First-Year Interdisciplinary Seminar: The Cultural Politics of Childhood

Catalog description

This course explores the fraught relationship between children and public policy makers in the United States. How do policy makers understand and seek to regulate childhood? Do all children require the same care and attention from government? And what do we even mean when we talk about "children"? We begin by examining common conceptualizations of the child figure. While all children possess some universal characteristics that transcend time, place, and personal circumstance, we can also understand the child figure to be a social construction, with childhood as we know it emerging as a coherent life stage only in the past few centuries. Public policy—laws and regulations concerning education, child abuse, and juvenile justice, for example—has both responded to and helped shape new conceptualizations of childhood. The remainder of the course focuses on children as members of families. Just as we can understand the symbolic child figure to be a social construction, so we will see that race, class, gender, and sexual orientation are key factors influencing the lived experiences of actual children and their parents. Additionally, we will examine how the proscribed "best methods" of child-rearing seem to change frequently. Scholars and thinkers we will encounter include Ta-Nehisi Coates, Annette Lareau, Sally Mann, Neil Postman, Mical Raz, and Judith Sealander. Ultimately, while the course emphasizes the constructed nature of childhood, students are encouraged to develop and refine their own ideas about what public policies might actually benefit young people.