The Sociology of Childhood

William A. Corsaro was Robert H. Shaffer Class of 1967 Endowed Chair and is now Professor Emeritus in the Department of Sociology at Indiana University, Bloomington, where he won the President’s Award for Distinguished Teaching in 1988. He was the first recipient of the Distinguished Career Award for the Section on Children and Youth of the American Sociological Association in 2013. He taught courses on the sociology of childhood, childhood in contemporary society, and ethnographic research methods. His primary research interests are the sociology of childhood, children’s peer cultures, the sociology of education, and ethnographic research methods. Corsaro is the author of Friendship and Peer Culture in the Early Years (1985), author of “We’re Friends, Right?” Inside Kids’ Culture (2003), and coauthor with Luisa Molinari of I Compagni: Understanding Children’s Transition From Preschool to Elementary School (2005). He is the coeditor with Jens Qvortrup and Michael-Sebastian Honig (2009) of The Palgrave Handbook of Childhood Studies. Corsaro was a Fulbright Senior Research Fellow in Bologna, Italy, in 1983-1984 and a Fulbright Senior Specialist Fellow in Trondheim, Norway, in 2003. He received an honorary doctorate from Uppsala University, Sweden, in 2016 and was recipient of the Cooley-Mead Award from the Social Psychology Section of the American Sociological Association in 2019.   Judson G. Everitt is an Associate Professor in the Department of Sociology at Loyola University Chicago. He has served on the faculty at Loyola since 2009. Dr. Everitt earned his Ph.D. in sociology at Indiana University with a doctoral minor in Educational Leadership and Policy Studies. His research examines the interconnections among organizations, culture, and socialization with a particular focus on the professions. His prior work examines teachers’ professional socialization in his book, Lesson Plans: The Institutional Demands of Becoming a Teacher (2018), and he recently coauthored an updated edition of The Sociology of Education with Jeanne Ballantine and Jenny Stuber (2022). His most recent work examines how medical students interpret and respond to institutional pressures in health care through the student cultures they form in medical school.

PART ONE: THE SOCIOLOGICAL STUDY OF CHILDHOOD
1. Social Theories of Childhood
2. The Structure of Childhood and Children’s Interpretive Reproductions
3. Studying Children and Childhood
PART TWO: CHILDREN, CHILDHOOD, AND FAMILIES IN HISTORICAL AND CULTURAL CONTEXT
4. Historical Views of Childhood and Children
5. Social Change, Families, and Children
PART THREE: CHILDREN’S CULTURES
6. Children’s Peer Cultures and Interpretive Reproduction
7. Sharing and Control in Initial Peer Cultures
8. Conflict and Differentiation in the Initial Peer Culture
9. Preadolescent Peer Cultures
PART FOUR: CHILDREN, SOCIAL PROBLEMS, AND THE FUTURE OF CHILDHOOD
10. Children, Social Problems, and the Family
11. Children, Social Problems, and Society
12. The Future of Childhood