Professor Stefan Tanaka, History Department, UCSD

"Introduction: Time and Children"

 Professor Paula Fass, History Department , UCB and Stanford University

"Children and Globalization"

I will provide an overview of the development of the modern concept of childhood, especially in the United States, and how the values that we associate
 with childhood grew in the context of Enlightenment ideas and modern conditions.  I will examinethe contradiction between these ideal and realities in the 
nineteenth century and the emergence of a consensus about what a proper childhood should be. This norm regarding childhood was applied universally and 
became a standard in the twentieth century.Finally, I argue that this norm has been brought into the global world of the twenty-first century to provide 
a problematic but still important measure of how children should be treated and understood.
   

Professor Barbara Rogoff, Psychology Department, University Of California Santa Cruz 

"Cultural Aspects of Learning:  Observation, Collaboration, and Multimodal Conversation"

In some communities, a prevalent form of learning is through keen observation of ongoing community events in which people collaborate when they are 
ready.  This approach to learning seems to be especially common in indigenous-heritage communities of the Americas, and less prevalent in communities 
that segregate children from the range of activities of their community.  These ideas will be illustrated with research in Guatemalan Mayan, 
Mexican-heritage, and European-heritage US communities as well as observations in an innovative US school.

Patricia Greenfield, Psychology Department, University Of California Los Angeles

"The Child Development Transition: Linking Sociocultural Change and Developmental Change"

In this presentation, I argue for the nature of larger social ecologies as a starting point for  theory in cultural developmental psychology.  For this theoretical starting point, 
I select Tonnies' (1887/1957) contrast between Gemeinschaft (community) and Gesellschaft (society).  These contrasting social ecologies are then integrated into the earlier
 theory of two cultural pathways through universal development - an individualistic pathway favoring the development of independent behaviors and a collectivistic pathway 
favoring the development of interdependent behaviors (Greenfield, Keller, Fuligni, and Maynard, 2003). Worldwide forces, both through internal social change and immigration, 
are constantly moving environments away from Gemeinschaft toward Gesellschaft characteristics. These sociodemographic trends include movement from rural residence, informal 
education at home, subsistence economy, and low technology environments (Gemeinschaft) to urban residence, formal schooling, commerce, and high technology environments 
(Gesellschaft); the trends apply to the developed as well as the developing world.  These changes shift cultures from collectivistic to individualistic, while shifting social development
from interdependent to independent and cognitive development from contextualized to abstract. The integration of social structure concepts with developmental theory can resolve
two essential issues: 1) sociocultural environments are not static and therefore must be treated dynamically in developmental research; 2) both social and cognitive development are 
affected by the same forces and consequently need to be integrated into one unified theory of culture and human development. The explanatory power of the theory will be 
illustrated with two types of empirical example. 

Professor Jennifer Cole, Anthropology Department, University of Chicago 

"How Historical Change Comes to be Imagined Through Youth: The Case of Contemporary Madagascar"

Youth contribute to the creation of the future because in the process of coming of age, they simultaneously draw from the past and transform it in order to face new cultural, 
historical and economic conditions. The cultural anxiety that often surrounds youth, and adult efforts to intervene in youths' development to ensure an ordered transition to 
adulthood (which from the point of view of the parental generation means continuation of the present), both arise from this fundamental contradiction. Yet despite cultural 
representations of conflict and rupture associated with youth, the process of generational transition is heterotemporal -- an uneven blend of continuity and change.  
This presentation examines how youth come to be associated with transformation in contemporary Madagascar, by examining 
two practices which youth engage in --sex for money exchange and Pentecostalism. 

 Professor Kathleen Jones, History Department, Virginia Tech

"Unnatural and Monstrous": Child Suicide in the Late Nineteenth Century

Though not the "crisis" we label them today, child suicides alarmed late nineteenth-century Americans. At the time physicians and moral statisticians framed suicide as behavior that 
reflected the social experiences and mental development of, in nineteenth-century language, the "age of maturity."  Yet, self-destructive acts by young people appeared to be on the 
increase, and increasing at a time when childhood represented a "joyful and carefree" stage of life, an age unfettered by the worries and burdens - the motives for suicide  -- that 
took over when the child achieved adulthood. This talk explores efforts by suicide specialists to reconcile the image of the child with their understanding of the causes of 
self-destruction. It suggests that the anxiety about child suicide was a product not of numbers, but of the challenge these acts of volition posed to adult authority and the ideas of 
social hierarchy and social order embedded in generational relationships.   The history of suicide when viewed through a generational lens (something most historians of this topic 
have not attempted) points to the need for including age among the categories of power relationships that shape modern historical analysis.

Professor Ann Anagnost, Anthropology Department, University of Washington 
"Imagining Global Futures in China: The Child as a Sign of Value" , forthcoming in Jennifer Cole and Deborah Dunham, eds. Figuring the Future: 
                                                                                                                                Children, Youth, and Globalization (School of American Research Press).
As globalization opens up possibilities for transnational futures, education to prepare the child for competition in a global marketplace is becoming 
increasingly privatized. In China, parents seek out commodified forms of supplemental schooling and intensified investment in the material and mental 
development of their only child to give them a competitive edge. The production of children as global citizens is a process that is increasingly subject 
to transnational gazing at the practices of other countries in East Asia and in the West in ways that are refiguring the categories of both culture and nation.

Professor Andrea Arai, Anthropology Department, University of Washington 
"The Discipline of Global Futures: Patriotic Education and the Crisis of the Child in Japan"

Following little open debate, but much controversy, the Japanese ruling party in January passed a bill altering the meaning and intent of a key education law. 
Over its sixty-year history, the Fundamental Law of Education (FLE) served as a final guarantor of educational rights and a bulwark against pressures (both domestic and foreign)
for Japan to re-militarize. The new law, intended to counteract the effects of individual rights and pacifism, said to have rendered the nation abnormal and its youth incapable of 
sacrifice and devotion, requires schools to “foster patriotic attitudes and parents to accept more responsibility for their child's successful development. While critics view these
changes as a return to the heavy-handed State involvement of prewar times, this paper argues that they represent instead the shifting of responsibility from the government to the 
individual and a new disciplinary structure suited to the pressures and requirements of economic globalization. In this paper, I track the inception of these changes from the moral panic 
and emergent expertise surrounding the child of the recessionary 90s, through the present global demand for mobility, 
liquidity and internalized sacrifice in an era when national futures no longer guarantee personal ones.

Dr. Mizuko (Mimi) Ito, Research Scientist, Annenberg Center for Communication

"Amateur Cultural Production and Peer-to-Peer Learning"

Low cost digital production tools and traffic in media over the Internet are supporting new forms of peer based creative production, sharing, and learning. 
While communities of amateur media production and sharing have always existed, the Internet makes these forms of cultural engagements more widely accessible 
and visible. We are currently seeing an explosion of interest in grassroots and amateur forms of knowledge and cultural production such as blogging, video blogging, podcasting, 
fan fiction, and media remix. In this presentation, I'll discuss and ethnographic case study of one set of amateur cultural production communities centered around English-language 
fandoms for Japanese animation and comics. I'll discuss the social dynamics  of these groups, the kinds of creative productions they engage with, and the learning dynamics of these 
communities. These amateur media production communities exhibit unique forms of peer-to-peer sharing, feedback, and reputation systems that support interest-driven learning.