Examines the young dancer as performer, choreographer, audience member and critic. Studies the philosophic principles, pedagogical practices, creative processes, and performance habits of young dancer companies, and/or dance companies that perform for young audiences.
Renowned scholar Robert Skloot suggests that Theatre of the Holocaust scripts can express their understanding of historical facts, and although the plays are not history, they would not stand apart from history. Holocaust plays and drama work can raise crucial historical and moral questions and make them more immediate. Traces of lives, real or imagined, […]
This course explores the experiences, perspectives, and roles of children and youth in migration processes in a global context. Through an examination of various theoretical texts and case studies, this course provides a critical introduction to a variety of issues currently debated in the field of childhood and migration, including agency and identity, emotion and […]
This course investigates how children learn about and experience the law through children’s literature and through direct contact with the legal system. Topics include: children’s understanding of legal terminology; the law’s treatment of discipline and punishment in the school system and at home; the circumstances under which children can be removed from their parents and […]
This course traces the history of children and childhood from the Middle Ages into the early twentieth century using historical, literary, and cultural sources. The primary (but not exclusive) focus is on the Anglo-American legal tradition. Topics include: the treatment of children under the common law in the criminal courts and in matters having to […]
This iteration of our course explores mostly contemporary childhood and youth cultures with a specific, Canadian, urban context: Toronto, and its suburbs. Relying on literary fiction, ethnography, photography and film, we study adultist attempts to regulate, restrict, appropriate and monetize the cultural dynamics of Toronto's children and young people. Of course, we also study how […]
Before we explore what "fantasy" constitutes, we consider competing, contemporary constructions of what constitutes the "real". We proceed to map how varied constructions of childhood had shaped, and were shaped by, their relationship to ascendant beliefs regarding "reality" as the realm of adulthood and "fantasy" as the province of childhood. Our course attempts to challenge […]
Analyzes and examines Children's Literature and Indigenous Knowledge in North America, focusing on the similarities among diverse traditions of contemporary Indigenous Children's writers in both Canada and in the United States. Explores the many and the varied interpretations of the Indigenous Children and their historical experiences, residential schools, definitions of cultures, childhood self-determination and the […]
The purpose of this class is to understand children’s lives around the world, with particular focus on the lived experiences of children/youth and childhood/adolescence in the Majority world. In a globalized world our connections to Majority world children are closer than ever – the shoes you are wearing, the music you listen to, issues of […]
How are children's lives structured in digital spaces or networked publics? What do these spaces look like? How do children access them and use them? Are they digital homes for institutional voices for and about children, which seek to organize, categorize, and confine children's lives to social norms as dictated by adults? Or are they […]