CFP

[Peto Andrea]

Call For Papers

Session for CASCA 2000

Anthropology, Feminism and Child Research: Exploring Connections,
Contributions and  Contestations

Co-organizers: Virgina Caputo (Carleton), Pamela Downe (Saskatchewan)
and Jane Helleiner (Brock).

This session will offer a forum for informed debate concerning the
connections between anthropology, feminism and child research. After a
period of relative neglect, a reinvigorated anthropology of childhood
has drawn attention not only to the need to historicize and
denaturalize the concept of childhood, but to the value of analyses of
the "cultural politics of childhood" in the context of  local,
national and globalized political economies (Stephens 1995, 1997;
Scheper-Hughes and Sargent 1998). This work has included examination
of children and childhood in the context of social and political
dislocation, poverty, war, work, homelessness, environmental
degradation, and human rights. There have also been important
methodological contributions from anthropologists working amongst
children. While some of the recent anthropological child research
acknowledges a theoretical and methodological  debt to feminism, much
of current work has yet to fully engage with the broad and diverse
insights of contemporary feminist scholarship.  At the same time past
feminist writing, including feminist anthropology, has tended to
address childhood only indirectly (i.e. through the study of women and
motherhood); a neglect now being partially rectified through critical
examination of "girlhoods" (Mankekar 1997). This session is designed
to explore existing and potential connections among anthropology,
feminisms and child research in the contexts of theoretical,
methodological, historical, textual and/or ethnographic analyses.

Suggested areas for papers may include:
-feminist theory and child research
-feminist methodology and child research
-the ethnography of gendered childhoods
-gender, childhood and social policy
-gender, childhood and nationalism

Abstracts of 250 words or further enquiries to:

Dr. Jane Helleiner
Department of Child and Youth Studies/Sociology
Brock University
St. Catharines, Ontario
email:  jhellein at spartan.ac.brocku.ca

Deadline for abstracts is February 15, 2000.