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The Rutgers University Press
BOOK SERIES in CHILDHOOD STUDIES
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The
Rutgers University Press Book Series is the
first multidisciplinary
book series in Childhood Studies. The
book series, edited by Myra
Bluebond-Langner, PhD, Distinguished Professor of
Anthropology, provides a major opportunity for the Center
and University to shape this new field. The purpose of
this series is to increase understanding of children
and childhood experiences in the United States and abroad.
The series reflects the current view of children and
approaches to the study of childhood. Authors come from
a variety of fields including: anthropology, criminal
justice, history, literature, psychology, religion, and
sociology. Books address not only to a scholarly audience,
but also to those directly responsible for ministering
to children's needs and formulating policies affecting
their lives and futures. >>> Instructions
for Authors
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Books in Childhood Studies |
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Race
in the Schoolyard: Negotiating the Color Line
in Classrooms and Communities
Amanda Lewis
Publication
Date: 2003
This
book won the
2005 Critics’ Choice Award
by the American Educational Studies
Association
and the 2004 Myers Outstanding
Book Award. |
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http://165.230.98.36/acatalog/__Race_in_the_Schoolyard_1090.hml |
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on image to enlarge |
Amanda
Lewis explores how racial identity and racial inequality
are reproduced daily in elementary school. She suggests
that schools and teachers are centrally involved
in drawing and reinforcing racial lines, rather than
mitigating inequality. Lewis’s research is
based on ethnographic observation in classrooms,
schoolyards, and lunchrooms in three elementary schools.
Although these are places where race is not supposed
to matter, Lewis shows how race insinuates itself
into everyday school life.
Amanda Lewis is an associate professor
in the departments of African American studies and
sociology, University of Illinois, Chicago. |
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In
Sickness and in Play: Children
Coping with Chronic Illness
Cindy Dell Clark
Publication Date: 2003
Cindy Dell Clark shows how children adapt to chronic
illness. Focusing on asthma and diabetes, she examines
how children experience symptoms, suffering and treatment.
Clark demonstrates how children use play, ritual,
games and humor to cope with illness.
Cindy Dell Clark is an associate
professor of human development and family studies
at Penn State University, and an associate and fellow
of RUCCCS.
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http://165.230.98.36/acatalog/__In_Sickness_and_in_Play_1321.html
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At
PLAY in BELFAST
Donna
Michelle Lanclos
Publication Date: 2003
Donna Lanclos writes about children on school playgrounds
in Belfast, Northern Ireland, using their own words
to show how they shape their identities. The notion
that children’s voices and perspectives must
be included in a work about childhood is central to
the book. Lanclos explores children’s folklore,
including skipping rhymes, clapping games, and “dirty” jokes,
from five Belfast primary schools. She listens for
what she can learn about gender, family, adult-child
interactions and Protestant/Catholic
tensions. |
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on image to enlarge |
Lanclos
frequently notes violent themes in the folklore and
conversations that indicate children are aware of
the reality in which they live. At the same time
however, children resist being marginalized by adults,
who try to shield them from this reality.
Donna Lanclos is an adjunct professor
in the department of anthropology at the University
of North Carolina, Charlotte and an associate of the
Rutgers University Center for Children and Childhood
Studies. . |
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Rethinking
Childhood
Peter B. Pufall and Richard P. Unsworth,
eds.
Publication Date: 2004
Praise for Rethinking Childhood
Twenty
percent of American children live in poverty, parents
are divorcing at high rates, and educational institutions
are not always fulfilling their goals. Against this backdrop,
children are often patronized or idealized by adults.
Rarely do we look for the strengths within children that
can serve as the foundation for growth and development. In Rethinking
Childhood, twenty contributors,
coming from the disciplines
of anthropology, government, law, psychology, education,
religion, philosophy, and sociology, provide a multidisciplinary
view of childhood focusing on the ways in which children
shape their own futures. The contributors present ideas
that lead not only to new analyses, but also to innovative
policy applications. They challenge readers to develop
fresh ways of listening to children’s voices that
enable both children and adults.
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Peter
B. Pufall is a professor of psychology at Smith
College and co-editor with Harry Beilin of Piaget's Theory:
Prospects and Possibilities. Richard P. Unsworth is
a senior fellow of the Kahn Liberal Arts Institute at
Smith College where he was dean of the chapel and a professor
of religion.
