Great Issues in the Social Sciences: Childhood
Fall 2005
MWF 9:10-10
Professor 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 this course, we’ll explore a variety of perspectives in the social sciences, including works in the fields of anthropology, history, sociology, and cultural theory. Course materials will include a study of street children in Brazil, studies of childcare in Sweden and Denmark, a documentary about the children of Chernobyl, 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 and we should all be able to draw in some way upon our own experience. Our topic is also a useful way of exploring key issues in the social sciences. 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. Although children have often been ignored by social scientists, they’ve also been considered crucial for an understanding of socialization and enculturation. In addition to the assigned readings, students will have the opportunity to conduct research on a topic of their choice.

TENTATIVE LIST OF READINGS/FILMS
Castaneda, Claudia. 2002. Figurations: Child, Bodies, Worlds. Duke University Press.

Katz, Cindi. 2004. Growing Up Global: Economic Restructuring and Children's Everyday Lives. University of Minnesota Press. ISBN 0816642109

Hecht, Tobias. 1998. At Home in the Street: Street Children of Northeast Brazil. Cambridge University Press. ISBN 0521598699.

Mintz, Steven. 2004. Huck’s Raft: A History of American Childhood. Belknap Press of Harvard University Press.

Olwig, Karen Fog and Eva Gulløv, eds. 2004. Children's Places: Cross-Cultural Perspectives. Routledge.

Schor, Juliet. 2004. Born to Buy: The Commercialized Child and the New Consumer Culture. Scribner. 068487055X

Films:
To Be and To Have (2004)
Central Station (1998)
Secrets of a Wild Child (1994)
Chernobyl Heart (2003)