Children, Youth and Violence

(3 Credit Hours) · Undergraduate

In this course, we will examine the particular social, cultural, and political positions occupied by children and youth in contexts of violence, and the practices in which they engage to survive. Children have inhabited a position in popular imagination as unmitigated victims of violence—as the refugees, the slaves, the kidnapped child soldiers—while youth have contrarily been portrayed as the willing perpetrators of violence: its rebels, gang members, and rioters. In this course we will investigate notions of child and youth autonomy, gendering, socialization, liminality and resistance through case studies ranging from the streets of Pakistan to the juvenile prisons of the US and the rebel camps of Sierra Leone.