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Global Perspectives of Critical Childhood Studies

This course examines the conceptual framework of critical childhood studies and its intersection with Black feminism, critical race and postcolonial theory, disability studies and queer theory. The course centers the everyday lives, activities, stories, and critical perspectives of children/youth made marginal by changing economic global conditions and forms of structural, historical and political violence. The course draws on memoirs (eg. Soldier: A Poet’s Childhood, by June Jordan); films (eg. The Flordia Project); ethnographic studies (including Shapeshrifters: Black Girls and the Choreography of Citizenship, Aimee Meredith Cox; Growing Up Global, Cindi Katz and Unsettled Belonging: Education Palestinian American Youth after 9/11, Thea Abu El-Haj); and young people’s own creative knowledge production through visual arts, imaginative play and theater (eg. used by scholars including Beth Ferholt, Kathleen Gallagher, Wendy Luttrell, Marjorie Faulstich Orellana, Lauren Silver & Tran Templeton) to explore how children & youth navigate citizenship, school, social service institutions, children’s “rights” and the criminal justice system. Our focus is on relational theoretical, methodological, and pedagogical strategies used to work with rather than on or about young people.