Private Group active 7 years, 9 months ago

Children and Adults

This seminar explores how the meanings of childhood and adulthood and child/adult relations have changed over time, and how both academia and the general public are currently debating them. Following the UN Convention on Children’s Rights (CRC) the term “child” in this seminar refers to all young people up to 18 years of age, and hence it includes those whom we commonly call in North America “adolescents” and “youth”. While drawing deeply from theory in the social sciences and the humanities the course will repeatedly return to the close observation of children and adults today and to the very different kinds of relationships established in a range of institutional settings. We will also address those professions that have consciously tried to transform the nature of child/adult relations, such as alternative education and play work. The CRC will also be an important focus, with the emergence of children’s rights resulting in new conceptions of children capacities to act and rights as citizens and important debates on the age of majority and the age of license for different activities