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| http://165.230.98.36/acatalog/__Rethinking_Childhood__1322.html |
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Armies
of the Young:
Child Soldiers in War and Terrorism
David
M. Rosen
Publication Date: 2005
Children
have served as warriors throughout history – as
uniformed soldiers, camouflaged insurgents, and even
suicide bombers. Are child soldier’s aggressors
or victims? It is a difficult question with no obvious
answer; yet in recent years the acceptable answer among
humanitarian organizations and scholars has been the
latter. These children are seen as hideous examples of
adult criminal exploitation. David Rosen argues that
this response oversimplifies the child soldier problem.
Drawing examples from three parts of the world, he shows
how children are not always passive victims, but often
make the rational decision that the one thing worse than
fighting is not fighting.
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Praise
for Armies of the Young
"No
thinking person, no media commentator, no political leader
can afford to be without this book -not if they care
about the truth and want to understand one of the more
awful realities of our time. It will stir you to action
on behalf of the world's vulnerable children."
-Phyllis Chesler, author of The New Anti-Semitism
David
M. Rosen is a professor of anthropology and law
at Fairleigh Dickinson University.
http://165.230.98.36/acatalog/__Armies_of_the_Young_2298.html
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Vietnam's
Children in a Changing World
Rachel Burr
Publication Date: Fall 2006
Using
ethnographic material gathered on the streets of Vietnam,
from international aid agencies, orphanages, reform schools
and Vietnamese governmental organizations, Rachel Burr
explores the complex lives of children who work and live
on the streets in urban Vietnam. Arguing against the pervasive
Western bias that undergirds the work of many international
aid agencies, demonstrates how economic imperatives and
Vietnamese cultural emphasis on work and filial obligation
draw Vietnamese children to street work.
Rachel
Burr is a lecturer in childhood studies at the
Centre for Childhood, Development and Learning at The
Open University, London, UK.
http://rutgerspress.rutgers.edu/acatalog/__Vietnam_s_Children_in_a_Changing_World_2548.html#3643
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Imagined
Orphans: Poor Families, Child Welfare, Contested Citizenship
in London, 1870-1918
Lydia Murdoch
Publication Date: Winter 2006
Imagined
Orphans explores the discrepancy
between the representation and reality of children’s
experiences within welfare institutions in Victorian
London. Reformers portrayed children who resided in
institutions as either orphaned or abandoned by unworthy
parents, much like Oliver Twist, the archetypal workhouse
child. Imagined Orphans demonstrates that
most institutionalized children had at least one living
parent, that parents turned to welfare services as
solutions to short-term crises rather than as permanent
depositories for children, and that many parents struggled
to maintain contact with their children during the
period of institutionalization. The book documents
the place of the poor in Victorian welfare practices
and the contested, class-based nature of citizenship
in the late nineteenth century.
Lydia
Murdoch is an assistant professor history at
Vassar College.
http://rutgerspress.rutgers.edu/acatalog/__Imagined_Orphans_2643.html#3822
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Girls
in Trouble with the Law
Laurie Schaffner
Publication Date: Summer 2006
Girls
in Trouble with the Law takes
us to the heart of life for adolescent girls in secure
juvenile facilities across the United States. In bringing
the voices of court-involved young women into the public
conversation about youth crime, adolescent sexuality,
and community violence, Laurie Schaffner’s vibrant
ethnography offers new views of youth experiences with
racism, poverty, violence, and sexuality as well as
a critique of the ways gender and justice are produced
in the juvenile legal system.
Winner
of the Distinguished
Contribution Award
from the American Sociological Association's
Section on Children and Youth |
Laurie
Schaffner is an associate professor in the criminal
justice and sociology department of the University of
Illinois at Chicago. Her previous books include Teenage
Runaways: Broken Hearts and "Bad Attitudes".
http://rutgerspress.rutgers.edu/acatalog/__Girls_in_Trouble_with_the_Law_2549.html#3645
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Growing
Girls: The Natural Origins of Girls’ Organizations
in America
Susan
A. Miller
Publication Date: September 2007
Cookies
and camping may be the first things that spring to mind
when Americans think about Girl Scouting, but in this history
of girls’ organizations, Miller shows that much greater
issues were at stake. At the turn of the twentieth century,
experts identified adolescence as a new and potentially
perilous life-stage. If not properly navigated, they argued,
female adolescence threatened the health of the individual,
the integrity of the family, and even the welfare of the
State. In the midst of these dire predictions, girls’ organizations,
such as the Girl Scouts, the Campfire Girls, the Girl Pioneers,
offered a different vision. Growing Girls explores
leaders’ efforts to create a modern conception of
girlhood that would help girls redefine their relationships
to their American heritage, their families, and their own
bodies.
