Rachel Conrad

Recent and Upcoming Courses

• Children's Rights

  John Wall has written that "children's rights are arguably the major human rights challenge of the twenty-first century." In this course, we will critically explore approaches, controversies, ambiguities, and promise related to theory and practice concerning the rights of people under the age of 18. We will review the emergence across the twentieth century of international human rights approaches to children's rights, culminating in the United Nations Convention on the Rights of the Child, and examine why the United States remains the only UN member state that has not ratified the UN Convention. We will consider domestic and global examples of contemporary structures and practices that support young people's active, participatory roles in their societies. A central component of the course will be students' project-based research on particular topics related to children's rights. This semester, the course will incorporate attention to children's rights perspectives on climate change.

• Youth / Poets

  This seminar in social and literary studies of childhood will take up multiple perspectives on young people as writers of poetry. We will explore the work of recent scholars in childhood studies, literary studies, children's literature studies, and critical literacy studies who contemplate questions about young people as consumers and/or producers of culture; as potential poets in the future and/or actual poets in the present; as objects of adult teachers' pedagogical ideas and/or as subjects producing and performing their own ideas and artistry. Examples of youth-written poetry are drawn largely from late twentieth-century and early twenty-first-century US contexts. The course involves collaborating with young people on poetry projects. Previous coursework in childhood studies or poetry is recommended.

• Field Study Semester

• Fictions of Childhood

  This interdisciplinary course will combine critical approaches to childhoods with critical studies of literature. We will work on literary texts written for adults that feature children as subjects together with texts written for a young audience and some written by young people. We will explore questions about the representation of children and childhoods; children's agency; memory, loss, displacement, and resilience; and childhoods, imagination, and language. While we will read primarily English-language texts, we will also critically consider the canon of "fictions of childhood." This course is pitched at the Division II level and is not recommended for first-semester students.

• Critical Youth Studies

  In this advanced seminar we will critically examine ideas about children and youth through readings in childhood and youth studies, sociology of childhood, and critical developmental psychology. An important component of students' work in this course is to critically evaluate ideas, practices, and methodologies related to childhood and youth in their own academic studies, including areas not listed above such as anthropology, history, education, and the arts. This course is recommended for students whose Division II concentration intersects with the Critical Studies of Childhood, Youth, and Learning (CYL) program. As it includes culminating work, it is particularly appropriate for students in the final semester of Division II.