Culture, Inequalities, and Children: Unequal Childhoods through Relational Perspectives

• In Event: 30461 - Section on Children and Youth Roundtables
  In Refereed Roundtable (60 minute): Table 2. Expanding Theories of Childhood

Abstract

By selectively reviewing sociological literature on children, culture, and inequalities—focusing on empirical studies from North America—this paper argues that research on childhood inequalities and culture in North America would benefit from theoretical, methodological, and empirical insights drawn from the cultural studies approaches developed at the Centre for Contemporary Cultural Studies (CCCS) at Birmingham University from the mid-1960s to the early 2000s. Furthermore, it demonstrates that incorporating macro-relational perspectives provides crucial analytical guidance in uncovering the connections between the processes of the “pricelessness” (Zelizer 1985, 2010b) of privileged children and the “unchilding” (Shalhoub-Kevorkian 2019) of underprivileged children who are excluded from childhood.

Author

• Seyma Özdemir, University of California, Santa Barbara