Susan
A. Miller is an undergraduate advisor and lecturer
in history and women's studies at the University
of Pennsylvania.
http://rutgerspress.rutgers.edu/acatalog/__Growing_Girls_890.html |
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Designing
Modern Childhoods: History, Space, and Material Culture of
Children 
Marta Gutman and Ning De Coninck-Smith, editors
Publication Date: Winter 2007
In this
volume, historians, ethnographers, geographers, and architects
examine the history and design of places and objects associated
with children historically and in the present day. They
consider parks, playgrounds, schools, houses, computer
games, dolls and pacifiers. The volume also explores children’s
points of view about the spaces, buildings, and objects
they use and create in the modern world. As the authors
extract common threads in children’s understandings
of the material world, they also attend to how the experience
of modernity varies for children across time, through space,
and according to gender, race, social class, age, national
and local cultures.
Marta
Gutman is an associate professor of architecture
at the School of Architecture, Urban Design and
Landscape Architecture at the City College of New York. Ning
de Coninck-Smith is an associate professor of
educational sociology at the Danish Educational University.
http://rutgerspress.rutgers.edu/acatalog/designing_modern_childhoods.html
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| New
Titles in Childhood Studies (Forthcoming) |
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Inventing
Modern Adolescence:
The Children of Immigrants in Turn-of-the-Century America
Sarah E. Chinn
Publication Date: Summer 2008
The
1960s are commonly considered to be the beginning of a
distinct “teenage culture” in America. But
did this highly visible era of free love and rock ’n’ roll
really mark the start of adolescent defiance? In Inventing
Modern Adolescence: The Children of Immigrants
in Turn of the Century America Chinn follows the roots
of American teenage identity further back, to the end of
the nineteenth and beginning of the twentieth century.
She argues that the concept of the “generation gap,” a
stereotypical complaint against American teens actually
originated with the division between immigrant parents
and their American born or -raised children. Melding a
uniquely urban immigrant sensibility with commercialized
consumer culture and a youth-oriented ethos characterized
by fun, leisure, and overt sexual behavior, these young
people formed a new identity that provided the framework
for today’s concepts of teenage lifestyle. Addressing
the intersecting issues of urban life, race, gender, sexuality,
and class consciousness, Inventing Modern
Adolescence is an authoritative and engaging look
at a pivotal point in American history and the intriguing,
complicated, and still very pertinent teenage identity
that emerged from it.
Sarah
E. Chinn is an associate professor of English
at Hunter College, and the executive director of the
Center for Lesbian and Gay Studies at the CUNY Graduate
Center. |
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Risky
Lessons: Sex Education and Social Inequality
Jessica
Fields
Publication Date: Summer 2008
In Risky
Lessons: Sex Education and Social Inequality Fields
considers the current controversy surrounding sexuality
education as it plays out in classrooms and everyday
lives of students and teachers. This ethnographic study
of sex education in three U.S. schools illuminates the
intended and unintended consequences of young people
gathering to discuss the bounds of sexual health, acceptability,
and pleasure. Fields finds that students learn not only
how to care for themselves, but also important lessons
about relating to their own and other’s sexualities.
These lessons reflect, reinforce, and sometimes challenge
racial, gender, and other social inequalities.
Jessica
Fields is an assistant professor of sociology
at San Francisco State University |
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Disrupted
Childhoods: Children of Women in Prison
Jane
Siegel
Publication Date: Winter 2008/2009
Disrupted
Childhoods: Children of Women in Prison explores
the issues arising from a mother’s incarceration,
and provides first person accounts of the experiences
of children whose mothers are in prison. The
book offers an unparalleled view into children’s
lives before and after their mother’s confinement.
Interviews with nearly 70 children and their
mothers conducted at different points in their
mothers’ involvement in the criminal justice
system bring to light the lived experiences of
prisoners’ children. Siegel places the
mother’s incarceration in the context of
other aspects of the children’s lives;
which are characterized by many hardships and
traumas. Disrupted Childhoods contributes
to our understanding of this at risk population
of children, and humanizes the discourse about
incarceration’s collateral consequences.
Jane
A. Siegel is an associate professor
in the department of Sociology, Anthropology
and Criminal Justice at Rutgers University in
Camden where she is also affiliated with the
Center for Children and Childhood Studies. |
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The
Child in World Religions
Edited
by Don Browning and Marcia Bunge
Publication: Winter 2008/2009
The
Child in World Religions provides
a new window on the basic understandings of
children in major religions around the world.
