Suspended in 2025/26
AN458 Half Unit
Children and Youth in Contemporary Ethnography
This information is for the 2025/26 session.
Course Convenor
Prof Catherine Allerton
Availability
This course is available on the MRes in Anthropology, MSc in Anthropology and Development, MSc in Social Anthropology and MSc in Social Anthropology (Religion in the Contemporary World). This course is available with permission as an outside option to students on other programmes where regulations permit.
Course content
This course explores the paradoxes and contexts of social science work on children and youth through an intensive focus on contemporary ethnographies exploring children’s social worlds. This ethnographic work is multi-disciplinary (emerging from anthropology, geography, sociology, media studies), and builds both on earlier ethnographies of childhood from the mid-twentieth-century onwards, and on growing theoretical interest in cross-cultural understandings of ‘the child’ and their competencies.
In the first half of the course, we investigate 5 central paradoxes that emerge through a consideration of children and childhood. These are: 1) Universal/ Constructed; 2) Being/ Becoming; 3) Structure/ Agency; 4) Protection/ Participation; and 5) Representation/ Reality. These paradoxes allow us to consider important questions such as: What does it mean to see childhood as a 'construction'? How has ethnographic work questioned universal frameworks for child development? How should we understand children’s agency? How successfully can 'child rights' be achieved in different cultural contexts? Why should children's perspectives be taken more seriously in the social sciences?
In the second half of the course, we turn to 5 key contexts for ethnographic analyses of children's lives. These are: the street, school, work, play and war. How have the lives of 'street children' been approached and understood? What do critical ethnographies of schooling tell us about its role in reproducing inequalities? What, if anything, is the difference between beneficial child work and harmful 'child labour'? How can we recognise and theorise children's play? And how have ethnographic accounts documented both trauma and resilience in the context of 'child soldiering'?
Teaching
10 hours of lectures and 15 hours of seminars in the Winter Term.
This course has a reading week in Week 6 of Winter Term.
4 hours of film screenings in WT.
Formative assessment
Essay (1500 words)
Students will have the opportunity to submit one formative essay of up to 1500 words during the course.
Students will be informed of their formative submission deadline by email by the end of Week 4 of term.
Indicative reading
R.A. LeVine and R.S. New (eds) 2008. Anthropology and child development: a cross-cultural reader; N. Scheper-Hughes and C. Sargent (eds) 1998. Small wars: the cultural politics of childhood; K.F. Olwig and E. Gullov (eds) 2003. Children's places: cross-cultural perspectives. D. Durham & J. Cole (eds) 2006. Generations and globalization: youth, age and family in the new world economy; M. Liebel. 2004. A will of their own: cross cultural perspectives on working children; V. Amit-Talai and H. Wulff (eds) 1995. Youth cultures: a cross-cultural perspective; A. James. 1993. Childhood identities: self and social relationships in the experience of the child. A. de Waal and N. Argenti (eds) 2002. Young Africa: Realising the rights of children and youth; J. Boyden and J. de Berry (eds) 2004. Children and youth on the frontline: ethnography, armed conflict and displacement; Levinson, B, D. Foley & D. Holland. (eds) 1996. The cultural production of the educated person: critical ethnographies of schooling and local practice; H. Montgomery. 2009. An introduction to childhood: anthropological perspectives on children's lives;
Assessment
Essay (100%, 3500 words)
Key facts
Department: Anthropology
Course Study Period: Winter Term
Unit value: Half unit
FHEQ Level: Level 7
CEFR Level: Null
Total students 2024/25: Unavailable
Average class size 2024/25: Unavailable
Controlled access 2024/25: NoCourse selection videos
Some departments have produced short videos to introduce their courses. Please refer to the course selection videos index page for further information.
Personal development skills
- Self-management
- Team working
- Application of information skills
- Communication
- Specialist skills