Sociology 3290 Final

Front 1

Children's Experiences and Interpretations of Race

Van Ausdale, Debra, and Joe R. Feagin. 1996. “Using Racial and Ethnic Concepts: The Critical Case of Very Young Children.” American Sociological Review, Vol. 61, No. 5 (Oct., 1996), pp. 779-793.*

Back 1

• How young children perceive race
• They are purposely perceiving race, before people thought that they had to have learned it from somewhere

• What is the problem?
o The United States has this rederick that we are post-racism we are not a post-racist society
o We have a problem with explicit/outright racism
o We have this idea that children are blank slates, they are these fresh beings, and if we are going to start over, we have to shaped the children so that we can make the next generation better

• Children find reasons to exclude other children
o Before this article it was assumed that children were accidentally using race
o We have to think about children MORE like ourselves instead of LESS like ourselves
• What are solutions?
o We need to acknowledge it and bring it into the school curriculums earlier

Front 2

Children & Gender

Thorne, Barrie. 1993. Gender Play. New Brunswick, NJ: Rutgers University Press. Chapter 4.

Back 2

-"when boys and girls have a choice of companions, they more often separate than integrate"
-outside of school boys and girls often played with each other but in school boys and girls rarely played with each other
-as children grow older, they tend to separate more and more by gender, with the amount of gender separation peaking in early adolescence
-widespread assumption that gender is somehow 'natural' or an 'imperative' of development


Why do boys and girls self-segregate?
1. Shared Interests (dolls/trucks)
-on average, boys have a somewhat higher activity level than girls, but the ranges between the most and least active boy, and the most and least active girl, are much greater than the statistical difference between all the girls compared with all the boys.

• What’s wrong with this idea as an explanation?
o Social consequences
o Sometimes kids play together and sometimes they don’t-not really an explanation for that

2. Psychoanalytic Processes
-boys are motivated to separate from and to devalue 'things feminine' in order to gain separation from their mothers. Because mothers do the bulk of primary parenting.
-Women mother, girls have trouble with boundaries, girls cant figure out where they end and mom begins, boys know the boundary
3. Cognitive Labeling
-when boys associate with boys and girls with girls, they have found a powerful way of 'doing gender' of announcing and sustaining separate gender identities

o When does gender make a difference and how does it make a difference?
• Schools, neighborhoods, families
• 3 factors that we have to pay attention to
 1. Public/crowded
 2. Formal, age-grading
 3. Continued presence of power and evaluation: teachers actively produce gender in the classroom. Adults can desegregate a group and girls can follow in.

Front 3

Children in Groups and Kid Culture

Corsaro, William and L. Molinari 1990. ‘From seggiolini to discussione: The Generation and Extension of Peer Culture among Italian Preschool Children.’ International Journal of Qualitative Studies in Education 3: 213–30.

Back 3

-children begin life as social beings within an already defined social network and, through the growth of communication and language, they, in interaction with others, construct their social worlds.
-A major change in children's worlds is their movement outside the family unit.
-childhood knowledge and practices are gradually transformed into the knowledge and practices are gradually transformed into the knowledge and skills necessary for participation in the adult world.

-Approach-avoidance: always a threatening agent who was both approached and avoided.
-overall approach-avoidance demonstrates how children cope with real fears by incorporating them into peer routines that they produce control.
-Involves 2 phases: the children discuss and eventually make a joint claim to a specific area of play. Second, involves active attempts to protect ongoing interaction from the intrusion of other children.
-the children first agreed that they were playing together and then went on to mark verbally their need to protect their play from the intrusions of others.
-when another child attempted to enter into the play.
Children develop and use elaborate communicative strategies:
• 1. to claim ownership of objects and play areas
• 2. to resist the attempts of other children to gain access
• 3. to attempt to gain access to ongoing play if they are not the original participants

The Protection of Interactive Space as a Divergent Routine
-Italian students would explain what they were doing and in some cases invite other children in, American children resisted attempts

Front 4

Children's Literature and children's lives


Tatar, Maria. 2011. “No More Adventures in Wonderland.” The New York Times. October 9.
Tatar, Maria. 1999. “Introduction.” The Classic Fairy Tales: Texts, Criticism. New York: WW Norton.

Back 4

Fairy Tales
• overcome evil
• happy ending
• saving a woman
-In the 19th century, they put out ads for fairytales, mostly bourgeoisie women who were nannies responded with fairytales
-No political unity, Folk tales were told so that children would grow up with these stories and they would have a common reference point

Front 5

Sexuality

Barrie Thorne and Zella Luria, "Sexuality and Gender in Children's Daily Worlds," Social Problems, 33 (3), 1986: 176-190.

Back 5

• Sexuality is happening in middle childhood, it is part of the gender system.
• Links with gender.
• Girls and boys do it differently
• Girls were more focuses on romance and emotional,
o Dyads
• Boys was strictly physical
o More violent
o Rule violations
• Learned from peers

Front 6

Sexuality

C.J. Pascoe. 2005. “’Dude, You’re a Fag:’ Adolescent Masculinity and the Fag Discourse,” Sexualities, v8, n3, pp 329-246.

Back 6

Pascoe: “Dude You’re A Fag”
• Fag Discourse
o Masculinity, how boys show that they aren’t feminine.
o Not about figuring out who is actually a homosexual.
o Used to discipline and herd boys in to appropriately masculine behavior.
o “Boys who break rules of both gender and sexuality are harassed for being homosexual”
• Things that make you subject to being called “Fag”
o Emotional, Dancing, Caring about clothing, Incompetent, Weakness/feminine, African American boys were excluded from dancing and clothing
• Outside of the book:
o Hospitality/domesticity/detailed, Proximity, Weakness/feminine, Breaking rules

Front 7

Child Labor and Children Laboring


Zelizer, Viviana. 2002. “Kids and Commerce.” Childhood 9 (4): 375-96.*

Back 7

• The image of children as workers, provokes society
• Yes, there is exploitation, but it is less because of children’s innate universal innocence, children generally experience them as unequal exercises of power.
• Children perceive these extensive economic ties as unequal exercises of power.