By introducing and presenting a range of classical
texts on children from within different traditions,
the editors and contributors of this unique
volume seek to locate various critical issues
concerning the relation of children to religion
and the relation of these childhood traditions
to their surrounding social contexts. Traditions
will include Judaism, Christianity, Islam,
Hinduism, Buddhism, and Confucianism.
Don
Browning is the Alexander Campbell Professor
of Religious Ethics and the Social Sciences,
emeritus, at The Divinity School at the University
of Chicago. Marcia J. Bunge is
Professor of Theology and Humanities and director
of the Child in Religion in Ethics Project at
Valparaiso University in Indiana. |
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The
Child in American Religions
Edited
by Don Browning and Bonnie Miller-McLemore
Publication: Winter 2008/2009
The
Child in American Religions is a groundbreaking
collection of essays that brings the field of
religion into the scholarly discourse on childhood
in America. The authors consider the various
ways in which different religions and religious
groups define and guide children within the context
of American culture and society. What is their
understanding and view of American children?
How does each interpret, reconstruct, and mediate
its traditions, beliefs and practices to support
and guide children in light of what they see
to be the dominant threats and opportunities
of American life?
Don Browning is the Alexander Campbell
Professor of Religious Ethics and the Social Sciences,
emeritus, at The Divinity School at the University
of Chicago. Bonnie J. Miller-McLemore is
the E. Rhodes and Leona B. Carpenter Professor of
Pastoral Theology and Counseling at The Divinity
School at Vanderbilt University. |
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Pleasures
and Perils: Girls’ Sexuality in a Caribbean
Consumer Culture
Debra Curtis
Publication Date: Winter 2008
What
is the relationship between intimate acts and private
desires and larger cultural and economic
factors? If we assume that sexuality is strongly
influenced by cultural forces then how do we account
for the ways individuals craft their own sexual lives?
In Pleasures and Perils, anthropologist
Debra Curtis turns her attention to the much neglected
subject of the sexuality of Caribbean girls. Like
many girls in the developing world, they occupy an
intensely marginalized social position. Drawing on
ethnographic fieldwork on Nevis, an increasingly
globalized island society, Curtis investigates the
conditions of sexual exploitation and the nature
of sexual pleasure to emphasize the ways in which
religion, public health, and consumer culture shape
girls’ sexualities. Just as importantly, Curtis
explores how girls navigate various social, cultural
and personal tensions in their lives. Ultimately,
this ethnography demonstrates that sexuality is a
domain of power and powerlessness, self-determination
and cultural control.
Debra
Curtis is an assistant professor in
the Sociology and Anthropology Department at
Salve Regina University in Newport, R.I. |
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We
Fight To Win: Inequality and the Politics of
Youth Activism
Hava R. Gordon
Publication Date: Summer 2009
In
an adult-dominated society, young people often
find themselves shut out of political participation
processes. In We Fight to Win, sociologist
Hava Rachel Gordon offers a compelling account
of the attempts of young people to break into community
politics, and documents the battles that teens
wage to form youth movements and create social
change in their schools and neighborhoods. Gordon
examines two youth movements in two U.S. cities
to show how these activists employ a variety of
strategies to disrupt adult power in order to become
political forces. However, these strategies are
far from universal. Gordon shows the many ways
in which the politics of youth activism are structured
by overlapping age, race, class, and gendered axis
of power and privilege. This is one of the first
books to take a in-depth look at how youth politics
operates on the ground and in the lives of adolescents
working for social change.
Hava
Rachel Gordon is an assistant professor
in the department of Sociology and Criminology
at the University of Denver. |
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| Selected
Other Rutgers University Press Books on Childhood |
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Patricia
Adler and Peter Adler |
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1998 |
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Donna
Eder |
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1995 |
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Joyce
Everett, Sandra Chipungu, and Bogart Leashore |
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2004 |
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Donna
King |
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1995 |
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John
Laszlo |
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1996 |
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Lorraine
LeBlanc |
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1999 |
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2003 |
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Susan
Palmer and Charlotte Hardman |
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1999 |
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Margaret
Rosenheim and Mark Testa |
Early
Parenthood and Coming of Age in the 1990’s |
1992 |
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Sona
Schneider |
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1995 |
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Ellen
Seiter |
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1995 |
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Barrie Thorne |
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1993 |
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For more
information about the Book Series in Childhood
Studies, click on icon |
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| >>> Instructions
for Authors |
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