Authors Posts by Cindy Dell Clark, PhD
Cindy Dell Clark, PhD
I am an anthropologist interested in a particular native people: American kids. My fieldwork explores children’s cultural worlds highlighting children’s own perspectives. Over a lifetime, I have done extensive practical research that gives voice to children about such experiences as chronic illness, play, eating, and popular culture. My exploration of children’s experience as a scholar has a larger goal: to bring children more to the forefront in understanding the social world we share with them. *A more extensive bio is available under CWA Founders.
Who Are Schools For?
Not everyone watched John Merrow’s compelling news stories about education on the PBS News Hour prior to his recent retirement. According to Merrow’s 2017 book, Addicted to Reform, only 25 percent of American households...
“Mine Eyes Have Seen the Glory of the Burning of the School”
As little ones gather up their school supplies and head off to school this September, what are the attitudes about school that they bring along with their backpacks? In meeting kids during research, I...
The Upside of Playful Risk
Summer is here, time for kids’ action adventure.
Reread that opening sentence. Did you think of movies released in the summertime?
Or did you think of the adventurous active pastimes that kids engage in during summer?...
Bypass the Bunny Trail? Kids Say No!
While most adults are eager to indulge their children and grandchildren at Christmas, my ethnographic research on Easter (described in my book Flights of Fancy, Leaps of Faith) suggests that many parents are more...
Love Is a Stitch in Time That Saves Nine
Recently, I was waiting in line at a highway rest stop and struck up a conversation with the woman in front of me. Her story stayed with me. She had an autistic son whose...
Kids to Grinch: Here’s What Christmas Really Means
In my recent talking with kids, Scrooge of London seems to have lost a lot of ground as the definitive morality tale about Christmas self-redemption. Instead it’s another miserable misanthrope, the green Grinch of...
What Halloween Masks
October 31st is America’s curious anomaly. On October’s last day, as trees defoliate and nature ebbs towards the deadness of winter, parents mark the day by lifting prohibitions. From sugar treats to stranger visiting,...
Children Past, Present, and Yet-To-Come
As American social scientists go, few are more influential than Robert Putnam, the Harvard professor and author of the 2001 mega best seller Bowling Alone.
When Putnam recently turned his attention to U.S. income...
Flagged: Children on July 4th
During the years 2005 to 2012, when I conducted research on July 4th family rituals, the United States imported — mostly from China — over $32,000,000 worth of American flags. These flags testify to...
Childhood Cancer: Powerful Words
With regard to our kids, words we hope never to hear or have to say include “cancer” and “death.”
We hope to avoid these words altogether, and when they arise, there is a tendency to...
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