Credit Points 10

Coordinator Di Dickenson Opens in new window

Description This subject will explore how the meanings we place on children vary across cultures and communities and over time. Students will have the opportunity to examine implicit and explicit images of childhood and to consider how these images inform how we think and engage with children in our everyday lives; the role they play in the institutions that impact children’s lives and in the disciplines that study children. Images will be drawn from a range of contexts and types of media. Students will also have the opportunity create their own representations of children.

School Humanities & Comm Arts

Discipline Anthropology

Student Contribution Band HECS Band 4 10cp

Check your fees via the Fees page.

Level Undergraduate Level 1 subject

Learning Outcomes

After successful completion of this subject, students will be able to: 

1. Undertake a basic social semiotic image analysis
2. Analyse how childhood is represented in a range of images
3. Develop arguments about the relationship between images of childhood and real children’s lives
4. Create visual and verbal images of children, informed by reflection and scholarship  

Subject Content

• Concepts of childhood and stories we tell about children
• What we can learn by examining images of children and childhood 
• Basic social semiotic image analysis methods
• Changing images of childhood across time
• Images of childhood across cultures and communities
• Images of childhood in texts aimed at children
• Images of childhood in texts aimed at adults
• Disciplinary differences in how children and childhood are represented 
• Relationship between images of childhood and real children’s lives
• Institutional images of children and childhood