Showing 1-20 of 49 items.

Producing Children

Critical Studies in Childhood Creativity

Rutgers University Press

Children’s culture is not only culture for children; it’s culture by children — yet scholars of children’s culture overwhelmingly center work by adults for children. Producing Children acknowledges and theorizes children as cultural producers, underscoring how such creativity empowers children as active participants in their own culture, and helps us to reconceive our understandings of children themselves.

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Producing Children

Critical Studies in Childhood Creativity

Rutgers University Press

Children’s culture is not only culture for children; it’s culture by children — yet scholars of children’s culture overwhelmingly center work by adults for children. Producing Children acknowledges and theorizes children as cultural producers, underscoring how such creativity empowers children as active participants in their own culture, and helps us to reconceive our understandings of children themselves.

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Children as Social Butterflies

Navigating Belonging in a Diverse Swiss Kindergarten

Rutgers University Press

Children as Social Butterflies offers an analysis of how children negotiate social belonging. Ursina Jaeger followed the children of a kindergarten class in a stigmatized and diverse neighborhood for several years, both inside and outside of school. Along with giving vivid insights into the children's everyday lives, she examines how social differentiation is learned in diverse societies.

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Care and Agency

The Andean Community through the Eyes of Children

Rutgers University Press

This book describes the lives of children in rural communities of the Andes Mountains of Peru. It foregrounds the children’s own perceptions and feelings, so far as they can be known by researchers using ethnographic methods. It shows the great variety of Andean childhoods – some happy, others harsh and demanding – and suggests the options children face: follow the many to migrate to the city or risk their hopes on a better future in the rural setting. 
 

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China's Left-Behind Children

Caretaking, Parenting, and Struggles

Rutgers University Press

Paying special attention to the seventy million children left behind by internal migrants in rural China, this book investigates the role of parental migration and the left-behind status of their children in shaping family dynamics and the children’s general wellbeing, including school performance, delinquency, resilience, feelings of ambiguous loss, and other psychological problems.

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The Farm & Wilderness Summer Camps

Progressive Ideals in the Twentieth Century

Rutgers University Press

The Farm & Wilderness Summer Camps explores how ideals considered progressive in the 1940s and 1950s had to be reconfigured to respond to shifts in culture and society as well as to new understanding of race and ethnicity, social class, gender, and sexual identity through a study of the popular Farm & Wilderness camps. To illustrate this change, Emily Abel and Margaret K. Nelson draw on over forty interviews with former campers, archival materials, and their own memories. This book tells a story of progressive ideals, crisis of leadership, childhood challenges, and social adaptation in the quintessential American summer camp.
 

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Between Self and Community

Children’s Personhood in a Globalized South Korea

Rutgers University Press

Between Self and Community investigates the early childhood socialization process in a rapidly changing, globalizing South Korea. Based on long-term ethnographic fieldwork in a South Korean preschool, it examines how both children and teachers interactively navigate, construct, and reconstruct their own multifaceted and sometimes conflicting models of “a good child” amid Korea’s shifting educational and social contexts.

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Children of the Rainforest

Shaping the Future in Amazonia

Rutgers University Press

Children of the Rainforest explores the lives of Matses children growing up in a time of radical change in Amazonia. Using visual and participatory methods, the book explores ethnographically how children’s imaginations, play, and shifting desires are powerful catalysts of social change, which shape the future of their society and of Amazonia at large.

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Children of the Rainforest

Shaping the Future in Amazonia

Rutgers University Press

Children of the Rainforest explores the lives of Matses children growing up in a time of radical change in Amazonia. Using visual and participatory methods, the book explores ethnographically how children’s imaginations, play, and shifting desires are powerful catalysts of social change, which shape the future of their society and of Amazonia at large.

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When Are You Coming Home?

How Young Children Cope When Parents Go to Jail

Rutgers University Press

When Are You Coming Home? answers questions about how young children cope when parents go to jail. Told through the real stories of children, caregivers, and parents navigating parental incarceration, this book delves into the nuances that comprise children’s well-being and family relationships. In doing so, it calls out contextual vulnerabilities while emphasizing resilience processes that shape how children make sense of being separated from parents and await their likely reunification.
 

