Category Archives: New Books

New Books

New Book Release: ‘Children as Caregivers’ by Jean Hunleth

In Zambia, due to the rise of tuberculosis and the closely connected HIV epidemic, a large number of children have experienced the illness or death of at least one parent. Children as Caregivers examines how well intentioned practitioners fail to realize that children take on active caregiving roles when their guardians become seriously ill and demonstrates why understanding children’s care is crucial for global health policy.

Using ethnographic methods, and listening to the voices of the young as well as adults, Jean Hunleth makes the caregiving work of children visible. She shows how children actively seek to “get closer” to ill guardians by providing good care. Both children and ill adults define good care as attentiveness of the young to adults’ physical needs, the ability to carry out treatment and medication programs in the home, and above all, the need to maintain physical closeness and proximity. Children understand that losing their guardians will not only be emotionally devastating, but that such loss is likely to set them adrift in Zambian society, where education and advancement depend on maintaining familial, reciprocal relationships. View a gallery of images from the book.

Children as Caregivers: The Global Fight against Tuberculosis and HIV in Zambia (Rutgers Series in Childhood Studies, March 2017) is now available for purchase online through multiple retailers, including Rutgers and Eurospan. An online art gallery of the children’s drawings is also available through Flickr, and helps illustrate the children’s caregiving throughout the book.

Announcements, New Books

New book – Doing Style: Youth and Mass Mediation in South India

9780226327853In Doing Style, Constantine V. Nakassis explores the world of youth and mass media in South India, where what Tamil youth call “style” anchors their day-to-day lives and media worlds. Through intimate ethnographic descriptions of college life in Tamil Nadu, Nakassis explores the complex ways that acts and objects of style such as brand fashion, English slang, and film representations express the multiple desires and anxieties of this generation, who live in the shadow of the promise of global modernity. Continue reading New book – Doing Style: Youth and Mass Mediation in South India →
New Books, Resources

Re-publication of Adventure in Play (1957)

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unnamed-2Common Threads Publications is pleased to announce the launch of their ‘Playwork Classics’ series – unavailable and neglected historical texts written by the adventure playground pioneers and those involved in the development of playwork profession.

The first Playwork Classic, John Barron May’s Adventure in Play, is now available. Originally published in 1957, Adventure in Play is a report on one of the first experimental adventure playgrounds in the UK. Adventure in Play provides an engaging and sometimes challenging account of how the radical new concept of ‘adventure playground’ was first put into practice. In doing so it raises important questions about the development of today’s adventure playgrounds and the modern-day playwork profession which grew out of them.

Adventure in Play is essential reading for childhood historians, playwork students, sociology scholars and anybody interested in the development of play services for children from a historical perspective.

More information can be found here http://www.commonthreads.org.uk/?page_id=216 . To be kept up-to-date about forthcoming titles in the Playwork Classics series, please email us at info@commonthreads.org.uk.

New Books

New Book – Doing Anthropology in China with Kids

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9788776941703Edited by Candice Cornet and Tami Blumenfield

University of Hawaii Press

While many anthropologists and other scholars relocate with their families in some way or another during fieldwork periods, this detail is often missing from their writings even though undoubtedly children can have had a major impact on their work. Recognizing that researcher-parents have many choices regarding their children’s presence during fieldwork, this volume explores the many issues of conducting fieldwork with children, generally, and with children in China, specifically. Contributors include well-established scholars who have undertaken fieldwork in China for decades as well as more junior researchers. The book presents the voices of mothers and of fathers, with two particularly innovative pieces that are written by parent–child pairs. The collection as a whole offers a wide range of experiences that question and reflect on methodological issues related to fieldwork, including objectivity, cultural relativism, relationships in the field and positionality. The chapters also recount how accompanied fieldwork can offer unexpected ethnographic insights. An appendix alerts future fieldworking parents to particular pitfalls of accompanied fieldwork and suggests ways to avoid these.

http://www.uhpress.hawaii.edu/p-9406-9788776941703.aspx