Childhood Identities

the long version

Childhood Identities explores the experience of childhood from children's perspectives. Drawing on ethnographic work in schools and the accounts of children aged between four and nine years old, its aim is to understand the importance of the body as a medium of social expression - both in its appearance and its performance - and to assess the significance which this has in children's social relationships and friendships. It explores the process of socialisation through parents' narratives about their children's experiences of illness at home and at school, raising questions about ideas of difference and disability as they relate to social identity and personhood during childhood. Contributing to the sociological and anthropological work on the body and health/illness, the children's accounts also reveal the subtle and different ways in which age and gender shape children's growing sociality in relation to the concepts of belonging and outsiderhood.