to describe local demography and trends relating to food, health and childcare and relate these to the national level.
  • Use ethnographic research techniques to create ‘micro ethnographies’ of the food practices of young children (aged 2-5) and their carers in a small number of selected nurseries and, where possible, their homes.
  • Explore, via these ethnographies, the meaning, symbolism and materiality of food in children’s and parents’ lives and the ways in which ‘health’ and ‘nutrition’ figure in these.
  • Examine young children’s agency and preferences in respect of food practices across the sites of home and daycare and how they intersect.
  • Explore parents’ views/experiences of children’s food provisioning in different contexts.
  • Produce a thesis that provides a core foundation for later publication

Candidate requirements

The successful candidate will have a previous first class or strong upper second class degree in anthropology (or in a closely related discipline, as well as familiarity with anthropological theory and methodology). The student’s principal affiliation will be with the Department of Anthropology and Sociology at SOAS, where he/she will attend the weekly Research Training Seminar and the Research Methods course and have access to other training provided by SOAS and the Bloomsbury Doctoral Training Centre. The student will also audit the postgraduate course in the Anthropology of Food at SOAS. Additionally, the student will audit postgraduate courses at the Institute of Education in the Sociology of Childhood. The student will also have a desk at the IoE’s Thomas Coram Research Unit, facilitating close collaboration with the co-supervisor and colleagues there.

Shortlisted candidates will be interviewed.  Interviews will be held at SOAS or via skype during the week of 16/20 March 2015.

The studentship is for a duration of 3 years and will cover course fees (at the usual level for UK and EU studentships) and a student stipend.

Applicants from non-EU countries may apply for this project but will be required to meet the additional costs of overseas fees from other sources.

Key references

  • Bronfenbrenner,U. (1979). Contexts of child rearing: Problems and prospects. American Psychologist, (34): 844–850.
  • Clark, A. (2005). Beyond listening: children’s perspectives on early childhood services. Policy.
  • Corsaro, W. E. A. (2005). The Sociology of Childhood. 2nd Edition. Thousand Oaks, California: Sage.
  • Greene, J.C., Caracelli, V. J. and Graham, W. F (1989). Toward a conceptual framework for mixed-method evaluation design. Educational Evaluation and Policy Analysis, 11(3): 255-74.
  • Newson, J. and Newson, E. (1963). Patterns of Infant Care. London: Penguin.

Further details about the project may be obtained from:

Principal supervisor: Harry G. West, hw16@soas.ac.uk, http://www.soas.ac.uk/staff/staff31990.php

Co-supervisor: Rebecca O’Connell, r.connell@ioe.ac.uk http://www.ioe.ac.uk/staff/TCRU_40.html

Further information about PhDs at SOAS is available from:
http://www.soas.ac.uk/anthropology/programmes/phd/
http://www.soas.ac.uk/admissions/pg/research/

How to apply:

Applicants should follow two steps:
(http://www.soas.ac.uk/anthropology/programmes/phd/)

  • STEP 1:  Apply for the MPhil/PhD Anthropology and Sociology

Applicants must submit a COMPLETE on-line application for admission to the MPhil/PhD Anthropology and Sociology .  Please state in your on-line application for admission your intention to also apply for the Bloomsbury Scholarship under Professor West’s supervision.   In your research proposal, please include your reasons for applying for this project and any ideas you have for how you might approach the research.

Applicants must have an offer of admission BEFORE the closing date for scholarship applications.  A complete application for admission includes transcripts, an explanation of the grading system for any degrees obtained outside of the UK, two references, CV, research proposal and a personal statement. The panel will be considering your scholarship application TOGETHER with your online application for admission.  Please note that your complete application for admission can take up to 4 weeks to be considered by the Department, although this may vary depending on the time of year.  You should be prepared to wait up to 6 weeks during busy periods.

  • STEP 2:  Apply for the scholarship

You must apply for this scholarship via the on-line scholarship application form (https://docs.google.com/forms/d/1jfKSNW5IDOH0rTjqhkNcmoc5tcrozQxLvHPcqZlpQQs/viewform?c=0&w=1&usp=mail_form_link)

For any queries regarding the studentship application procedure, please email scholarships@soas.ac.uk

For any academic enquiries, please email the Research Tutor, Department of Anthropology and Sociology: Professor Trevor H J Marchand tm6@soas.ac.uk

Closing date for applications is 17:00 (UK time), Monday 23 February 2015