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Global Child

Children and Families Affected by War, Displacement, and Migration

Rutgers University Press

Global Child highlights the unique features of participatory, arts-based, and socio-ecological approaches to studying war-affected children and families, demonstrating the collective strength as well as the limitations and the ethical implications of such research. Building on work across the Global South and the Global North, this book aims to deepen an understanding of this tri-pillared approach, and the potential for this methodology to contribute to improved practices in working with war-affected children and their families.

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A World of Many

Ontology and Child Development among the Maya of Southern Mexico

Rutgers University Press

A World of Many explores the world-making efforts of Tzotzil Maya children from two different localities within the municipality of Chenalhó, Chiapas. It shows that as they create their worlds, children create themselves as distinct human beings, being differently in their world.
 

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Playing with History

American Identities and Children’s Consumer Culture

Rutgers University Press

Examining cultural products geared towards teaching children American cultural identity, Playing With History highlights the changes and constancies in depictions of American identity since the advent of modern consumer society. The book examines political and ideological messages sold to children throughout the twentieth century through toys, dolls, books, and amusement parks.
 

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Life in a Cambodian Orphanage

A Childhood Journey for New Opportunities

Rutgers University Press

Combining detailed observations of children's daily life in a Cambodian orphanage with follow-up interviews of the same children after they have grown and left, this book shows how orphanages can be configured to meet children's developmental needs, providing evidence that they are not always bleak sites of deprivation and despair.

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Disputing Discipline

Child Protection, Punishment, and Piety in Zanzibar Schools

Rutgers University Press

A visual and poetic exploration into the lives of Zanzibari children who negotiate the intersections of universalized and local children’s rights aspirations, Disputing Discipline shows how anti-corporal punishment programs in schools unintentionally compromise children’s well-being and asserts that children’s views and experiences can and should transform our understanding of child protection policy.

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Belonging and Becoming in a Multicultural World

Refugee Youth and the Pursuit of Identity

Rutgers University Press

Based on extensive ethnographic fieldwork in Brisbane, Australia, Belonging and Becoming in a Multicultural World provides a critical analysis of the shortcomings and underpinning contradictions of modern multicultural inclusion. It demonstrates how creating a sense of identity among young Sudanese and Karen refugees is a continual process shaped by powerful social forces.

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The Queer Aesthetics of Childhood

Asymmetries of Innocence and the Cultural Politics of Child Development

Rutgers University Press

In The Queer Aesthetics of Childhood, Hannah Dyer offers a study of how children’s art and art about childhood can forecast new models of social life that redistribute care, belonging, and political value. She asserts that in the aesthetics of childhood, a more just future can be conjured.
 

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All Together Now

American Holiday Symbolism Among Children and Adults

Rutgers University Press

Holidays are times for creating memories and for celebrating cultural values, emotions, and social ties. All Together Now considers holidays that are celebrated by American families and shows how entire families bond at holidays in ways that allow both children and adults to be influential within their shared interaction.

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Weighty Problems

Embodied Inequality at a Children’s Weight Loss Camp

Rutgers University Press

By investigating how contemporary cultural discourses of childhood obesity are experienced by children, Laura Backstrom illustrates how deeply fat stigma is internalized during the early socialization experiences of children. Weighty Problems finds that embodied inequality is constructed and negotiated through a number of interactional processes including resocialization, stigma management, social comparisons, and attribution.

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Weighty Problems

Embodied Inequality at a Children's Weight Loss Camp

Rutgers University Press

By investigating how contemporary cultural discourses of childhood obesity are experienced by children, Laura Backstrom illustrates how deeply fat stigma is internalized during the early socialization experiences of children. Weighty Problems finds that embodied inequality is constructed and negotiated through a number of interactional processes including resocialization, stigma management, social comparisons, and attribution.

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