Anthropology of Childhood, Youth and Education MSc

The Anthropology of Childhood, Youth and Education MSc was the first degree of its kind in the world when it was established and is still unique in its thoroughgoing anthropological perspective on what it is to be a child or to be young.

Its key organising principle is that understanding children requires the study of how their relations with others - peers, older and younger children, parents, teachers and other adults - inform their practices, identities and world views.

This course addresses the following issues from an anthropological perspective:

• Do children of ‘different cultures’ live ‘different worlds’?
• How does education impact upon children’s worlds and upon social and cultural practices more broadly?
• How do everyday processes of learning – both formal and informal - help to shape children’s ideas of and engagement with society at large?
• What is the role of schools in the transmission and acquisition of cultural values to children and youth?
• And why are adults’ ideas about childhood and youth so important for what children learn and aspire to become?

The distinctiveness of this degree derives from an anthropological approach that focuses on the importance of children’s and youth’s perspectives, and on the role that education (formal and informal) plays in children’s learning processes and in the transmission and acquisition of cultural knowledge.

Anthropology at Brunel is well-known for its focus on ethnographic fieldwork: as well as undertaking rigorous intellectual training, all our students are expected to get out of the library and undertake their own, original research – whether in the UK or overseas – and to present their findings in a dissertation. Students take this opportunity to travel to a wide variety of locations across the world – see “Special Features” for more details.