A summer reading and viewing challenge…

We briefly interrupt our summer photo/stories series to ask for your assistance in creating an arts & hums reading/viewing list for childhood and youth studies students and researchers. Over the next few months, we are looking to build up a resource for those of us involved in the teaching of childhood and youth studies, in whatever guise or disciplinary space, with an emphasis on the relationship between childhood and public life, children’s participation, childhood agency, and children’s politics.

The resource is intended to complement existing academic reading lists and to provide ideas about the ways in which the arts and the humanities can be used in our understanding of the relationship between childhood and public life.

 

We are therefore asking for nominations of books, films and/or poetry that illuminate the meeting point and any combination of the following themes: childhood, the political (broadly defined), family life, intergenerational conflict/solidarities, and social change. A few book examples we’ve discussed: Midnight’s Children (Salman Rushdie), The Tin Drum (Günter Grass), Vernon God Little (DBC Pierre), and film examples: The 400 Blows (Francois Truffaut), The Kid (Charlie Chaplin), If… (Lindsay Anderson).

We are asking that nominations are accompanied by short justification for the nomination (up to 300 words, can be less and/or, if you really feel like it, more is also fine). The nomination and its justification, credited to the nominator, will be re-blog on the Connectors Study blog over the winter of 2018-2019. All nominations will remain openly accessible on the blog and would provide a resource for enriching and complementing existing social science reading lists, where there is an interest in broadening social science curricula and engaging with cinematographic, literary, and poetic figurations of the civic and the political in childhood.

There is no deadline for nominations/submissions and we will take them on a rolling basis until the end of the project in September 2019. We are particularly keen to create an international resource and especially encourage the nomination of books, films and poetry from the Global South, and of directors, poets and writers, past and present, whose work speaks from different positions of ability, class, ethnicity, gender, and race backgrounds, and their combination.

Please send nominations to s [dot] nolas [at] gold [dot] ac [dot] uk

A huge thanks for your support!The Connectors Study team

PS: Photo/stories from the field continue as normal, every Wednesday and for the rest of the summer. You can read the entire series here.

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