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CONTRIBUTIONS TO CROSS-DISCIPLINARY RESEARCH ON CHILDHOODS
Within the last decade research on childhood as a changing social and historical construction, and of children as social actors who create their own social worlds, has blossomed within the disciplines of sociology, history, anthropology, and geography. Center for Working Families researchers have drawn upon and made significant contributions to this burgeoning field of study. In addition to research on adult care for children, including varied child-rearing beliefs and practices, CWF researchers have attended to the ways in which children negotiate and experience families, parents’ work sites, day care centers and other contexts of care, and the process of growing up. Barrie Thorne’s ethnography of growing up in Oakland is based on extensive team fieldwork in a variety of settings and on interviews with children and parents from a range of class and ethnic backgrounds (including immigrants and transnational family arrangements); she is developing a community study, from the vantage point of children and childhoods. During her stay at CWF, Annette Lareau worked on a pathbreaking book about class and racial ethnicity in family practices of childrearing and in children’s experiences of these practices. Research by post-docs Rivka Polatnick and Elaine Bell Kaplan also highlighted negotiations across generations through interviews with middle-school children and their parents; their writing, on themes such as the negotiation of "growing up schedules" (Polatnick) and perceptions of danger (Kaplan) drew attention from the media. Two CWF pre-docs, Cheri Jo Pascoe (who interviewed teen-age boys), and Christopher Davidson (who interviewed teens active in a synagogue), examined children’s and teen’s perceptions of the work and family practices of their parents. Pascoe found that the high school boys she interviewed were critical of absent and unaffectionate fathers; they envisioned a future family life in which they could be nurturers like their mothers and wage earners like their fathers. These projects have helped bridge a striking gap between research on experiences and practices of parenting (childrearing, mothering, fathering) and research on the experiences and agency of children. As chair of the American Sociological Association Section on the Sociology of Children and Youth, and as the U.S. editor of the journal, Childhood: A Global Journal of Child Research, Barrie Thorne has helped promote this sort of bridging research.
During spring 2002 a number of CWF workshops highlighted the history of childhood, with discussions guided by faculty member, Paula Fass. and Visiting Scholar, Gary Cross -- both noted historians of childhood. We capped this intellectual feast with the May 2002 conference, Designing Modern Childhoods, organized by post-doc Marta Gutman, and a former Visiting Scholar from Denmark, Ning deConinck-Smith. Papers from the conference will become a special issue of Childhood: A Global Journal of Child Research (to be published in 1994); others will be included in a co-edited volume.
BIBLIOGRAPHY ON SOCIOLOGY OF CHILDHOOD
Other Pages Under Contributions: