by Teresa Kuan
2015 – University of California Press

Love’s Uncertainty explores the hopes and anxieties of urban, middle-class parents in contemporary China. Combining long-term ethnographic research with analyses of popular child-rearing manuals, television dramas, and government documents, Teresa Kuan bears witness to the dilemmas of ordinary Chinese parents, who struggle to reconcile new definitions of good parenting with the reality of limited resources.

Continue reading New Book – Love’s Uncertainty: The Politics and Ethics of Child Rearing in Contemporary China →

by Lauren J. Silver
UNC Press (2015)

System Kids considers the daily lives of adolescent mothers as they negotiate the child welfare system to meet the needs of their children and themselves. Often categorized as dependent and delinquent, these young women routinely become wards of the state as they move across the legal and social borders of a fragmented urban bureaucracy. Combining critical policy study and ethnography, and drawing on current scholarship as well as her own experience as a welfare program manager, Lauren Silver demonstrates how social welfare “silos” construct the lives of youth as disconnected, reinforcing unforgiving policies and imposing demands on women the system was intended to help. As clients of a supervised independent living program, they are expected to make the transition into independent adulthood, but Silver finds a vast divide between these expectations and the young women’s lived reality. Continue reading New Book! System Kids: Adolescent Mothers and the Politics of Regulation →

by Beth Baron

Stanford University Press
(2015)

Preview available here on the SU Press website!

In The Orphan Scandal, Beth Baron provides a new lens through which to view the rise of Islamic groups in Egypt.

Continue reading New Book! The Orphan Scandal: Christian Missionaries and the Rise of the Muslim Brotherhood →

2nd edition just released!

The Anthropology of Childhood: Cherubs, Chattel, Changelings
by David F. Lancy

Read about it in the New York Times: “The Only Baby Book You’ll Ever Need” (Michael Erard, 1/31/15)

Just released from Rutgers University Press 

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.

by Nazan Maksudyan
Syracuse University Press (2014)

Book Description
History books often weave tales of rising and falling empires, royal dynasties, and wars among powerful nations. Here, Maksudyan succeeds in making those who are farthest removed from power the lead actors in this history. Continue reading New Book: Orphans & Destitute Children in the Late Ottoman Empire →