Childhood studies

Тексты традиционного детского фольклора вполне способны стать источником для реконструкции обрядовых реалий. Особенного внимания в этой связи заслуживают редкостные, старинные, полузабытые ныне варианты таких текстов. И, безусловно, требуются дальнейшие исследования путей трансформации обрядовых действ, ритуальных формул и текстовых клише в детские песенки. Ведь, несмотря на некоторые впечатляющие совпадения с теми реалиями, которые отразились в потешках, всё-таки многое такое, что запечатлелось в детском фольклоре, не находит прямых аналогий в этих материалах. Можно предполагать, что сравнительно поздние записи застали народную обрядовую традицию уже в стадии размывания древних верований, ритуалов и обрядовых текстов, а потешки запечатлели более раннее состояние традиции. Это пока что только догадка. Вообще же путь для сопоставительного исследования восточнославянских обрядовых реалий и детского фольклора открыт. И он может оказаться весьма перспективным.

Based on fieldwork in Egypt’s desert lands, this paper discusses rural childhoods in an area experiencing rapid social and cultural change. Since 1987, the Egyptian Government has made new villages in the desert as a means to increase agricultural production and solving problems of unemployment. Many settlers move to the Mubarak villages in order to give their children a good start in life. The desert villages are associated with a type of ‘rural idyll’. The process of settling in the desert impacts upon the children’s possible pathways to adulthood and their identities and social relationships. Not only do the children grow up in a different physical context, they are also exposed to new norms, values and behaviour that influences their everyday life and shape their identity. Especially the change from living in large, extended families to living in nuclear families as well as women’s new roles impact upon the children’s lives. The social contexts shaping the desert childhoods are in some ways more similar to contexts in ‘developed’ countries than in other parts of rural Egypt. The paper ends up by contrasting ideas of rural childhoods in Egypt with those found in ‘developed’ countries.

The cinema of monstrous childhood is not limited to young boys and girls who commit acts in secret and in isolation. Nor is this conflict always confined to the boundaries of the family melodrama. Another set of films with origins in the same post-war era combine existing fears about childhood run amok in the absence of parental authority with attendant fear concerning juvenile delinquency, or what young bodies may do when together: unsupervised, uncontrolled, and undifferentiated. This article deals with groups of children as social monsters, what I refer to as the “child collective” film—with young bodies en masse, in unison, working in concert but discordant with parental society. More than simply a fear about losing control of children, these films speak to a deeply embedded fear about losing control of the future itself, with monstrously different social formations antagonistic to systems of heterosexual kinship.

""La mayoría de los y las menores procedentes de adopción internacional logran una adaptación adecuada a su entorno, por lo que, en general, la mayor parte de las adopciones son satisfactorias tanto para los hijos e hijas cuanto para padres y/o madres. A pesar de la buena adaptación de estos niños y niñas, la investigación indica que los menores procedentes de la adopción, nacional e internacional, suelen estar expuestos a
experiencias vitales que pueden conllevar problemas en su desarrollo cognitivo, emocional y conductual. Existe cierto consenso profesional y científico en la importancia que tienen algunos factores preadoptivos así como otros postadoptivos."""

Este es un nuevo espacio desde donde descubrir y compartir nuevas miradas en torno a temas sociales que nos preocupan o, mejor, que nos ocupan. Nuestra labor de investigación y difusión sobre temas relacionados con las adopciones, las infancias y juventudes y las familias, se ha concretado a través del proyecto I+D Adopción Internacional: la integración familiar y social de los menores adoptados internacionalmente. Perspectivas interdisciplinarias y comparativas financiado por el Ministerio de Ciencia e Innovación (SEJ2006-15286/SOCI), que llevamos a cabo un amplio equipo de investigadores y asesores provenientes de diversas disciplinas, actividades profesionales e instituciones, desde hace dos años."

In the mid-twentieth century, psychologists Kenneth and Mamie Clark conducted their famous "doll test" in which they asked African American children whether they preferred black or white dolls. Most children identified white dolls as "nice" and black dolls as "bad"-proof, the Clarks argued, that segregation damaged black children psychologically. These findings figured pivotally in Brown v. Board of Education. Bernstein defamiliarizes the "doll test" by locating it not in the history of Civil Rights but instead in the history of representational play involving racialized dolls. Bernstein argues that a black child's rejection of a black doll might indeed reveal internalized racism; but it could also constitute a rejection of violently racist practices of play that had, for a century, been coordinated through black dolls. Thus Bernstein offers a new understanding of the Clarks' child-subjects not as passive internalizers of racism instead as agents who resisted inherited traditions of performance.

This article develops a Foucauldian account of the rise of the modern school, on the basis of a thorough examination of all references to education in Foucault’s work. It analyses the seventeenth century origins of mass schooling and traces its development up to the nineteenth century. It identifies several overlapping stages in this multifaceted and largely contingent development, particularly a fundamental shift from a negative to a positive conception of the school. This Foucauldian understanding of the rise of schooling as a disciplinary technology suggests that an initial focus on the exclusion or confinement of disorderly groups was gradually superseded by a focus on the inclusion or ‘attachment’ of diverse individuals and on the development of their potential. It concludes by cautioning against over-simplistic applications of Foucault’s work to the field of education.

The present contribution reassesses the main aspects of the epigraphic sources found in the so-called tophet in order to demonstrate how they are significant and how they undermine the funerary interpretations of these precincts. The inscriptions decisively define the tophet as a place of worship, a sanctuary where sacrifices were made to specific deities in specific rites. The epigraphic evidence combined with literary and archaeological data show how these sacrifices consisted of infants and small animals (either as substitutes or interred together), sometimes commemorated by the inscriptions themselves.