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Zeteo (ζητέω): to challenge, question, dispute, explore the forgotten and ignored

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Tag: children

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Fighting over a pair of brand new sneakers

August 25, 2014 by Alexia Raynal

The meaning of marginalized children’s consumption habits Children usually have little purchasing power but are a big marketing audience. In the United States, as in many other parts of the world, an entire industry revolves around children’s consumption habits. Leggo, Barbie, and Disney are among the better known companies. But there are also many others that target less “mainstream” markets. This post is about such “marginalized” markets as analyzed by social researcher Elizabeth Chin in her book Purchasing Power: Black Kids and […]

Categories: Alexia Raynal, ZiR • Tags: childhood, children, consumer, consumerism

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Rich in symbolism, short on power

August 18, 2014 by Alexia Raynal

The problem of representation in children and childhood narratives One of the greater challenges of writing about children has to do with representation. Children are rarely given a space to speak freely. Because their voices are not accessible to adults, people who speak about children run the risk of seeming to speak for them. Sadly, this is also the very goal of others: to manipulate what children—inadvertently or not—communicate. In most cultures, childhood is a symbol of innocence. This vulnerability is used to justify political action. I […]

Categories: Alexia Raynal, ZiR • Tags: apartheid, childhood, children, ideology, innocence, political propaganda, politics

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Waksler & Dickens: Different, not less

August 11, 2014 by Alexia Raynal

Frances Chaput Waksler’s writings on the sociology of childhood have been a must for people interested in working with children for decades. Her article “Studying Children: Phenomenological Insights” (1986) is one of her most quoted texts. In it, Waksler encourages her readers to substitute the term “less” with “different.” Children as a category, she argues, are not less serious, less knowledgeable, less important than adults: The distinction between adult and child may become irrelevant as we come to focus simply on varieties of […]

Categories: Alexia Raynal, ZiR • Tags: Charles Dickens, childhood, children, education, Great Expectations, literature

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Future, it’s a big word for me!

August 4, 2014 by Alexia Raynal

The Children of Gaza The amount of child injuries and deaths during the conflict in Gaza is devastating, with children making up about 30 percent of the civilian casualties according to the Unicef in a report by The Telegraph. There is no academic reading for today, only the words of children of Gaza (published online by The Hypertexts in an ultra simple format), which I will let stand on their own. We feel for all those lives that have been interrupted by war.   […]

Categories: Alexia Raynal, ZiR • Tags: childhood, children, Gaza, Palestine-Israel conflict, politics, war

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Limiting fantasy play: A view of Mennonite kids

July 28, 2014 by Alexia Raynal

Views about what is good and bad for children vary across cultures. The rural Mennonite community in Chihuahua—perhaps the most visibly cohesive ethnoreligious immigrant group in Mexico—certainly has its own ideas. Briefly put here, Canadian Mennonite immigrants (originally from Russia) began settling in Chihuahua in 1922. Back then, the Mexican government seemed to believe that the country needed people like them to work the land, resulting in president Alvaro Obregón allowing Mennonites to establish an autonomous community in the north. Since […]

Categories: Alexia Raynal, ZiR • Tags: childhood, children, education, literature

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Chanel Brenner Poet

“A Poem for Women Who Don’t Want Children”

July 8, 2014 by Ana Maria Caballero

I come across all sorts of poems in my continuous hunt for poetry contests and literary journals that might house the verses I wrestle to write. Yesterday, I came across a jewel. A simple, stunning jewel. The poem was a finalist for Rattle Poetry’s 2013 Contest and was written by Los Angeles-based poet Chanel Brenner, pictured to the right. To read more poems by Ms. Brenner, click here. Below is the poem that left me stunned. A POEM FOR WOMEN […]

Categories: Ana Maria Caballero, ZiR • Tags: children, death, grief, literature, poetry, writing

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In childhood, we press our nose to the pane, looking out—

July 7, 2014 by Alexia Raynal

In memories of childhood, we press our nose to the pane, looking in. “The day I Left My Son In The Car” is a self-exploratory article that details Kim Brooks’s experience with the juvenile court system. Brooks, the author, explains how the decision to leave her 6-year-old child in the car for five minutes led her through two years of involvement in the court system after being accused of contributing to the delinquency of a minor (i.e., she left the kid in need of services). […]

Categories: Alexia Raynal, ZiR • Tags: childhood, children, memories, parenting

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Changing the plot: victims of incest

June 30, 2014 by Alexia Raynal

For those of us who grew up with the Disney characters, artist Saint Hoax’s “Princest Diaries” series might be extremely off-putting. In an effort to create sexual assault awareness (or else, to re-write history based on visual lies), the Middle Eastern artist shows Disney’s princesses being forced to kiss their fathers. The disturbing images use the corruption of a somewhat common childhood fantasy—being a princess—to bring light to the true horror of domestic sexual abuse: a majority of child victims are assaulted by family […]

Categories: Alexia Raynal, ZiR • Tags: art, childhood, children, rape, sexuality

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Revisiting the problem with protecting the innocent

June 23, 2014 by Alexia Raynal

Last winter I quoted, inspired by the sexual undertone in Balthus’s paintings of children at the Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York, an article about the negative consequences of equating childhood with innocence. In “Who Are You Kidding? Children, Power, and the Struggle Against Sex Abuse,” Jenny Kitzinger criticizes people’s tendency to describe childhood as an innocent time and space for at least two reasons: [1] If defiling the pure and deflowering the virgin is supposed to be erotic, then focusing […]

Categories: Alexia Raynal, ZiR • Tags: Balthus, child prostitution, childhood, children, immigrant children, innocence, sexuality

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