Anthropology of Childhood, Youth and Education MSc

About the Course

This MSc was the first degree of its kind in the world when it was established and is still unique in its thorough-going anthropological perspective on what it is to be a child or to be young. Its key organising principle is that understanding children requires the study of how their relations with others - peers, older and younger children, parents, teachers and other adults - inform their practices, identities and world views.

Aims

• Do children of ‘different cultures’ live ‘different worlds’?
• How does education impact upon children’s worlds and upon social and cultural practices more broadly?
• How do everyday processes of learning – both formal and informal - help to shape children’s ideas of and engagement with society at large?
• What is the role of schools in the transmission and acquisition of cultural values to children and youth?
• And why are adults’ ideas about childhood and youth so important for what children learn and aspire to become?

This course addresses such issues from an anthropological perspective. The first of its kind in the UK, its distinctiveness derives from an anthropological approach that focuses on the importance of children’s and youth’s perspectives, and on the role that education (formal and informal) plays in children’s learning processes and in the transmission and acquisition of cultural knowledge. Through an examination of ethnographic cases from the around the world (including the UK), participants will learn about the different ways in which childhood and youth are understood and conceptualised, along with the different educational forms and processes through which cultural knowledge is transmitted and acquired, and how culture impacts upon these processes.

Enquiries

Course enquiries
Email sss-pgenquiries@brunel.ac.uk
Tel +44 (0)1895 265951

For applications already submitted
Contact Admissions online
Tel +44 (0)1895 265265

Course director: Dr Peggy Froerer

View the Social Sciences website

Related Courses

• Medical Anthropology MSc
• Psychological and Psychiatric Anthropology MSc
• Social Anthropology MRes
• Anthropology of International Development and Humanitarian Assistance MSc

Special Features

Our course team has worked in countries across the globe including South, West and East Africa, Papua New Guinea, Indonesia, India and Sri Lanka, as well as Britain.

Research interests of our current team of internationally respected anthropologists are as follows:

Dr Nicolas Argenti has undertaken long-term fieldwork in Cameroon and in Sri Lanka. He is an expert on children’s and young people’s experience of conflict and on theories of child play, embodiment, and collective memory.

Dr Andrew Beatty specialises in religion, kinship and emotion. He has worked on the relation between family forms and styles of thinking (conceptual and moral relativism) in Java, has a research interest in Mexico and has published on the anthropology of emotion.

Dr Dominique Behague specialises in the anthropology of psychiatry, the biomedical and social sciences, and the medicalisation of life-cycle transitions, including adolescence and young adulthood, in Southern Brazil. Recently, Dominique has conducted ethnographic research on the role of epidemiology and evidence-based medicine in global health politics and financing, with specific reference to the rise of global mental health.

Dr Peggy Froerer has conducted extensive field research in India. She is an expert on the anthropology of childhood, education and schooling, and is interested in theories of learning and cognition. Her earlier work focused on Hindu nationalism and Christian/Hindu ethnic relations. She is currently working on a monograph on education and social mobility in central India.

Dr Eric Hirsch has a long-standing interest in the ethnography and history of Papua New Guinea. His research focuses on issues of historicity, landscape, power and property relations. He has also carried out fieldwork in Britain on the relations between new technologies and personhood.

Dr Isak Niehaus works on the diverse fields of population removals, cosmology, witchcraft, masculinity, sexuality, politics and AIDS in the South African lowveld, and is interested in the parallels between post-Apartheid in South Africa and post-Communism in the Czech Republic. He is currently writing the biography of a South African teacher.

Dr Melissa Parker has undertaken research in Sudan, Kenya, Uganda, Burkina Faso, Ghana and London. Her publications address a wide range of issues including tropical diseases; maternal and child health; female circumcision and sexuality; HIV/AIDS and sexual networks; anthropology and public health.

