Do children construct or discover ethnicity? Insights from a west London primary school
- When?
- Monday 19 November 2007, 17:00 to 18:30
- Where?
- Room 04AD00, Department of Economics, University of Surrey
- Open to:
- Staff, Students, Public
- Speaker:
- Dr Ruth Woods
Dr Ruth Woods, University of Canterbury
Abstract
Developmental psychologists see ethnicity as an immutable property of the person based on ancestry, a property they call ethnic constancy (Nesdale, 2004). They therefore conceive of children's learning as a universal pathway culminating in the discovery of ethnicity's immutability. In contrast, most sociologists and anthropologists view ethnicity as socially produced and thus open to being constructed differently by different groups, or generations, of people (Eriksen, 1993; Levine, 1999; Song, 2003). From this perspective, children do not inevitably come to realise that ethnicity is fixed, and may in certain circumstances construct a conception of ethnicity as mutable. My presentation combines conventional psychological measures of ethnic constancy with interview and ethnographic data in order to explore the emerging ideas about ethnicity held by children attending a multicultural primary school in west London. I will argue that while data gained by conventional measures seem at first sight to support the psychological approach, closer examination of that data in conjunction with richer qualitative material suggests that the children are constructing a complex understanding of ethnicity which does not map onto definitions taken for granted in the psychological literature.