Panel for AAA 2009 on constructions of childhood in schooling

More happy news: the panel Micah Gilmer and I organized for this fall’s meeting of the American Anthropological Association in Philadelphia has been accepted. Here’s the program; abstracts for the panel and my paper after the jump:

“Schooling Which Child? Contested Constructions of Childhood and Youth in Educational Settings” (sponsored by the Anthropology of Children and Childhood Interest Group)

  • Bambi Chapin (University Maryland, Baltimore County),
    “Developing Understanding in Children, Understandings of Child Development: Sri Lankan Models of Child Development and the New Educational Reforms”

  • Jennifer Adair (University of Texas, Austin), “Immigrant and Nonimmigrant Teachers’ Conceptualizations of Diversity and Childhood in Five U.S. Cities: The Chancla Debate”

  • Micah Gilmer (Duke University), ” ‘These Kids Got to Step Up and Be Men’: Language and Football as a Liminal Space at Eastside High”

  • Alicia Blum-Ross (University of Oxford), “Creative Geniuses or Feral Thugs? Participatory Filmmaking and the Construction of ‘Youth’ “

  • Tyler Bickford (Columbia University), “Competing Public Childhoods: Entertainment Media, Consumerism, and Children’s Expressive Practices at a Vermont Primary School”

  • Chaired by John Herzog (Northeastern University)

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Panel on portable music and technology

Happy news — a panel on mobile music and technology that I organized with Heather Horst, Ben Tausig, and Bill Bahng Boyer has been accepted for SEM 2009 in Mexico City. Here’s an outline (abstracts for the panel and my paper after the jump):

“Contested Musical Mobilities: Ethnomusicologies of Portable Listening and Technology”

  • Tyler Bickford, “Tinkering and Tethering: Children’s MP3 Players as Material Culture”

  • Bill Bahng Boyer, “Blasting the Ghetto: Boomboxes and the Spilling Over of Portable Audio”

  • Heather A. Horst, “Noise, Sound, and Other Callings: Mobile Communication in Everyday Life”

  • Benjamin Tausig, “The Co-Motion of Bangkok”

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Review of Kathryn Marsh’s The Musical Playground

I reviewed Kathryn Marsh’s The Musical Playground: Global Tradition and Change in Children’s Songs and Games for the Journal of Folklore Research. It’s quite a book, really underscoring how these enduring oral traditions connect to growing networks of media, migration, and education.

Marsh’s book — based on a massive international research study of children’s clapping games in seven countries — is nicely complemented by a new study going on in the U.K. about the relationships between kids’ singing game traditions and new media — games, phones, the Internet, etc. The project, led by Jackie Marsh at the University of Sheffield, among others, involves new ethnographic studies of kids’ playground games, an archival project digitizing the Opie’s collections, and an effort to program the Nintendo Wii to play some of these games. See the write-up in the Telegraph. It’s really nice to see this emerging synergy between research into kids’ expressive culture and their technology/media practices, and the U.K. project will be an amazing resource when it’s completed. 

My review after the jump. I’ll link to it when it goes up at JFR.

Update 8/26: The review came out and is online here
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Review of Boynton and Kok, eds, Musical Childhoods

I reviewed Susan Boynton’s and Roe-Min Kok’s edited volume, Musical Childhoods and the Cultures of Youth,  for Current Musicology last fall. Really a nice book. The review is here and on scribd:

Earbuds Are Good for Sharing

I just sent off a chapter about sharing earbuds for a forthcoming volume from Oxford UP on Mobile Music Studies. My chapter is called “Earbuds Are Good for Sharing: Children’s Sociable Uses of Headphones at a Vermont Primary School.” It is here as a pdf preprint and also on scribd:

Review of Montgomery, Generation Digital

My review of Kathryn Montgomery’s Generation Digital: Politics, Commerce, and Childhood in the Age of the Internet is up at the Resource Center for Cyberculture Studies, along with a response from Montgomery. RCCS, by the way, is a tremendous resource for book reviews — David Silver does a great job getting multiple reviews of interesting books and most of the time even including author responses. Wonderful stuff.  

Kidz Bop piece up at Consumer Studies Research Network newsletter

My “Kidz Bop, ‘Tweens,’ and childhood music consumption,” has been included in the most recent issue of Consumers, Commodities, and Consumption, the newsletter of the Consumer Studies Research Network. It can be read here.

MACSEM 2008 Panel: “Children, music, and media in the contemporary US”

In March Jenny Woodruff and I organized a panel at the annual conference of the Mid-Atlantic chapter of SEM, on “Children, music, and media in the contemporary US,” which included papers by Sarah Snyder and Jenny Johnson. It was a rare chance (hopefully more and more in the near future) to bring together some of scholars who have recently been opening up new doors for ethnomusicological study of kids, media, and popular music consumption.

Abstracts after the jump.

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Consumption studies conference

At the end of July I’ll be participating in a conference on the “Contested Terrain of Consumption Studies,” hosted by the Consumer Studies Research Network, in Boston, presenting research on kids and media consumption from my dissertation.

Paper for SEM 2008 panel: “Media consumption as social organization in a New England primary school”

My contribution to the panel mentioned in the last post will be a paper titled “Media consumption as social organization in a New England primary school.” (I’m really happy with the allusion to Goodwin’s He Said She Said, but I really need to start writing more explanatory titles.) Abstract after the jump.

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