Great Issues in the Social Sciences: Childhood

“Keisuke,” 2001, Loretta Lux

HSP 155    CRN 2316

Tuesday & Thursday

10:10 - 11:30pm

Observatory

Dr. Molly Mullin 

How have people living in different times and places thought about and experienced childhood?  Is there something distinctive about childhood in our own era?   In addressing these questions, we’ll explore a variety of perspectives in the social sciences, focusing especially on anthropology and history.  Course materials will include ethnographies of street children in Brazil and school children in New York, an autobiography of a Hopi Indian, and a history of American childhood.

This course is designed to fulfill the core curriculum requirement for a "mode of inquiry" course in historical and cultural analysis.

Courses that fulfill this requirement, according to the Albion Academic Catalog, “must 

 1.  include material significantly removed from the students’ experience either by virtue of cultural or historical distance;

  2.  direct students to investigate their own cultural and historical moment from a perspective informed by their study of culture or history;

 3.  require students to explore the specific cultural context of artifacts, to the extent that the course covers artifacts of a different culture or from a different historical period” (Albion College Academic Catalog, 2004-2005).

 
Although an important part of this course is our consideration of the unfamiliar, one advantage of our topic is that childhood should be something we can all relate to.  Our topic also provides a useful introduction to key issues in the social sciences.  Although children have often been ignored by social scientists, they’ve also been considered crucial for an understanding of culture and socialization. We sometimes assume there’s something universal and unchanging about childhood, but social scientists have found vast differences and surprising transformations over time—in children’s lives and in how they are imagined, represented and understood. 

This course will be conducted as a seminar and the emphasis will be on student-led discussions.  In addition to essays based on assigned readings, students will be expected to research and analyze the childhood of someone who grew up in a very different cultural and historical context.