Dr Will Rollason's research is based in south-east Papua New Guinea, focusing on issues of development, race and work in the post-colony. He has written on clothing, sports, tourism and colonial politics. Currently, he is working on the way in which indigenous ideas about the future affect contemporary engagements with capitalism and development.

Dr James Staples conducts fieldwork in South India, including long-term research with leprosy-affected people in a rural coastal community and, more recently, with disabled people in the major city of Hyderabad. His thematic interests include personhood, performance and the body; disability and notions of human rights; and marginal livelihoods, including begging.

The Anthropology Department has an associated research centre focusing on children, child development, youth education and learning - Centre for Anthropological Research on Childhood, Youth and Education (CARCYE).

Course Content

The course is designed to show postgraduate students how anthropological approaches can be used to gain access to and understand children and young people's lived experience, their ideas about the world and themselves, and their relations with peers and adults. In so doing, it aims to provide a rigorous grounding in key anthropological ideas and research methods and to show how a comparative social analysis illuminates our understanding of ourselves and other people.

Typical Modules

Core

The Anthropology of Childhood and Youth
Main topics of study: the concept of the child in society; children's participation in society; children's ways of coping with violence; child play; child labour; the history of youth as a political category; young people's resistance to marginalisation; the radicalisation of young people.

The Anthropology of Education and Learning
Main topics of study: Education and Learning: culture and cognition; learning and embodiment; education, learning and apprenticeship; learning, language and knowledge; learning, identity and social difference; learning and social memory

Ethnographic Research Methods
Main topics of study: the centrality of fieldwork to anthropological research; theoretical and practical issues of participant observation, open-ended unstructured interviews and semi-structured interviews; the advantages and disadvantages of using questionnaires during fieldwork; different styles of ethnographic writing; gaining access in ethnographic research; ethical clearance and ethical dilemmas arising in the course of fieldwork; constructing a research proposal.

Dissertation
The specific topics and/or research problems discussed in the dissertation are a function of the student’s particular research interest in the domain of the anthropology of children, child development and youth, and the data generated by the student’s own fieldwork.

Recent examples of dissertations by students:

• The language of learning: how children become learners
• ESL children and their friendships
• A Greek community school in a London district: ethnic socialisation among third generation children
• Youth marginalisation, affiliation and livelihoods in Sierra Leone

Elective

Anthropology of Disability and Difference
Main topics of study: A critical overview of the medical and social models of disability that have framed discourse on disability; ethnographic and phenomenological alternatives to such approaches; conducting fieldwork with cognitively and physically impaired people; disability across the life course, with a focus on childhood disability; identity and disability; social policy, development, the state and disability; ethical dilemmas and the new genetics.

Anthropology of the Body
Main topics of study: The social body; embodiment, ‘habitus’ and phenomenological approaches to the body; cross-cultural perceptions of the body; the body in parts; sex and gender; childhood and the body; bodily norms, beauty and ideas of the perfect body; biomedicine and the body; death and the dying body.

Anthropology of the Person
Main topics of study: Theories of the person; the notion of 'normality'; the emergence of memero-politics; classifications, kinds, and kind-making; 'looping effects'; cultural bound syndrome and 'ecological niche'.

Kinship, Sex and Gender
Main topics of study: Descent and alliance, the household, the incest taboo, new reproductive technologies, kinship and the state, gay kinship, the abortion debate, conceptions of social reproduction, kinship and migration, the social and cultural construction of paternity.

Foundation Disciplines of Education
Main topics of study: Psychology - the science of human behaviour; How can the study of psychology inform education? History of education; What is philosophy? the philosophy of education; the sociology of education: ethnographic studies; social class external to and within individuals: aspects of the sociology of Pierre Bourdieu; the social construction of childhood; children, childhood and schooling; the problem of adolescence; social and emotional development in childhood and adolescence; values and education; multiculturalism and education; psychological aspects of motivation; philosophical considerations relating to thinking and the curriculum.

