Study Details: MSc 1-year full-time; 2.5-years part-time
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.
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.
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
Home/EU students: £5,060 full-time, £2,530 part-time; International students: £11,330 full-time, £5,665 part-time
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).
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.
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:
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.
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.
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