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 […]
This course analyzes childhood as represented and experienced in Canadian culture through time, across regions, and among cultural groups. There are two primary aspects to the course: first, an exploration of the range of representations of children and childhood in Canadian expressive culture through different moments of history, throughout different regions, and among different cultural […]
This online course explores the role of documentary films in understanding the culture of childhood and youth in a global context. Students will engage in an in-depth examination of documentary films (both local and international) from multicultural contexts around the world. Through reading, watching, and analysis, students in this course will have the opportunity to […]
This course seeks to examine the dynamics of parent/child relationships. Theoretical models and illustrative data from sociology and related disciplines of anthropology and psychology are utilized to provide a comprehensive understanding of this process. The focus of the course will be upon understanding how research into parent-child relations has evolved from unidirectional to bi-directional resulting in […]
This course explores major themes in the formation of Canadian society through a critical examination of issues and debates aired in recent historical scholarship. Three periods pre-industrial, industrial and post-Second World War provide a temporal framework for analyzing recurrent issues.
Some major modern theories of child development are compared and their corresponding data and methodologies are analyzed.