Literature Policy and Analysis
Main topics of study: What is policy analysis? The role policy plays in education in the UK and elsewhere. Social values and political forces shaping (higher) education policies. Recent theory, practice and research in policy formation and implementation in education settings at the national and local levels. The development of policy analysis. Models of policy analysis. Theoretical underpinning and ethical considerations of policy analysis. Stages of planning (identifying a topic, locating topic within existing research, planning action, gathering data, analyzing data and dissemination). The processes of researching and writing a literature review. Accessing and critically reviewing literature in specialist area.

International Development, Children and Youth
Main topics of study: Exploring definitions of childhood, youth and international development, and theories of childhood and youth. In particular students will be introduced to the new social studies of childhood. The key tenets of this approach – the social construction of childhood and youth, and the agency of young people – will subsequently be used to examine how theory, policy and practice in international development has accounted for and impacted on young people’s lives. 

Global Agendas on Young People, Rights and Participation
Main topics of study: Human rights: history, critiques and mobilisation; Theorising children’s rights: child liberation and caretaker views; changing conceptions of children’s rights; the UN Convention on the Rights of the Child: history and critiques; alternative conceptions of children’s rights: the African Charter; children’s rights in practice: children’s rights in national laws; claiming rights; participatory development: history and practices; children’s participation: the arguments; participatory projects with children; problematising children’s participation; youth and participation; youth politics and activism.

Applied Learning for Children, Youth and International Development
Main topics of study: this module will consist primarily of a placement activity, lasting a minimum of 10 days, which can take place in their own place of employment (paid or unpaid) or another organisation. The placement must be approved by the module co-ordinator and the project worked on must demonstrate relevance to the study of children, youth and international development.

Plus two un-assessed reading modules

History and Theory of Social Anthropology
Main topics of study: evolutionary' anthropology; 'race', 'civilisation'; diffusionism and the Boas school; the development of ethnographic research; functional, structure and comparison; structuralism; neo-evolutionism; culture and the interpretation of cultures; critiques (Marxism, feminism, post-modernism).

Issues in Social Anthropology
Main topics of study: kinship; gender; religion; anthropology of the body.

Teaching and Learning

You will be taught via a combination of lectures, seminars, workshops, tutorials and film.

Assessment

You will be taught via a combination of lectures, seminars, workshops, tutorials and film.

Assessment is variously by essay, practical assignments (eg, analysis of a short field exercise), and a dissertation of approximately 15,000 words. This dissertation is based upon fieldwork undertaken by the candidate. There are no examinations.

Careers

Candidates will acquire analytical and research skills that can be used in a wide range of careers. In addition to providing a firm grounding for doctoral research on childhood and youth, graduates will find that the degree enhances professional development in fields such as teaching, social work, counselling, educational and child psychology, health-visiting, nursing and midwifery, paediatric specialisms, non-governmental agencies and international development. Every year, some of our graduates also go on to do further research for a PhD in child-focused anthropology as members of the Centre for Child-Focused Anthropological Research (C-FAR).

Fees for 2013/14 entry

UK/EU students: £5,800 full-time; £2,900 part-time

International students: £12,000 full-time; £6,000 part-time

Read about funding opportunities available to postgraduate students

Fees quoted are per annum and are subject to an annual increase.

Entry Requirements

Normally a good Honours degree from a UK institution; an equivalent overseas qualification; or an equivalent professional qualification (eg from a teaching or health or child welfare background or similar). Candidates not fully meeting these criteria may nevertheless be considered.

English Language Requirements

• IELTS: 6.5 (min 6 in all areas)
• TOEFL Paper test: 580 (TWE 4.5)
• TOEFL Internet test: 92 (R20, L20, S20, W20)
• Pearson: 59 (51 in all subscores)
• BrunELT 65% (min 60% in all areas)

Brunel also offers our own BrunELT English Test and accept a range of other language courses. We also have a range of Pre-sessional English language courses, for students who do not meet these requirements, or who wish to improve their English.