There is a line to be drawn between child work and child labor.
• Child work is what we read in Zelizer or Hausa, about children’s economic contribution
o Not necessarily a bad thing, its their contribution, and it can be a cultural norm
o Ability to pursue an deducation
o Paid a fair wage
o Benefits the child & family
o Hazardous

Front 8

Private and Public Power: Domestic Violence and Abuse

Kitzinger, Jenn. 1996. “Who Are You Kidding: Children, Power and the Struggle Against Sexual Abuse.” In Allison James and Alan Prout, eds., Constructing and reconstructing childhood. London: Falmer Press. 165-189.

Back 8

-childhood then is not defined by age but by some set of qualities or experiences which are incompatible with being assaulted
-using this concept of innocence to incite public revulsion against sexual abuse is problematic for three main reasons:
• 1. the notion of childhood innocence itself is a source for titillation for abusers.
• 2. innocence is a double-edged sword in the fight against sexual abuse because it stigmatizes the 'knowing' child
o sexually victimized children may become "walking invitations"
• 3. it is an ideology used to deny children access to knowledge and power and hence actually increases their vulnerability to abuse

-childhood as an intuition that makes children 'vulnerable'
• Children as victims
o Active role
o Titillating to perpetrators
• Innocence vs. ignorance
o More vulnerable to abuse
o Problem of knowing child
• Different tactics children use to protect themselves
o Try to keep busy by leaving the house, Fight back, Girl tries to look more like a boy, or ugly and dirty, Blank out, Get a protector, boyfriend or dog, Make themselves pass out or induce nose bleeds, Participate to get it over with sooner, Squeaky toys, Protecting other children
• Differences between prevention programs
o An alternative to child innocence prevention, teaching them to say no, problem is that it gives the illusion of childhood control, children as active and children as in control, they are essentially powerless in this situation because they cannot control it.
o To think about this and really end it, we must talk about adult child power.
o Ultimately it is childhood as an institution that makes childhood vulnerable

Front 9

Youth Activism and Age Inequality

Gordon, Hava Rachel. 2007. "Allies Within and Allies Without: How Adolescent Activists Conceptualize Ageism and Navigate Adult Power in Youth Social Movements." Journal of Contemporary Ethnography. 36 (6): 631-668.

Back 9

-young activists collectively interpret and politicize their understandings of ageism in the course of organizing youth movements.
-these politicized understandings of ageism directly inform young people's organizational structures and social movement strategies.
1. Demographics-one is more racial and ethnic,
2. Principal Goals
• focus on macro level institutions, processes, and ideologies in the making of youth subordination
• it is crucial to understand how age operates as an axis of social power
• to see how young people contribute to the social construction of adolescence in an age-stratified society
• teenagers to recognize ageism and their own social subordination in adult society
• use their knowledge of ageism to guide their tactics
• to keep organizations safe from adult power (csa)
• CSA was into economics
• UY was more into equality of their education, providing food drives for local businesses
• UY was more focused on social issues, local community
3. Primary Tactics
• organized strikes
• high school students organizing with Cal Berkeley students
• CSA was more radical
4. Relationship to activist adults
• use adults as facilitators but didn’t want them to getting involved (CSA)
• served as political face
• UY had adult allies within
• CSA had adult allies without
• Adults provide links to social services
5. Differences among youth?
6. Relative strengths and weaknesses
• UY gets more legitimacy, and they benefit because they have learned something from the past.
• It’s a risk for UY

Front 10

Children’s politics

James, Allison. 2011. “To Be (Come) or Not to Be (Come): Understanding Children's Citizenship.” The ANNALS of the American Academy of Political and Social Science January 1, 2011 633: 167-179

Back 10

• Differentiated citizenship
• Incremental citizenship
• Special citizenship

Front 11

Reading: Pugh, Allison J. 2010. “Three Ways Out of the Escher Print: Childhood Research and Theoretical “Progress.” Unpublished manuscript to be distributed.

Back 11

Contradictions:
1. Why “projected childhood”
• People think that children need protection, need safety, yet you have children that can do anything and are savvy as the kid from home alone


2. Active Children v. Protection
-How much of kids active participation, is related to if we actually need it, it’s remarkably convenient that at the moment there is forced labor of all adults, we now have the approach that kids can be alone, sense of comfort with adults

• some of the scholars that we have read have started to pull back from opposition, to marry developmental psychology view and the socially constructed approach.



3. Inequality & Nostalgia: Working class v. affluent childhoods
Are we saying that working class kids have better self esteem and better ability to handle situations, but these skills don’t translate into social mobility?
• “People currently talk about the old days, that nostalgia is over the working class childhood for today.
o What are we saying that working class childhood confers today

Front 12

Child Labor and Children Laboring

Schildkrout, Enid 2002 [1978]. ‘Age and Gender in Hausa Society: Socio-Economic Roles of Children in Urban Kano.’ Childhood 9 (3): 344–68.

Back 12

• Adults: gender segregation
o How are women segregated in this society?
• Women live in Purdah-Islamic route in Nigeria
• Children: there is very little gender segregation- only with some assignment of tasks
o Are essentially the public economic face of the women’s economic Purdah
o A lot of divorce in this area, and this is how women get money, through these children’s capacity to move
• They mark adulthood when they increasingly live in sex segregated worlds, boys eat with men