Discussion Facilitator:
Myra Bluebond-Langner,
Center Director

Group Discussion, Introducing Ourselves and Our Work: Individual and Group Goals for the Series

A welcome to the campus, the Center, and the series. Seminar participants will have an opportunity to describe their current research and to engage in spirited discussion about the field of childhood studies – strengths, limitations, challenges, and opportunities – with attention to contributions their work makes to childhood studies. Participants will be asked to consider the pressing issues in the field and the contributions scholars can make to a richer understanding of children and childhood.

Phillip Kilbride, Ph.D . Chair and Professor of Anthropology, Bryn Mawr College

Approaches to the Study of Children and Childhood: Ethnographic Lessons from the Streets of Nairobi, Kenya

The label “street child” routinely used in cross-national studies does not adequately capture the experience of children living on the streets of Nairobi, and in fact may not be appropriate for children living on streets elsewhere in Kenya, Africa or other parts of the world. Drawing on over 20 years of fieldwork in Africa, Dr. Kilbride will show the heretofore overlooked involvement of children living on the street in a national socio-cultural system (e.g. through their labor as trash collectors and survival sex workers, enjoyment of indigenous games and sports, participation in marriage and funeral customs, and for girls, sometimes voluntary motherhood). He suggests a new construction, one that recognizes these children as members of the working poor, and in the case of girls, their post at the bottom of the national gender hierarchy. Dr. Kilbride also considers the implications of his analysis and the work of A.I. Hallowell and Clifford Geertz for cultural perspectives on childhood studies.

Discussant: Cati Coe, Assistant Professor of Anthropology, Rutgers University

Caroline Levander, Ph.D. Associate Professor of English, Rice University

Children’s Rights and Welfare: The Place of Children in Current U.S. Political Debates

This lecture considers the following questions: Why do we tend to use children to personalize debates about social justice and civic responsibility? What does it mean to act 'in behalf of a child'? and What is at stake in claiming rights for a figure who is not fully autonomous or able to speak for themselves? Turning to a wide range of political writings, social commentaries, and child manuals--those documents that tell us most about how the nation-state, the citizen, and the child interact—Dr. Levander will consider the historical origins and ongoing legacy of the child in U.S. political culture and the effect of such a legacy on the rights of real children.

Discussant: Carol Singley, Associate Professor of English, Rutgers University

Annette Lareau, Ph.D. Professor of Sociology, Temple University

Shaping “Life Chances” for Children in America: Class, Race, and Family Life

In her 2003 book, Unequal Childhoods: Class, Race, and Family Life, Annette Lareau portrayed the lives of white and black families that she and her research assistants observed. She suggests that social class leads to a different cultural logic of childrearing. Middle-class children, with a busy schedule of activities, extensive reasoning between parents and children, and intensive oversight of children’s institutional lives, are raised in a pattern of “concerted cultivation.” By contrast, the working-class and poor children in her ethnographic sample were raised with more free time, directives from parents to children rather than reasoning, and a granting of autonomy to children in their institutional lives, something Dr. Lareau calls “the accomplishment of natural growth.” While both approaches have advantages and disadvantages, the middle-class approach gives children training in highly valued skills, or what some would call “cultural capital.” In her talk, Dr. Lareau will briefly compare the findings from her ethnographic study with a national survey, the Child Development Supplement of the Panel Study of Income Dynamics. In addition, she has continued to follow the twelve children she describes in her book as they have moved through adolescence. She will discuss the longitudinal patterns, especially the continuing power of class and the growing influence of racial experiences in shaping the life chances of children.

Discussant: Myra Bluebond-Langner, Distinguished Professor of Anthropology, Rutgers University

“Bullets Don’t Have No Name on Them”: What We Can Learn About Violence Reduction from Young People Growing Up in Three Dangerous Philadelphia Neighborhoods

As Philadelphia struggles with a recent upsurge in lethal violence that has claimed the lives of over two dozen school children between September 2003 and March 2004, it is imperative that scholars try to understand what it is like to grow up in a dangerous environment. The “Youth and Crime Control Study” research team has conducted in-depth interviews with over 140 young people, ages 13-23, some of whom have been involved in street crime, recruited from three neighborhoods in Philadelphia, renamed Cedar Grove, El Barrio and Plymouth. The neighborhoods, one predominantly African-American, one Hispanic and one white, collectively accounted for one sixth of all homicides (N=132) in Philadelphia from January 1, 2002 through June 30, 2004. These neighborhoods accounted for 18% of all rapes, 15% of all robberies and 16% of aggravated assaults in the city over that time. In short, these neighborhoods are dangerous places in which to live and grow up. The data from the in-depth interviews is supplemented with self-report data and official police statistics, details the myriad ways in which young people cope with violence and danger, and their opinions on what can be done to prevent or reduce crime. The data illustrate the capacity of young people to contribute to the informal social control of crime and disorder.

Discussant: Dan Hart, Professor of Psychology, Rutgers University

Jennifer Tilton, Ph.D. Visiting Lecturer, Wesleyan University

Dangerous and Endangered Children: Youth, Community Activists and Parents Redraw, Defend and Contest the Changing Boundaries of Childhood in the Law

In March 2000, voters in California passed Proposition 21, an initiative that encouraged local jurisdictions to charge juveniles 14 and over as adults for most serious crimes. Proposition 21 prompted significant debate among parents, professional youth workers, community activists and young people about the nature of youth crime, changes in children and childhood, and how lines should be drawn between childhood and adulthood. This paper examines how parents, community activists and young people in Oakland, California struggled to redraw, defend and contest the boundaries of childhood in the face of these legal changes and in the face of broader anxieties about the security of the path between childhood and adulthood. Dr. Tilton explores the ways adults have mobilized to extend the protections of childhood to all children and youth by shaping the ways young people used time and space in the city. She argues that legal changes, economic transformations and parenting strategies have consolidated an emerging racial and class divide in the length and experience of adolescence.

Discussant: Jane Siegel, Assistant Professor of Criminal Justice, Rutgers University

“I am Quite a Guinea Pig”: Children, Families, and the Medical Management of Disease

In less than forty years, the prognosis and course of many childhood cancers has undergone dramatic transformations. In the 1940s, a new system for identifying and classifying cases redefined childhood cancers from a virtually unknown set of killers to a rare, but deadly scourge that was a major case of childhood mortality. In the decades that followed—a time of rapid, promising discoveries in medical science—a close link between laboratory and clinical experimentation was promoted as the key to identifying cancer cures. While the institutional histories of childhood cancer research that emerged have focused on the identification of effective chemotherapeutic agents and development of drug protocols, Dr. Krueger finds these accounts incomplete. Fuller understanding of the history of development in childhood cancer requires attention to parent and patient perspectives. She argues that patients and families continually negotiated the changing medical management of pediatric cancers. By attending to the voices of parents and children, the history of therapeutic breakthroughs become nuanced accounts of cooperation, skepticism, and resistance between families and practitioners during pivotal years for childhood cancer research and treatment.

Discussant: Janet Golden, Associate Professor of History, Rutgers University